Some Brisbane Guy

Today somebody sent me a link to MIS Australia’s article about some ridiculous filters the ever-paternalistic Australian government is trying to foist on the Australian public for our own protection. Like, thanks you guys.

Anyway I got feisty when I realised that you can’t cut and paste from the Australian Financial Review’s MISAustralia website. As soon as you highlight text on the site, it becomes all garbled. My first, knee-jerk reaction when somebody does something on their website to make it less useful for users (like disabling right-click) is along the lines of “Errr you MORONS! WHY would you BOTHER DOING THIS?” Which is not exactly constructive criticism, but I really can’t see how doing this kind of dumb stuff on your website is a good idea.

If you don’t want your content on the web, don’t publish it there!

I can somewhat understand the mindset of fear at work here. Site owners feel that their content is sitting out there on the web ready to be copied and exploited by anyone. But here are a bunch of reasons why it’s dumb to use lame “DRM” or “copy protection” methods on your website:

You’re making it HARDER for people to share your stuff with their friends

In my case with this article, a guy at work tried to send me the link and a relevant quote from the article — but couldn’t! He could only send me the link. If a busy person can’t just quickly cut and paste the written equivalent of a soundbite to somebody else, they might not bother at all — it’s annoying and confusing. Not only that, but I might not visit your site because it’s just a boring link - there’s no snippet to pique my interest. This means less traffic for your website.

Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s HARDER TO FIND

Having garbled content is bad for search engine rankings. Don’t believe me? Try this search — it’s searching for the phrase “opponents of isp-level filtering” on Google — but restricted to ONLY on the MIS Australia website. Whaddya know, it returns ZERO results! That’s because the “protected” content makes NO SENSE to search engines. Not being searchable means missing out on A LOT of potential search traffic.

Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s not SHARING INFORMATION - what the web is built on

The most successful websites actively share their content to attract more users/readers using something called RSS. What RSS does is lets you share your content so freely that computers can find new stuff on your site and do the job of spreading it around for you! The only way people are going to know that your site has great content is by showing it to them. Hiding your content away is going to help nobody — not readers, because they can’t find you, and not you, because you’ll have no readers.

I can appreciate that people may be fearful about their content being stolen by web scraping. But this is actually not that big of a problem. Google knows how to deal with web scraping and has methods of determining who should be rewarded as the original publisher of content. Some kid stealing your articles and posting them on his own site isn’t going to take away all of your traffic!

You’re making your website WORSE TO USE.

So many sites that prevent me from right-clicking an image make me angry, because usually I’m just trying to see a higher-resolution version of the picture that they’ve scaled down to fit their page using HTML, but the pic is really a big, colourful picture with lots of detail that I’m missing out on. That sucks. Or maybe I want to send the picture to a friend, saying “Hey, look at this great site, they have heaps more cool pics like this one!” — just saying “hey check out this site they have cool pics” is way less powerful.

And that’s just disabling right-click. MIS Australia’s effort actually makes the site look TERRIBLE -- they have to use a fixed width font because their lame content “DRM” just uses two layers of content, one beneath the other! If you used a variable-width font the text on the two layers would never line up, and you would just get a jumble of letters. So that’s why MIS Australia’s articles look like they were typed out in the 1940s, even on a beautiful screen with font smoothing.

Speaking of a jumble of letters, that’s also what any visually-impaired person’s screen reader is going to see when it tries to read out the page. Way to discriminate against the disabled, yeah!

Your lame system can be easily circumvented ANYWAY - so why bother?

Especially the sites that deny the ability to right-click. There’s so many ways around this that it’s just pointless and makes your site annoying. If you really don’t want people to steal your images, use low-resolution pics with a watermark, because your right-click prevention just won’t work. If you really don’t want people to steal your website code, the best you can do is to obfuscate it — or don’t publish it at all! Web programmers are crafty — and often still in high-school, so they have lots of time to work around your tricks!
In the case of the MIS Australia website, to get the text of any of their articles is as easy as using /g,’\n\n’).replace(/< [^>]*>/g,”));})();”>this link and choose “Bookmark this link” or “Add to Favorites” and save the link to your bookmarks/favorites.

