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Yet another reason to use Firefox

Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Or Chrome, or Opera etc etc, as demonstrated here.

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posted by Croydonian

'Google a tragedy for young people' - says noted semiotician

Thursday, November 12, 2009
That got your attention, didn't it?

Anyway, Umberto Eco has been grilled by Der Spiegel, and this quote was just dying to be taken out of context.  So I have taken the opportunity:

SPIEGEL: But you also said that lists can establish order. So, do both order and anarchy apply? That would make the Internet, and the lists that the search engine Google creates, perfect for you.
Eco: Yes, in the case of Google, both things do converge. Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous -- not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.
 

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posted by Croydonian

Asking a little too much from Twitter

Tuesday, September 22, 2009
This, from Ban Ki-Moon of the UN:

Hello, everyone!
...
As you know, I just rang the Peace Bell.  I think you saw a broadcast of my remarks.  These can be summarized in three words:  We Must Disarm.  I shared some of the messages that we received on Twitter from people just like you –- maybe even some people right in this room.

I also tweeted some of my own reasons why We Must Disarm:

·         because the world is overarmed and peace is underfunded;

·         because disarmament contributes to development; and

·         because nukes threaten humankind.  Let’s get rid of them 4 good.
I sent these messages on Twitter because I want to involve the whole world in the campaign to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.  Not just political leaders but citizens everywhere -– including students like you.  You are the future leaders and owners of this planet Earth.


Erm, can't see that he'll achieve that, somehow.

Meanwhile, as if the poor man hasn't suffered enough he has just met David Miliband, and earlier on he was hobnobbing with the odious Blair.  His Twitter feed is here, but what really intrigues is the one person Mr Moon follows, a British twitterer called Matthew Somerville who appears to be a civilian.

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posted by Croydonian

Further mocking of Segolene Royal

Saturday, September 19, 2009
Having posted some screenshots of Royals' risible Desirs d'Avenir website and its parodies the other day, Nick asked whether our Gallic chums have a 'Downfall' industry.

Mais oui:



They call it La Chute, by the way.


Folk who like this sort of thing might like Sarko getting upset about the poor sales of his wife's CD:

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posted by Croydonian

The perils of letting politicians design their own websites

Thursday, September 17, 2009
'Design' in a loose sense, but our old friend Ségolène Royal has admited that she chose the photo used for the relaunch of Desirsdavenir.com.   Because she liked it, that's all. :


Erm, see what I mean?  Anyway, Sego has prompted much mirth Trans-Manche with that toe-curler, and DDA now looks like this, or would do but for the fact it has fallen over.  Again:


Better, if still pretty nasty.

Anyway, those lovely people at Le Parisien have links to all of the best mockeries of the original.

Desirsdendives seems intent on keeping up with the weekly changes, and is making good use of endives.

Meme-desirsdavenir.com has a selection of parodies, with these my favourites:




There's a nifty DDA generator here, which I would screenshot, but I have failed to get it to accept a photo upload of yours truly, so it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Sego has a track record of making odd pronouncements, so the David Ic*e look to her website does not surprise me unduly.

An extract from something I blogged a while back:
Le Figaro thinks she is being ironic in commenting "Reading these works I had the impression that if I was Joan of Arc, I would already have been burnt at the stake".

I am not sure she does irony, and there is context which strengthens my stance:

"[Father] Forgive them, for they know not what they do".(And Le Figaro makes the point that she is quoting scripture. I am not gilding the lily. C) "I forgive those who attack me as I think they do me less evil than they do to the Socialist Party, or to the Left".

However, here comes the ne plus ultra:

"Unfortunately I also believe that there was - and perhaps it was sub-conscious - in all of these attacks sexism, and to see it so strongly, and even I am surprised by it, I think it is connected with racism".

Royal may well have been born in Dakar, but it was in a Senegal under French rule and no-one could mistake her for being anything other than French to a degree that the Front National would approve of.

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posted by Croydonian

Erm, why bother?

Monday, September 14, 2009
Going through my bookmarks, I noticed something a bit odd going on at ElectionGuide.org:


Yup, somebody thought it was worth defacing the site.  Par for the course, I suppose, but clicking through does not take one to a site filled with the hacker's exploits, or even to a line or two of the same on ElectionGuide's site.  The missing headline is 'Senior Fatah Official Concerned Over Egyptian Election Plan', so quite what V0ld's agenda is has to be open to question.

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posted by Croydonian

Obama's stat pr0n

Wednesday, July 29, 2009
From CNS News, via Zogby:

"The traffic at President Obama's official White House Web site--whitehouse.gov--has fallen from a post-Inauguration peak to nearly the same level it was during the waning days of the Bush administration.

