Irony...

Wordpress.com has introduced one of those lovely 'Possibly Related' things, on all users' posts by default. Ah, but there's a twist; instead of showing your visitors what is possibly related on your own blog, it shows them what is possibly related on all blogs!

By the way, from what I've seen, 'possibly related' means, in this context 'post written by 12 year old neo-Nazi which includes similar words to those that you used in your post. Like "a". Or "the".'

Anyway, on to the irony!

The top comment is one which seems to have been copied and pasted over lots of entries mentioning the whole thing. The bottom is one recognising the possibility (nay, certainty!) of this features being misused by naughty spammers. The top one, of course, is a form of spam, albeit spam which is liable to wear out your CTRL and V keys. Note that it is also written more or less in the style that one expects spam blogs to be.

Automattic really should realise that when testing a new and almost certainly annoying feature, it is probably a good idea to make it opt-in, not opt-out. There seem to be a lot of irritated users talking about it.

Oh, some bonus extra irony for you:
That's from Matt's blog; Matt is the founder of Automattic, which operates Wordpress.com. Sphere is the company which provides the absurd link spam possibly related items; Matt is an advisor to it.

Anyway, I'm sorry, but AOL? Prescient? AOL? Whatever he's on, I want some.

Apple finally push out Java 6

Apple's latest MacOS update finally (about two years late) pushed out their version of Java 6 (also known, rather confusingly, as Java 1.6). Bizarrely, though, it is 64 bit only, so it will not be used in Safari (which is still always 32 bit); Safari is still on 5.

It doesn't seem to be on by default, but you can enable it through Java Preferences (just type it into Spotlight, then drag 1.6 to the top of the list, and click save).

It really has taken them an amazingly long time, though, considering that it's just Sun Java with OS hooks. Here's an enthusiastic post from 2006 looking forward to its imminent release. Bet he was irritated...

What's it like? Well, Eclipse feels considerably snappier. I'm not a Java programmer, and don't really use any Java apps except Eclipse, so can't really comment further.

Stonehenge actually missile site?

From Wikipedia:

Ancient, military and uninhabited structures (such as Stonehenge) are sometimes instead classified as Scheduled Ancient Monuments and protected by much older legislation whilst cultural landscapes such as parks and gardens are currently "listed" on a non-statutory basis.

Oh, those druids.

Scary old America

Just saw an American news channel (Fox, I think). Presenter says that someone fired on American soldiers in Baghdad, injuring six of them. Sad face. Then, she says that they fired back, destroying three houses and killing at least 25, most of them civilians. And she grins. Really. It was terrifying.

See, this would be the difference. People rarely grin about pointless death on Irish or British TV. I worry that the TV presenters have perhaps become just a little detached from reality.

George Bush's wife being eccentric in public

George Bush's wife, Laura (whose accomplishments, apparently, include being a very heavy smoker and killing a friend when she was a kid through dubious driving; who'da thunk it?) was in the news twice today!

She's brought out a book for kids (on reading; hopefully her command of the English American language is rather better than Georgie's), and won a sandwich-making contest. Really. I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up, could you?

The position of First Lady has always puzzled me a bit. The US press tend to treat her a little like you'd expect the Queen to be treated, but she does seem to do the strangest things!

If Clinton wins the election, will Bill be first gentleman, I wonder? And, if so, will he be expected to go around winning sandwich contests?

How Google indexing REALLY works

So, go to any Youtube clip from a TV show, and you will see comments consisting of nothing but random lines from said show. For no reason. People just type them in.

And, when you think about it, how else would Google figure out what was being said? Voice recognition is hard. Far cheaper, surely, to brainwash, or possibly genetically engineer (it tends to be mostly the younger users) millions into posting the words as comments?

I'd assume that the site ranking works in much the same way. No doubt those people have special tools to move pages up and down, Digg-style. The whole link spam thing, then, is clearly just a ruse. Bad, naughty Matt Cutts!

Mario Kart matchmaking oddity

The Mario Kart (a popular Nintendo franchise) game for the Wii has quite good online play capability. One unusual feature is that the user can select the character they want to use before they start looking for a game. There can only be one instance of a given character per game, so the matchmaking system must presumably look for games where that character is not used. Games tend to be found very quickly if you choose an obscure character.

This must complicate the process, and I'd be quite interested to see how it is efficiently implemented. Interestingly, you can't choose to race on a particular track; presumably, the designer decided that a sufficient pool of games to give a satisfactory user experience with so many options couldn't be guaranteed.

It'll be interesting to see if this level of choice spreads into other games, as online play becomes more popular.

Sega naming weirdness

Sega's Mega Drive (Genesis) console was marketed as a 16bit console, but used the Motorola 68000, effectively a 32bit chip. If someone had suggested to Sun that its Sun-1 was a 16bit system, they would probably have been offended.

Free business plan - hosted blogging which actually works

I've recently been bitching about Wordpress.com, and to an extent Blogger, as you may have noticed. Have I a better solution? Well, yes, actually. And has I have neither the will nor the resources to actually implement it, you, dear reader, can have a go if you like.

So, to recap. Problems with existing blog platforms (not all apply to all platforms; see previous posts for more detail); slow, insufficient levels of customisation, poor import/export ability, obnoxious advertising, weird, dreadful interfaces, seemingly not maintained at all. There's another one, which I didn't mention previously; Tumblr, a strange creature in general, doesn't fall into many of the above traps, but is verging on feature-free. Don't do that. At least support comments.

Okay, my solutions? First, slow. This one is moderately easy. Make pages static, serve through content delivery network, invalidate as they're changed. True, not the cheapest solution, but see below for that.

Insufficient levels of customisation. This is only really a big issue with Wordpress.com, where you can't create custom themes and are charged for having custom CSS. There should, in principle, be no problem with allowing the user to have custom themes; simply give them a safe DSL to specify them in, as Blogger and various others do. Hardly rocket science. Don't know why I mentioned it, quite frankly.

Import/export is a no-brainer. It's actually really easy to do, but most platforms seem to have poor support for it. Not just being able to import posts and comments; the user must be able to import a whole blog without breaking incoming links and so forth. Each platform has a different linking format, of course, but none of them are terribly complicated. If a user can move their existing blog to your system easily, and can move away from your system easily if they're unsatisfied, they are surely far more likely to give it a go. If they wish to flee back to Wordpress or Blogger, fine; it's your job to make your service good enough to convince the not to. Allowing custom domains for free is a no-brainer, of course, and would greatly help users to transition while not losing links.

