Category Archives: Internet

General tibbets about the Internet go here.

An Example of Ambiguous UI

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Bad UI: What the hell is this?

I had to install Opera to test something out, so this is the first time I’ve actually ever used it.

I’m testing the <audio> element, and for some reason I just assumed that this slider was an audio slider. I thought “oh, that’s quite smart actually” (there may be audio playing somewhere on the page, but you’ve no idea where, so just use this global or tab-wide one), but no it’s actually a zoom slider.

Who on earth uses zoom so much that it needs to have its own unlabeled part of the UI?

Products I can’t live without

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Last year I did a post on products I can’t live without with the intention of doing the same this year and comparing. I totally forgot about it until now.

Lets just go through last years list and see how it matches up.

digg.com – gosh. I can’t believe how much I actually loved that site. I use Reddit now, and would never dream of going back to digg.

WordPress – Meh. I don’t use it so much these days. It’s still something I use (obviously), but more and more rarely.

Google Talk – It’s only my Android, and people talk to me sometimes on there, but I don’t use it these days. Back into MSN!

Youtube – I use this more these days, thanks to 4oD being on there.

last.fm – I still store my plays on there, but I use Spotify to listen to music now.

4chan – What the hell? Not been there in years.

Google Reader – I’m using Fever now!

Google Notebook – this got retired. I mostly just use actual physical notebooks now. If there’s a link I want to jot down, I bitly it first.

Almost everything has changed then really. I didn’t think my habits had changed as much. Here’s this years list:

  • Fever – it’s just so much more beautiful and personal than Google Reader. I guess I like controlling it on my own server.
  • Google Listen – for podcasts on my Android
  • Spotify – I’m a premium member, I like it so much.
  • Steam – I really like having electronic copies of games. I’m not so bothered about physical media.
  • World Of Warcraft – it’s a phase, I’m sure.
  • Facebook – of course.
  • Reddit

It’s odd to see how many of my favourite things are all paid for now. I’m not sure if paying for something is a thing that people do as they get older, or if I just feel better about paying.

It’s nice to be back in charge!

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I switched back to WordPress.org, on a hosted server from .com since my domain wrapping ran out, and I was getting bored of the walled garden anyway. I wanna start WordPress hacking again and it’s hard to do that with a blog to play around with!

I’ve switched to a new theme too, which is freaking amazing. Not just the front end, but the back end is so comprehensive. There’s a few changes and little bugs I’ve noticed already, but I’ll fix them and send them back to the author when I get a few minutes.

Hashmask for WordPress plugin

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Check me out being in the WordPress plugin directory!

I decided to add Hashmask as a plugin to the WordPress login form, mostly because I hated the problem that arc90 fixed. Wasn’t really that complicated, nor is it world stopping, but it’s totally my first submitted plugin!

Screenshot of Hashmask in WordPress

Screenshot of Hashmask in WordPress

Twitter and politics

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John Prescott decided to write an article commenting on how politicians use social media, off the back of Cameron’s “twat” remark. He said that having to get your point across in 140 characters forces them to be concise and to have an actual opinion, not avoid the question.

One of the comments to his article was

Yeah, more empty sloganeering is exactly what the country needs.

–thaumaturge

And I can see their point. The example that Prescott gave – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” – was a bad one. That’s not really the use of twitter.

Cameron apologises for saying offensive 4 letter word on radio – TORY? http://tinyurl.com/mtd6sj

–@johnprescott

That’s more like a twitter usage. It’s not a party policy message because there’re better places for those to go. The limited characters really isn’t enough for those. But a quick quip, off the cuff, makes the politician more human. Someone we can relate to better and get to know on a more personal level.

I want more politicians to be using the Internet like this. You can have an actual conversation with them on twitter and sometimes they even reply. People have to remember, and respect, that you’re voting for an actual person, not a party. Just because a person is a member of the Labour party, it doesn’t mean they back national ID cards, for instance. Voters need to know who the person is, not just what party they’re in.

As always where politics is concerned, people are idiots. The comments to that article could have been a nice debate about the uses of the Internet within our executive, but instead they turned mostly into people complaining about Labour. The damn article had nothing to do with Labour. STFU.

YouTube comments suck, someone should fix that.

