Irish Rail's stormy relationship with the Irish language

As you know, it has long been the habit of the Irish government to insist that vaguely official things be translated into Irish, presumably on the vague, fuzzy basis that somewhere out there, there is someone who speaks Irish, but not English. Irish Rail's approach to this policy is... interesting.





Note the third item.





You didn't see that previous picture. This is the only instruction sign for the emergency intercoms that we have. Yes, indeed.





As no-one is going to bother to read the Irish bit anyway, so we may as well render it in an ugly font. In different case. In italics.





Only Irish speakers may use this escalator. Also, look, another ugly font, and dodgy fadas.





On the other hand, people who speak only Irish should feel free to electrocute themselves.



Irish speakers have been known to smoke.





But they don't litter.



Also, more ugly fonts. Irish Rail really needs to pick an ugly font, and stick with it.

Fishy pharmaceuticals

Spam subject of the day:

"Cod Tramadol".

Yes, delicious new Tramadol with the great taste of cod! Available at your local pharmacist and/or fishmongers today.

Look Around You for Programmers

I'm sure I've mentioned Look Around You before. It's a series of spoof educational videos about science. It's great.

And then, there's the Erlang Movie. It's a (mostly) non-spoof movie demonstrating Erlang the programming language, but is, nonetheless, terribly funny. It's quite old; you can see the line along the bottom where the analogue video tape wasn't tracking correctly. And it blows these new-fangled videos on how to make a blog in twenty minutes with Ruby on Rails or how to write a domain specific language in Lisp or how to make a large heap of unmaintainable code in PHP or whatever out of the water.

The setting is in an office with lots of telephones, divided by cubicle partitions. Dialogue highlight:

Man1: As we look at the screen we can see that something has started to go wrong.
Man2: We see here that something has gone wrong.

And it finishes up with "And of course, all this leads to very short lead times." Were any words ever dearer to a programmer's heart? Erm, well, probably, yes.

Shockheaded Peter

I just today head the songs of a wonderful group called 'The Tiger Lillies'. Really, they're great; have a look.

Anyway, they made a musical version of a classic 19th century German children's book called 'Struwwelpeter' (Shockheaded Peter). This is one of these charming moralistic things in which a child does something bad and is punished. Degrees of punishment vary, however, with no particular relation to the severity of the crime. Observe.

Mild
Child does not groom himself properly.
Child is unpopular.

Children tease dark-skinned boy.
Children dipped in ink. (By passing tall beardless man; they probably got off lightly.)

Boy won't sit still at table.
Boy pulls food on floor, parents are displeased.

Child walks into river.
Child's portfolio drifts away. (Eh?)

Medium
Child terrorises other children.
Child bitten by dog, which eats his sausages. (Could possibly be promoted to 'Nasty' if 'sausages' is euphemism.

Nasty
Boy doesn't eat soup.
Boy starves to death.

Boy goes outside during storm.
Boy blown away and never heard from again.

Girl plays with matches.
Girl burns to death, watched by her cats.

Boy sucks thumb.
Boy has thumbs cut off by passing tailor(!)

At this point, the author went off his anti-psychotics, I think

Weird
Rabbit steals hunter's rifle and eyeglasses and begins to hunt the hunter. (Please note that Warner Bros. apparently stole Bugs Bunny from this book.)
In the ensuing chaos the rabbit's child is burned by hot coffee.

I mean, where does the last one fit in? The rest are all more or less 'don't do that'; the last more "don't allow your parent to turn into a rabbit and become a serial killer." On pain of coffee.

There's a Wikipedia article here. It's not about the aforementioned book, though. This one is.

Linktastic

Apparently, this is the 60th highest ranked Irish blog by incoming links. It doesn't really get a look in based on Technorati rank, though; evidently no-one actually bothers reading it, they just link to it!

BrowseHappy - apparently earning money for Wordpress, not Automattic

Following on from here.

According to Matt, the money from the affiliate link on BrowseHappy goes to Wordpress.org. (Incidentally, I wonder does that mean that the ads on his blog, which, when they existed, used the same ID, funded Wordpress too?) That's good, though I am still of the opinion that it should at least have been mentioned somewhere, possibly with some disclosure on what precisely it would be used for.

