Have started to use MyPimp as I need a calendar and it makes sense to have one online. The contacts bit might be useful too.

However, there is a big problem with it at the moment and that is that it only supports american date formats, i.e. today on MyPimp is 11/5/05, wheras my brain thinks it is 5/11/05. I didn’t think this would be that much of an issue, but it genuinely is very annoying and I can’t see myself using it until that is sorted.

On the bookmarking front, there’s just no way I can do it. I know I only set myself the challenge to record my site visits for one weekend, but I am already bored. It just ain’t for me…

• Meebo: aweb based multi-service IM tool
• Kiko: AJAX based online calender
• Using MediaWiki to Build a “normal” Website

From today’s Guardian: Time for the web pioneers to pick sides.

Yahoo has been sending men up mountains. Last week, the portal – which claims to be the world’s biggest, with a user base of more than 345 million – unveiled its latest journalistic enterprise, Richard Bangs Adventures. The five-part multimedia package is produced by the eponymous adventurer, who is following mountaineer John Harlin on an expedition up the same peak that killed his father 40 years ago.
It’s a marvellously well-formed piece of multi- media journalism, and gives the kind of all-encompassing coverage that only the combination of video, audio and text provides. It’s the kind of experience that can only be delivered through a complex channel such as the web.

It goes without saying that this appropriation of other media by and for the internet is not new. Yahoo is only alone in pushing forward in multiple areas. The portal recently announced that it was hiring former CNN and NBC correspondent Kevin Sites to work for it. Sites – who came to prominence writing a weblog of his journeys in Iraq – is travelling to every war zone in the world in a year. His exploits will be tracked through the website Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone (hotzone.yahoo.com).

The idea that Yahoo is interesting in making news, not just repackaging it, should come as no surprise. After all, it is now a vast media empire. But while it’s all very well sending reporters on “dangerous” missions into the unknown, elsewhere the commitment to independent journalism doesn’t seem so secure.

A day off work today. A few quick things before I get on. Maybe more later…

• Google Print is online. Had a quick play, looking for H.G. Wells’ The First Men on the Moon. Sadly that text is still under copyright so not all of it is available. Plenty of other classics are there in full though. Haven’t had a chance to see what options are available for printing – I am guessing that it is probably just an on screen thing.
• Firefox has reached a 10% share of the browser market, according to ZDNet, linked to by John Naughton. This is good news, not least because the more people using FireFox means that they can’t be ignored, and web sites will have to start complying with standards to ensure their sites are displayed proplerly.
• Google’s personalised portal is now released for the UK. Has a few new links for UK related stuff, like news and even the London Review of Books! Sadly, the UK-centric weather service focuses only on a select band of cities – the closest to me being Wolverhampton, which is almost completely useless!

• New Google Desktop Blog
• Guardian Technology: Microsoft: 1995 redux?

Everyone has heard of NaNoWriMo, the web-organised novel writing sprint, which involves writing 50,000 words to get a novel finished during the month of November. It sounds like madness, and it is.

What’s the point of it? Well, part of the idea is that the quality of what you write isn’t all that important. It’s the very act of getting the words down on paper, or rather onto the screen, in such numbers that the whole thing just won’t seem so daunting any more. Plus, there might be some nuggets of plot or character, or maybe even a chunk of some genuinely good writing that can be salvaged. It also gives you an opportunity to say to people at christmas parties that you are now on your second novel.

Over on Palimpsest, we have set ourselves a different challenge. We are going to try and get the 50,000 words done collectively. With more of us involved, the individual word count goes right down, but complications are added, such as getting the thing to make sense, for example. Have a read of the various deliberations that have taken place over who is involved, how it can be done, and what the plot should be.

The actual document is being collated using the web word processor Writely – which is ideal for a collaborative project like this, where people from both the UK and the US are working on the same document. A copy of the work in progress is published for other Palimpeople to read and keep up-to-date.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out. It looks like there will be a massive editing job at the end.

Microsoft have released two websites just recently: one that barely works and one that doesn’t actually do anything at all.