Now, advertising. Obviously, you need some source of revenue. Wordpress.com and Livejournal annoy their users with ads; Blogger doesn't but has its own issues. My solution is pretty simple, and, I think, makes more sense than theirs. It is as follows. Service is free up until a certain numer of page views a day; blogs which no-one looks at don't really cost you anything, anyway. Let them place ads if they feel like it. After that, give your users a choice. First, they can pay a monthly fee based on traffic; if they do, the situation remains as before. Second, ads with revenue sharing; Google AdSense now makes this terribly easy through their API. They show ads, you get a cut. Price the first option to make this one attractive, but not mandatory. Third, just show ads; this is for people who don't want to get into the whole AdSense thing for whatever reason; hopefully rare.

This way, everyone is happy. The small bloggers, 99% of your users but a tiny fraction of your costs, don't have to pay at all. Bigger bloggers can either pay to have total control (as with TypePad), make some money, or just coast along with your ads.

The maintainance and interface ones are interesting. Blogger tends to feel like no-one has touched it in years. Wordpress.com, less so, but it still has its quirks. Anyone who wishes to start a viable competitor should be able to beat both of them with a little effort. On interfaces, well, with the best will in the world, it's quite obvious that while Wordpress.com put some effort into their new interface, they didn't have proper UI designers. Invest in a professional UI designer; UI is important. Google's UI, of course, hasn't really changed since before wood was invented.

Like it or not, hosted blogging is the way of the future. Running your own blog is too much like hard work, except for people who actually enjoy being sysadmins. Thus far, the free solutions are mediocre at best. Anyone who can put together a really good, polished product, which is free for the afore-mentioned small bloggers who don't really cost anything, could do rather well.

Why am I offering up these ideas? Well, I want a hosted blogging platform which works properly, too. Go make it.

Crazy, crazy comments

I received the following lovely comment today (on this totally unrelated post):

Hey, what's up. I think I can help you with your fugly problem.

See, it's not that you're just fugly as hell. You could still get laid, if you fucking actually wanted to and weren't so obsessed with feeling bad all the time.

Here's the problem with you: you're motherfucking boring as hell, and unbelieveably self-absorbed. Every fucking time I talk to you, you never ever even remotely give a shit. You come wish bullshit like "I'm busy", which you never fucking are, because you spend all your time on your fat ass reading shitty blogs about shit that doesn't matter.

You don't need an SSRI, you need a motherfucking carbon monoxide overdose. Try it, and witness for a brief moment the wonder of Darwinism.

First, I have no idea who this is. No idea at all. I can't, offhand, think of anyone who I routinely tell that I'm busy. Sure, I'm often busy when I'm at work, but in my off-time, no so much. I will admit that I'm a bad conversationalist over MSN, AIM, Jabber, fax machine and so forth, but that's just one of my little quirks. Never been too comfortable with them (especially the fax machines; I'm at least fairly sure that it's not someone I know in real life.

Right. I shall address their points, because I am in that sort of mood.

"See, it's not that you're just fugly as hell. You could still get laid, if you fucking actually wanted to and weren't so obsessed with feeling bad all the time." - Funnily enough, I have recently come to the same conclusion. The getting laid thing, I mean; I beg leave to suggest that the 'fugly' bit is subjective. But yes, getting laid; not that difficult (surprisingly; I used to think that it was the most difficult thing in the world).

The thing is, I've never been that much into the whole random sex thing. Relationships are more of a problem, because, you know, the majority of people out there are painfully stupid. I realise that this may come across as arrogant, but I'm tired and irritated and inclined to speak my mind. And, as my lovely commenter so rightly points out, I am not the best-looking in the world. My chances of meeting someone who is (a) gay, (b) reasonably intelligent, (c) nice, (d) unattached, and (e) not horrified by the sight of me aren't so good.

"Here's the problem with you: you're motherfucking boring as hell, and unbelieveably self-absorbed. Every fucking time I talk to you, you never ever even remotely give a shit. You come wish bullshit like "I'm busy", which you never fucking are, because you spend all your time on your fat ass reading shitty blogs about shit that doesn't matter." - Oh, dear. Well, again, the boring thing is subjective. About 150 people subscribe to this blog, but I've always wondered about that, I must confess; I suspect that something is wrong with their brains. Self-absorbed - erm, well, yep, maybe. I mean, this is a blog, right? I'm supposed to be. Look at Michael Arrington. He's clueless and revoltingly naive, and yet he thinks he's the king of the world. That's how blogging works.

As to the busy thing, well, I am sometimes, you know, dear. And on fat asses, well, really, I can't win, can I? My friends are telling me that I'm too thin, you are telling me that I'm too fat (as did a Wii tonight; in fairness to it, I had told it that I was 160cm tall, which turns out to be a little under 5'3; oops...) Quiver quiver wobble wobble, and so on.

The post that the person is question left a comment on, of course, was nothing to do with shitty blog posts; it was about shitty blog platforms operated by slightly scary people (yes, it was the Wordpress.com thing).

I resent the allegation, by the way, that I spend all my time reading shitty blog posts about shit that doesn't matter. I don't know about you, but I only read highly important blog posts about nuclear energy, stupid Web 2.0 companies, the implosion of the economy, and so on. Oh, and this, of course, but it's got pictures of cute cats, so is acceptable regardless of the importance of the content.

You don't need an SSRI, you need a motherfucking carbon monoxide overdose. Try it, and witness for a brief moment the wonder of Darwinism.

Now, say what you want about SSRIs, SNRIs and so forth, but if not for them, I wouldn't be here today spewing out crap on the Internet to literally twos of people. Direct all complaints to Wyeth, Pfizer et al., thanks. Carbon monoxide... well, dear, there are really far more convenient ways of killing oneself. Why, even Hitler had to give up on it rather quickly for his mass-murder (Zyklon B is rather cheaper, I hear). Try harder next time. Where on earth would one get a fatal level of CO these days, anyway?

Of course, as you can see by this absurdly long post, this random person's complaint has bothered me, to an extent. I'm sensitive like that. Bad habit; it makes me vulnerable to attack by really very pointless people. If they have an issue, though, contacting me personally, or at least signing off, would surely be more effective?

They call me Mr. Spamtastic...

Remember I mentioned Wordpress.com the other day? They've just added a fabulous new feature, whereby they show links to other (Wordpress.com) posts under your post, which their computers imagine to be related. Oh, goodness, I can't wait. You see, the fundamental problem with Automattic's whole strategy of leading readers towards other Wordpress.com blog posts is that the vast majority of blogs are written by really stupid people. I don't want to read those ones, and neither do you. Well, maybe you do; you're reading this crap, after all. I, quite frankly, have higher standards.