He also says that it must not have generated enough to be noticeable. That seems curious. There are, after all, quite a few Wordpress and Wordpress.com users, and it seems likely that many of them use or used Internet Explorer. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are 1,000,000 users. 10% of them click the link. 50% of them decide to download Firefox, and 40% of those click the nice graphical affiliate add, rather than the two ordinary text links, which go directly to Mozilla. That's $20,000, which is surely enough to be noticeable! Of course, my numbers may be dubious. In addition, the page is well-linked-to, and at the height of its popularity in 2006 had a respectable Alexa rank. There was, presumably, non-Wordpress traffic.

Finally, the 'shoving people heavily in the direction of Google Firefox links in order to make money' thing has always bothered me a little. The nastiest examples, of course, involved denying access to anyone who didn't use Firefox, instead giving them a page with the affiliate link. This is nothing like that, of course, but I still am not a fan.

BrowseHappy, advertising, and dictatorial development

More news from the wacky world of Wordpress; I almost wish I was still using it so that I'd have more reasonable cause for complaint... I was put onto this by this article, although the advertising discovery is my own, or at least no-one else seems to have mentioned it.

Since time immemorial, the Wordpress admin screen has bothered users using Internet Explorer by pointing them to BrowseHappy, a Wordpress (or Automattic? It's unclear.) operated website which urges people to switch to alternative browsers, using the arguments that Internet Explorer is no longer being developed, and doesn't meet standards. That is, it (BrowseHappy) is out of date; it doesn't seem to have been updated for some time.

A few months ago, someone submitted a patch to prevent it appearing for Internet Explorer 7. After some discussion, it was decided to remove the link entirely. This was done, then hastily reverted, by order of aforementioned Matt (founder of Automattic, which operates Wordpress.com). The bug was reopened by the guy who had reverted it, and then after a small amount of discussion Matt closed it, without reasonable explanation. Another developer reopened it, more discussion, Matt closed it again. And again. Trac thread here.

Matt stresses that the issue is trivial, which, on the face of it, appears to be the case. It only appears on the admin page, and isn't visible to search engines anyway, so it isn't more profiteering on page rank or anything. There's no benefit to Wordpress or Automattic from people clicking through, surely? Well, there's a little more to it than that, actually.

Here's the FireFox page from BrowserHappy. See the "Browse the web faster. Get Firefox with Google Toolbar." link? That's a Google referrer ad. Google will pay whoever put it there about a dollar per user installation of their customised Firefox. On a page linked to by every copy of Wordpress, this could add up.

Now, if the money is going to Wordpress.org, that isn't so bad. I'm still not sure it's entirely okay, but it could be worse. If it's going to Automattic, however, there might be a bit of a conflict of interests. Note that the Google Adsense Client ID (pub-9971280513277476) in the BrowseHappy ad is the same as the default one in this plugin written by Matt. Hmm.

Update: pub-9971280513277476 is also the client ID that Matt used when he used to have AdSense on his blog. From Wayback machine (mirror; the main one's down at the moment). Hmm.

Another wonderfully stupid consumer product

This thread mentions a method of giving up smoking. Okay, nothing new about that, right?

Wrong. The method describes involves lasers.

First of all it is a cold laser, the basically laser certain points on your head and hands and this takes away the craving for Nicotine.

Of course, plenty of people will sell you a homoeopathic method of giving up smoking, or a prayer, or whatever, but somehow lasers seem just a little too weird.

Other points of interest; the original poster is called 'TeenageKicks' and has been smoking for 14 years. Hmm. Under the circumstances, the username is a little frightening.

Oh, how I love lifts

From the lift in work:

I can't say I like the quotation marks around 'emergency' much. What are they doing there? Is there a "Not for actual emergencies" disclaimer somewhere?

Also, the building is brand new. As in, the other floors aren't occupied yet. However:


It could be worse; the other lift, now out of order for the last few weeks, was built in 2004. Have they been hanging around in some huge lift warehouse since? Is there really a three-year backlog of lifts?

However, the scary lifts turn out to be worth it. We have quite a nice view from the roof:

Etymology

I just noticed something. A couple of days ago I mentioned Automattic, which owns Wordpress.com and is run by one Matt. Look at the name. Nope, I didn't notice that his name was in there originally, either. Clever, if a little (or very) egomaniacal.

Everyone's a spammer, now

A couple of days ago I wound up the sensitivity of my blog's spam detection system a couple of notches. Big mistake. A fair few legitimate comments got classified as spam (not just as unapproved, where I'd be at least emailed about them, but as naughty, naughty spam to be hidden away).

They've now been approved. Sorry about that.

