Guy Kawasaki writes about  his 10/20/30 Rule of  Powerpoint:

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Just finished The Consolations of Philosophy, and while it took me a while to read a 250-odd page paperback, it was enjoyable stuff throughout.

De Botton picks 6 philosophers and 6 predicaments, one for each philosopher to console us. It’s attempt to make philosophy practical, then. The philosophers in questions are:

• Socrates – Unpopularity
• Epicurus – Not having enough money
• Seneca – Frustration
• Montaigne – Inadequacy
• Schopenhauer – Broken heart
• Nietzsche – Difficulties

So, the focus is pretty narrow on each one, this isn’t a reader on all aspects of each thinkers’ work. But de Botton picks out some excellent passages from the original works for quotatation, and his own explainations and examples are thoughfully and entertainingly done.

It’s a great little book, though whether it would ever be of any practical use I’m not sure. Itcertainly has put me in mind to read some more de Botton this year: I have Status Anxiety on the shelves and wouldn’t mind having a go at his Proust one at some point.

Consolations also has one brilliant joke, which really had me laughing out loud when I spotted it:

It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highy intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear ones do not.

The WordPress blog has finally announced the release of version 2.0, or ‘Duke’. The post presents a nice list of new features for users:

• Completely Redesigned Backend — The first thing you’ll notice when you login to your blog is the backend has been completely overhauled for both aesthetics and usability. This is the first iteration of exciting things to come from the Shuttle team of designers that has been volunteering their time, and look for even more aesthetic improvements in the future.
• Faster Administration — Call it AJAX, call it DHTML, call it Larry, but we’ve paid close attention to streamlining some of the most common tasks in managing your blog. For example if you’re writing a post and you can add categories on the fly, much like tagging in Flickr. Also instead of having two separate UIs for “simple” and “advanced” posting, we’ve combined them and let you customize the layout of the page on the fly by dragging and dropping the dialogs around. It saves where you put things so when you return it’s just like you left it. When you delete a comment or category it will fade out without a page load.
• WYSIWYG Editing — WP dev Andy Skelton and the TinyMCE team have done a tremendous amount of work to bring a smooth WYSIWYG editing experience to WordPress. As code purists, we are very picky about what kind of HTML is generated, and while it’s not perfect yet (for instance nested lists can cause trouble) for 95% of what you do post-to-post the WYSIWYG should save you time. And if it doesn’t, you can turn it off on your profile page. One note: Safari and older versions of Opera, both fantastic browsers, don’t yet support everything that’s needed to do WYSIWYG, but we fully expect new versions of those browsers will continue to improve their standards support, so it may just be a matter of time.
• Included Spam and Backup Plugins — We’ve included two of the most popular WordPress plugins: Skippy’s DB backup can backup your database to a file and optionally email you a copy; Akismet is a distributed anti-spam system which gets smarter the more people use it.
• Resizable Editing — This is one of my personal favorite features. Ever been writing a post and that textarea seemed a little small? Happens to me all the time, and our new rich text editor includes a feature that lets you resize the editor on-the-fly by clicking on the corner, just like a regular window.
• Inline Uploading — We’ve optimized our uploader for image, audio, and video files and put it inline with the posting screen. You don’t have to bounce around any more when writing a post! It also will organize your files for you as you upload them to make them easier to find later. On the backend, each uploaded file is actually a “sub-post” so it can have individual comments and pingbacks, its own permalink, and even a custom template based on what type of file it is. You can click on attached files to get a menu of options, or if you’re on Firefox you can drag and drop them into your WYSIWYG editor.
• Faster Posting — In the past if you were linking to a number of posts or pinging a lot of update services, your posting time could appear to slow to a crawl even though everything was instantly done on the backend. We’ve modified how this works now so posting should be near-instantaneous, like everything else in WordPress.
• Post Preview — Another enhancement to the post screen, now when you save a post it shows a live preview of how the post would look on your site, with the stylesheet and theme and everything. No more publishing a post just to see if it works.
• Streamlined Importing — We’ve rewritten our import system from the ground up to be much easier to use (you no longer have to edit files), put it behind authentication, and also made it easy for new importers to be dropped into the system, much like plugins.
• User Roles — We had a ton of feedback on our old numerical user level system. No one was exactly sure what those numbers meant! We’ve distilled the basic functions into a set of roles — such as administrator, editor, contributor — that make it easier to understand what sort of capabilities you’re giving your blog’s users. The new system is completely pluggable too, so plugins can modify roles and create groups that have access to certain things.
• Header Customization — If you’re tired of the blue header in the default theme, you can now change the colors and text of it, which we’ve included as a demo of some of the new features available to theme authors.