The dramatic drop in traffic has happened despite the Obama Administration's complete redesign of the site. According to the web-traffic tracking site Alexa.com, whitehouse.gov was almost the 500th most popular Web site in the world in February. Since then, it has fallen to the 3,732 ranked Web site in the world. Traffic to the site has fallen 51.6 percent in the last three months".


Anyway, Alexa allows statpr0n fans to download the daily top 1m sites (No, I'm not in it, alas. And neither are you, unless you are Dale, Fawkes, Dizzy or DK. Couldn't be bothered to check anyone else), and whitehouse.gov currently lurks at 4419, sandwiched between 1111.com.tw - having looked at it, I have no idea what it is about, although it appears to be work safe - and geenstijl.nl, of which I have heard. It is a sort of blog / news / waggishness site for sound Dutch types.

To add insult to injury, poor old 'bama does not even have the top US govt site - that goes to NIH.gov (a health site) at 478, followed by NASA at 545 and CA.gov at 748. He is outdone by Google Angola, but betters Google T&T.

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posted by Croydonian

A little something for classier iPhone users

Wednesday, July 01, 2009
"The Amazing Girlfriend Manager"

"With this application you can improve your relationships by applying concepts of CRM [to] your girlfriends. Think about your girlfriend as a client! What information and tools you need to improve your relationship? This application is the answer".

Features of this application: - Allows you to manage multiple girlfriends at the same time (not recommended for moral reasons) - You can assign a rating for each girl - Stores personal information, preferences, sizes of clothing, notes and other data for each girl

Etc etc.

And some screenshots:



I'm not an Apple victim, so it is no use to me, not that I would etc etc.....

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posted by Croydonian

Some rather good photoshopping

Friday, June 26, 2009
Found this here:
The photoshopper is Brian Lane Winfield Moore, and if I have read the Creative Commons licence properly by linking, attributing etc I am within the licence's terms. More in the same vein here, although I think the one I've used is the pick of the bunch.

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posted by Croydonian

Novel uses of the internet, pt 542

Monday, June 01, 2009
This from German English language daily The Local:

"The Protestant church in Germany rang in the Pentecost holiday weekend by successfully completing a project to summarise the entire Bible via Twitter, thus achieving a world record".

Those diligent Germans included the Apocrypha too.

And here it is, beginning thus:

"Gott schuf Himmel und Erde. Sie war leer. Er erschuf Tag und Nacht. Es kam der erste Tag und es war Gut!"

Even my 25 year old German O level is good enough to work out what that means. All credit to the Evangelische Kirche for this achievement. I think Luther would have approved, and frankly a sight more interesting than the guff one generally sees tweeted.

Maybe I'll start tweeting an out of copyright novel. Here goes - 'Call me Ishmael'....


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posted by Croydonian

Those lucky Cypriots

Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The stand out finding from a rather dull Eurobarometer survey on 'Confidence in the Information Society' is this - some 33% of Cypriot internet users are not aware of spam. Mind you, some 3% of Britons are unaware of spam. Blimey.

Elsewhere, the Maltese rate as the schmucks of the EU, with some 8% apparently having been phished. Presumably a significant proportion of Maltese bank deposits are now in Nigeria.

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posted by Croydonian

When is a privatisation not a privatisation?

Tuesday, May 05, 2009
ICANN - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - runs the top end of the internet under a contract with the US Department of Commerce. As a user, I'd say it is doing a pretty good job, all things considered, although 'this agreement expires on 30 September this year'. What's more, it is not an arm of the US state, it is 'a private not for profit corporation'. So not really something one could privatise.

However, a certain organisation that lurks in Brussels has a certain Commissar with a track record of not really understanding market mechanisms, and she does not like the ICANN set up one little bit, and wants it 'privatised':

"I trust that President Obama will have the courage, the wisdom and the respect for the global nature of the internet to pave the way in September for a new, more accountable, more transparent, more democratic and more multilateral form of Internet Governance"


Is your skin crawling yet? It gets worse, much worse.


"EU Commissioner Reding also outlined how a new model of Internet Governance could be shaped after 30 September. It could include in particular the following:
  • A fully privatised and independent ICANN complying with the best standards of corporate governance, in particular with those on financial transparency and internal accountability, and subject to effective judicial review".
Which probably boils down to green audits, the odd CSR programme and anything else that looks pretty in the annual report.

And now for the ohnosecond:

"A multilateral forum where governments can discuss general internet governance policy issues, such as a "G12 for Internet Governance" – an informal group of government representatives that meets at least twice a year and can make, by majority, recommendations to ICANN where appropriate. This group would provide swift reaction in case of threats to the stability, security and openness of the internet. To be geographically balanced, this "G-12 for Internet Governance" would include two representatives from each North America, South America, Europe and Africa, three representatives from Asia and Australia, as well as the Chairman of ICANN as a non-voting member. International Organisations with competences in this field could be given observer status".

