The Butt Ugly Weblog

Finally got around to watching the wonderful Life after people document by the History Channel (got the link from Kasa). It's funny how insignificant all our efforts here seem to be, and - even though this was not mentioned in the document - our longest-lasting objects are now traveling in space, where our corrosive touch cannot reach them anymore.

Is it just me, or have Technorati, Twingly, Icerocket and Google Blogsearch become completely useless in trying to figure out who is linking to whom? Icerocket finds one reference (which isn't my own) from 533 days ago; Technorati is finding nothing; Twingly just lists my own blog as someone who links to my own blog a lot; and Google Blogsearch is just generically braindead.

On the other hand, following actual referrers says that at least Nokia Conversations is linking to me again, and I get random inflow of traffic from here and there.

Have the spammers won the battle? Is link/trackback spam finally so bad that the baby is finally going out with the bathwater? Is this the end of the great interblogistic discussions (though I am not sure if they ever started)?

Or did the discussion just move to Facebook and Jaiku and Twitter and nobody told me?

Sometimes there is a really large gap between designers and engineers, as pictured in this wonderful scetch from Smack the Pony. While feasibility is the key, it does not necessarily produce good results. You also need to have a bit of sanity in the mix.

Not that I really know whether it's usually the engineers or the designers which are the culprits. I often feel like there's a a huge gap even between engineers.

Here's a thought which I didn't really have much time to work on... But let's put it here to see if it catches on (and you can substitute the word "process" for "technology" in the following sentences):

When users have something they wish to accomplish, and you develop technology for it - that is evolution.

When you develop technology, and suddenly you have users who want to do something with it, something they couldn't do before - that is revolution.

Revolutionary steps aren't always bigger than evolutionary steps, even though we often think that way. But they in general enable new, interesting venues by jerking loose something which goes above and beyond of what we normally perceive.

I guess this is one of the reasons why it is important to listen to your users, but not do blindly as they suggest. You can only do incremental evolution, but you can never appear at a revolution, if you do. If guys at Xerox PARC had listened to the users, who wanted to have bigger monitors in order to have larger spreadsheets, we wouldn't have windows and icons and pointers these days, which would've kept computing out of regular Joe's hands.

(Of course, there's heck of a lot of technology which is developed and never gets any users, so they hardly count as a revolution.)

OK, there is one reason why Bookmooch sucks. And it's the fact that it seems that most people in it are "willing to send books to their home country only". There is little point to join the service if you're from a small country - no matter how many nice books are out there, you can't get them.

I'm pretty frustrated. It's not that expensive to send economy abroad, you cheap bastards!

Vihreä Lanka (in Finnish) writes about the new bottled water called "Plup". They're donating 10 cents for every bottle bought to save the Baltic Sea (which is in a pretty bad shape), so they're advertising it as a "ecological thing to do".

Unfortunately, simple maths shows that they will have to sell about half a million bottles before they're even with the advertising money used so far. Not to mention that the damage to the environment per bottle is more than the the ten cents. Even the bottle is not recyclable. Is there a dissing group I could join? In fact, could somebody please sue these persons for false advertising?

If you care at all about the environment, the simplest thing you can possibly do is not to buy bottled water - and most especially, Plup. Just fill the bottles with tap water (and a dash of lemon, if that's your thing. It is mine.).

(This advice may not be valid in some countries - unless you want to have a close encounter of the porcelaine kind. I really hope this whole Plup thing is a joke.)

Having been driving around for the past two weeks (rented a car to visit people) and relying on GPS navigation software (Nokia Maps and Navicore, mostly - they suck in different ways, but Nokia Maps is pretty okay for the money, though I still rely on Navicore more)... India and Africa and a lot of other nations have an immense number of streets which are unnamed. This, of course, presents challenges to navigation.

What would happen if Google or Navteq or Tele Atlas or Nokia some other big navi/map provider were to just de facto name the streets? Could they make it stick? Would the locals adopt those names? Could the big corporations, assisted by automatical software and imaging/GPS satellites, keep track of the changing of important public infrastructure better than the local officials?

'cos if these companies are hell-bent on selling everyone navi software and maps - and we all know how picky computers are with names and labels - something's gotta give somewhere.

(Oh yeah, Ropecon. Trying to get there, but still sitting lazily at the computer...)

This is one of the reasons why I don't want to move all my personal communication to Google (or any other single company for that matter). Remember this the next time you want to outsource your emails and documents.

When it comes down to your personal convenience and corporate policy, the policy wins; and once you start storing your documents in the network, the network will own them in a very concrete sense.

(Via BB.)

The trouble with Sampo Bank gets a Daily WTF summary. It certainly qualifies - loss of estimated 20k customers (in a country of five million) due to one of the worst IT upgrade jobs ever is the stuff of legends. It's a story that IT professionals today will tell to their children over campfires, as a warning that some jobs come with too low a paycheck.

http://www.pagetable.com/. All the nostalgic übergeekery you could possibly want.