I will be abroad on holiday for the next week and a half and will probably not be updating the blog. Hooray!
Update: I’m back!

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I enjoyed seeing this WayBack Machine version of Google in 1998. I found it funny how the grey ‘beta’ lasts to this day, though in a slightly different font.

In particular I love the 1999 logo page: ‘feel free to download one of the following “stickers” of our main logo’, ‘Here is our main logo full size, created using GIMP. If you want to hack on it, here is the XCF file.’,'… and some of our faithful users have even been inspired to produce their own versions of the Google logo, including this animated GIF by Travis David Freeland:

‘
[Via Omar Chowdbury]

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eSolutionsData conducted a survey which shows that Splasho is the most popular blog in the world. We are glad that a well known polling organisation such as eSolutionsData has recognised the amazing achievements of this blog.

Of course none of thats true. I really love Philipp Lenssen’s new project, innocuously situated at eSolutionsData.com. It allows the user to enter their own statistics to be displayed in a professional-looking webpage. In fact a closer look reveals the stupidity but as well as being banner-blind most of us are well trained to look straight for the content and generally to trust a professional looking site to be professional (unless it looks very templatey).

It shows the importance of reading the small print and doing research to find how reliable the website your looking at is. It will also be incredibly useful to prove your point (in a very immoral way) with statistics literally at your fingertips.

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I love this video.

This 1972 documentary entitled “Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing” covers the early years of ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet, through interviews with the heroes of the internetworking revolution. Tightly wound internetworking geeks like the legendary JCR Licklider intensely recite the benefits that internetworking will shortly deliver, sliding in digs at the telecoms industry, the Bellheads who have no desire to see this future realized. This is a fantastic 30 minutes of paleo-nerd memorabilia.

[Via BoingBoing]

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If you have a blog, I would strongly recommend Performancing’s Metrics, which provides a service geared towards blogs much more than Google Analytics.

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It confuses you for a while, then you get it..

Link to post on ajaydsouza: click on the picture to view full.

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According to this Microsoft have released an update which will force you to click on any embedded content to be able to interact with it, in Internet. This includes flash and videos. You’ll be able to watch the video but to pause it you will first have to click it to be able to pause or adjust the volume. In addition, as the article points out, it will be twice as hard to close the flash ads which appear over content. Its all because of the Eolas patent case.

This will be hell for web developers although there is a workaround which is to add the tags with Javascript, this is not covered by the patent and encouraged by Microsoft. I guess the best thing is :

<script>
document.write(' </script>
<noscript>
<embed....>
</noscript>


[Via Kottke]

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My blog and other sites are all hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech, a web host I strongly recommend.

I would strongly recommend them, prices=
$1 per gigabyte – bandwidth
$0.01 per megabyte per month – storage

And that is literally how it works, you have a balance you can top up with a credit card or Paypal and it slowly goes down, you can start a site with 25 cents. What is great about this is that they only make money when you’re site does well which gives them an incentive to produce the great service and support that they do. You also pay nothing for bandwidth when your site gets no hits for a few days. I was using it when I was dugg recently and there was no noticeable difference in how my site was served.

By the way they have no affiliate program so I’m not getting paid to tell you this! Disadvantages: no SSL, PHP in safe mode (see phpInfo) and other restrictions described in FAQ.

I strongly urge anyone to try it, you won’t lose more than a dollar.

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James Lilek’s COMPU-PROMO has 9 great pictures of old computers with funny captions.

[Via BoingBoing]

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Oh my! Read the full article about this terrifying event!

[Via Kottke]

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There are a lot of Firefox extensions out there with comedy value, here are some of my favourites.

FireSomething

You may notice some slight differences in the title bars above to that your Firefox. This is the work of the wonderful FireSomething. FireSomething has a number of (configurable) prefixes and suffixes which it randomly arranges in hilarious ways.

It also allows you to rebrand the about dialog and to send your new name in your User-agent header (you’ll attract the attention of WebMasters perusing their stats!)

Unfortunately FireSomething has not been released for Firefox 1.5, I have manually edited the XPI to support 1.5 and it works great for me but I have not stringently tested it. If you want to use my version click here to install FireSomething. If you have a version of Firefox prior to 1.5, then see the entry at Mozilla Update.

Bork Bork Bork!

The Swedish Chef is a well known Internet phenomenon but this extension takes it just a bit further.

Bork Bork Bork adds a checkable option in the View menu to convert your web browsing experiment into the Swedish Chef’s bizarree dialect. It perfectly preserves the layouts of pages and applies to everything, inlcuding error messages!

It also has a window called the Chef’s Kitchen which allows you to choose what URL’s you want automatically ‘borked’ and others to whitelist.

Adbar

Opera is the only browser that rivals Firefox in terms of features and for a long time it’s free version was sponsored by a compulsory AdBar at the top of the page. AdBar allows you to give Firefox the same functionality, but nobody gets the money from your clicks. When it can’t get Google Ads it encourages donations to the Mozilla Foundation and offers advice.

View and Install AdBar at Mozilla Update

Anti-Paranoia

All over the Internet we are drowned in messages telling us how insecure our transactions may be. Its enough to make you fear for your life. Thats until you get Anti Paranoia!

It pops up re-assuring “Don’t Panic” messages both randomly and on-demand in particularly tense situations.

Confuscator!

You may have received a chain email something like this in the past. It cites research stating that words are very readable even if the letters between first and last are re-arranged. Although some of the email is not true the phenomenon it mentions is. This extension allows you to select any text and adds a right click option to pop up a scrambled version of it using a number of options. You can also enter your own text to scramble.

View and install at Mozilla Update

A few more..

about:KitchenSink – There are extensions in FireFox to do virtually anything and for a long time it has had everything except a Kitchen Sink, now it has that too. (Just an ASCII animation of a kitchen sink, extension also has other features) – See also the Book Of Mozilla

Abe Vigoda Statusbar – monitor whether Abe Vigoda is still alive in your statusbar, totally bizarre!!

LeetKey – allows you to appear seriously cool by translating your text into h4×0r

DelciousDelicacies – it was a sad day when Firefox’s description of cookies in the privacy changed from “Cookies are delicious delicacies”. This nostalgic extension restores the text to its former glory.

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Ionut Alex. Chitu in the Google Blogoscoped Forum linked to this red button which you really should not press.

Its extremely reminiscent of this page (DON’T GO TO IT!).

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