famous tale speaks of a naked king, who being the King, makes nakedness blindly accepted as a norm. No suspicion is raised until one man from the crowd yells “The King is naked“. This comes to show that the flock can accept things without using any self-judgement.

Likewise, Internet users circulate bits which gain their value from word of mouth. One such example is the Satellite Google Maps hype. When the net became aware of the service, everyone quickly got excited. This probably wouldn’t have been the case if was not a Google feature. I looked at satellite images of this type back in 1999 or 2000 (using TerraServer) and identified friends’ homes. It wasn’t as widespread at the time because there wasn’t as great a ‘buzz’.

An actual satellite image of a field in Illinois

I recently decided to take on a little obligation. I would like see if I can handle 20 low-resolution pictures a day; every single day, that is. I have made the process of transferring data from my camera to the Web very efficient and I will soon discover how my pictures collage extends (see an example from my health club).

Certain on-line services offer customised information as images. Wundeground deliver your local weather as a GIF file and DanaSoft provide informative signatures, as shown below. Since both are displayed regularly in my personal portal, I like using the functionality of CSS which clips images as illustrated in this example page. Feel free to copy.

Some relevant code from the example:

<div style="position:absolute; top:5; left:10;
clip:rect(12px auto 40px auto)">
<img
src="http://www.danasoft.com/sig/fookitnow.jpg"
style="border:1px #000 solid;" />
</div>


ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has come out with an announcement about the new .jobs and .travel domain suffixes, while considering .asia, .mail, .tel, and .xxx.

I previously criticised ICANN (registrars particularly) about making things worse. They allow virtually anybody to take over an unsuitable domain name; now they consider the .xxx suffix. Is that what the Internet involves? Jobs, leisure and pr0n? It is about time the Internet adopted a tree structure to clear up the chaos.

have spotted potential in unifying newgroups and feeds. Much of my reading involves newsgroups and aggregators as I do not require much beyond plain-text and a few references (links) to richer pages.

Feeds on the left and newsgroups on the right; click images to view in full size

The two applications are separate, yet they are similar in nature (see the screen-shots above to convince yourself). Will someone consider combining them? Web sites viewed as newsgroup threads? Perhaps newsgroups aggregated with abilities to participate?

Palm OS is a wonderful platform, but like all others, it exhibits some irrational behaviour.

• #1: Clipboard too small
  
  Example: have you ever tried to copy a portion of one memo onto another?
   
• #2: No undo stack
  
  Example: erase an entire paragraph, then type in a single letter. Can the paragraph return back to life?
   
• #3: Limit on memo size
  
  Description: a user runs out of memo space and needs to fragment the text.
   
• #4: Low-resolution applications
  
  Description: even with high-resolution screens, scrolling is much needed, for example in Date Book.
   
• #5: No key locking
  
  Example: Palm that powers up in the pocket.
   
• #6: Unquoted limit on number of categories
  
  Example: hard-core Palm users that accumulate too many items under the restrictive number of categories.
   
• #7: Error log dismissed automatically
  
  Description: on the PC-side, error logs disappear after 60 seconds; no option to change that exists.
   
• #8: Repeating events archived just once
  
  Description: those who are fond of archiving will notice that repeating events get archived only once — at the end.
   
• #9: Searching twice within the same item
  
  Example: ever tried finding all occurrences of a term in one single item? Searching is poor in scope. Only a global search is available and it highlights the first occurrence.
   
• #10: No alarm priorities/types
  
  Example: loud alarm in the middle of a meeting or quiet alarm when a crucial event comes up.
   

Cited by: PalmAddict

he OS X Finder overwrites directories without aggregating files in both source and the destination. For example, when a directory called /Photos is copied to /Directory/Photos, it will delete its the contents of /Directory/Photos rather than merging. That serves as a case study where the user is not sufficiently involved and, consequently, data can be lost. This behaviour must have been inherited from Mac OS 9 as Linux does not have this problem and neither does Windows.

Yesterday I spent hours driving myself mad as I realised I had lost data 4 months ago. No back-ups could resurrect that data. File dialogues must always be verbose as data loss is the most frustrating experience of all.

A KDE “overwrite file” dialogue; click image for full-sized view

Developers must begin to involve users in choices that are made, as the example above suggests. “Easier-to-implement” or “automatic” are usually a bad idea. For the very same reasons, for example, image2.jpg appears after image10.jpg in file managers. That is simply a common ‘bug’ that mushroomed into a norm.