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.

ith larger hard-drives hitting the market every year and growth that obeys Moore’s Law, people begin to collect rich media on their workstation. Sooner or later, since greed for storage ups, space will run out.

Hitachi are presenting new technology that relates to storage in volume. This can break Moore’s Law in (potentially) the same way as optical and quantum computing. Terabyte hard-drives are near.

I took a glance at a desk this morning when I saw this Orbit Professional pack of gum. It is shocking that Orbit have gone as far as wrapping gum as if it was some powerful prescription drug. Is that what they mean by “Professional”? [sarcasm] Gum can apparently have an effect enormous enough to justify a dosage. [/sarcasm]

While on this issue, it is worth noting that two-thirds of an Easter egg pack comprises packaging material.

he Google Blog has just announced inclusion of satellite images in Google Maps (see “satellite” at the top-right corner). Americans can now identify their house and scroll around their neighbourhood to view everything from high above. The tool has an amazingly responsive interface.

I decided to look at Key West; I could zoom in much further