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Intellectual heights known only to YouTube

Intellectual heights known only to YouTube

YouTube’s comments really suck. In fact, most of the videos suck too, but every comment is pretty much awful. This is problem most likely came around because of the size of the community just exploded, there’s no reason to be held with any respect.

Places like reddit are still in that point where they don’t have too many users, so the quality of comments is still pretty high. Talk in text speak and you’ll be down voted to oblivion. Whereas on YouTube that seems an okay thing to do.

Each video – even really obscure videos – always seems to have a new comment thread made within the last day or so, making it impossible to have an actual, productive conversation.

There’s also a problem with threads… If you click “reply” to most threads, you just start another thread… Sometimes it works as a nested comment, like expected.

So, to fix the problems we need a smaller community, with more power for each user to vote on the smarts of each comment… We obviously can’t get rid of 90% of the YouTube community, but why can’t we just ignore it?

I was thinking someone should make a Greasemonkey script which removes all the comments on videos, and replaces it with comments maintained by someone else’s service. The new service obviously won’t be adopted by 99% of the current YouTube raff so we’ll get a smaller, more sophisticated society of people commenting on videos.

I like this idea. Someone should do it, or maybe I should.

Edit: Looking into this more, you can probably use the Disqus API.

If you ask me, the week should start on Thursday.

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Growing up on LiveJournal and Neopets (gosh, I can’t believe it’s been so many years since I’ve used those websites) I think it’s understandable for me to forget that the Internet is actually full of people. Sometimes I think that subconsciously I imagine all this content online to have just appeared from no where, or written by people on other continents who will always remain a stranger. Even some of the people I’m friends with on MSN that I’ve never met are dehumanised in my mind.

That’s why it’s refreshing to bump around the Internet and find people who not only seem to exist, but live pretty damn close to me. I found these strangers through total serendipity. I was looking at the Fizzpop event page for today (which I can’t go to – I wouldn’t be able to get back home), and then ended up at the Digital Brum site.

They’re listing web related events around Birmingham, some of which I’d love to go to, if only to give me something really interesting to do, maybe meet a few more interesting people. Then I found out about Digital Brum which lists a whole load of other events happening around Birmingham.

Ultimately I ended up at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe website, where they were listing past attendees. An entire list of people in interesting positions, most of them with links to their products and blogs. There are some people like Rob Day who’re 16 years old and have two projects that are looking really awesome in the pipe line. Kind of makes me feel like I’ve wasted my teenage years. This is totally the age of the teenage entrepreneur, and so I’m disappointed in myself for not doing anything amazing. Still though, it’s inspiring for me to do something now.

Found Calum Brannan’s blog too. He has a meeting table. A meeting table! It’s weird how small things like that really get me excited about eventually working for a company. Hopefully a small company. He’s working on Youmeo, which really looks interesting. I was thinking the other day how annoying it is to have both my Facebook and Twitter to update. (A few people who attended that event are working on Youmeo on second glance. I’d love to work on a team project…)

All in all, I’m mad hyped about eventually having a career. At the moment (well, especially at the moment, whilst university is finished till October) my work load isn’t that big. Heck, I sleep in till one o’clock most days just because I have nothing to do. It’d be really nice to get a job at a web start up or something. Places like arc90 who have amazing ideas in their lab (but they’re American).

I guess I could actually full time start freelance work; looking for new clients from nine to five, rather than taking on the clients that come to me (which is only a small number really). When I’m not looking (I’d probably get bored with eight hours of cold-emailing people from job boards), I should be developing my knowledge on general stuff. There still stuff about WordPress I’d be interested in poking around more with.

I’m going to make tomorrow busy.

There’s no need for the government to step in

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I’d probably be the person my friends would think most likely to lobby for laws net neutrality, but they’d be wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I’m massively pro-net neutrality and think it’s vital for the continued growth of the Internet and innovation. What I don’t agree with is further legislation.

In England, our current state of play is that the government thinks everything is fine, despite BT capping and throttling. I agree with them. I don’t think that the government should step in and force private companies to follow their morals. The government has no say in how BT should be running their company.

But I’m paying for an 8Mb connection! That’s what I should get.

No, you’re not paying for an 8Mb connection, you’re paying for the service laid out in the terms and conditions you signed up for. Terms which you said you agreed to when you made the contract for your service. Those conditions openly say “we’re going to throttle your connection to 896Kbps for streaming videos”, and everything else Ars is complaining about. If you don’t like that, there’s plenty of competitors who offer different terms. Use them.

