Don Norman is asking for help redesigning his website. Considering he’s pro-design, and the senior partner of the infamously anti-design Jakob Neilsen, this has to be tempting for the Neilsen wolves huh ;-)
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James AC Joyce has written an amusing rant about how MovableType users are killing the internet through their stupidity. I think the base of James’ problem is his inability to use Google. However I have to agree that it was a bad decision by Six Apart to make trackbacks and comments into pop-up windows.
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In design school a critique is a valuable (although potentially scary) way of improving your design ability through peer review. In the real world criticism is a dirty word from which nothing good can come. Paul Scrivens does a design critique, and the real world leaves comments.
Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about critiquing, and the associated benefits and pitfalls. I hope Paul’s next critique attracts more considered feedback ;-)
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Comment and referrer spam is just beginning, but already weblog users are responding. I’ve collected some information for those who want to fight back and take it to the spammers. Somebody spamming you? Learn how to shut them down, and make the web a better place.
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I found an interesting website offering very detailed whois information: whois.sc.
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I’ve written a very brief guide on how not to get Chain Email, Viruses and Spam. It’s all very basic self-protection info, and should hopefully keep 95% of the ‘bad stuff’ out of your life.
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Here are some of my favorite animations and flash movies — check ‘em out!
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The ReUSE:IT competition to redesign Jakob Neilsen’s UseIt.com website is over. Here are the designs that I liked the best.
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I’m trying to find out why I can’t see Todd David Rudick’s great Japanese study tool Rikai.com in Safari. Is it due to the HTTP 1.1 compression used? I hope the Safari developers can tell me…
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The first spam I’ve read in quite a while. This reminds me of all the anti-spam stuff I have to do…
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China, South Korea and Japan announce plans to help develop a decent OS, Microsoft cries foul. Microsoft goes before the US Congress to talk about virus susceptibility in it’s OS, and a new security hole is found. Hehehe.
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I’ve found a great Safari enhancement called HetimaSafariHackEX. It adds a new menu allowing you to quickly change your default charset (great for surfing Japanese pages when your default charset isn’t Shift-JIS). It also adds bookmark title searching, and (very) basic code colouring to View Source. It’s good!
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Knowledge is power. However endless copyright extensions are preventing knowledge from entering the public domain. Recently the BBC and
MIT have announced plans to publish a lot of material, free for non-profit use. This is inspiring news, and reminds me of Philip Greenspun (another person contributing to the greater good).
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BBC had an article on the origins of Spam today, but failed to link to the Center for Democracy and Technology report they quoted, amusing since the BBC’s article is just a shorter, less detailed rewrite (bad BBC). While…
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I was playing around with Goole today and discovered something interesting. I was reading about Google Hacks and jokingly did a search on my ‘mindshare’ for boblet. I was surprised to see my blog show up prominently, because I…
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I’ve just read a very interesting and timely article on Isreal and the Middle East situation, by one of my favourite web writers Phillip Greenspun. He’s written a quick, no-BS overview of the situation in the Middle East, with…
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The suggestions in George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (1946) are ones I want to practice by writing this blog. Thanks to Kevin Marks for the link. James Sphar is making a visual web traffic analyser, that generates…
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Just a brief rundown… Been busy the last week - got two new jobs, including a web design one (!), plus I’m meeting a couple of designers with some freelance potential next week. Things are hotting up! On the down…
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Saturday… involved getting up early and driving to Taki, to teach little kids. Wow, there’s a couple of two year olds in the class! I thought it was from 3 upward ;-) After that I headed home and saw a…
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Miwa’s birthday! Woop. I heard about an interesting program (thanks Gios) - iSwipe. It’s a general multi-protocol download app for Macs compatible with: WWW,
FTP, Hotline, Napster, OpenNapster, Gnutella, FastTrack and Carracho(*) networks, and soon the OpenFT network. The way…
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The day before Miwa’s birthday. After surfing overly long I embarked on an epic tidy. It involved taking down some unused curtains putting another bookshelf in pretty much emptying the cupboard sorting through the boxes putting everything back in the…
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