Comment Subscribe 1.02

I've just released a new version of Comment Subscribe (my user comment notification plugin for Movable Type). It fixes most of the issues reported with the first two, so please do upgrade if you're using an older one.

You can get it here.

Weird MovableType issue

I've noticed something very odd happening with MovableType. Generally, the Atom feed, which I use to supply a feed to Feedburner, displays full posts, as is right and proper. Occasionally, however, for no obvious reason, it'll start showing post teasers; just the first 200 characters or so. My solution so far has been to change to using the RSS feed for Feedburner, as it always seems to show the full post. It's all very strange, though. I suspect it could be something which is fixed in MT4; I'm still on RC4 for the moment.

Wispa!

Remember the Wispa?

It was a very popular Cadbury's chocolate bar made of a sort of hardened chocolate foam, abandoned early this decade due to falling sales and very high production costs.

It came in a number of variations, including ordinary (very nice), mint (horrible), gold and cappuccino (both lovely). It attracted a cult following on, where else, the Internet, and various campaigns were launched to get Cadbury's to bring it back.

Anyway, they are bringing it back from the dead this October, with a trial run of 27 million. If it sells well, it will apparently be revived entirely.

I wish they'd brought it back when I still ate chocolate; I tend to avoid it these days.

Vote of no confidence

Ever feel like all your problems in life boil down to one tiny, silly psychological issue, which should, in theory, be easily ignored?

In my case, it is self-confidence. It's not that I have too much; that would actually be rather nice. I envy people who have too much self-confidence. It's more that I have none whatsover.

Those of you who've been reading this blog for any reasonably long period of time before will have seen my interminable rants about how I can't get guys. While, in the past, I was always inclined to blame the way I looked, I begin to wonder if it's not just a confidence thing. After all, very ugly guys seem to be able to get quite okay-looking guys all the time... Hah, 'just'. We'll get to that.

It isn't just the guy thing. General social stuff is a big problem, too. At parties, I tend to be the one who hides in the corner; I can deal with meeting new people in very small doses, but large numbers of new people or even, sometimes, people I know can terrify me. I always feel a bit like I'm out of the loop. I always worry that I'm more annoying than anything else to my friends. And yes, all of this is probably more irrational than anything else.

Other areas suffer, too. When I have a programming problem to solve, say, I can become terrified about the possibility that I won't be able to solve it, and spend quite a long time obsessing over that. I even occasionally abandon these awful blog posts because I worry that they're too poor even for this blog's low standards.

I can't even buy clothes without being absolutely horrified about what people are thinking about me and about how I look.

The problem is that it's one thing to realise that you're being irrational and that you have insufficient self-confidence, and quite another to actually do anything about it. How do you change your gut reactions? Logic is all very well, but tends to take the backseat to emotion in these matters. And yet, if I could get over the confidence thing, I'd certainly be far happier. It's annoying...

If anyone suggests the bloody Gay Mens' Health Project's bloody confidence classes, I do reserve the right to set fire to them. Just so you know.

Wordpress people are scary

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a great fan of Wordpress. My objections, however, were in general technological. I was unimpressed with its interface, I found it slow, I had my doubts about the SQL it generated... and then I looked at the source. That was enough for me, and I fled, in terror, to Blogger.

Now, not using many plugins and being the independent type, I hadn't seen much of the support forums. At one point, I did have a look to see how many people were having speed issues with the (at the time) appalling SQL, and found the community generally extremely defensive and patronising towards anyone who dared complain.

A few weeks ago, then, I saw this post (about people moving to Movable Type from Wordpress). There first saw the writings of Matt, who runs Automattic (the company that operates Wordpress.com). I'm not sure what it is about him, but he really gets on my nerves.

Anyway, the point of all this is to point you to this wonderful blog. 'Wordpress wank', hosted on Wordpress.com, and all about all the wonderful drama associated with that service and the platform it uses. Gasp in horror as Wordpress.com quietly adds large, random, apparently insufficiently-tested ads to people's pages. Giggle at Spammy Wordpress (Wordpress.org briefly, in the past, exploited the fact that every Wordpress blog in existence links to it by filling itself with enormous amounts of spammy articles about asbestos and such with Google ads, dodgy link-cloking, and so forth. Much publicity, panic, pagerank temporarily revoked, etc. later, the spam was removed.) Etc. It really is great fun.

Then again, I have been known to take a little too much pleasure in clever people complaining about things wittily.

Happy computers and free text messages

My Mobile phone provider, Meteor, just sent me the following message:

To continue getting FREE Meteor to Meteor text 24/7, don't forget that you now need to top up by a further 20 euro :)

Somehow, a machine sending me smiley faces feels weird.

