Gadgetopia

New in mortuary science: Dissolving bodies with lye: Don’t read this before lunch.

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

[…] The coffee-colored liquid has the consistency of motor oil and a strong ammonia smell. But proponents say it is sterile and can, in most cases, be safely poured down the drain, provided the operation has the necessary permits.

I think it would be weird to not exist like that. With burial, you have a body. With cremation you have ashes. With this, you have…nothing. You get turned into liquid then spread throughout the sewer system.

It was like you never existed. There is no physical record of you left.

Got a band but can’t afford to shoot a video? Use public CCTV cameras and then demand the footage!: This is a great idea. I wonder how long it took them to get all this footage?

Unable to hire a production crew for a standard 1980’s era MTV music video, they performed their music in front of 80 of the 13 million CCTV “security” cameras available in England, including one on a bus.

They then used Britain’s Data Protection Act to request the footage that was shot of them.

If it’s anything like the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S., they could have been waiting for years.

i have some doughts in .net Please clarify me.: Some guy made a weak attempt to get posters on Spolsky’s discussion group to answer a homework question for him. Hilarity ensued.

Strong typing is hitting the keyboard with your fists. Weak typing is hitting it with so little force that the key doesn’t depress enough to activate the keyswitch

[…] Cyclomatic complexity refers to the vast number of washing machine cycle choices available on today’s machines.

Mamma Mia! Papa John’s raking in the dough online: An entire article on CNN about the apparent explosion of ordering pizza on the Net.

Dominos Pizza Inc., put its own twist on online ordering early this year by introducing a “Pizza Tracker,” which lets customers keep tabs on the progress of their orders. Consumers can find out when their pies are in the oven, when they’re on the way, and even the first name of their delivery person.

Roger Ebert’s Journal: Fanzines beget blogs: Roger Ebert has a blog now, which is crazy cool in and of itself. This week he talks about how the old world of fanzines preceded the current crop of blogs and perhaps even the Web itself.

I have always been convinced that the culture of sf fanzines contributed heavily to the formative culture of the early Web, and generated models for web site and blogs. The very tone of the discourse is similar, and like fanzines, the Web took new word coinages, turned them into acronyms, and ran with them. Think about it. Science fiction fans in the decades before the internet were already interested in computers, big-time — first with the supercomputers of science fiction myth, and then with the earliest home-built models. Fans tended to be youngish, male, geeky, obsessed with popular culture, and compelled to circulate their ideas. In the reviews and criticism they ran, they slanted heavily toward expertise in narrow pop fields.

Ebert rules.

(Roger Ebert emailed me, not once, but twice. Have I mentioned that recently? Seriously. Twice. Two friggin’ emails.)

Microsoft says proxy battle not worth it: And that’s the end of that.

In a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer confirmed that Microsoft was willing to offer $33 a share, but that Yahoo was holding out for at least $37 a share, or $5 billion more than Microsoft was prepared to spend. In the letter, Ballmer also says he is ruling out a direct offer to shareholders.

I built an intranet for a client. One of the functional items is a viewer into an Exchange calendar. We use a handy third-party component to display the contents of an Exchange public folder on a page.

The month and year to be viewed is driven off the querystring. Something like:

/month.aspx?m=11&y=2010

So you can look at any month by writing your own querystring. We check for valid input and everything, but so long as you enter a valid month and year in the querystring, you can (could) look up any logical month in existence, as far ahead or behind as you want.

Each month has helpful “Next” and “Previous” links on it that form the URL for the next or previous month.

Sadly, we’re also indexing the intranet via a Google Mini.

Astute readers will see the problem here…

Two things happened:

1. The number of pages in the Mini spiked. The client was suddenly hitting their document limit. They only had about 10,000 actual pages of content, but the Mini was claiming it had indexed four or five times that number.

2. We started to get reports about odd months being returned in search results. Months like “November 2609” for example…

The Mini’s crawler, bless its heart, was dutifully following the “Next” and “Previous” links in the calendar into infinity in either direction. It was, in effect, inventing its own URLs…forever. Every new page in the calendar gave it a new URL it hadn’t seen before. The Mini’s crawler had fallen down the rabbit hole.

Easy problem to fix, but an embarrassing oversight nonetheless. We now drop the “Next” and “Previous” links at 24 months out in either direction, and we throw a 410 for anything outside those bounds in the past, and a 404 for anything outside those bounds in the future.

I just checked today, and the number of pages in the Mini came down 2,000 yesterday, as it rechecks out-of-bounds URLs and gets back 410s and 404s.

I wonder how many sites on the public Internet have this same problem? I wonder if crawlers have any logic to detect this?