Am currently three-quarters of the way through Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. It’s good stuff so far. It dicusses a particular aspect of six philosophers’ work: Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Having looked up a couple of the texts covered in the book on Gutenberg I am happy to admit to being glad that de Botton explains it all so well. Indecipherable is not the word.

Written by the man himself!

• Librivox is an interesting project, a kind of audio Gutenberg, running on a mixture of WordPress and phpBB. Volunteers collaborate on recording mp3s of classic, out-of-copyright texts. As with all these things, the quality must be variable, but it is a laudable project.
• Performancing has a problem: the HTML it spits out into blog posts is not standards compliant.

Well, I have upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and it was as seamless as always, no problems whatsoever. Will now get in touch with Rick and Chilli about getting theirs sorted out too.

Incidentally, the WordPress site has had a bit of a makeover. No word on the blog yet as to any details, and the link to the new version download hasn’t been announced, so I may have jumped the gun a bit. Never mind – if any of the WordPress guys read this, then they know it all works just fine.

A couple of great features I have just spotted, there are bound to be more as I investigate, are that the editing window can be dragged larger with the mouse, and that post previews show the post inside your chosen template, rather than just with text. Brilliant!

Interesting story from the BBC:

Businessman wins e-mail spam caseA businessman has won what is believed to be the first victory of its kind by claiming damages from a company which sent him e-mail spam.

Nigel Roberts, who lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands, took action against Media Logistics UK over junk e-mails in his personal account.

Under new European laws, companies can be sued for sending unwanted e-mails.

The Stirlingshire-based firm has agreed to pay £270 compensation to Mr Roberts, who runs an internet business.

‘Tiny victory’

Three years ago the EU passed an anti-spam law, the directive on privacy and telecommunications, which gave individuals the right to fight the growing tide of unwanted e-mail by allowing them to claim damages.

Mr Roberts received unwanted e-mail adverts for a contract car firm and a fax broadcasting business and decided to take action against the company.

The company filed an acknowledgement of the claim at Colchester County Court but did not defend it and a judge ruled in favour of Mr Roberts.

In an out-of-court agreement Media Logistics agreed to pay Mr Roberts damages of £270 plus his £30 filing fee.

Mr Roberts said he had limited his claim to a maximum of £300 in order to qualify to file it as a small claim.

He said: “This may be a tiny victory but perhaps now spammers will begin to realise that people don’t have to put up with their e-mail inboxes being filled with unwanted junk.”

No-one from Media Logistics UK was available for comment.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office, the watchdog who oversees the Data Protection Act, said it was the first case of its kind he had heard of.

He said: “What I can say is that I haven’t heard of anyone doing so and we haven’t taken a case under that legislation.”

• Office Weblog: Meme of the day: Outlook 12 and RSS
• OH MY GOD…! – Trent End Talk on Boxing Day’s game: Forest 4 Donny 0!
• Festivus has been mentioned to me a few times over the last few days…
• Terminated – “early yesterday the piqued Austrian city of Graz removed the words “Arnold
  Schwarzenegger” from the city’s football stadium”. Hehe.