The one saving grace is that you are allowed disable it, at least for the moment. It's on by default, though. And here, actually, we have hit upon the greatest weakness of the free hosted blogging platforms; they can do what they want, no matter how annoying, because it is so bloody difficult to switch provider.

If Automattic would only give up on the whole 'keep all viewers within Wordpress.com forever' thing, and scrap the bloody stupid, revolting, horrible Snap things, they wouldn't be so bad. Of course, those things make them money, and the majority of their users don't seem to care. Truly the MySpace of blogging platforms. It says a lot that Blogger, one of ailing Google's worst and least maintained properties, is miles ahead of them.

Worse is Better - the Wordpress.com Conundrum

Wordpress.com is a popular blogging hosted blogging platform operated by Automattic. For some reason, people tend to have the idea that it is very good, and, especially, better than Blogger.

The three big free hosted blogging platforms are Blogger (owned by Google), Wordpress.com, and Livejournal, owned by a weird Russian company. Let's have a look at them under categories which might be interesting to someone starting a blog, shall we?

Advertising

Wordpress:
Wordpress had mandatory advertising, but most users don't know about it. How can this be? Well, they don't go to great lengths to tell you about it, it's not visible to logged-in users or regular visitors, and it's hidden in a few other ways (browser-dependent etc.)

Now, that's all very well, but, really, do you want your visitors seeing ads like this (from a real, non-mail-order-bride-related, Wordpress.com blog)?
Probably not. Users can't place their own ads, and though the Automattic founder did refer to providing a paid option to do so in an interview last year, nothing has happened on it so far. This is perhaps not surprising; those dodgy ads probably make them a lot of money on high-traffic sites.

Blogger:
No mandatory ads. You can place your own ads and get paid for them.

Livejournal:
Ads on free version.

Theme customisation

Wordpress:
You can't customise the template at all, but for $15 a year you can customise the CSS applied to it. Don't expect to see template customisation any time soon; Wordpress templates are written in PHP, and can't really be safely taken from users. There's a large library of themes you can use.

Blogger:
You can customise your template and/or CSS. There are a few default themes available.

Using your own domain

Wordpress:
It costs $10 a year, or $15 if you want to buy a domain through them as well.

Blogger:
Free. Some sort of ordinary domain registration charge if you want to use Google as registrar.

Widgets

Wordpress:
A few, generally branded.

Blogger:
Lots.

Speed

Wordpress:
Generally rather slow. Occasionally unusably slow.

Blogger:
From very fast to somewhat slow, depending on the phase of the moon.

Import

Wordpress:
Pretty comprehensive.

Blogger:
Not really; they don't seem to believe in it.

Interface

Wordpress:
Well, just look for yourself:
Some people seem to like it, but it terrifies me.


Blogger:
Dowdy and weird.

Reliability

Wordpress:
Used to go down a lot; this seems to be improving.

Blogger:
Generally fine; one major outage last year. Seemingly random obscure features occasionally die for a few hours.

Misc.

Wordpress:

By default, 'Snapz Web Shots' (an abomination in the eye of God) are enabled. It's not too clear how to disable them. Ooh, I hate them. These things, the ones that pop up if your cursor strays over a link:
Classy, eh? I assume they make money from them; they really destroy user experience.

Tags at the bottom of posts link not to a list of the posts you've made with the relevant tag, but to a list of the posts everyone else on Wordpress.com has made with the relevant tag. If you ask me, this is absurd and broken. Why do they do it? Well, for a while, those (ad-laden) tag pages appeared very high in Google searches for just about everything. Then Google tweaked something, and they vanished. They still use them, though, in the sure and joyful hope of their resurrection.

Owner

Wordpress:
Automattic, a company led by Matt Mullenweg, noted for his complete inability to tolerate criticism. Support forums are currently falling apart, with banning of critics rife. Previous feats have included really dodgy link-farming on Wordpress.org, and herding IE users towards a Google affiliate link to download Firefox with the Google toolbar.

Blogger:
Google, the new evil empire. Support forums? Hah, don't be silly. There's only minimal evidence that Google has touched the thing in the last few years, never mind support!

Spam filtering

Wordpress:
Akismet seems to get a worrying number of false positives.

Blogger:
Seems to work well.

Conclusion

Sounds like an obvious choice, doesn't it? And yet, more and more people move to Wordpress.com every day. It's bizarre. People think that Blogger still has mandatory ads, and that Wordpress doesn't. I suppose part of the reason is the implied link with the popular Wordpress.org blogging platform, but still, at this point I'm amazed people put up with the situation.

For all your ursine needs

This is from eBay's top level category.

Now, I realise that it (presumably) means teddy bears, but I would like to believe otherwise.
Erm, right.

The page in question is also a worthy competitor for the coveted 'Horrible URL of the Year' award:
It's like the established sites saw the whole Ruby on Rails '/person/mags/nose-length/on-thursday', took it as a personal affront, and went marching off in the other direction.

Update: Ironically enough, the above horrible-URL image rejoices in the URL: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H0m-YylXpxc/SBEbo0B5fyI/AAAAAAAAARk/voZqm-kRrow/s1600-h/Picture+30.png

Whatever happened to Kibo?

James 'Kibo' Parry was an odd USENET celebrity from Boston, chiefly famous for turning up in any USENET discussion mentioning his name; he grepped his ISP's newsfeed. Most well-known USENET people are just loonies, but Kibo's actually quite clever and amusing. I'll confess to having read through most of his available post archives over the years...

Anyway, I just noticed that he hasn't posted to USENET at all this year; the last post seems to be Christmas 2007. What happened? Come back!

You know, USENET celebrities were far better than blogging celebrities. If someone would replace Arrington with Kibo, I would be eternally grateful.

Why Analytics is irritatingly slow

If you've used Google Analytics, you'll probably have noticed that it's... slower than the rest of that company's products. Not dramatically, of course, and it's very consistent; it just takes longer to load pages.

The reason, it turns out, is that the huge, Javascript and Flash laden pages are coming across HTTPS.

So, on the one hand, you know why it's so slow, now. And on the other, you can rest assured that no-one can steal your highly important statistics for your Beanie Babies (remember that? I think it's what God inflicted on us to make up for not having had World War III yet...) website. Unless, of course, you use the 'email reports' feature that Google is so keen to foist upon you; unlike Analytics, GMail traffic is not encrypted.