Meteor's free messages to other Meteor numbers thing is a nice feature, but for people like me who don't use the phone that much, it tends to lead to barely any credit being used during the free text periods. I rarely make phonecalls, and a lot of my friends are on Meteor.

Fresh cod and chips and a copy of Vogue, please

I just saw a little bit of "Britain's next top model" on the telly. The models were eating large portions of fish and chips from a chipper. Now, this all seems wrong somehow. I feel fat after having fish and chips, and I am not paid to wander round wearing hardly any clothes. Aren't these people supposed to be anorexic? They should be dining on air, with perhaps a glass of diet water on special occasions!

Stupid brandname of the week

Yes, Autocrat coffee syrup. Autocrat. You apparently put it in milk. Assuming you like milk with added sugar and fake coffee.

I mean, though, why 'autocrat'. If I saw this in a supermarket I would break down laughing. Are Americans used to it at this point?

On the plus side, I'm sure they were able to get great celebrity endorsements in the pre-World War II period.

Stupid even by comic-book standards

This (marginally NSFW) is... well, that is to say... the thing is... it's a comic about a man who's embarassed that he has a small penis, so becomes a superhero (or super-villain, possibly; I'm not sure) with a gun for a penis. Yes, really. It is. I wouldn't make something like that up, would I? Oh, the prosthetic penis is also a drill, by the way. And a scissors.

Please note that the protagonist doesn't just have a small penis, he also seems to have some sort of premature ageing thing. In the scene where he's in high school he looks about 50.

Also, this. I have not the words.


By the way, it was published by DC comics. It is not some obscure sex-shop-bound thing.

This is what happens when you dismantle the Comic Codes Authority.

I hate to think the sort of Google queries that are likely to bring up this post...

Bonus extra nonsense, from the same site. Anime, this time; a gay pet shop owner gives out killer pets to mildly bad people. Bizarre.

Introducing the Apple iHear

I am informed that it is common practice among people who illegally film movies in the cinema using a camcorder to distribute on the Internet to use a device which receives the transmission of the soundtrack intended for hearing-aid users. This gets them better sound than using the camcorder's microphone would.

Clearly, the MPAA et al. are not going to take this sort of thing lying down. There's an obvious solution; DRM hearing aid transmissions! And who better to implement the system than good old Apple?

Expect to see the iHear in medical supply shops within the year. Below is depicted a prototype.

(Actually, it's just a random hearing-aid I found on the Internet. Admit it, though; if you had to use a DRM hearing aid, you'd go for an Apple one, and not a Microsoft plays-for-sure-except-on-Zune one which requires Windows Vista Service Pack 8 and a lot of luck.)

Arm-crushing robot of doom

The BBC reports that arm-wrestling machines are being withdrawn in Japan, due to them breaking peoples' arms. According to a representative from the manufacturer, it is perfectly safe; even women should be able to beat it!

For your enlightenment and safety, a representative image is attached.

Remember, if you are confronted by an arm-crushing robot, run up the stairs; by the look of it it probably has the same issues as early-model Daleks in that regard. Failing that, just have a woman beat it, as per the manufacturer's statement.

Comment Subscribe updated

My Movable Type plugin, Comment Subscribe, has been slightly updated, thanks to Arvind Satyanarayan, who made a number of changes and sent them to me.

Also, it's currently the featured plugin on Movable Type's plugin directory, which is sort of cool. :) 

Pointless service of the week

From the DART, that mecca of advertisements for stupid stuff:

Yes, they are suggesting that you use Teletext through your mobile phone. Teletext. Though a phone. I would feel moderately confident in saying that no-one has ever, ever, ever done this, and no-one ever will.

The very best in pub toilets

The other day, I was in Doyles, a pub near Trinity. I was at the heats for the standup competition from the Bulmers Comedy Festival; they're actually great fun, by the way.

Anyway, as you do, I went to the toilet. And what confronted me, but:
Two toilet rolls! Imagine the convenience!

Also, there was a large box above the sinks labelled "Washroom dosing system". It beeped periodically. I don't think I liked it much.

GData for everything except the useful services

GData is an enhanced Atom format which Google uses to provide web service interfaces for some of its services. I used it a while ago to move a Blogger blog to Movable Type. It's available for Blogger, and Picasa, and even weird things like Google Base and Notebook.

