More on exploding powerbooks

Just a quick follow up on the Apple Hindenbook story.

It seems that the Japanese aren't too impressed with exploding powerbooks. Their Trade Ministry is calling for answers from Apple.

As pyrotechnics aren't going down so well in Japan maybe Apple should try some new ideas to appeal to a more japanese audience.

iBukkake anyone?.

Paris vs Pensioner

It seems that internet democracy has spoken again. Paris Hilton launched her own channel this week on YouTube to promote her new music album. But it seems that people would rather here the grumpy musings of an old man that tune in to see what Paris is turning her nose up at lately.

The article over at TheReg has more details but it really is all down to the numbers:

Subscribers : Paris - 2549, Pensioner - 23267
Views : Paris - 285572, Pensioner - 720418

Apple Hindenbook - Flaming Marvellous

Apple has issued a recall on some of their batteries, not many, only 1.8 million....

Apparently there is a small problem with them, nothing major. What is this problem? It seems there is a small chance they might explode. See what I mean, hardly worth mentioning.

It seems that Apple are determined to equal PC laptops in every respect including the exciting new bursting into flames or exploding features that Dell have implemented recently. Gives me a great idea for a "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" video. Of course Microsoft aren't to be left out, looking back to 2005 when they added a new feature to the xbox.

Credit card comparison

Just a quick one, I've been looking at credit cards recently, trying to find some mug who will give me 0% on a sizable balance transfer. What I have found invaluable in this search through the minefield that is personal finance is a couple of websites that let you quickly compare different cards.

The big thing here is offers, balance transfers, interest of purchases all the tricks they want to use to make you choose them. Compare & Save does all the leg work for you, giving a big list of cards and what they are offering at the moment. Hell of a lot easier than trawling through each of the bank's websites to find out what the latest and greatest offer at the moment. They also offer the same thing for personal loans, savings accounts, current accounts and other financial services

Another one to try is creditcards.com which offers a similar service but focuses just on credit cards.

A new kind of tech book, move over O'Reilly

If like me you have heard about the new craze that is Ruby on Rails then you really need to check out Why's Poignant Guide. Go read it now, no don't finish reading this sentence. Or this one. Just go and fracking read it.

For anyone who is still in a disobedient frame of mind, this is a book that is so far from the normal drone of O'Reilly style tech books that they are barely comparable. The style of writing is so full of bizarre imagery and fanciful language it sounds more like a funky new novel than an introduction to a new scripting language.

This writing style is more than a gimmick though, the use of descriptive language and analogies throughout the text really act as an aid to memory. To get a taste of what I mean read the snippet below.

Method arguments are attached to the end of a method. The arguments are usually surrounded by parentheses and separated by commas.

front_door.paint( 3, :red )

The above paints the front door three coats of red.

Think of it as an inner tube the method is pulling along, containing its extra instructions. The parentheses form the wet, round edges of the inner tube. The commas are the feet of each argument, sticking over the edge. The last argument has its feet tucked under so they don’t show.

I find this way of writing positively juicy in its description. I fully intend to install Ruby and work my way through the guide with the intention of shifting these ramblings onto a platform I can claim is marginally more original in it's construction.

Technical authors everywhere, read this, learn from it and realise that technical writing doesn't have to be sterile and dull.

Smoothies good ...... kiwis bad...itching

Making smoothies is awesome... making smoothies with kiwis.... leads to itchy mouth!

Itchy mouth is bad

Nothing to fear from liquid bombs on planes?

A very interesting article over at The Register gives good reason to believe that there was actually nothing to worry about during the big aeroplane bomb scare last weekend.

Basically according to the article the supposed deadly 'binary liquid' bombs (a binary bomb is one where two components need to be mixed to cause an explosion) are essentially a myth. The anti-terrorism experts, who have clearly watched Die Hard too many times, and need to brush up on their chemistry. Mixing the chemicals in flight would have not been a case of nipping to the lavs and dumping a couple of bottles of liquid into the toilet causing a huge explosion. What would actually need to be done is at least a couple of hours of careful preparation to create a mixture potent enough to do any real damage. Hardly likely to avoid the attention of the passengers and crew.

