Computers & Internet

The art of office e-mail war by David Miller : Ah the joys of corporate email politics. Email is quick, easy, and it offers the sender nearly immediate access to anyone on a corporate network. Miller goes through a variety of different strategies for manipulating e-mail, some of which are quite amusing. Personally, I haven’t really been a part of the more nefarious strategies, though I often use email’s obvious strategic value. We don’t have BCC where I work, so that leaves out some of your average backstabbing stories. One thing I’ve found useful, though, is that CCing my bosses while requesting something from someone else will almost always yield faster results than if I didn’t CC them. When people see the boss’s name attached, they know they better get things done quickly and efficiently. This, of course, leads to my boss getting upwards of 500 emails a day, so I try and use this only when I need it… [Thankee James]

In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson: An intelligent essay dealing with the trials and tribulations of computer Operating Systems. Of course one of the big problems he discusses is Metaphor Shear (which is basically the point at which a metaphor fails), which is ironic because he uses quite a few metaphors himself in the essay. One of the best is when he relates the Hole Hawg (an incredibly powerful drill that with drill through just about anything, but also incredibly dangerous because it has no limitations or cheap safeguards to protect the user from themself.) with the Linux operating system. The essay is a great read, and goes into much more than just Operating Systems. Highly recommended.

If you like Stephenson’s fiction, you might also want to check out The Great Simolean Caper, an interesting story set in the not to distant future. It shares some common ground with Stephensons other work (namely, Snow Crash) and is quite an enjoyable read. Its also a bit scary, because it brings up quite a few security and privacy concerns. With the advent of digital cable and set-top boxes, companies are starting to track what you are watching on television, whether you like it or not. I’ve seen the data myself, and I think the advertising industry is going to go wild when these numbers start piling up (the data I saw showed enormous spikes and troughs roughly coinciding with commercials). The sneaky set-top boxes in Stephenson’s Caper might seem unlikely, but we’re really not too far away from that right now…

pyRads� is a service for purchasing, managing, and serving micro advertising on web sites. Micro advertising is different than most banners and other forms of advertising you see on the web in that: 1) It’s low-cost, easy, and often highly effective for advertisers. 2) It’s unobtrusive, interesting, and even useful for the audience. This is an interesting little project from Pyra (makers of Blogger) and I can see it being very, very popular. Right now, the only advertising space you can buy is on Blogger, but that is a really attractive place to advertise – plus, I’m sure ev is hard at work getting other websites in the loop… It should be interesting to see how this turns out, as this form of advertising is emminently more effective and less obtrusive than all the others. Hell, at $10.00 a pop, I’m tempted to run a “Rad,” just to see how well this really works.

In other blogging news (well I guess this is kind of old, but still noteworthy), Dack is back, featuring links on “The Dumb War”. I don’t really like this very much, though; I still miss the old Dack.com.

“It just keeps looping, Adrian! You call this music?!” – This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while. Thanks DyRE!

Opera 6.0 for Windows Beta 1 was released yesterday. I fell in love with Opera 5.x; it became my favourite browser for a number of reasons. With Opera 6.0, I was looking forward to a host of new and exciting features. To be perfectly honest, I don’t see much to get excited about. The most noticeable feature is the ability for users to choose between single or multiple document interface (SDI/MDI); this is pretty much irrelevant to existing Opera users like myself, but I suppose it could be an important step in converting users accustomed to competing browsers. The other “big” change is the completely new default user interface, which I despise (fortunately, Opera has the ability to customize the interface:) There are a bunch of other nifty enhancements (and bug fixes), but nothing approaches the big innovative leaps that Opera 5.x made. There are also a few rendering bugs that I suppose will be worked out before the official release. Still, I highly recommend you take the Opera plunge if you haven’t already; download the whopping 3.2 mb installation file here.