It is not, however, available for Google websearch, Groups, or GMail. This is a shame; I had planned on writing a little thing for viewing USENet posts from a particular person at a particular time in a particular group; for why I might want to do this, see this huge accumulation of nonsense written by Kibo. You can understand why they'd be reluctant to do it for their big services, I suppose, but Groups hardly needs to be protected...

Oh, they don't provide it for GMail contacts, either; a pity, as it could be very handy there.

Their API page is fun. Each API has a little list of apps which use it - except for the really
pointless APIs, like the one for listing peoples' Google documents;
clearly no-one could think of anything to do with it.

Blogging software, a religious issue

I was much amused by this post here, and associated comments. 'Matt' is a lead developer of Wordpress, by the way. Yes, really. He's very aggressive, isn't he?

Also, bonus. Note that post's URL extension. It's '.eire'. It's just as well, really, that he doesn't live in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or anywhere else with an unreasonably long name.

Movable Type Comments Subscription

One of the features I miss a bit from Wordpress is the one which allows a commenter to subscribe to receive emails about future comments on the same article. The 'Notify me of future comments on this article' checkbox. So I wrote a Movable Type (4) plugin to do the same thing. It's here.

A few other people have mentioned missing this one. There is a commercial plugin which does the same and more, but it's only available for older versions of MT.

Movable Type, by the way, has a very nice plugin API, although it does, of course, involve writing in Perl.

FeedBurner introduces crappy new word

'Pubvertise'. Yes, 'pubvertise'. I have not the words.

Here is the post, in case you were wondering exactly what it meant; personally, I couldn't be bothered to check.

Cute error messages

I just attempted to go to Twitter, only to be presented with this:

It's so cute, you'd nearly forgive them for being broken all the time.

The Dollar's up!

Here's an interesting graph; the bars represent earnings on an affiliate programme, where the payout is a fixed sum per action; the higher bars represent two payouts while the lower bars represent one.

Why, then, are the two high bars different heights? Simple; the values are in Euro, but the payout is in dollars; the dollar has changed value sufficiently in a day to show a difference.

Okay, so I thought it was interesting.

Fascinating quote from the UK Food Standards Authority

""The term "vegetarian" should not be applied to foods that are, or are made from or with the aid of, products derived from animals that have died, have been slaughtered, or animals that die as a result of being eaten. Animals means farmed, wild or domestic animals, including for example, livestock poultry, game, fish, shellfish, crustacea, amphibians, tunicates, echinoderms, mollusks and insects."

Right. As opposed to those animals which remain living when eaten? May tapeworms legally be labelled 'vegetarian'? Interestingly, land mammals don't get a look in; care for some vegetarian steak?


Also, I am sceptical as to whether anyone eats tunicates.

How to Annoy People

The above-depicted object is a remote-controlled electricity socket. The manufacturer claims that it's to be used to make it easy to turn devices off at the socket, presumably to save power. Of course, I think that we all know that the real market for this device lies in annoying people. Imagine the possibilities! Turn off someone's computer from across the office! Toggle the microwave on and off until it explodes! Hide it behind the washing machine and cause it to 'break' at inconvenient times!

Possibly I just have a twisted mind, of course.

Blogger to Movable Type or Wordpress

As promised, here is an article describing how to import Blogger posts into Movable Type and Wordpress blogs, along with a couple of scripts I wrote to make it (hopefully) easier to manage.

Blogger to MovableType Move

As I previously mentioned, this blog is now published using MovableType, from Six Apart; it previously used Google's Blogger. I had a few reasons for making this change, but the most immediately pressing was that I had managed to break Blogger in such a way that the file extensions on all my posts were changed to .txt, breaking all incoming links. I'm still not too sure how I did this, but I was unable to reverse it, and the final beta of MovableType was just out, so I thought I might as well give it a go.

All in all, I'm very happy with it. Installation was easy. Migration was somewhat less easy but doable, and I managed to keep all of my page names the same and keep all my old comments; I'll talk about how to do this in a later article. The admin interface, while initially weird, is okay once you get used to it, and the post editor is quite nice; certainly far nicer than the terrible Wordpress one, and on about the same level as Blogger's.

The speed of using the admin interface, searching and so on was greatly increased by just enabling fast-cgi. Republishing still takes a while, but is tolerable, and you generally don't have to republish the whole thing, unless you're messing with the template. Browsing the blog itself is lightning-fast, of course; after all, it's just static HTML.

The comment situation seems reasonable; there are decent spam filters, and it's easy enough for users to leave comments; I think it's better than Blogger, at least.