The first is live.com, some sort of portal that seems rather like start.com, though Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s chief apologist, claims there will be more to it than that. At the moment though, it doesn’t work with Firefox. Joel Spolsky gives it a thorough spanking.

The second is officelive.com, which appears to be an attempt by Microsoft to head off the potential competition of Web 2.0 style applications, presumably by offering online services that MS Office currently lacks while still tying users into the core desktop applications. Either way, all you can do at the moment is register an interest.

There are a couple of issues to be debated around here. One is the current fad, which is to release stupidly early beta versions of software, which I assume Google is partly responsible for. Is there some sort of credibility to be gained by having beta releases floating around at a really early point? Possibly – the other factor might be that these companies are getting a whole load of free testing being done, and with the growth of blogs and accurate searching via Technorati and the like, it’s all very easily collated.

Secondly, if Microsoft is taking a turn in this direction, then it must be pretty worried. Maybe the constant rumours of a Google powered OpenOffice have got Bill Gates and co. a little worried. But the ease of sharing and collaborating on documents across the net is becoming a number one priority for software makers, and this will have interesting affects on all sorts of things, not least the way people work. Soon, people working from home, given a fat enough broadband connection, will be able to do everything that someone based in the office can – and they can be anywhere in the world, and using any operating system. Maybe Microsoft try and use their web services to tie users into their existing platforms, but they would be unlikely to succeed long term.

The key to all this is the creation and acceptance of an open standard for documentation formats, to ensure that peope can work across all services, so that it doesn’t matter what application or site someone is using: the file can always be opened.

• Phil B: I want to…
• Dilbert’s blog
• Nextaris – Pretty much lets you do anything with your files online

Two in two days! You are so lucky.

• Tony Finch: Frustrated by Thunderbird
• The Guardian: You can judge a person by their book covers

I love these posters. The sheer awfulness of the puns they employ never fail to make me smile.

This was taken on my cameraphone (hence (lack of) quality) in Warwick.

Haven’t done one of these for a while. Sorry!

• Joel: Something Rotten in AdSense
• CyberJournalist: Top 10 Reasons for Reading a News Site
• Google Base Was Sort of Live
• Phil Bradley asks which blogging system he should switch to

Palimpsest’s Book Group is reading two H.G. Wells books at the moment. Being a skinflint, I thought I would download them from Project Gutenberg, a library of free books available in ext format, and sometimes HTML.

The two novels are:

• The First Men on the Moon
• The Sleeper Awakes

The trouble is that often the HTML option isn’t there, and the text files are formatted with hard line breaks, which means that the lines break at that point whether it needs to or not. So if you load them into a word processor and change the font and text size to get the page count down for printing, the results look terrible.

Surely, I thought, it must be possible to automatically remove these line breaks, somehow? I asked in various places:

• Palimpsest’s Ono No Komachi suggested using EReader, but that costs money!
• The guys at South Cheshire LUG had a go at producing some Perl to convert the text files – but they didn’t quite work, and I don’t have a linux box to run these on yet
• Blixa on Palimpsest came up with some VBA script for MS Word to reformat the text, but it doesn’t quite work either, and it involves Word and VBA (but is very clever)…

All to no avail!

Until Carfilhiot suggested a tool called GutenMark, a command line tool for linux or Windows which takes the text file and reformats nicely it to HTML. It is released under the GPL, so it should be possible to have a look at the source and see if it can be persuaded to produce just text files, though it may be possible to cut and paste from the browser to a text editor to see what results from that.

Carfilhiot has hosted the reformatted versions of the Wells texts:

• The First Men on the Moon
• The Sleeper Awakes

Excellent – and the copy-and-paste to text file seems to work too!

