Author: Rory

Last month I posted about the possibility of conditional advertising on blogs. The idea was to present ads only when certain conditions were met. The specific conditions I wrote about were age of posts (a la Aquarionics) and where the visitor came from. I’ve actually got around to doing something about that idea, so now anyone getting to an archived post on SoylentRed from a google search (in a fit of lazyness I just looked for the string "google" in the HTTP referer header) will be greeted with—hopefully—relevant advertisements. Guaranteed not to annoy regular readers!

This isn’t a huge new project on the scale of Gmail or Froogle. It’s just a minor Google Labs project. But Chikai Ohazama seemd so keen in his announcement of GoogleX I just felt compelled to spread the (somewhat subdued) word.

Update (17^th March 2005): I now appears to have been pulled.

Update2: Via a Slashdot comment from its author, a more OSX-y version.

I remember planning to mention Matthew Baldwin‘s Tricks of the Trade site when it was launched but Google reckons I didn’t get around to it. So here it is, prompted by the news that it’s about to become a book. The site was started when Baldwin read an intervew with a clown:

At one point the interviewer asked, “What if you’re dying out there? What if the kids are hating it?” And the clown revealed a fascinating trick of the birthday clown trade: Every year, it seems, there are two or three funny words that invariably crack kids up, and when things are going sour, you can blurt one out and bring the house down. But a clown’s got to keep up to date, because the funny words mysteriously change over time. Where “booger” might have killed in 1998, 2004 demands nothing less than an “underpants.”

This turned into the subject of one of Baldwin’s regular columns on the Morning News, then a website of its own, and soon a book detailing tricks of various trades.

I’ve just been forced to upgrade to Firefox 1.0.1 because of a crasher bug that I couldn’t track down. All pages on Soylentred.net were causing instant crashes in Firefox 1.0 and Mozilla 1.6 (which remains unfixed). Here are all the details I could find:

• Soylentred was the only site causing the crashes.
• The crashes occured on every page of Soylentred that I tested, except for the login page for administration.
• Disabling extensions in Firefox had no effect (as you would expect since my Mozilla setup has no extensions).
• Disabling javascript, images, plugins, cookies, and styles had no effect.
• The pages dowloaded fine. The title was displayed in the titlebar and I could view source on the page before it tried to render.
• I downloaded the front page and viewed it locally. It caused a crash. When I removed the line <base href="http://www.soylentred.net/" /> (which causes the browser to treat all relative URLs as relative to that base URL) it didn’t crash.
• A brand new profile succumbed to the same crashy fate

Having run out of ideas, I upgraded. Firefox 1.0.1 handles everything fine. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten what I was planning to write about when I first got hit by the bug.

Okay, maybe not gone, but I loved that pun too much not to use it. Via Insert Joke Here, Penta Water has been ruled against by the Advertising Standards Authority. The finding states that

the scientific evidence submitted did not prove that Penta had health benefits over and above those of ordinary water, or had been restructured to form stable smaller clusters

The thing about science—its advantage over religion—is that you can’t just make it up.

Wouldn’t it have been much better if George Lucas could have kept Darth Vader out of the trailer for Episode III so that his appearance in the film would be that much cooler? I mean everyone already knows he’s going to be in it, the trailer doesn’t show him actually doing anything, why is he there? It should have hinted at his presence. A shadow, or a sillouette. Lucas has the subtlety of a porn director. Consequently he may have the same talent for directing.

Via a comment on Pharyngula, "Inept individuals ooze confidence, study finds":

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David Dunning is haunted by the fear he might be one of them.

A study conducted at Cornell University found that incompetent people are less able to judge competence and consequently don’t consider themselves to be incompetent. It’s an intuitive result. Everyone rates themselves highly at some task, some because they’re good, some because they’re so bad they can’t even tell. Interestingly it seems that the most competent people in the tests performed were likely to under-rate themselves but corrected their ratings when shown the results that others attained.

Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study were likely to underestimate their own competence […] When high scoring subjects were asked to "grade" the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance.

So now we all have to face the possibility that we’re not actually all that special, we’re just spectacularly blind to our own inadequacies. You have to ask yourself one question: Do I feel competent? Well, do you, punk?

I’ve heard a lot of talk of Greasemonkey recently. Since I’m barely awake right now I can’t actually remember if it’s all from the same source or not, but I think there’s some small increase in the buzz around this right now. I’ve had this nifty little extension for a while, but it’s only since other people have told me what to think that I actually start to see some major potential in it. Actually, some of that potential has already been released.

Okay, rewind. You probably don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about. I’ll start again. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you associate user scripts with particular web sites (including wildcards so you can apply them to all sites or just some subset of the Web). The scripts are run on the page after it loads just as if they were included on the page. The interface for installing and managing the scripts is very polished by extensions’ standards. You just load the script in Firefox and click on a "Install User Script…" menu item.

Since most of the interface of Firefox is written in Javascript it’s no surprise that there’s quite a lot of power in these scripts. The one that inspired this post is one that goes so far as to add a completely new feature to Gmail so seemlessly that you would think it part of the application itself. Check out Adding Persistent Searches to Gmail.

Is this the extreme of user-oriented content manipulation that Google’s toolbar has elicited a storm about? Keep an eye on the Greasemonkey wiki to see how far it goes.

Seriously. A big-ass balloon. I’m not quite sure if I’ll ever be able to inflate it, but I think it’s more the symbolism that I care about, rather than the thin layer of latex stretched around my own private chunk of Earth’s atmosphere. You see today was the last day of the Dublin Juggling Convention, the day of the games.

Aside for the uninitiated: Gladiators is a game played by jugglers which involves doing foo for as long as possible while trying to stop everyone else doing foo. So three-ball galdiators involves juggling three balls while pushing other jugglers, lunging wildly at them, or just plain knocking their balls out of their hands or the air. The last person still doing foo after everyone else is knocked out is the winner.

I had hoped to make a good showing in the three-ball competition, since I’ve generally done reasonably well in the games we’ve played in Trinity. It’s a combination of what I wouldn’t stretch to calling "skill" but is at least competence, combined with tactics. Unfortunately I got knocked out by a nasty kamikazee attack, leaving my hopes of glory shattered.

After a stint on the sidelines watching the five-ball endurance and club chin-balancing endurance competitions I was back in the game for a curious club-based hat game. Each competitor makes a sort of three-pointed crown out of three precariously-balanced clubs and wears it while trying to make others drop theirs. I think I had the best balanced crown but I was knocked out soon after we switched the game to gladiator format to speed things up.

Back to the sidelines I watched the long-distance club-passing, diabolo skipping, and devil-stick propellor endurance competitions. At some point someone devised a three coin gladiators game where all the dropped coins went into a hat and the winner got them as his prize. I figured the best jugglability-to-denomination ratio was possessed by the 20 cent coin. I was wrong.

Finally the violent bloodbath of the games was announced. The three-club gladiators. I lasted into the last five or six in the first game. It was decided (passive voice–don’t you hate it?) that a second game would be a good idea. It came down to two of us, and a tie when we both dropped. After a quick re-start, mano-a-mano, I lost the tie-break round. A third game saw me on the sidelines after a shamefully short run. The final pitted the top two from each heat in a five-man (yes, I know; someone messed up somewhere) battle royal, thereby making my defeat in round two utterly pointless. I took fourth place, my luck having finally run out. Fortunately there was a prize available for each of us. I got a balloon.

I admit it’s not the best prize ever. I admit that fourth place isn’t particularly impressive, even if some of my competitors were proffessionals. But you have to start somewhere. I know that the ball gladiators is within my reach for next time.

I just threw a club at my monitor. No more back-crosses in the house. I’ll be spending 10+ hours juggling over this weekend so I hope to improve my back-crosses, flats, and doubles with clubs. Then I may not feel the need to fling them around the house.