22 posts tagged “internet”

I really hate online advertising. This is basically my Most Hated list.

- Pop-unders: modern browsers block pop-ups now because they were abused so heavily by malicious hax0rs and the user unaware alike. Circumventing these restrictions using pop-unders is even more annoying as they *always* invoke new windows, even when the user forces all other links to create new tabs.
- Expanding Flash ads: as someone who is currently developing expanding Flash creatives, I certainly feel like a hypocrite here, but ads that expand are severely annoying. In my company's defence, however, we ensure that...

a) The ad doesn't fly out if you just brush over it, you have to hover for a meaningful period of time
b) Buttons to close it are prominent, instead of being obscure 8px text
c) The thing does actually close if the user asks it to
- Floating Flash ads: worse than expanding ads, these horrible abuses of technology hover over a section of the page (usually the content you came to the page for) and move as you scroll in any direction.
- Ads that use audio: I dislike audio on the web anyway. Unless I'm watching an online video or listening to a song, my speakers are off and my headphones are out of my ears. Random blasts of noise are always unwelcome.

I get that advertising is a much more welcome alternative to subscription-based content, but if you can't get a user's attention by creating appealing, usable advertising, you don't belong in business.

If you're like me, you'll want to block annoying advertising, and regardless of which browser you use, you can do this very simply without using add-ons. If you know the web domain the advertising is coming from, all you have to do is open your hosts file (c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts - you can open it with Notepad) and add a line like this:

127.0.0.1       a.tribalfusion.com www.tribalfusion.com

And yes, that is a line from mine, as Tribal Fusion are the single-most annoying advertising company I have come across so far.

UPDATE: I didn't think I was alone, and this article seems to prove it.

I am writing this because I had trouble finding this information. Every forum thread, support page and tech tips site I found on Google was terrible.

a) The Microsoft Xbox 360's wireless adaptor *is* compatible with the Apple Time Capsule
b) You do not need *any* other equipment to get them to talk to each other

Here, in a nutshell, are the settings you need for your Xbox 360 to successfully find and talk to your Time Capsule. These instructions assume you know how to use the Airport Utility (Apple's support site).

In Airport > Wireless...

- Radio mode: 802.11n (802.11b/g compatible)
- Wireless security: WPA/WPA2 Personal

In Internet > Internet Connection...

- Connection Sharing: Share a public IP address

In Internet > NAT...

- Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol: Yes

Assuming everything else is set up correctly (i.e. you can get online with other devices attached to your Time Capsule), your Xbox 360 should now connect, too.

Back in 1996, I started using the Internet. There were chat rooms, message boards, personal web pages, online profiles, usegroups, journals and lots of other ways for people to communicate online - regardless of how technically limited they were.

There was no fancy catch-all term like "social web" or "social networking"; nobody called themselves a "blogger", and none of these things had fancy names like Twitter or Facebook or MySpace, but they worked: hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of people around the world were able to communicate.

Working in the Internet, and specifically in "online community" as we called it, I don't remember there being articles about it in every single newspaper and magazine. Heck, we were lucky if nerd magazines covered things. And if you mentioned it in public? Oh boy, what an outcast you became. Especially if you (GASP!) met these people in real life and formed relationships with them.

And now? Now message board memes that would have gone unnoticed have articles in Time (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html); bands put their MySpace URL on CDs; my dad is on Facebook; I can't go five minutes without an eHarmony or Match ad on telly... it's crazy. In just a few years, using a computer to talk to and meet people has become entirely legitimate.

So what's next? What other interest of mine is suddenly going to become cool and popular? I'm hoping it's beard growing.

What do you love most about your job?

1. Problem solving. Although it's all in the field of nerdy computer things, I do like being given a problem then working out the best way to solve it. Or the best way with the time available, which are not always the same thing.
2. People. I work with several people who I love dearly and learn a lot from.
3. Learning. In the space of less than two years, I have learned a LOT and keep learning. It's great, and I attribute that to both the people I work with (especially my mentor, Eduardo, whose coding style is so easy to follow) and the fact that the company is too small for pre-defined roles to really stick on any given project. I was hired to do CSS and JavaScript, but spread out into SQL Server, ASP.Net, XML and other technologies just because I could and extra hands were needed.

Just over a week since we waited in line to order them, Jess and I finally got our iPhone 3Gs. Or rather, I went and got them while she got her hair cut as I was so impatient.

Within the space of half an hour, the sales assistant at the AT&T store had set up our account, transfered our numbers from T-Mobile and activated the phones, then I was out the door and shuffling home as fast as I could to play with mine.

I think I was playing for like five hours, before taking a nap.