God, I am a sad git doing this today. Still, here goes:

• Martin Rowson retells Tristam Shandy in the Guardian
• The Google blog post about the AOL deal
• …and the Guardian‘s view of the deal

That’s it. Have a good Christmas.

A poem from today’s Guardian Review by Rowan Williams:

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

WordPress and the Performancing Extension is a great tutorial for setting up Performancing to work with a custom WordPress install.

Currently my only real gripe is with the insertion of images, where to add an ‘alt’ tag one has to go into the raw HTML editor to add them in.

Have finally got round to installing the Performancing extension to FireFox, and it works a treat! Here’s a snapshot of me using it to write this post. It even drags in your categories and previous entries for you! I did at first find it a little irritating that the editor appears on every tab in your FireFox window, and not just the one you are commenting on, but it is simple enough to drag the editor down to a smaller size.

greasemonkey is another extension, one that allows you to add all sorts of scripts to make life easier. I’m sure most people are well aware of it already. However, the script I really wanted, the inline wikipedia viewer, doesn’t seem to work and just sticks on the loading messages. The page on the UserScripts site says it is broken too. Anyone have any ideas?

Due to a total cock-up on the theme for this blog, I have had to revert it back to the original Beeblebrox one.

Will have my changes back in place sometime tomorrow, hopefully!

• Google Modules – add functionality to your personalised Google home page
• Steve Rubel writes about the Performancing FireFox extension – which from “any page in your browser, just right click and special blog publishing frame opens. Fill it out, add your categories and post.”
• Internet cafe bans baseball caps
• Meebo: Instant Messenging through a browser. Cool.

From BBC News:

A Japanese man has died after being tackled by fellow train passengers who believed he had molested a woman during the morning rush hour.
The man fled the train at a station in the city of Osaka after a 20-year-old student accused him of groping her.

The 40-year-old was brought to the ground by four male passengers, who included at least one off-duty police officer. He died later in hospital.

Women-only carriages run on some trains in Japan because of groping complaints.

The college student accused the man of groping her on Tuesday, shortly after the train they were travelling in stopped at JR Tennoji Station in Osaka, Mainichi newspaper reported.

He ran away but was chased by four other passengers, who tackled him on the platform. “We are looking into the cause of death and details about how he was overpowered by the passengers,” a police spokesman told the French news agency AFP.

Despite the introduction of penalties and women-only carriages, Tokyo police reported more than 2,000 groping incidents on the city’s trains last year.

Delightful!

Exciting (well, for the likes of me it is…) announcent on the WordPress development blog:

The next release of WordPress is drawing near. Please help us shake out any last remaining bugs by downloading and testing the 2.0 Release Candidate. If all goes well, the Release Candidate will become 2.0 final. We’re almost there. Download, test, and head over to the Beta Forum to let us know if the Release Candidate is ready for prime time.

I installed it as a new blog just to have a look around, and it is pretty good. The main change really is a nice wysiwyg editor for posting:

I’ll certainly be upgrading as soon as the final version is released!

My Heritage is currently in beta – it’s going to be some sort of genealogy website or something – but it does have this face recognition thing on it, where you upload a photo of your face, and it tells you which celebrity you look like. Great!

Sadly, the only photos of me I had to hand weren’t very clear, so it couldn’t give them a proper going-over. The only one I could find was a rather grubby effort from a mobile phone. Anyway, the results were shocking.

1. Sania Mirza (65% similarity to me) – a woman at #1! Bloody hell. And I have never heard of her. Turns out she is an Indian tennis player.
2. Peter Sellers (62%)
3. Kevin Mitnick (52%) – who? Some sort of internet security geek apparently.
4. John Cusack (47%)
5. Tom Hanks (45%)

More fun on this subject over on Palimpsest.

• Uncyclopedia – a pretty funny Wikipedia spoof
• Goal Mouths is now live
• BBC Technology: What is it with Wikipedia?
• Guardian Technology on Yahoo!