The blog turns out to be about 80 megabytes of HTML when published! Which I suppose isn't that dramatic, but I was a little surprised.

Another Blog Move

As you may have noticed, this blog has moved again, this time to the new version of MovableType. Migrating data from Blogger was interesting; I shall be putting up a post about it later.

So far, seems very nice.

De-wobbling device

Here is a camera which has a feature to make very fat people slightly less fat. Watch the video. It's great!

In other fat people news, look what I saw on boards.ie's fitness board!
Yes, Tuna shake. Argh.

A blog about stalking childminders

I recently came across this. It's a blog where people post stories of bad or occasionally good nannies they have seen, apparently with the idea that the employer might read them. Whether this has ever actually happened or not I don't know.

The whole thing actually makes quite compulisve reading, largely because of the comments. Some are insane, some just odd, and a few even sensible. And then there are things like this:
All too often, the comment threads break down into fighting between nannies, employers of nannies, and mothers who don't employ nannies (dubbed 'bitter poor people', or 'bpps', by some of the more cretinous of the nanny employers).

The detail in some of the reports, by the way, is verging on scary. The Internet is indeed a strange and varied place.

Update: this post is so wonderfully poetic, yet creepy, that I thought it necessary to quote it in full.

This incident transpired Monday,(7/30) mid -afternoon at Cuernavaca Park, in the city of Burlingame, CA. The nanny was a mickle to behold. Long, lush locks of dark hue, the delicately lined lips of a cherub and the sweet skin of a honey dew. She wore a red, clingy top that stretched across her body and revealed a slip of her stomache. Her jeans were low rise, presumed stretch denim and worn close to the bone. Her shoes were nondescript and so I cannot say. Her eyebrows seems drawn on at an improbable arch. Although she looked rather lovely in the mid day sun, she was when managing your child, somewhat of a scourge. I witnessed two time outs given for no reason whatsoever, except the nanny was incapable of aquiring cell phone reception and frustrated for that. The little boy wanted to climb the bars and needed undersupport. To him she said, "if you cant do it yourself, you cant do it". Her accent was subtle. A latina, but as fair as the driven snow. The little boy looked sad and lost. He asked her to watch this or watch that, she rolled her eyes and turned abruptly toward the sea. He asked to go home. Claimed he was hungry and his little legs were tired. She said, "in a minute, in a minute". When he fell and scraped his knee ten minutes later, he cried. She said, "now what" with a bored expression and yanked him up by his arm. He was only a boy of 2 or 3. Wearing a bright blue shirt, with a yellow truck on it, cargo style shorts and little, tevo- style sandals. Should I have been a painter looking to paint a beautiful portrait, I might have chosen she. But I was a parent out with my child, not nanny spotting and yet I found her.

What an odd man.

Twitter texts cheaper than expected

From my pay-as-you-go Meteor phone, updating Twitter (via their UK number) turns out to cost 12 cents per minute. About twice what I normally pay for a text message, but not horribly expensive in the scheme of things, and a lot less than what I expected given that people in the UK were talking about it costing 25p a shot.

Also, a friend is using it to spread disrepute about me.

Programming over Potter

From Amazon's Canadian site.

This is truly bizarre.

Another interesting interpretation on a news article

From BBC.

Farmer Laurence Matthews, who owns the land where the second outbreak struck, said the farmer whose cattle were culled, and his family, were "absolutely devastated".

The farmer is devastated that his cattle and family were culled? Well, naturally.

The perfect present for someone you don't like

From the Oak Ridge Laboratory museum:


That marketing slogan didn't work for Sellafield, either.

Please note that you can still get silly radioactive 'health' products today; they seem to be popular mostly in Japan, the land which brought you Hello Kitty vibrators, though.

The dedicated shopper can still occasionally find radium-tastic items on eBay, although these days they tend to quickly remove listings for the nastier ones.

The joys of inconsistent user interface design

Today, I installed GMail Notifier, a little widget which changes colour when you have new mail in your GMail account, on Windows Vista. Now, I already use it on my Mac at home, so I thought I knew what to expect. On the Mac, it is a grey envelope which turns red (like the GMail icon, in fact) when you have mail. You can click on it, bringing down a menu with a list of new messages. This is handy.

I was slightly worried installing it on Vista because it clearly states on the website that it's for Windows 2000 and XP; however, there hasn't been a release on Windows in over a year, so they may just not have bothered to change the website; a big oversight for Google, you'd think, but they often don't keep their less prominent websites in wonderful repair.