If prepared in advance the explosive would have been a simple white powder but unstable enough that a terrorist would be more likely to blow themselves up in the taxi on the way to the airport than at a precise time on the plane.

Check out the article, enlightening stuff and yet more evidence of the fear culture we are living in where barely qualified 'experts' are directing policy based purely on their own ignorant paranoia.

Guess the terrorists should just switch to snakes, explosives are so last year.

Games: Flipix Hell

While browsing through web design company websites I stumbled across Atomic Design and their little viral marketing game Flipix

This has been driving me insane over the last couple of days so I am going to share out that insanity between the rest of you.

Flipix looks so simple, all you have to do is make all the tiles the same colour. But that is how it drags you in, next thing you know you have been doing it for 20mins and still have those elusive last 2 tiles showing infuriating orange!

Go and check it out, but don't come crying to me when you lose your lunchbreak to this two tone trial.

15 Websites that have changed the world

Just noticed this one on Slashdot. It is discussion about a guardian article about the 15 websites that have defined the web.

1. eBay.com
2. wikipedia.com
3. napster.com
4. youtube.com
5. blogger.com
6. friendsreunited.com
7. drudgereport.com
8. myspace.com
9. amazon.com
10. slashdot.org
11. salon.com
12. craigslist.org
13. google.com
14. yahoo.com
15. easyjet.com

I certainly agree with most of them, not necessarily pioneers in their respective fields but definetly sites that have defined the web as it is today. Although saying that I'm not sure what salon.com is doing on there.

RIAA wants to depose dead defendant's children

They really are stooping to a seemingly impossible new low with this one. Details can be found at Recording Industry vs The People but the jist is that someone died before they had a chance to squeeze money out of them so they are going after the kids. They aren't all bad though, they are allowing the family 60 days to grieve before demanding signed depositions stating their father's guilt.

Nothing like turning family against their own so you can prove the guilt of someone who not only wasn't guilty but has actually died. What are they trying to prove? Or is it just that 15 year old girls are getting a bit too tough for them and they think dead people might be an easier target.

More discussion about this can be found at slashdot

Music: Lily Allen

You may live in a cave, I have to consider this. Also the likelihood that you have could just returned from a long sea voyage. These are two of the very few situations that could have prevented you from having heard of Lily Allen.

Her signature track and first single 'Smile' has been the song of summer 2006. As with everything that rockets to cult status from obscurity there is a hierachy of coolness (coolivity? coolistics?) depending on how early you pick on the latest hit thing. The number of perceived cool points gained varies depending on how early you drank the proverbial kool aid. For instance I hold the prestigious accolade of being able to say that I read Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code' before it hit the bestsellers list 10pts there me thinks. If you picked up the book on your way out of the cinema after seeing the film then it is a minus 50pts for you. Can you feel your coolness melting away?

I reckon I did ok with Lily Allen points wise being at her Stealth (annoying flash website alert) gig in Nottingham gave a score boost, the first time she had done a gig outside of london and well before the single came out.

Great gig, great girl, fucking great music. Go and buy it.

Hardware: Nvidia launch DIY Quad-SLI

As if any of us could affors the two uber cards for an SLI rig Nvidia are trotting out an easy solution for even more power. Only for the super rich though as not only will you need to shell out up to £450 a piece for the cards but also another huge wad of cash for a screen that can do justice to the 2560x1600 resolution you could be running.

Ah well I can always dream....

How to deal with the RIAA

Now of course none of you download copyrighted music from P2P networks, that would be terrible.... wrong.... stealing.... penniless artists.... blah blah blah

Then again, a lot of the people who are sued by the RIAA didn't actually download any music either or even if they did the damages asked for in lawsuits filed by the RIAA have no relationship with any actual loss of revenue.

The RIAA vs John Doe - A laypersons guide to filesharing lawsuits runs through the process that the RIAA use for their lawsuits without resorting to impenetrable legalese.

While it doesn't offer a real solution of what to do if you have been sued it does clear up some of the confusion and give some pointers of where to start.