Now read an article on MISAustralia.com and if you like it, click your bookmark/favorite you have just added.

Presto! The article contents will be pasted into the comments box at the bottom of the page for you to cut and paste at your leisure.

I’ll say it again. If you’re going to go to the trouble of putting your content on the web, why hamstring your efforts? Put it out there and SHARE IT, and more importantly, LET OTHER PEOPLE SHARE IT — that’s what your website is for, and that’s how you get popular!

I’m listening to an IT Conversations podcast of Rasmus Lerdorf (the guy who created PHP) speaking about PHP, and I have to say I’m pretty surprised to hear him say “I hate programming with a passion — I created PHP to avoid programming.”

Rasmus says that he wrote PHP while building a web-based system for Toronto University. The university didn’t care how he built the system, they just wanted their system, so Rasmus built PHP to make his job easier.

Rasmus’s decision to open source PHP was made when he was getting lots of questions about how he was doing his work, and they had the same needs. Rasmus and the University of Toronto were delighted at the speed of development they were now getting — and that he was fixing bugs in his sleep!

To run a successful open-source project, Rasmus says that you need to cater to four types of people:

• those with simple self interest - they have a need that the project solves
• those looking to express themselves through their code
• to interact with others to get their oxytocin fix
• those who want to make the world a better place

The same motivations that motivate people to join an open source project also motivate people to join an interactive website.

You have to think about how the people think about themselves when they involve themselves in your project. You have to give them some ownership and control…which was hard for me…then again I’m a really lazy guy

In order to build a decent modern web application, you really need to think about what the users think of themselves when they interact with your site. Every single action a user performs with your website improves your site.

Later Rasmus delves into performance profiling and optimising a PHP website using Callgrind/valgrind, as well as some stuff about the ubiquity of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and other topics.

It’s a great podcast, do yourself a favour and have a listen.

The Buzzword

Like any good buzzword (say…agile — or is that AGILE? No, it isn’t.), Web 2.0 is overused and bastardised to mean a thousand different things by some groups of people, and at the same time it’s mocked and dismissed as just another buzzword by others.

OK so it’s March 2008 and Web 2.0 is so not cool these days because it’s so old, but I feel like it’s important that I share two insightful resources that really do describe Web 2.0, if not succinctly then at least fairly comprehensively

The Resources

The first thing I want to share, and probably the canonical Web 2.0 description, is Tim O’Reilly’s essay “What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.”

The other thing is this Youtube video that really had an impact on me when I first watched it. I think it does a good job of demonstrating the ideas behind web 2.0, especially for only 4 minutes and 31 seconds. It’s a good, quick conceptual overview of the whole concept.

The “I Kinda Reckon” Bit

So now that we’re talking about the whole web 2.0 concept thing, I’d just like to point out that it is really a lot different to the ideas people had back in the dotcom boom/bust days. Business ideas were much more aligned to the big dollar outlay, build-it-and-they-will-come, broadcast mentality of more traditional media and businesses (although some apparently got it right anyway.)

So everyone threw all that stuff out in favour of lightweight, bootstrapped startups that rely on users contributing, and APIs and interoperability and simplicity and figuring out what the web is and not imposing some model from before.

If you look at it like a giant agile development project, the original dotcom web bubble was our first iteration. We got some features, some stuff worked, some stuff was missing, and we threw some stuff away in the dotcom bust. Maybe Web 2.0 is iteration two — Fred Brooks did say, “build one to throw away.”

The Wrap Up

So as insanely belated as this post is, I really wanted to get these two resources off my chest and out of my private wiki (feel the two-point-ohness) so that y’all can enjoy them. Please do so.

Whoo yeah I’m excited!

About two months ago I got a new Apple Macbook Pro. I love it, it’s rad, I love using it etc. But something that’s been bugging me no end is that I don’t know the shortcut key to jump to the address bar (where you type http://…etc) in Firefox. In Windows you just do Alt-D and you’re there, I think that works in Linux as well, but on OS X it’s no go.