On that subject, why are HTTPS sites always so slow? Extra latency seems to be introduced. Possibly they don't support keep-alive, or something.

I have not the words

So Gawker can tell you about it for me.

Basically, a rather ugly past-it actor/model/banker took offence at being rejected on some pathetic dating site. I mean, how dare she! He told her all about his MENSA membership, and he's been in well-known movies like "Diary of a mad black woman" (really).

His website also gives us much other important information, like his shoe size (11, one assumes US), and height (6 foot). Tellingly, not his weight, though; for all that he goes on about his amazing sporting feats, he looks a bit, well, doughy.

Oh, I do love it when dreadful people make fools of themselves on th'Internet! The whole thing is so wonderful that I have finally given in and added the main Gawker blog (I already had Valleywag) to my poor, overburdened RSS reader.

Bonus cringeworthy nonsense; you can get tshirts with a picture of him and any of these wonderful captions for only 20 dollars. XL only (that vast, terrifying tent-like US XL tshirt size, one assumes); presumably his fans tend to be wobblebottoms. Roll the captions:

1. Mensa Member w/ Muscles

2. All this AND I'm Ivy League educated

3. I'm an 8.9 on Hot or Not

4. I can bench/squat/leg press over 1200 lbs combined

5. I've had lunch with the Secretary of Defense

6. I live in a High Rise w/ a concierge

7. I drive a Bimmer convertible

8. I have been in 14 major motion pictures

9. I am a trainer on the side

10. You have to impress ME and meet MY criteria and standards

11. I winked at John Fitzgerald Page and all I got was a scathing email!

12. Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what you can do for John Fitzgerald Page

13. John Fitzgerald Page for President

14. I am going to the gym in 26 minutes

15. I'm not arrogant, I'm accomplished!

I mean, quite frankly, if it was me, I would just kill myself. He's never going to be able to go out in public again.

Alarmingly poor design from Twitter

I occasionally use Twitter, a service which sends updates that friends have made with their mobile phones or IM clients to you. Besides various client applications, there are three major ways to use it; just view updates on the web, get them sent to your IM address, or get them sent to your phone.

Now, I don't like it when it text messages me constantly, so I always have it set to my IM address or web. The problem is that if you leave it on IM, then log out of your IM client, it starts sending SMS messages instead. Why? I have no idea. It seems like ridiculous behaviour to me, and it's terribly annoying.

It is, of course, also easily fixed. Just don't tell it your phone number. That's what I've done now. Why it does it in the first place, though, is a mystery to me.

More on why Yahoo is in trouble

At Google, they apparently have nice perks, like free food, gym, big monitors, 20% time, and so forth.

At Yahoo, on the other hand, people throw balls at you. Really. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Now, call me boring and cowardly, but that seems like a hellish work environment to me. Who could develop a working search engine, after all, if at any moment they might be hit in the face with rubber things?

Exciting InnoDB progress

Apparently, InnoDB, the more advanced standard MySQL storage engine, has been fixed to run well on many-processored machines. Wonderful if true; there are no details yet, but the source seems reliable.

MySQL isn't dead just yet, apparently.

On Facebook's famous gay ad

There's been some talk about an ad for a gay-oriented website which has been appearing unto straight Facebook users. Most people seem to think that this shows a problem either with Facebook's own ad targeting or with the way the ad itself was set up.

I think that it's probably something a bit more clever.

You see, most openly gay people will already know the locations of the sort of resource advertised. If they want porn or dating/sex sites (I'm not entirely clear on what the ad is advertising; as I'm gay Facebook hasn't shown it to me), they will already know where to get them.

Assuming that Facebook's ads pay per click rather than per view, though (I will confess to being a little unclear on this point, and couldn't be bothered to go and look), it actually makes a lot of sense to show this stuff to people who say that they're straight in their profiles. Why? Because those of them who are actually closeted gay or bisexual won't have been exposed to such material, and are far more likely to click, and to use the site, whatever it may be.

So, really, it's probably less a case of broken advertising and more a case of clever advertiser.

Happy Birthday, Register!

The Register, that wonderful technological tabloid, is apparently ten years old! That the web has been a big thing for a whole ten years makes me feel old, to be honest.

I've always liked El Reg. It's the only tech news I really read these days, besides Valleywag (which is rather Web 2.0 centric). Most of them are so disgustingly enthusiastic. I mean, look at Techcrunch. In an ideal world, I'd read the IT equivalent of the Guardian, but it doesn't really exist, so The Sun of computing will have to do. The Register is at least sensible, self-aware, and fun. Drivel about AJAX is kept at a minimum.

Anyway, congratulations, Register people. Hopefully there'll be another few decades!

Update: Also, NTK seems to have exploded; the last newsletter was in early 2007. A shame. More feeling old.

Cores, cores, cores

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has come under attack for saying that most people won't derive any benefit from having more than two cores in their desktop. In particular, he claims that they're of no benefit to developers.

Now, this seems to be an absurd claim. Ever compiled a C++ project? It takes a long time, and it is very easily parallelisable. Atwood is a VB.NET programmer (they still exist?) primarily, so this isn't something he's as likely to see; apparently the current managed .NET compilers do not parallelise well.

Personally, I don't have much use for seven million cores on my desktop. I'm writing this on a Macbook Pro, running off battery. Since the machine isn't doing much, the CPU will have wound itself down to about 800MHz. And that's just fine. It feels fast. If I was a C++ programmer, four cores or more might be nice, but I mostly do Erlang and Lisp these days.

I have a 4-core machine at work. It's nice to watch an Erlang system using all the CPUs, but that's about all the good it does me. It can be useful for getting an idea of how something will run on a multicore server, but actually running that something on a similar server would generally be better.

Of course, this isn't really the point. For some time, your average desktop machine has been faster than anyone except gamers, graphic designers and so on really need. If I was buying a desktop I'd be reluctant to spend much extra to get four cores, but I probably wouldn't need to; the price difference tends to be minuscule. Where multicore chips really come into their own is on the server; an application server will generally scale linearly with number of processor, although a database server won't.

So yes, four cores on desktop; not so useful for most people, great for C++ programmers and graphics people, but so cheap that it hardly matters.

Saturdays

I always have such good intentions for Saturday, I really do. Go swimming, go shopping... In the end, of course, I end up hiding at home not doing very much.

Oh, well. Swimming tomorrow. Really. I promise.