For all the hype, for all the waiting, I am actually impressed. It effectively renders FOUR of my existing devices obsolete. It plays music every bit as well as my iPod (being, essentially, the latest generation). It can make calls, send text messages, take photos and do almost everything a phone can (MMS remains oddly absent). I can play games that look better than anything on my Nintendo DS, albeit with more limited control options. And, oddly, I feel it's going to reduce my time on my laptop, too - between the built-in apps and those you can already download from the new app store, I can surf, email, blog, manage photos, watch YouTube videos and generally piddle away time.

And in case you want to know, the applications downloaded so far...

- AIM
- Aqua Forest
- De Blob
- Facebook
- Last.fm
- MySpace Mobile
- NetNewsWire
- Remote
- Super Monkey Ball

... but I think I need a time out:

1. I saw a car with the license plate "WHT SPCE". I said to two co-workers "I can't see this car as I ignore white space." If you understand this joke... yeah.
2. I heard a co-worker laughing about hex values for colours. If you know what hex values are... yeah.

YEAH. Seriously.

It is done. At 10am, I was sat in my underwear playing on my Xbox 360 when I heard a knock at the door. I quickly got dressed and answered to Ivan, a different RCN guy who had come to hook me up.

He came in and had a look at the cabling we have, I called the building's engineer then Ivan went and met him. Two hours and much destruction of the wall outside my apartment later, we have...

- Cable TV! We have an HD DVR box, so we get to watch over 30 channels in high definition, and can record shows while we're out/watching something else. Yay!
- Fast internet! All of our games consoles are now online via our router, and not my laptop.
- A cable spanning a small segment of wall.

I am now very happy.

Last year, I tried to get Comcast to install their cable-based internet in my apartment. I made the appointment, took the time off work and waited for the guy to show up.

He was a really friendly guy and made a good attempt at hooking me up, but it seems when the owners of the building remodelled, they embedded the cable Comcast needed access to inside the dry wall. The guy kept on saying that he could find the RCN cable, but not the Comcast one.

I gave up and just got a slower mobile broadband card. This is great for a lot of things, but to hook my Xbox 360 and Wii up, I have to connect on my MacBook Pro then link via Wi-Fi or ethernet. It's cumbersome.

Recently, RCN were in our building trying to drum up business, so I thought I would try them out. I investigated their packages and eventually ordered their 5MB internet service, plus their premium cable TV package with an HD/DVR receiver.

The man came tonight and started prodding around inside the aerial thingy in the wall. After doing his tests, he first concluded that the cable coming into our apartment was Comcast, not RCN. Uh. Of course, he soon realised it was neither - it was the crappy free TV we get throughout our building.

After talking with the doorman of the building and his supervisor, he is coming back tomorrow to make a hole in the wall outside our apartment to reconnect the RCN cable to our aerial socket and give me the internet and TV gubbins I've ordered.

Want to write copy for the internet? UNINSTALL MICROSOFT WORD IMMEDIATELY.

Throughout my tenure in the world of the internet, I have had to take copy from a variety of sources - writers, lawyers, marketing people, and plain old clients. Without fail, I have had to reformat that copy every single time. Multiply this by the number of times clients and lawyers change their mind about copy and it gets very irritating.

Microsoft Word, you see, is not designed for generating internet-friendly copy but they are all extremely fond of it. As well as littering text with junk spacing, Word converts punctuation into special characters to make your copy look nice when printed onto paper, but these characters are not easily recognised by HTML.

End result? Strange symbols dotted throughout your copy or, if any form of scripting code is used to render it, your page will die a big, ugly death.

Worst Offenders:

1. The mdash: often mistakenly refered to as a hyphen, this symbol gets its name from the fact it is the width of the letter M in your chosen typeface.
2. Curly quotes aka smart quotes: don't they look pretty and quotey? Well, they're the devil, and so are you for using them. And hey, you, Frenchy, the guillemet is just as bad, you strange-angled-quote-using weirdo.
3. Ellipsis: or "three full stops in a row" to the layman... ANNOYING.
4. Double-spacing: this isn't really Word's fault, nor does it cause any of the ugly issues the others do, but double spaces do not apply to web content. I don't care if you have a degree in Journalism.
5. Superscript: an absolute pain in the arse to render correctly in HTML, although certain specific characters are catered to (certain superscript numbers, the degree symbol, and so on).

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080305-reznor-makes-750000-even-when-the-music-is-free.html

I don't know what the costs of the servers were. I don't know what the cost of producing the various physical versions of the music will be when completed. I don't even know what the album cost to produce.

At the end of the day, though, Trent Reznor could feasibly come out of this entire experiment with a significant chunk of change in his pocket... despite the fact he released his album using a Creative Commons license that means just one person downloading it legally could then have made it available for free to anyone without any legal comeback.

Are you listening, recording industry? Nope? Didn't think so. Carry on with your self-destruction.