Anyway, it does seem to work correctly on Vista, but the interface is different to the Mac version, and, in my opinion, worse. The envelope turns blue instead of red; this isn't a big deal, but it's quite a lot less obvious. More irritatingly, when you click on it, you don't get a list of message subjects. I'm not sure why, as this is an obviously useful, clever feature present in the other version, which can hardly be difficult to implement.

Even more irritatingly, it doesn't tell you how many messages there are! On MacOS, the number of messages appears on the toolbar icon, but not on Windows. I can't see any reason that this should be technically infeasible, so it looks like just poor sharing of ideas between the same teams. This same problem seems to be epidemic in Microsoft, by the way; just compare the feature sets of IE5.5 for Mac and its contemporary Windows version to see what I mean.

There's one other issue, but I suspect it to be more of a Vista oddity than a GMail notifier one. On installation, it asks you which browser you'd like to use. I left it on the default setting, 'System Default', as I had my default set to Firefox; I cannot abide weird, menu-less IE7. When clicking, however, on 'View new messages', it came up in IE7. I'm not sure why; other applications used the correct browser, and when I set it explicitly to use Firefox it was fine. I've seen this with other applications on Vista from time to time, though, so am inclined to blame Microsoft until proven otherwise.

Worrying Labels

When the top light's off, does it mean that he's asleep? Or simply non-sentient?

Blogsodus

I just noticed that along the way, on one of my blog migrations, a number of people had been left accessing a feed which hadn't been updated since April. It's now redirecting to where it should be. So, if lots of new posts have just appeared on a blog that you thought dead, that's why. Sorry for the inconvenience. How you could survive three months without my blather, I just don't know.

Headline of the day

Sadly, the article doesn't really live up to the promise of its title; apparently Thai police who are naughty will have to wear the Mark of the Cat for a few days.

"Guilty officers will be made to wear the armbands in the office for a few days, with instructions not to disclose their offences. Let people guess what they have done."

Presumably persistent offenders will be branded with mouthless cartoon cats.

Odd things from work

Here are a few random photos I had lying around from our lovely office.


Here's the coffee machine.


The photo doesn't really do justice to how very, very bright red this instruction is. This machine doesn't ask you to add more water, it demands it!


This is a light switch! The notice is probably there because the light switch is right beside the door, while the door release switch is 'round the corner near nothing in particular.


How rude! I think that this was a relic from the building work, and is now gone.

Another sign that my brain is going downhill fast

Reading a news article today, I originally read "[the body] was found by a road" to mean that a road had found the body. Only when I noticed the sheer silliness of this interpretation did I realise what it actually meant.

Lard breaking the bank? Move to Ireland!

The following diagram graced the Irish Times a few weeks ago.

Please note that while everything else is horribly over-priced, Ireland does have cheap oil and fat. It's just as well too; otherwise we could never maintain our world-class fleet of fat people.

Next time you're in the pub, consider saving money by having a pint of bacon-grease, instead of beer.

Are you targetting the lucrative sex-offender market yet?

I'm sorry, what? "Checking out the neighbours"? Is there really much of a market for ads aimed at people who enjoy inspecting the naughty bits of others in public toilets? And who calls a toilet a 'washroom', anyway?

Stupid consumer product

This is called 'Silavent'. From what I heard, 'small-lorry-idling-vent' would be more appropriate.

Stupid consumer product of the week

Seen at a party. For those of you who don't know, Druids is a brand of cheap high-alcohol-content cider. In the last few months they've ventured into the lucrative pear cider market first broached by Kopparberg, but this is something in an altogether different league.
Now, close inspection of the ingredients list reveals that it is not actually made out of starfruit; it's apple cider with starfruit flavouring. Okay, fair enough. But why starfruit? I've never even eaten one, and I doubt that many Irish people have. It isn't the first thing that jumps to mind when you think 'alcoholic drink', I'll bet.

The bottle was empty when I saw it, so I, perhaps fortunately, didn't have the privilege of tasting it. Have you? What's it like?

Twitterbuzz is back

A while ago, I put together a site called TwitterBuzz, which shows recent links that people have posted to Twitter. It was down to a while due to technical problems and lack of time on my part, but is now back up. Enjoy!

Previous articles on TwitterBuzz here.

At the office

Here's a picture of me at my desk in work. I'm not normally that red-faced; I think the heating was turned up abnormally high in the room at the time. The weird expression is because I was surprised at the picture being taken.