Well, I’ve just found out the shortcut keys for not only the address bar, but the search bar as well (and also in Thunderbird!):

jump into the search bar in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird

Cmd-K (Mac), Ctrl-K (Windows)

jump into the address bar in Mozilla Firefox

Cmd-L (Mac), Ctrl-L (Windows)

Mozilla.org has more juicy keyboard shortcuts.

This is super good news because now I can use basically the same key combo on Windows and on OS X. My life just gets better and better, friends.

Something else that’s kinda annoying about Thunderbird is that it’s not GMail. I love GMail and all my mail goes through it so that:

1. tons of spam gets filtered out by GMail’s awesome spam filtering
2. I can access a copy of all of my mail from anywhere on the internet (except work who block GMail…argh)

But not only does my mail all go through GMail, I download it all via POP3 to my Thunderbird mail client. This is because:

1. I then have a backup copy of all my email on my own computer and am not just trusting Google to never go broke/lose my mail/start charging me to access it/something else unforeseen
2. I can access my email when I’m offline, eg on a plane or a train or whatever

But as I was saying, Thunderbird is not GMail and despite being a proper rich, fat-client desktop application, it doesn’t have the great shortcut keys that make GMail so quick to navigate and move messages around. Plus it doesn’t have that whole “archive and forget, then search later” philosophy, it has the old-school “carefully choose category-based folders for your messages and then take forever to find them later” philosophy, which is so 1998 and lame

But what I’m getting at is that now thanks to GMailUI Thunderbird works like GMail, adding j,k and other shortcut keys to navigate messages as well as a really cool “Expression” search mode that lets you search just like you do in GMail.

As I said, my life just gets better and better.

If patience truly is a virtue, then the guys who made these two videos are really virtuous. Check out this Line Rider insanity:

Yes it’s crazy huh? Well this is nutser in a more hardcore nerd way. A guy has built a robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube! It’s called Rubot. Apparently the “scanning phase” isn’t shown, and the robot was given an easy cube that wasn’t messed up very much so that the video didn’t go on for 15 minutes. Coolness:

Enjoy kiddies!

My shiny, expensive (for a 17″) TFT is being a moron and going bright for about a second before turning off its backlight so I can’t see a thing. I think it’s under warranty…I hope it’s under warranty.

Anyway you don’t care about that, you care about finding out what to do when your Philips 17″ 107P monitor picture goes fuzzy, don’t you? This would probably apply to other monitors as well, and anyway you should definitely read this
FAQ called “How do I adjust the focus of my monitor?,” which I used and found inspiring and helpful. Yeah I said inspiring, I wasn’t going to try fixing the screen myself because I nearly killed myself messing about in the insides of a monitor once before.

Anyway, you don’t care about me nearly dying either, you want to know how to fix your blurry Philips 107P screen, don’t you? It’s really easy, you just need a philips head screwdriver.

So what you need to do is take off the plastic cover of ye olde Philips, by removing the screws marked in the pic below:

That pic is kind of unnecessary, basically just keep taking screws out until the plastic cover comes loose. If you take out more than 6, you’ve taken out too many, you fool.

Now all you have to do is use your trusty screwdriver to twiddle the internal focus knobs through the holes in the aluminium shielding, as indicated in the pic below.

I actually took off the aluminium shielding, but you don’t actually need to, I just had no idea what I was doing, and the FAQ linked above said that you may need to take it off, so I did. Now that I’m shining a light to show you the way, you won’t need to go through the pain that I endured. Good luck to you, old chap.

So basically the story is that you need to have the monitor turned on and plugged in to your computer, so you can stick your screwdriver in and twiddle the focus knobs. The top one seems to be the main one, but the middle knob seemed to me to be adjusting the edges of the screen a bit better. But I can’t say for sure what they do, so just twiddle until it looks right.

The bottom knob adjusts brightness or something, you will probably want to leave that one alone.

Good luck adjusting your fuzzy, blurry Philips screen. Don’t electrocute yourself, that would be moronic because you need to be living to be able to enjoy a sharp monitor. Dying is for quitters.

Let’s see if I can blog this by email before my computer restarts automatically.

After you install some Windows Updates, Windows earnestly insists that you have to restart your computer as a matter of urgency. Apparently urgently enough to popup a dialog box that takes the focus from any other windows you may have open and sets the default focus to “Restart Now” so that if you press Enter (like say, if you’re typing and the dialog pops up and you press Enter for a new line), your computer restarts.

