Meep’s Musings

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

What do Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Ashlee Simpson and Goldfrapp have in common? They don’t trust their fans. More precisely, they don’t trust their fans on the internet, or how else can it be explained that they did not offer full-length streams of their songs prior to release?

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A big field of computer human interaction is usability, which means how well certain things can be used by their user. These things can be anything from the handle of a door over a car seat to a website - everything that can be used can be judged by its usability. For man-made objects, this means the design is scrutinized under certain criteria - such as affordance or suitability - and it won’t surprise you that many designs spectacularly fail this scrutiny (especially the ones that are uber-pretty: let it be said, design isn’t everything!).

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Another example of why it’s always a good idea to not listen to those pesky “Update now!” messages: FileZilla is an Open Source FTP program and so far has always been simple to use, reliable and highly tweakable. New release candidate 3.0.4.1 takes care of all three things and blasts them into oblivion faster than you can say “Hey, where did my connection go?”.

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Check out these really marvellous & funny animated shorts about adventures in the insect trade:

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Who says online games can’t teach you something useful? Launchball will give you a better understanding of physics, but it’s so addictive you won’t even notice. Try to maneuver your ball through 30 levels by making use of fans, batteries and ramps - even if you hated physics at school, you will love this game!

I’ve been having trouble accessing my main e-mail account at 1&1 all day, and it drives me insane! Thunderbird tells me there are messages, but it can’t retrieve them - the same with the webmail interface. Does anybody else have this problem or is it just me? And if you want to reach me today, either use the Yahoo! address or this blog, thanks!

It appears the Corrs’ record company has finally, after a long and painfully slow struggle, decided to use this groovy new thing called “The Internet” to promote and sell the group’s music. However, they are doing a tremendously bad job: denying willing buyers the opportunity to purchase the product can hardly be called brilliant.

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Link indication

With the help of this plugin, it is easy to asign a little image to each of your links and style them according to the target of the link. For example, any external link can be indicated by , and there are many more possibilities (e.g. for Wikipedia or IMDb links, etc.).

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There are few things that are as much fun as spying on the people who visit your web sites (and yes, everybody does it - no matter what they say :P!). For one thing, you can see what pages are popular, where your readers come from and what browsers they use (for the inclined geek of importance ;)). On the other hand, you can see what surfers were looking for, and that is always highly interesting and entertaining.

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…namely version 2.0. My experiences, annoyances and pleasant surprises so far:

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