Dunno about the shopping thing, though. I always promise myself I'm going to go buy clothes; the last time was a couple of years ago. In particular, I need new shoes; my one pair are now too small and a bit leaky. In the end I end up being too scared, of course; I've always had this complete horror of clothes shops. It's not the spending money thing; if I can buy an outrageously expensive laptop, I can surely spend a few quid in Dunnes. It isn't even a self-image thing anymore, I don't think. It's just a weird phobia...

Twitter explodes in delight!

After a few weeks of almost working properly (I'd actually started using it again), Twitter is on the blink. Not as slow as it used to be, but still breaking randomly.

Someone just needs to write a Twitter-clone which actually works properly, really. It's not as if it would be difficult; eJabberd now has functionality which will more or less do it for you.

Yahoo(!?% et al.) treading a dangerous path...

So, apparently, Yahoo is messing with its ad pricing algorithm, increasing the minimum price for some keywords. This is the same Yahoo which is trying to do whatever it can to ward off Microsoft.

If Google was doing this, it would be interesting, and might have some potential. For Yahoo, it is horribly stupid. The thing is, in this day and age, why is someone using Yahoo for advertising? In most cases, probably the same reason they're using Yahoo for anything else; they are used to it. If Yahoo makes confusing changes to any of its generally rather inferior services, people will flee. I'd be amazed if this ad thing isn't catastrophic for them; people who are confused or worried by the changes will just jump ship to Google.

A selection of vaguely funny screenshots

Google can haz JSP programmer?

(Context: This was from the comments on an article about a large peering centre in the US; a lot of the madder readers decided that the article was a national security risk.)

You know, I'd be willing to bet 1 million imaginary Internet dollars (about 3 imaginary Internet euros at current rate of exchange) that DallasDeckard is fat and drives an SUV or pickup truck. And probably fully believed all that crap about WMDs.
From noted obnoxious bulldog enthusiast Jason Calacanis's rather pointless Mahalo. It decided, it seems, that the ten or so pages I'd viewed were quite enough. Yep, that'll make it competitive with Google!

(The much-vaunted articles, by the way, are generally poorly-written and uninformative. Why this service is still around I do not know.)

I was reading a perfectly ordinary Google Groups posting about Google App Engine, when AdWords apparently decided that I could probably speak Arabic.

The Apprentice

The Apprentice is a fascinating show. You see, Sir Alan Sugar, the one who founded Amstrad and then drove it into the ground based on silly email systems and no real products but satellite decoders, gets to pretend that he's good at business, and shout at people! Hilarious.

The people themselves are as bad, if not worse. Most of them are unpleasant idiots, so you tend to find yourself rooting for the hot ones. On the last show, a fat loud tedious guy who wouldn't stop going on about he had an IQ of 170 got kicked off. Oh, I am glad!

Every week, they have an absurd assignment, which they fuck up in the most ludicrous ways. For instance, if you had to use a piece of software you'd never used before for your mad business, you'd try it beforehand, right? Yes, so would I. That's because we're sane, and thus not suitable to go on dodgy reality TV shows.

Insight into Google Engineering?

Today, Google released a new version of their Google App Engine SDK. The big change... well, it works on Windows. The previous one, while it had a Windows MSI installer thingy, was unable to deal with Windows pathnames. Clearly, no-one had ever tried to use it.

This is surprising, really. It at least implies that most or all Google programmers use Linux or Mac workstations. There've been signs before, of course; the GMail notifier thing, in particular, is far better on MacOS than on Windows...

Still, though, amazing that no-one even ran through the example stuff before releasing it.

eVotr - Adventures in Google App Engine

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Google App Engine (yep, that thing I won't shut up about) account, so I thought I'd better make something with it. Since it was a special occasion, I decided to drag out one of my silly website ideas which had been lying about for a year or so; an online voting thingy, for college societies and the like. I was inspired by the terribly impressive and frightening perl script that Trinity CSC uses to do proportional representation, you see.

First off, the object database thing which we've heard so much about really is very, very good. Writing things with it is a positive pleasure, and it more or less forces you to store your data in a manner which will allow it to be distributed over multiple machines. This is a huge problem, even the huge problem, for relational databases, by the way. Sooner or later you tend to end up with a really big heavily-used table or set of interdependent tables which flatly refuse to be sharded. Some services, like Flickr, are intrinsically shardable, of course, but some aren't so much, and of course eventually they end up having to pay silly money to IBM or Sun. I'm quite convinced that Sun, in particular, owes its continued existence to really bloody huge databases.

Anyway, the outcome of all of this was that every part of my service should, theoretically, be able to scale close to infinitely, except for the private election option. Giving the site a list of many thousands of users who would be allowed vote in a particular election could be problematic. It's fixable, but would require a bit more work.

And that's not all! You get easy integration with Google accounts, so anyone with GMail can just log into your site without registering, and you don't have to mess around writing your own authentication stuff.

So, in the end, it took about two and a half hours, and consists of 335 lines of Python and 207 lines of HTML. It's by no means feature-complete, but still, I was pleased with how quick it was to get things done. If the web developers of the world can get over their PHP fetish, I can see Google App Engine becoming very big.

Ther are, of course, other considerations. What's performance like? Well... hardly inspiring, I'm afraid:
Not horrible, but not amazing. Of course, for a lot of applications it doesn't really matter, and you can expect that, all going well, it will remain at about that speed no matter how many people are using it. It does more or less rule it out for certain types of site, though of course it's a new service and improvements may yet be made.

And then, there is the whole resource usage issue. 10GB either way a day is more than generous, but, well, what about these things:
We just don't know, at least for the moment.

Anyway, the application is here. Please go and poke at it, so that I can get a better idea of just what a megacycle is when it's at home! Note that it's hardly complete at the moment; it doesn't even have proportional representation! Also, as is traditional, it's really, really ugly. Really. I've outdone myself this time.

Well, I happen to like my webapps written in FORTRAN

I've babbled on a bit lately about Google's App Engine thing; it's a hosted Python interpreter with a nice object database backend, basically. Anyway, it only came out a few days ago, but already there are calls for other languages. Lots and lots of really obscure other languages. A comprehensive list, and you can check here if you doubt me:

• PHP
• PERL
• Ruby
• Java (with heavy-weight frameworks, no less!)
• Groovy
• Javascript
• C#
• ColdFusion
• Erlang
• Common Lisp
• Wordpress (not a language, but really!)
• COBOL (I think that one was a little tongue in cheek.)
• VB.NET
• VBScript
• Pascal

I'm sure some of them are joking, but many seem to think that these are sensible requests which could be accomodated easily.