30sec left.

So yeah I could press Restart Later now, but then this would just annoy me some other time.

Edit:

In all the excitement (the floor in our office was being vacuumed and I had to move my chair with only 1 minute to go!) I forgot to attach the screenshot:

As a grammar nazi I notice trivial minutiae like this. Lately I’ve started using GMail to store and archive all my mail so that I can always get to my email no matter what computer I’m on. Maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I’m obsessive.

Anyway, since GMail started a couple of years ago, the main benefit of GMail is listed on the homepage as, “Search, don’t sort.” But now it’s “Search, do not sort.” Weird. Check out these screenshots.
Now go read something interesting.

Update: That was this morning. I tried to post via email but it didn’t work. The computer I’m using now shows “Search, don’t sort” and not the clunky “do not sort”. My other computer seems to use google.co.uk instead of google.com or google.com.au, so maybe the chaps at GMail think that the Poms aren’t hip enough for apostrophied abbreviations. Interesting…

Ask any red blooded Aussie and he’ll tell you. Poms are wankers. It looks like they’re finally coming to grips with themselves (hah) and celebrating their national pastime with a week long masturbate-a-thon, to be televised on Channel 4, whatever that is. Australians don’t even bother with channels below 7, except for the old public broadcaster ABC on trusty channel 2, but that’s taxpayer funded so what do you expect.

A mysterious, anonymous friend, co-worker or miscellaneous associate generously extended me the warmth of sharing with me a Larvatus Prodeo blog post about an upcoming British TV event dubbed “Wank Week”, involving hundreds of Poms gathering in a hall in London to wack off apparently to aid some charity.

They can do whatever they need to so that they feel justified about rubbing one out, I say. Who am I to judge?

To me, the most disturbing issue in this whole matter is that “Kim” of Larvatus Prodeo (what is that anyway?) managed to start her blog post about a large number of people masturbating and a lot of people having a “debate” without writing “mass debate”. Truly a sad story, Kim has really let herself and the Australian blogging community down here by not taking this most blindingly obvious of opportunities to indulge in high-school humour.

Christian inspired me with his That’s Gold emoticon that he created for MSN to post up one of my own MSN experiences.  It actually is also related to something being “gold” but I went for something a bit more generic and literal.
I’ve made a bunch of stupid, useless MSN emoticons to amuse myself and my friends, but by far the most often used is the emoticon to use instead of saying “that’s gold!” or just “gold!” or even just “lol”, or sometimes to supplement lol when you really want to show your appreciation for a comment someone has made and “lol” just doesn’t cut it yet you don’t want to go with “alol” (actual laugh out loud) or add an extra “hahaha” or something else onto the end.

This emoticon’s story is also quite interesting because it went through several stages of evolution, as seen in Fig. 1 above.

Here you can see the emoticon graduated from its first inception as a static emoticon which MSN displays very small and boring in the chat window. Clearly, this is not the effect we were after with this emoticon so more work was needed. In the unlikely case that you want to download the boring version, it is provided for you as a normal static GIF file below. It does look the same enlarged size as the other emoticons but don’t be fooled — MSN will shrink it once you convert it to an emoticon.

The next version was the first animated one but it also failed to impress us with its predictable, even keeled and slow wagging side to side. If this emoticon was a dog, you wouldn’t assume that it was particularly happy to see you, would you? It is more of a dog that is begging for a biscuit at the side of the table but doesn’t really believe it will get a biscuit, yet it can’t leave the table lest it misses out. Thus this emoticon failed in its task of conveying the “Gold!” emotion successfully as well.

Finally, we struck gold (hah!) with the next iteration. This version was named “Goldy” because of either a mistyped filename or for some equally inane reason. Nevertheless what it lacks in name it makes up for in spirit, because you can’t deny what this emoticon conveys — wacky comedy gold! And that’s what it represents. So next time your friend says something hilarious you don’t need to just say “oh that was gold my friend, yes indeed you certainly have a sense of humour don’t you”…you can just slap this emoticon into his window and show your gratitude for his comic genius.