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?: This post is five years old, but it’s important and touches on a point I’ve always kind of wondered about — what makes a blog? When do you have a blog as opposed to a regular Web site?

At Berkman we’re studying weblogs, how they’re used, and what they are. Rather than saying “I know it when I see it” I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven.

There’s a lot of technical information about templates and calendars and such, but in my mind, the differences is in perspective and tone, and Winer hits it on the head right here:

The personalities of the writers come through. That is the essential element of weblog writing, and almost all the other elements can be missing, and the rules can be violated, imho, as long as the voice of a person comes through, it’s a weblog.

When people read a weblog, they’re getting the voice of an actual person, not some nameless, faceless organization. That’s really the trick.

Last year, on this date, we posted that Dell was going to start selling Ubuntu-powered machines. We said:

Is this the moment desktop Linux proponents have been waiting for all these years?

This story came up in the “On This Day” section in the sidebar this morning, and I got to wondering about it. I had never heard anything else about it, and I thought, “Was that just another stunt press release about the mythical ‘Linux on the Desktop’?”

So, I went looking at Dell’s site, and I’m happy to report, that, sure enough, here are the Dell Ubuntu computers. They have four models — three laptops and one desktop. I went through the configuration process for the high-end XPS laptop, and you can apparently pimp out a Dell Ubuntu machine quite handily.

Nice going, Dell.

Architecture astronauts take over: This whole thing is great. Spolsky gets downright medieval further down.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It’s a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.

[…] It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

Whatever happened to Groove, anyway? I used to use it.

HTTP Error 410: Gone: I found this page today when searching for a refresher on the 410 status code. It means “gone.” Forever. Not just “not found” right now, but forever more. Gone, baby.

We should use status code 410 more.

As far as I can tell, it’s the forgotten stepchild of error 404 (Resource not found). Error 410 means Resource gone, as in, a resource used to exist at this location, but now it’s gone. Not only is it gone, but I don’t know (or I don’t want to tell you) where it went. If I knew where it went, and I wanted to tell you, I would use error 301 (Permanent redirect) and any smart client would simply redirect to the new address. But 410 means Resource gone, no forwarding address. Train gone sorry.

Sam Ruby brings up a good point about when it would be a great time to use 410.

[…] you would think that any decent aggregator would respect a 410, wouldn’t you?

I’ve long since removed my scraped feed, and marked it gone.

Despite this, a number of aggregators continue to relentlessly poll for changes.

I had this same problem when I removed the RSS feeds for comments on individual posts:

[…] this brings up the question of how to notify people that I’m doing this. How do you notify RSS users? The solution is pretty simple I guess — I’m going to tack an entry to the top of this XML file that just explains that we’re not maintaining these feeds anymore, rebuild them all one last time, and then leave the files out there long enough for everyone to ping them again.

But when do you pull the files? When I delete these 4,600 XML files, do I redirect requests for them to another feed with a single entry that explains that they’re gone? Are there best practices for this?

Found today during the configuration process when buying a Dell computer.

Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability: Jakob Nielsen, demigod that he is, has just published an interesting alert box about right-aligned menus (something we’re guilty of). He claims they reduce readability.

Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the speed with which users can scan the menu and select their preferred options.

The other two problems are (1) designers using all CAPS, and (2) lack of contrast between the background and letters.

What makes this interesting is that the University of Michigan read his Alertbox and realized they were guilty of all three problems, so they fixed their menu the same day, which caused Nielsen to update this column.

An examination of both screencaps is below the fold, and it’s interesting to look at — I tend to agree that the changed menu is remarkably more readable. And this is not only when actually reading it, but it just beckons to be read more. The “before” menu is something I probably would just gloss over without reading it, where I’d be much more likely to read the “after” menu.

Microsoft says XP is definitely dead in June, Dell says it’ll keep installing it: Dell has found a loophole in Vista licensing which it plans to exploit in order to keep selling XP machines.

Dell’s going to report a Vista sale to Microsoft, but deliver an XP box with Vista upgrade DVD to customers. (That sound you just heard was a million accountants sighing in appreciation.) The program will be available for Latitude, OptiPlex, Precision, Vostro, and XPS systems (some with a minor fee), and Dell says it’ll keep going as long as Microsoft supports the “downgrade” license option, which could be forever. Looks like June 30 just got a lot less scary for XP fans, no?

Adobe discontinues GoLive: We here at Blend are devastated by this news. Oh, wait, no we’re not.

Adobe on Monday announced that its venerable visual Web site creation tool GoLive has been discontinued. The company has ceased development and sales of GoLive effective Monday, April 28, 2008.