Amusing spelling mistake

Reddit and Digg widgets for new Blogger

In the last couple of years, many blogs have added links to submit stories to Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us and others to posts. Some use simple links, while others use a little widget which indicates whether the article has been submitted, and if so how many votes it has received, like the one

Many blogging platforms make it very easy to add these; there are a number of plugins available for Wordpress to do it, for instance, though, of course, they may or may not add significantly to page load time, make ten database queries per page, or stop working abruptly for no obvious reason. Wordpress is a bit like that.

There's no immediately obvious way to do it with the new version of Blogger, however. Google has been changing it quite quickly, so that even the 'Blogger Beta' in common use a few months ago was quite different to the current Blogger. Reddit even claims that you can't use the widgets, or buttons, on the new Blogger.

It turns out to be possible, although it's not immediately obvious, and requires some editing of your template code. As I wasn't able to find any other up-to-date guides, I decided to write about it. Before you start, be sure to save a copy of your template, so that you can revert if you break it. You can do this by clicking the Template tab and clicking Edit HTML, then clicking Download Full Template.

Now, still on the HTML editing page, check the Expand Widget Templates box. Search for post-body in the editing box. Now you should consider what you want to add, and where. You can add either the buttons, or the links, or both. If you put the code above the <data:post.body/> tag, the items will (barring very odd CSS usage) appear above your article; if you put it below, they'll appear below.

Here's the code for simple links to add an article to some popular services:

<a href="http://www.blogger.com/%27" url=" + data:post.url + " title="" target="'_blank'">Submit to Reddit</a> -
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/%27" phase="2&url=" title="" target="'_blank'">Submit to Digg</a> -
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/%27" title="" target="'_blank'">Add to del.icio.us</a>

And here's the code for the elusive Reddit button.

<script>reddit_url='<data:post.url/>'</script>
<script>reddit_title='<data:post.title/>'</script>
<script language='javascript' src='http://reddit.com/button.js?t=1'/>

The code for Digg should be similar.

By the way, while I'm obviously irritated about having to find all of this out by trial and error, I think that Google did the right thing by replacing Blogger's template language; the new one is far more versatile. They really need to document it better, though.

How Clean is Your House free on th'Internet

"How Clean is Your House" is currently available free on Channel 4's hard-to-install 4 on Demand service. It's such fun!

Classy, Google

Google recently launched a Cost Per Action (CPA) programme called Referrals 2.0, similar to Commission Junction, as part of their AdSense advertising system. I decided to look at what was on offer. I selected the 'Entertainment' section, and was met with this:

Now, this wasn't buried down the bottom of the page, or anything, this was their second best performing product. The text is as follows:

Marry An IT Professional Settled in UK, USA, Australia & Europe. Register Free! At BharatMatrimony.Com Now & Find Your Soul Mate.

I'm not sure where "luring unsuspecting women into bondage with presumably the uglier variety of IT professional in the Developed World" comes under Don't Be Evil, but I doubt it makes the top ten.

Here's the site, in case you'd like to sign up; not a referral link, obviously.

Actually, a bonus; a couple of fascinating excerpts from the site.

I look forward in joyful hope to the day that European dating sites allow you to select the caste of your intended.

And, even better, it is the best matrimony site of 2007! So there, all you other matrimony sites. In case you doubt the existence of such an award, it is here.

Harry Potter Addict

I appear to have become addicted to Harry Potter. I saw the film, complete with Imelda Staunton playing the sadistic kitten (and pink sugar!) obsessed madwoman, a couple of weeks ago, and am now on the last book. It's great! I don't want it to be over.

By the way, I did a quick Google to check if anyone else had noticed that Umbridge was using pink sugar. I wish I hadn't. (Don't click if the idea of a long tedious poorly-written story about Draco and Harry getting it on doesn't appeal. The silly thing doesn't even mention Umbridge!)

The last book contains the line: "They're so careless! Remember that poisonous duck?" That alone makes it worth the purchase price.

Also, I'd like to make it clear that I still resent it when German tourists point at me and shout 'Harry Potter'. I don't even look like him! Grr.

Blogger Known Issues Report

A bug that made it trivially easy to accidentally set your blog's language to Albanian has been fixed.

Heh.

If you notice that your blog's archives and other text appears to be in Albanian (and you don't want it to be), use Settings > Formatting to change your blog's language.

Yes, like I'd know.

I wonder how many blogs there are in Albanian? Three?