Bonus screenshot:

If it wasn't that he was a PHP programmer, I'd think he was joking; increasingly, the PHP community, possibly sick of everyone making fun of its absurd language for the last few years, is getting a bit like that. I do love that a 'PHP professional' is lecturing Google about scalability, though.

Quiver Quiver Wobble Wobble!

I've recently been playing Nation States, an online game which allows you to control the political development of a fake country by making a few policy decisions a day. It's really a bit like a huge, ongoing version of one of those quizes where you answer questions to place yourself on a political spectrum. Here's my nation, by the way.

Anyway, I have, for some time, been fond the of the phrase "quiver quiver wobble wobble". Some context is required, I fancy. I am, as you may have noticed, a great fan of Stephen Fry. In the early 80s he hosted a short-lived radio sketch show called Saturday Night Fry on Radio 4. It was a predecessor to A Bit of Fry and Laurie, but in my opinion far better.

One of the regular events was the reading of a few letters from slightly mad fake members of the general public. One such letter complained about the show, and asked why there couldn't be a decent show instead, something like "Fat man on a bicycle" (an obvious reference to those radio/TV shows in which someone goes around the country rambling about stuff). Fry proceeded to stage such a show, with him visiting various places, on a bicycle. At some point, Hugh Laurie identifies himself as the then art critic for the Guardian; the following dialogue ensues:

Fry: Hugh, you're meant to be a yokel, not the art critic for the Guardian.

Laurie: Well, you're meant to be fat man on a bicycle.

Fry: I am!

Laurie: No you're not, you're thin and tweedy.

Fry: Quiver quiver wobble wobble!

Fun phrase, I'm sure you'll agree, and at the moment, my blog is the only one on the Internet which mentions it. Imagine my surprise, then, when on viewing my issues in Nation States, I was presented with:

Sadly, I soon realised that the 'patriotic message' isn't actually part of the game; I has set my country's motto to be "quiver quiver wobble wobble", and the issue had simply included whatever the country's motto was. For a minute, there, I thought someone else had actually listened to Saturday Night Fry...

More fun stuff Google could do with App Engine

I've mentioned Google App Engine before; see here if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, here are a few features that I think Google could add, which would make it a more attractive platform.

• Some form of cron-job-like functionality; that is, the option to have a function executed at set intervals. This is essential for all sorts of applications, and could be relatively easily implemented in the current model.
• Allow users to easily create widgets to fit into iGoogle, Google Apps for Domains and the like. This would be particularly handy for the commercial sale of applications for corporate domains thing that I mentioned earlier.
• Allow application end-users to authorise applications to access Google APIs in their names without further action. Google already kind of has something like this for their GData APIs, but the user would, in this case, probably end in having to enter their password twice per session, once to access the App Engine app, and once to authorise it to talk to Blogger or Calendar or whatever. It would seem simpler to just allow them to permanently authorise the app, given that it's using Google's authentication system anyway.
• Somehow provide support for Comet; that is, webapp push to client. This would allow people to write chat apps, real-time multiplayer games etc. Google already has a high-capacity instant messaging system, Talk, which could serve as a backend; the user application would simply call an API function to send messages to users who were listening with a standard Comet technique. A Comet-like thing is already used by the Google Talk client in GMail, and is, by all accounts, one of the more stable and client-compatible ones around.
• For large sites which use more than the allocated free resources, allow the owner to ask or require the user to pay for resource use through an integrated micropayment system. Micropayment has never worked all that well before, but in this scenario, a user may be accessing many different App Engine sites through a Google account which could be linked with a Google Checkout thing. Allow owner to offer additional features, ad-free pages, etc. for micropayments.

Just a few ideas, but I'd be surprised if at least 1 and 2 don't turn up at some point. 3 might present privacy concerns, and 4 is dubious because widespread push-to-client is still a pretty new thing, even though it should certainly be technically feasible. 5 is radical, but I really do think that if App Engine apps take off, micropayments could really work there.

High Scalability in Action

From High Scalability, a blog about scalable applications:

Sadly, I didn't get a screenshot from when it was complaining about connection time-outs; that would have been far better.

Google and the Affero GPL

The Affero GPL is a bit of an oddity; it is a license for software which requires the release of the source code to the software to anyone who accesses that software, or a derivative of that software, over a computer network. The upshot of this is that if you make a website which uses an Affero-licensed library, you probably have to make the source of that website available to everyone who wants it.

Perhaps understandably, the Affero license hasn't really taken off. Anything licensed under it would be effectively unusable for any commercial activity. About the only AGPL software that is even vaguely high-profile was the web.py web framework for Python, which is used in Reddit and various other sites. I say was, because the author, probably on realising that no-one was going to use it under such terms (he presumably granted Reddit some form of exemption) hastily re-licensed it as public domain; about as radical a shift of open licenses as you can make.

There are a few (literally, it seems; about 20) Affero-licensed projects out there, though. Recently, Google announced that it wouldn't be allowing people to host them on its Google Code open-source project hosting service, which currently seems to be the general-purpose service of that type to use; Sourceforge just gets worse and worse. Their stated reason for this was they wish to prevent the proliferation of millions of different types of open source language, but a lot of people are claiming that the real reason is that Google sees this sort of license as a threat; Google uses a lot of open source software itself, and would presumably not like to see a situation where it would have to give up using certain libraries or commit to maintaining forks of them itself, because the alternative would be releasing source to its own systems.

It's a nice conspiracy theory, but in practice it's a bit silly. The AGPL is doomed from the get-go, and in particular it is very unlikely that anyone would shift a project from GPL to AGPL; most of the users would probably have to stop using it. An Affero-like clause was supposed to be inserted into GPLv3, but was abandoned at the last moment for, I presume, precisely this reason; it would greatly marginalise the GPL, and few GPLv2 projects would 'upgrade' their license. The only real use I can see for the AGPL is for commercial vendors of libraries who practice dual licensing; MySQL, for instance, could force many, many people to pay for a commercial license by shifting its client libraries from GPL to AGPL; they have already been shifted from LGPL to GPL for, I'd think, similar reasons. Even then, it would be risky; people might start seeing rivals with more permissive licenses as far more attractive.

Another issue is that at the moment interpretation of the AGPL isn't entirely clear and hasn't really been tested; there have been suggestions, for instance, that the content of an AGPL blog might itself fall under AGPL licensing.

So, yes, Google is almost certainly taking this stance on the basis that the AGPL is pointless, will lead to confusion, and will never be popular.

