This is just bizarre. I've received a new laptop at work and so I'm installing all my stuff. Firebug and YSlow have become absolutely critical to my day-to-day work, so that was on the list of extensions I want. Even searching for "firebug" locks up Firefox. Going directly to the site locks up Firefox. WTF?
Is, perhaps, the annoying virus scanner that PCs here come with doing something weird? This happens whether I use the corporate proxy or bypass it.
Anyone else seen this behaviour?
The trouble with the cheap, mega capacity memory cards you get these days is that I have less incentive to process them all. I've got a gig in my little pocket camera, and 2 gigs in the big one. This one is the pub quiz we sometimes do, and Simon Stewart dropped in.
Scott and Katie just visited for a quick weekend.
Todd and Pete just celebrated their five years together, so we had lunch at The Warren View with them and a few mates. Congratulations!
We went to the Surry Hills Festival a while back, then got sick of paying $6 for Tooheys New (ugh!) and retired to Mr Mary's in Redfern for a boozy afternoon.
I went to the Reunion Rave on Saturday night. It was fun catching up with all the old rave buddies, listening to old classics. Main observation of the evening: my hasn't everyone's skin improved?
Finally, Holly's been cooking up a storm!
In my recent post about online advertising, I mentioned that I use Adblock Plus and Filterset.G. Ares writes in to say that Filterset.G is is deprecated and probably unmaintained, with the last update in March. Didn't know that!
Ares recommends EastList+EasyElement from this list, which I've switched to now. We'll see how it goes.
I got this message in my feed reader this morning. It seems the BBC have moved the RSS feed for the "Documentary Archive" podcasts. The lame thing is, with a single line in their web server config, they could make this move completely seamless. Worse yet, when you follow that link there's nothing on the page called "Documentary Archive". Duh!
I haven't seen online ads since about 1995, when HotWired first pioneered annoying, animated banners that detracted from the content. Initially I was using hacks like hosts files and the like, then I started using Craig's Squid-based blocker until these days I use a combination of Adblock Plus, Filterset.G and some Greasemonkey scripts to block some of the more annoying inline ads. Any time an ad gets around these filters, I quickly squish it because I've got used to viewing content without distracting, annoying crap flashing near what I'm trying to read.
Now I'm on the other side of the fence, and we're advertising through some of these ad networks and I've had to test view some of it. First of all, I'm staggered at how intrusive they've become. On some sites like NineMSN, they overlay animations over the actual content! Unbelievable and I'm amazed anyone uses sites that do that kind of thing. Mainstream sites still even use pop-ups and pop-under crap?!?!? I can't believe audiences don't go out of their way to work out how to block all this.
It's quite remarkable how useless the ads are in delivering a valuable audience. I guess it's not particularly surprising. If you're reading about the cyclone relief effort in Burma, you're hardly going to click on an advert for, say, a car. It's a drive-by impression, with similar brand-building impact to a billboard or a display ad in a newspaper.
What's more, the publishers don't help themselves by even further devaluing their impressions. Fairfax sites reload every five minutes, so if someone walks away from their computer, it happily counts impressions with nobody home to see it. That makes me very suspicious of their impression counts. I can't believe the publishers could be so stupid. Google changed the nature of this business by delivering benefits for everyone: advertisers and advertisees, which is why they're make kongbucks. Seems the dead tree purveyors, and those apeing them, haven't worked that out.
So apart from a very cheap (and it would want to be, given the publishers' efforts to devalue the product) brand building exercise, I don't really see the point of display advertising on content sites. It's generally not that relevant, not particularly targetted, and doesn't deliver.
Search engine marketing, however, is gold. I don't filter out ads next to Google searches because they're often actually what I want! If you type in "Marrickville plumber", the ads actually show better results for local plumbers than the search engine results. Everyone wins! If someone clicks on your ad, they're actually very likely to be wanting what you're selling. But it seems the publishers don't understand that to be successful, they need to find a way to make their advertisers successful.
Finally, we're seeing some rather nasty behaviour. The ad network we're using is reporting about 30% more clickthroughs (as recorded by the publishers) than we're seeing actually arrive at the landing page. They claim this is a fairly normal rate. What's going on here? Click fraud?
The Same origin policy ensures that your browser won't load files from sources other than the original source of the loading file. It's vital to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks, but a bit annoying when you're working to draft AJAX responses.
One way around this is to run a web server on your local machine. There's lots of circumstances where this isn't ideal though, such as on an underpowered Windows piece of crap like I use at work.
Fortunately, Firefox has an option that helps get around this. I didn't find it when searching for "Disable same origin policy", so hopefully this blog post will help future seekers.
The Firefox option security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy allows local files to bypass the same origin policy. Yay!
I've used eBay for a very long time. Since it was first launched in Australia, I think. They had got the balance between buyers and sellers right. Recent changes of policy have forced me to think about whether or not I'll use it in future. I've decided that I won't.
They now require that you offer Paypal as a payment option, and will soon make it the only payment option. Paypal is not a bank, so your money is not guaranteed against failure of the institution. Paypal's dispute resolution procedures are opaque and poorly-implemented. Getting Paypal to connect with your bank account is a tedious, multi-day process that often fails. I refuse to use Paypal.
The recent changes to the feedback system also, I believe, skew things in favour of sellers too far.
Online auctions are really useful ways to buy and sell stuff, and you can often pick up real bargains. Conversely, when selling some people will end up paying RRP or more for used goods, which makes it great if you're selling. Now to find an alternative venue.
Any suggestions? I've found OZtion a bit crap.
It seems according to Hetty Johnson's version of "community standards" that any photograph of a person under the age of 18 in anything more revealing than a full burka is pornography. Anne Geddes, watch out!
The people who are sick are those who can't see a naked body in anything other than a sexual context. That's just weird and twisted. It's the Hetty Johnsons of this world who need help.
Disappointingly, our prime minister weighed in with his opinion without having seen the images themselves. He doesn't know a lot about art, but clearly he knows what isn't art.
A very helpful man from the Critical Mass list took a bunch of photos of a map I've been hunting for. The map is Map of the County of Cumberland showing Interim Plan No.2, 1947 from the NSW State Records. I want this map because it demonstrate's how the RTA (then DMR) has been hell-bent on implementing this ancient plan, which was conceived as Sydney's answer to LA's freeway network, before LA realised you can't build your way out of traffic congestion, which is something the RTA hasn't realised yet either.
So he's taken a big swag of photos with a digital camera of this very large canvas-backed map. Of course all the photos are at different angles, with different light and with differing perspectives. I need to stitch these together.
Hunting around online, most of the tools seem to be designed to stitch together linear panoramas, taken from the same vantage point and with very similar perspectives. Not useful for this job.
So, lazyweb, any ideas on the best approach?
PS: The photos are already in the public domain, and my stitched-together version will also be.
So I want to buy a heater and search for its model number to find who sells it. Last week Bing Lee were showing it for $850 before it mysteriously changed to $1,095 early this week. I just called the store to find out the real price and it's $845. WTF?
Why would they put a price that seems designed to turn you off buying it on the site? If I hadn't seen the cheaper price a week ago, I would have looked elsewhere to buy it.
A friend of mine bought a Rinnai heater and part of the reason she bought that one was the fixed price, Apple style, with no discounting. At least then you know what you should pay.