There’s ridiculous Facebook groups and then there’s this. I imagine it’s a joke as the admin is a graduate student but it’s written in an extremely serious tone. Last I heard there’s only 50 million Facebook users to begin with, then, even if there was 20 times the amount of Facebook users and they all joined the group who’s going to finance the cars? It would cost at least $5,000,000,000,000 for a billion new cars, assuming each car costs a modest $5000. 180,000 group members aren’t counting it out.
I love the parody groups: “If 8 trillion people join up, each wins $8 trillion and 4 cars made of gold” and “If one Octillion life-forms Join this group, I will become Optimus Prime”.
17th of March, 2008
If I’m in class and I’m on a Windows computer or iDisk isn’t working for whatever reason I have to email my work to myself so I have a copy. A lot of people use small USB drives but I’d rather not use hardware if software can provide a solution. USB drives are also constantly lost along with whatever work was on them at school anyway. I wanted a very simple, self-hosted, file manager that I could upload to at school and then download from at home. Something like box.net but even simpler and self-hosted. I thought there was a good chance something like this would already exist but was prepared to make my own.
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15th of March, 2008
At work last week it was suggested that a set of links should automatically open in a new window — functionality achieved using the anchor property and value target="_blank". The common logic behind this suggestion is well, we want to link to external websites but we don’t want them to leave our website, any web marketer trying to monetise your website will tell you that! My boss is smarter than that, they’re internal links and while he agrees that in 99% of cases target="_blank" sucks, he thinks it’ll create a better experience in this situation. I disagree. There’s no doubt situations out there that suit the opening of a link in a new window but there’s absolutely no situation where it’s appropriate to force it on the user with target="_blank".
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13th of March, 2008
According to the roadmap WordPress 2.5 is now three days late. According to the IRC channel, the estimated time of arrival is the 17th of this month. The hype around the latest planned release has been irresistible so this evening, four days before the estimated official release, I’ve installed 2.5 out of the subversion trunk. Many times in the last year I’ve tried WordPress administration modifications to the extent of Tiger (which I don’t particularly like as an alternative either) but have fallen short. The new 2.5 backend is beautiful and I no longer feel an urge to change it.
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10th of March, 2008
Ruby is famous for — among many other things — its clean, less cumbersome syntax. After all, it doesn’t bother you with such things as those annoy semicolons required on the end of each line. Even if you’re not a programmer Ruby code just looks nicer on the screen. While its syntax is shorter than other comparable languages, short syntax shouldn’t be confused with less code. Continue reading →
7th of March, 2008
With Leopard came support for icons up to 512×512 to support endeavors like cover flow which require high resolution icons to look good. Previously the maximum icon size was 128 x 128 so you could tell there was text on icons like TextEdit’s but couldn’t make out what it was. With the change in size Apple updated all of it’s system icons to the new 512×512 size. Before Leopard I went on a wild hunt looking for what it read, I didn’t find the answer and until now hadn’t thought to check out the icon at it’s new, readable size. Continue reading →
7th of March, 2008
The big news today is the official announcement and release of the iPhone SDK. We knew it was coming but we didn’t know the details — what liberties it would allow, whether it’d be open to everyone, how will they be distributed and installed? Answers were provided — apps will need to be approved by Apple, there’s a small fee to be listed in the directory, that directory being the iTunes (music) store and the cut is 70/30, developer/Apple.
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5th of March, 2008
The majority of posts I see on sites like del.icio.us and (especially) Digg are top n lists. Occasionally they’re useful, informative and can be a great resource, much more often they’re rubbish because the title is enough to get a mountain of traffic. Seldom do I visit websites like del.icio.us, Digg or follow websites that link to the garbage listed on those sites but I did come across 50 Content Management Systems, the perfect example of how bad these lists can get.
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