This History of Video Games is fairly comprehensive, thoughtful and exceedingly interesting, even if you don’t care too much for video games. The history even goes as far back as the late 19th century, when Nintendo started as a playing card company; then it details the evolution of several companies leading up to the current day wars between Sega, Sony, and the upcoming Microsoft Xbox. Its funny to note the parallels with the internet’s collapse (and, hopefully, rebirth). After a short period of growing pains where several video game companies crashed, the industry rebounded with fewer but healthier players (Sega, Nintendo, and later, Sony). I still miss the glory days of the Commodore 64 though; I spent countless hours playing games like Test Drive and Airborne Ranger (one of my all time favourites). [via alt text]

Mozilla 0.9.1 was released today, to much fanfare. Even the Slashdotters are praising the latest release, which marks a monumental leap forward over Mozilla 0.9. After downloading it myself and playing with it, I’ve been very pleased, though I still have a few small gripes (right clicking on the menus should work damnit!). Otherwise it seems like a much leaner, cleaner, faster and more stable build. Great work, Mozilla developers; I’m looking foward to a 1.0 release soon. However, with the news that Netscape is going away, I don’t know if any browser will be able to put a dent in Microsoft’s stranglehold, which is a shame, because Mozilla is a really great browser. Right now, I’m going to continue using Opera 5.11, because that is the best browser I’ve ever used – its only dowside is that I can’t really use it to post on Blogger or 4degreez.

Some of my previous thoughts on Browsers:

• Opera 5.11 : My favourite browser.
• Why the Browsers Haven’t Standardized : Interesting perspecive.
• Netscape Six : My initial review of Netscape 6 (Mozilla 0.6); most of these bugs have been fixed by Mozilla 0.9.1
• Netscape Crashes : My experience with CSS crashing Netscape 4.x

Also worth noting is this article and this article by Joel Spolsky illustrating what Netscape did wrong with version 6. Mozilla has come a long way though, and I think by the time 1.0 comes out, there will be little to complain about.

Update: 4:45 p.m. ET

After using Mozilla 0.9.1 all day, I can say that while it has improved greatly over previous versions, it still has a ways to go before it can really compete with IE. I ran into a few bugs and it crashed a couple of times, so its not quite the rock solid browser I was looking for. It doesn’t even come close to Opera, which is still my browser of choice. But then, 0.9.1 isn’t a finished product, so I still think its coming along well and that the finished product could be worth it.

No. I would never, ever do such a thing. Trust in me, loyal patrons (all 3 of you). Rest assured, this post has nothing to do with the annoying gameshow of the same title. It has to do with links and usability. Apparently, someone thought up 23 ways to weaken Web site links, from the obvious (broken, wrong) to the subtle (miscolored, unexpected) to the unfairly accused (embedded, wrapped). Its an interesting read, though its funny to note that weblogging, by its very nature, seems to break some of these rules. Especially those pesky memepoolers! [via webmutant]

Its been falling for quite some time now, and some think it won’t stop until the internet is dead. Why did it fall, and why does it continue to fall? Could it be the numerous business perversions of the english language? Perhaps dot-com communism is to blame. Its more likely, though, that this industry fallout is indicative of simple growing pains:

“What is happening now happens with every new explosion of technology. When the sky has finished falling, it will leave behind an industry with far fewer, but much healthier players. And then things will get better than they ever were.”

Automobiles, television, and video games all underwant similar pains in their infancy, then grew beyond control. Soon enough, we will find that the internet is growing vigorously, even if we have to pay for some things we used to get for free… [via evhead, arts & letters]

Heromachine is another nice little avatar maker (remember that whole storTrooper craze a while back?) that is themed more towards fantasy and superheros. Once again, its a lot of fun and I made myself a rather bland one, but it’d be pretty easy to make a really wierd one. [Thanks Drifter, via the 4degreez boards.]

What a wonderful browser Opera 5.11 is. The mouse navigation by gesture recognition, though hardly a new thing, is well implemented and clever. Theres lots of other nifty features (session storing, skins, command line switches), my personal favourite being the new web spider. Simply click Ctrl+J and you’ll get a list of all the links on a given page (which can be exported to HTML) Another great feature is the much improved download manager, which allows you to resume downloads. I’ve always liked Opera, but I’ve never used it consistantly… until now. For all you fellow Opera users, here’s a page by one of the Opera developers that has skins, customisations and user style sheets (among other things). Thanks to grenville for posting the info on the DyREnet Message Board!