There are hidden terms like this all over England; buy one get one free (the cheapest product is the free one) — free calls between 7am and 7pm (if you start a call at 6pm, and then go past 7pm, you’ll be charged for the entire call) — 30% less fat! (30% smaller bag). It just enforces that it’s important to read the small print. That’s all the onus there is, and all that there should be on businesses.

Whilst I don’t think there should be harsher laws about how terms are written, I do think it’d be a good idea for businesses to voluntarily add a simpler version of their terms. Just to make their customers happier. I can’t seem to find it, but I once found a website who had the normal legal text – hard to understand by anyone that’s not a lawyer – but by the side they had simple explanations. In someone like digg’s case, by the side of…

By creating and posting Content to Digg, you warrant that you own all rights to the Content, agree that the Content will be dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, available at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and that you will not object to the use of the Content by Digg in any context. To clarify, the above does not apply to the Content on external sites linked to by the original submission.

They could have “this just means that anything you give us is going to be put into the public domain, so anyone can do anything with it.” Digg’s ToS is actually pretty easy to read already, but other companies could really do with doing that too.

I don’t want to spend half an hour reading something before I can use a product!

That’s your choice, but the business has done everything they need to do in my opinion. You can’t complain when they suspend your account for doing something they don’t want, or when you’re hit with hidden charges. It’s your responsibility to read that stuff.

If the government can’t regulate, then who’s watching for consumer rights?

The consumers. If BT customer doesn’t like something they should leave BT, boycotting it. If enough customers are leaving (so it’s a big problem) BT will change. If you stick around with BT and put up with you, you’re sending the message that you’re okay with it.

That’s why I’m hopeful that if non-net neutrality comes into place, it’ll be fairly quickly kicked to the curb. There will always be some good guys in business. I’ve heard good things about Be. If there’s truly not anyone filling that need, then someone will pretty quickly notice it and set up a business there. (Hey, why not you?)

In sum, quit worrying about net neutrality, it’s here to stay. Government shouldn’t keep regulating businesses, let the customers do that. (You can almost feel Ayn Rand in the room, amirite?)

NoClassDefFoundError error, and a note on Bing

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Playing with Java and for some reason I’m getting this error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: AddingMachine (wrong
name: sum/AddingMachine)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
 at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: AddingMachine.  Program will exit.

I decided to Google it, like I do when ever I get an error of any kind. Then I remembered bing, and thought this is an ideal moment to try it out.

Bing being new isn’t an excuse that they can use to defend it; Microsoft has has years experimenting with search and should know just about as much as Google now, but they’re still making school boy errors. For instance,  this forum post is listed second in the results.

Bing should know it’s a forum, it’s pretty obvious. Then by that it could deduce that the person starting the thread is asking a question, likely my question. But there are no replies, so it’s clear that no one has answered it. Giving me that link is completely pointless. Google learnt that lesson years ago.

Back to the Java problem, I tried doing java -classpath . AddingMachine rather than just java AddingMachine and I get the same error…

Fix’d: I just copy-pasted the source from the java notes page I’m looking at. And the problem lied in it have a package sum; line. Just remove it.

Edit for protip: This is an error you’re running into because of packages, used to make java source files easier to manage. You should definitely check out this tutorial on packages if you’re having problems; Java Package Tutorial.

After weeks of aimless doing nothing…

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I plan on being busy tomorrow. Today wasn’t much of a productive feat either, despite me being back home. Apparently a change of scenery hasn’t inspired me to work. It looks like my main village is about to be nobled though, so I guess I won’t be playing Tribal Wars for much longer…

Tomorrow, I’m gonna head to dad’s around five o’clock, because I can get a lift at that time. I want to fix my bike up (it’s been out back for  a while now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s rusted beyond repair but I want to try. It’ll give me something relatively cheap to work on. Then, I think it’d be cool to just ride for a while. Mostly to increase my fitness, to be honest.

Then, ride back to mum’s – since I don’t have a bed back at dad’s house yet (the spare room got filled with junk as soon as I moved away to university). Or, better yet, I wanna check out the library. I’m not sure if they have wireless there but if they do it’d be rocking. If not, no problem I can do computer science theory stuff I need to do anyway – I’m sure they have books.