PHP: Displaying RSS feeds on your website

As promised here is a quick run down of how to exploit the multitude of RSS feeds out there. With a fairly simple chunk of php you can embed any RSS feed into your page giving you instant dynamic news content.

First things first all credit for this method goes to the authors of the 0'Reilly PHP cookbook as that is where I first encountered the method. If you are fairly new to php and looking for an instant how-to guide on how to do the most common php tasks then I would certainly recommend that book.

Anyway cutting to the chase below is the code for pulling in the RSS feed with a quick explanation and a download link at the end for the terminally lazy.

<?php
require 'XML/RSS.php';
$feed = 'http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&q= 
snakes+on+a+plane&ie=UTF-8&output=rss';
$rss =& new XML_RSS($feed);
$rss->parse();
print "<ul>\n";
 foreach ($rss->getItems() as $item) {
  print '<li>' .$item['description'] . "<li>\n";
  }
print "</ul>\n";
?>

Straight forward enough right? No? Well ok then maybe a bit of explanation is in order.

require 'XML/RSS.php';

The first thing you will notice is that we are using require to pull in a file called RSS.php this is the PEAR XML_RSS class which is doing all of the work for us. You will need to make sure you have PEAR installed on your server for any of this to work.

$feed = 'http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&q=
snakes+on+a+plane&ie=UTF-8&output=rss';

Next we set the variable $feed to whatever feed we want to display on the site. I have chosen the topical news about snakes on planes always a good one to stay on top of.

$rss =& new XML_RSS($feed);
$rss->parse();

$rss is a new XML_RSS object with the feed set to whatever we defined $feed as. The feed is then parsed by XML_RSS::parse()

print "<ul>\n";
 foreach ($rss->getItems() as $item) {
  print '<li>' .$item['description'] . "<li>\n";
  }
print "</ul>\n";
?>

The rest of the code just prints out each item in the parsed feed as part of an unordered list. Depending on what information you want you can change the print statement around for instance:

print "<ul>\n";
 foreach ($rss->getItems() as $item) {
  print '<li><a href="' . $item['link'] . '">' . $item['title'] . "</a><li>\n";
  }
print "</ul>\n";
?>

That would display linked titles above each item whereas the initial example was set to display only the description, if you are getting your feed from Google News they include the title and link in the description so it all comes out a bit neater.

Thats about it, told you it was simple. In fact so simple that you are surely either kicking youself that you haven't done it before or wondering why I am telling people about something that your grandma has been doing for years. In which case why are you still reading, dumb ass.

If you can't be bothered to even copy and paste the example you can download the source file or check out the example

Hope this was of some use anyway.

PHP: Integrating RSS feeds into webpages

I have been meaning to get around to writing a quick guide on how to integrate dynamic news feeds into web pages using the magic of RSS. Unfortunatly life intervened, incredibly important tasks had to be completed such as sitting, or sitting while drinking. I am sure you can understand how an undertaking of that magnitude could eclipse all other activities. Rest assured I will get the guide up shortly.

The fickle beast of adsense

Why is it that when I set adsense up for a client it all goes perfectly smoothly immediately resulting in vast amounts of clicks leaving everyone with a happy capitalist glow, but when I dare to cut my self a slice of the click money pie google bombards me with enigmatic errors.

For some reason logging into my account sends me straight to a screen insisting that I verify my email address, this would be reasonable if I hadn't gone through the process twice already. Well lets see how throwing myself on the mercy of their customer service department helps.

New things are sort of maybe happening.

Well this is all new to me in a writing sense. I have read blogs here and there but never endeavoured to produce anything myself. I will strive to avoid posting anything overly whiny and self indulgent, instantly distinguishing myself from most of the blogging world.

If I have anything useful to say I will try and drag my ass on here to say it. It is an odds on bet that it will be mostly by overly oppionated cynical wise cracking about whatever happened to catch my eye before I was distracted by something shinier.

Hopefully you should see some slightly more interesting stuff on here over the next few days. I am going to attempt to pass on some of the knowledge that I sieve from the shit I have to work through all day in the hope that the rest of you will have a slightly easier time with things. See thats me selfless to the end.