Been listening to Radio 4 and the Today programme on the way into work recently. This morning’s news was full of interesting stuff:

• Galloway accused of Senate ‘lies’ – I am no fan of Galloway’s, but I do find it surprising that the Seante Committee has come out with these statements without further interviews with ‘Gorgeous’ George.
• Africa Aids orphans ‘may top 18m’ – and one report stated that the life expectancy for a male in (IIRC) Zambia is 30. 30!
• EU mulls wild bird import freeze – Apparently this was suggested and agreed by most EU states in March this year. the only country to explicity say ‘no’? The UK. Brilliant.
• Overweight job hunters ‘lose out’ – no wonder I can’t get a job nearer home! Reminds me of one time I was being abused for my rotundity, and I accused my adversary of being fattist. “No, Dave,” he replied. “You’re the fattest.” Bastard.

The Guardian asks whether the content in Wikipedia is worth all that much, and gets some experts to judge some entries.

The founder of the online encyclopedia written and edited by its users has admitted some of its entries are ‘a horrific embarrassment’.

To be honest, I would never dream of using Wikipedia as a serious research tool. If I want a very quick rundown on something, though, it’s fine. Would be interested to find where Jimmy Wales mentioned this ‘horrific embarrassment’!

edit: Aha! The article than began all this was by Nicholas Carr, titled The amorality of Web 2.0. Wales then responds:

I don’t agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share
the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it
is free. It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better
quality, period, free or non-free. We should strive to be the best.

But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.

Why? What can we do about it?

So there we have it…unless we let Andrew Orlowski have his usual rant against ‘Wiki-fiddlers’, in the Register:

Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.

Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they’re talking about.)

Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that’s almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, … passionate, you haven’t met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it’s a religious crusade.

I recently joined Screen Select, an online DVD rental store. I had previously been a member of Amazon’s effort, but I cancelled as I was bereft of a DVD player for a few months. I pay £12.99 a month for an unlimited number of DVDs, and I can have 2 at home at any one time. To be honest, I rarely have two at home, it’s more the case that one is, and that the other is being either returned or sent out to me. Means we manage to get through quite a few films, which is good given that TV is so rubbish these days.

Here’s what we have had so far:

• Alien – Though the DVD was apparently the Director’s Cut, a studio release that Ridley Scott hated, it also featured the original version, which I watched. It’s visually stunning, claustrophobic and tense, and gripping from the very start. But it isn’t scary is it?
• Supersize Me – Entertaining bit of corporate America bashing. The science is all a bit dubious though, isn’t it, and the message obvious, at least for sane people.
• The Big Lebowski – Loved it. I am now tempted to change my Palimpname from Wavid to ‘The Dude’.
• The End of the Affair – Found this strangely unlikeable.
• Spiderman 2 – Even more stupid than the first one. Enjoyed it, but felt thoroughly ashamed of doing so.
• Hitchiker’s Guide… – My other half liked this more than me – she thought this might be because she hasn’t read the book for 10 years, while I re-read it all the time. It was ok, I guess.

This has been ripped and edited slightly from my Film List on Palimpsest.

Both Scoble and MJR have referred to Jakob Nielson’s tips for a well designed site, which is actually presented as a list of mistakes.

A lot of the stuff in here prompted me to change the layout of this site.

Have uploaded and slightly modified a new style. I wasn’t unhappy with the last one, but was concious that it was completely non-standards compliant and very graphics-heavy.

The other advantage of this one is that it goes against the annoying blogging grain of only using three-quarters of the screen. Font size might be a bit big, mind.

So, I am going to give this a go for a while. Let me know what you think!

Interesting debate on IE vs. Firefox on Palimpsest.

We have done loads this weekend. I was taken over with a real desire to get out into the fresh air, and fortunately we have tonnes of it around here. Here’s some photos of the places we went – more on my flickr page.

On Saturday, we visited Whittington Castle, which is remarkable for being run not by the National Trust or some large organisation, but a community trust set up by those who live nearby. A great project.

On Sunday we headed deeper into Wales. This is a small stream running between two buildings at William Morgan‘s birthplace at Tŷ Mawr, which is a National Trust site now.

Morgan was the chap responsible for writing the first Welsh language bible. The photo below shows the house where Morgan spent his formative years.