I think I may have to sit in a corner and shake for a bit.

For the bold, here is a video of the Commissar telling us all about it. She is almost as jumpy on camera as our own dear prime minister:


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posted by Croydonian

The 'professionalism' of Brown's web people

Saturday, May 02, 2009
A screengrab from the No 10 site:



I make the odd typo, agreed, but there's just one of me, and no-one is paying me either.

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posted by Croydonian

At last, a use for Twitter

Monday, April 20, 2009
Beyond declaring what you had for breakfast or, in my case, transmitting triple-distilled phials of the ambrosia of wisdom. (/sarcasm)

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, let me introduce the tweeting cat flap:

"Each cat has a small RFID tag on the collar. When a cat is in the close proximity of the door, a small RFID reader reads the tag and if the cat is authorized, a servo will unlock the cat door. The RFID reader and the servo controller are connected to an old laptop. The software on the laptop is written in Delphi and for each "cat door event" is sending a Twitter message and a picture to twitter.com"

And here it is:



The two mogs have some 1,182 followers here. As a geek-wannabe - I can do some basic things with hardware but never got further than 10 - Print 'I am cool', 20 - Goto 10 with programing - I am deeply impressed by this marvelous display of technology for technology's sake.

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posted by Croydonian

The World's most thrilling museum exhibit?

Friday, April 17, 2009
The Rosetta Stone? Pah. Magna Carta? Pah. Moon rock? Pah. Etc etc.

Stockholm's Tekniska Museet has this:

Yup, it is a rack server, as viewable in any number of corporate IT departments. OK, there is a tale behind it in that it was used by file sharing operation Pirate Bay, and was seized by the Swedish plod last year. Doubtless the queues to press one's nose to the glass stretch round the block.

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posted by Croydonian

The EU domain name

Friday, April 03, 2009
Says EuPravda:

"Three years after its launch, the .eu top-level internet domain continues to be a success story. There are now more than three million internet domains under Europe's own top-level domain"

Now let's look at what 3 million as a share of registration voice among the top ten domains looks like:



That's .EU in toxic-waste green (I let Excel choose the colours, honest) just shy of midnight at 2%, level pegging with .nl.

And since they have been kind enough to give figures for the EU and national TLDs per 1000 inhabitants, here's another comparison:



National figures for Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Bulgaria were not given, but only Luxembourg and the Irish Republic see EU TLD counts that are in the same league as the national figures, so they are officially the Commissar's two pets. We are outdone by the Portuguese and the Danish for .eu scepticism, with .eu amounting to 5.1% of .UK registrations. The Portuguese and Danes manage 4.2% and 4.6% respectively.

Note also the Dutch, Danish, Germans and ourselves are the most enthusiastic domain registrants overall, and the French are epically poor. Always supposing anyone cares a brass farthing, the domain I own for purposes of facilitating a vanity e-mail address is a .com.

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posted by Croydonian

Bon mot o' the day

From Andrew Lloyd-Webber, in a debate on internet piracy etc in the Lords:

"People have got into the habit of talking glibly about “content providers” as if they are some sort of optional part of the process. The great wines of France are not content providers to the glass manufacturing business".

This is pretty good too: "when the internet has become a sort of Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy".

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posted by Croydonian

What's going on with Nigel Evans MP?

Sunday, March 29, 2009
I ask, because he was suggested as a friend on Facebook, and the profile photo was a tad unexpected:


Making a wild stab in the dark, I would imagine the lady concerned is his mother, but one could be forgiven for being a little bewildered.

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posted by Croydonian

The Government has *how many* websites?

Thursday, March 12, 2009
Mr. Hurd: To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster how many public sector websites with unique universal resource locators are in operation in England"

Go on, guess.

"Mr. Byrne: The information requested falls within the responsibility of the Central Office of Information. I have asked the chief executive to reply.....Although we keep a register of all central government websites, it does not cover the wider public sector. As of end September 2008, Department Website Reviews have identified 1012 websites in operation by central government departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies.

I think I have three or four bookmarked. Heaven knows how many have been spawned by councils and those quangos that slipped under the wire.

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posted by Croydonian

One way of positioning yourself in a competitive job market

Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Yanick Miel, a desperate or audacious (or both) 23 year old French management etc graduate is selling himself on ebay, at a starting price of €1. The poor devil has made 300 applications and had 20 interviews and is yet to secure himself a job after five months. He is listed in the category of Art, Antiquités , Objets du XXème et récents.

More at Libé, including his plan to loiter at La Défense this afternoon handing out his CV. He also has a remarkably unattractive website.

As things stand, his price has gone up to €1070 but there are nine days to go. All the bidders are Parisians, oddly enough.

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posted by Croydonian