Pharmacopeia!

I'm attempting to ward off the nastier effects of my cold, which still hasn't gone away, with a wide variety of over-the-counter drugs. Observe:

Buying Nurofen (ibuprofen) turns out to be irritating; the pharmacists seem to be duty bound to try to force you to buy Nurofen Plus, which contains codeine, an addictive opiate.

Reverse Transcriptase - laziest name EVER

Reverse transcriptase is an enzyme used by retrovirii and similar for, well, whatever retrovirii do. Please note that its name is made up of bits of three different languages; reverse is English, 'transcript' is from the Latin, 'ase' is a Greek postfix. Surely a record?

Conservapedia

Take a look at this. Conservapedia. In this context, 'conservative' doesn't mean John Major, or even Maggie; it means 'psychotic religious mentally sub-normal American'. Here's their piece on 'Homosexuals and Murder'.

Vernon J. Geberth, M.S., M.P.S. who is a former commander of Bronx homicide for the New York City Police Department stated in 1995 regarding homosexual murders that homosexual murders are relatively common and these murders may involve male victims murdered by other males or may involve female victims who are in some type of lesbian relationship and they are murdered by another female.

What eloquence! I mean, that sort of prose would get you given out to by a primary school teacher.

From the article on Jews (particularly interesting, because the target audience seems to be half those people who support Israel no matter what bizarre, perverse things it does, and half Neo-Nazi):

Note the punctuation.

Can I tempt you to some atheism and mass murder?

Vandalism of Conservapedia is punishable by ten years in prison. And not signing your messages is punishable by death!

Americans, stop messing about invading random Middle Eastern countries. Drop bombs on these people, instead. The world will thank you for it, and Fred Phelps could use a little napalm.

Non-essential oils

• Walnut
• Linseed
• Cod (liver or otherwise)
• Pilchard
• Extra-virgin rapeseed (it exists!)
• Emu oil
• Emo oil

This has been a public disservice announcement.

A minor Blogger oddity

I quite like Blogger, by and large. It works well, and removes the need for me to mess about hosting my own blog. However:

Now, I don't quite understand the function of the bar across the top in the first place, but one feature in particular is baffling. That 'Next Blog>>' thing. In this context, 'Next Blog' seems to mean 'any random blog, probably in Greek'. Does anyone actually use it?

If so, why?

Evil eval

Common Lisp, in common with many other languages, has a command called 'eval', which evaluates the input it is given as a Lisp program. This seems like a nice idea, but there are issues with it.

SBCL, the implementation I generally use, compiles everything it's given, by default. This means that every time it is told to eval something, it must compile it. There is an interpreter, but it's not used at all by default, and is horribly slow. The need to compile any form given to eval is a problem even for very simple things, though:

This is SBCL 1.0.12, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at .

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
* (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (+ 4 5)))

Evaluation took:
0.014 seconds of real time
0.01 seconds of user run time
0.0 seconds of system run time
0 calls to %EVAL
0 page faults and
0 bytes consed.
NIL
* (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (eval '(+ 4 5))))

Evaluation took:
10.175 seconds of real time
9.77 seconds of user run time
0.37 seconds of system run time
[Run times include 0.27 seconds GC run time.]
0 calls to %EVAL
0 page faults and
2,720,007,360 bytes consed.

Yep, that's 2.7 gigabytes.

By contrast, clisp interprets everything it's given by default, and its compiler produces far slower code than SBCL's. Here is clisp doing the same thing (note the ASCII art menorah, which has caused endless squabbling on the clisp mailing list...):

i i i i i i i ooooo o ooooooo ooooo ooooo
I I I I I I I 8 8 8 8 8 o 8 8
I \ `+' / I 8 8 8 8 8 8
\ `-+-' / 8 8 8 ooooo 8oooo
`-__|__-' 8 8 8 8 8
| 8 o 8 8 o 8 8
------+------ ooooo 8oooooo ooo8ooo ooooo 8

Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Michael Stoll 1992, 1993
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Marcus Daniels 1994-1997
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Pierpaolo Bernardi, Sam Steingold 1998
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Sam Steingold 1999-2000
Copyright (c) Sam Steingold, Bruno Haible 2001-2006

[1]> (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (+ 4 5)))
Real time: 8.722473 sec.
Run time: 8.71 sec.
Space: 752 Bytes
NIL
[2]> (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (eval '(+ 4 5))))
Real time: 11.29976 sec.
Run time: 11.27 sec.
Space: 752 Bytes

And timing corresponding compiled functions:

; no eval
(time (bla))
Real time: 0.455828 sec.
Run time: 0.45 sec.
Space: 0 Bytes

; eval
(time (bla))
Real time: 2.433657 sec.
Run time: 2.44 sec.
Space: 0 Bytes

Lesson (hopefully) learned: while 'eval' could seem like a reasonable option on clisp and other Lisps with a good built-in interpreter, causing only a small slow-down, you do not want to use it in speed-critical, much-visited areas of code. After all, someone may want to run your code with SBCL, or another implementation without a decent interpreter. Obviously, it's fine for things which hardly ever happen.

A sunny day

After months and months of bloody darkness all the time, it is finally staying bright until a sensible hour! Yay!

Amazing how much better things seem when you see a bit of sunlight...

Google App Engine - the future?

Google launched something rather interesting yesterday.

Google App Engine is a system whereby users can write Python web applications and host them with Google. So far, so boring, eh? Well, not so fast. It provides an OODB backed by Google's proprietary BigTable database system, allows integration with their login system, and limits users, in the trial period, to 500MB storage, with 10GB a day transfer either way. Oh, and some nebulous limit on CPU cycles; that seems rather generous, but we shall see. All that is free; once the trial period is over users will be able to purchase additional resources.

Users can use their own domain for their application, and there is an SDK which you can download; it fakes the DB stuff locally, apparently. I'd guess that the major short-term consequence will be considerable damage to the web hosting industry. After all, if you wanted to write a simple webapp for company use, or your latest startup, or whatever, why on earth wouldn't you use this? Google isn't infallible, but it can probably be counted upon to be more reliable than your average fly-by-night webhost; even the biggest ones in the shared hosting space seem to have nasty issues almost routinely. Oh, and Amazon, of course, with their weird SimpleDB thing; it's particularly unfortunate for Amazon that their web services division suffered a major outage on the eve of the Google announcement.

What's in it for Google? Well, first, obviously, it's yet another place to put the bloody ads. Ads are Google's lifeblood. Some have theorised that it'll make it easier for Google to buy startups who use the service; they could simply buy them without worrying too much about porting.

There's another possibility, though, and I'm surprised that no-one seems to have picked up on it thus far. Google's Google Apps thing provides private email, calendar, and so forth, to various corporate users and universities. Wouldn't it be nice if a small business could simply go to a website and buy themselves, say, a CRM, or an accounting system, or whatever, maybe paying by user count or per year, which would be private to them, hosted by Google, and integrate nicely with their existing Google login system? I suspect that Google will do something like this, something along the lines of Apple's proposed iPhone software store. The developer will get a cut, Google will get a cut, the users will have their application without having to worry about hosting it themselves... Everyone's happy. Except the webhosts, and the traditional vendors of custom corporate software, but it's not Google's job to look after them.

I've played with the system very briefly, by the way; it really seems very impressive. The ease of uploading the applications you create, in particular, is simply amazing. Their 'hello world' app takes about a minute to get up and running.

I must say, I'm impressed. This is the first sensible thing I've seen Google bring out in some time.

The Decline and Fall of Yahoo(!)

It's more or less an open secret that Yahoo?%! has been busy falling apart for the last few years. They've failed to produce anything useful, they've lost market share, and they've become a bit of a joke all around.

A few months ago, Microsoft, the other market leader in frighteningly crap webservices, attempted to buy them. Yahoo!!§^&!!! wasn't having any of it, and is resisting. Given that they're facing a battle with their shareholders, you might reasonably expect them to sort themselves out, right? Well, not quite.

They have, in fact, fired hundreds of their staff, reorganised, launched two rather pointless services (Yahoo Video and the Flickr Video thing) to compete with each other, with the Flickr one being crippled for the benefit of the awful Yahoo?!!? one.

And now, they are apparently muttering about putting Google's ads on their sites instead of their own. Poor Yahoo. There was a time when they were the biggest, a time when they had the opportunity to buy Google for a pittance. And now look at them. About to be bought by also-dying (have you seen Vista? Office 2007? Poor, confused Server 2008? Live Spaces?!) Microsoft, and relying on the company they once turned down for money.

For the record, I hope that Microsoft doesn't manage to buy them. If Yahoo has done one sensible thing, it has been to leave del.icio.us, which they own, well enough alone. It's the only one of their services that I use. I just know that Microsoft would do something unutterably horrible to it; again, have you seen Live Spaces?

Yet another blog move!

Well, as you can see, assuming that everything updated properly, I've moved back to Blogger again. For some reason, you see, the world's blog spammers decided that my blog was the best target around, and I was getting thousands of spam posts a day. MovableType caught most of them, but the load involved was unacceptable. I'm sure there are ways I could sort this out, but really life is too short. They are Google's problem now; I trust that they will be able to deal with them better than I was.

Not all the posts from my old blog are here yet, but they should appear over the next day or so; I'm using a script accessing GData to import them, and Google imposes rate limiting on it...

Activate the particle accelerator of doom!

In a couple of months, CERN, the European body which collects large particle accelerators and invents the Internet, will be turning on the rather un-inspiringly named Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The purpose, I believe, is to poke at some elementary particle or other, with, before now, hasn't been adequately poked.

So far, so boring. However, a mad American botanist (MAB) has decided to sue said European body in an American court (SSEBIAA) to prevent it switching on aforementioned giant particle accelerator, because he thinks that it will destroy the universe. He did the same thing last year when some similarly, though not quite as, large accelerator was switched on in the US. The universe stubbornly went on existing, of course, but people with wacky beliefs are rarely put off by the universe not exploding the first time they predict it.

The worst of it is that none of the vaguely plausible hideous disaster scenarios associated with the LHC involve the destruction of the universe, only the destruction of the Earth. It might make create strangelets, a form of hypothetical evil matter which eats people, or it might make ikkle black holes; I gather that Stephen Hawking is expected to save the world if this happens. CERN scientists say that both are rather unlikely.

In any case, please do remember to celebrate Possible End of the World (but not Universe) day, sometime in June. At the appointed hour, glare suspiciously in the direction of Switzerland, and watch out for killer strangelets and/or Stephen Hawking leaping into action.

Google scraping the bottom of the barrel with AdSense

The problem with being a monopoly is that you don't really have much of an opportunity to increase your market share. Realistically, there are only so many people who want to push their absurd ads on the Internet.

And so it is for Google. For the last few years they've seen stellar growth. As a result they've a stranglehold on online advertising. This is all very nice, but it means that they're not going to be able to maintain the growth rates that their shareholders have come to effect.

Well, it comes down to this. Next and previous buttons on ads. Stupid, and no-one will ever use them, but they have to grab at anything they have. In the past year, the Google AdSense blog has been full of this sort of nonsense. Ads on everything, none of them really making the same splash as AdSense for Content. When it comes to it, who wants ads on their phone, or their cat, or whatever?

It's sad, but what can be done? The way Google is going, someone else may soon have the opportunity to take over.

Ding dong, the witch is dead

So, in early May, Bertie Ahern, our glorious leader, will be resigning, and the Mahon Tribunal will suddenly drop out of the public eye.

Anyway, I think that this is great news. So great, in fact, that I hope to have a little party to celebrate. The ceremonial burning of the brown envelope will have to wait, I'm afraid, until Fianna Fáil loses power; I mean, Brian Cowen, really! Of course, then we'll have Fianna Gael in power. Won't that be nice. The correct celebration for Fianna Gael falling from power is, as is well known, the burning of Enda Kenny.

Oh, dear. I should really think about moving to a proper democracy; this place gets me down sometimes. Of course, there are so few left, and more or less no English-speaking ones...

Somewhat worrying Macbook Pro issue

After not having used it for 20 minutes or so today, I opened the lid of my new Macbook Pro to see, well, something like this, though without the swirly effect; that seems to one of those taking-photos-of-screens issues:

Vertical dark bars down the screen, more visible on low light settings.

There's a forum post on the subject here, and, as it says, opening and shutting the lid again fixes the problem. This leads me to believe that it's probably a software or firmware problem; maybe some of the screen illumination isn't being switched on correctly.

Scary, nonetheless. I wonder how common it is?

Oddly, it's not the first weird display issue I've had, but the first one was definitely software and only started happening after I upgraded to 10.5.2. Scrolling slowly in Safari would cause some minor distortion of the page being viewed, and buttons in Eclipse flicker madly. This has only happened twice, and rebooting seems to fix it, but annoying all the same.