Life is grand

Over the radio this morning Ray Darcy said that an Taoiseach Bertie Ahern had announced the Irish general elections were to be held on the 24th of May. That is just a few weeks away, on a Thursday. 3 weeks is not enough time to cancel holidays or arrange to be in your registered area if you had business plans in another area.

It is also smack bang in the middle of college student exams. Nice one, stress the kids out even more. Workers don’t get official time off to vote either.

Seems all a bit rushed and half-arsed to me.

One nice aspect of Twitter is that when you quit or you don’t use it for a few days it doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to make an announcement on Twitter or answer a bunch of emails wondering what happened. It isn’t like blogging in that. None of this “I quit!” and then five days later you start again. You use Twitter when you want to at whatever pace you want. Take a break, go on a blitz, have a siesta. No worries.

I was looking forward to subscribing to the Authors@Google videos which are hosted on YouTube. Sadly I cannot find an RSS or Atom feed on the YouTube channel page. This seems to be a trend at YouTube; a lack of feeds and when they are available they are hidden away.

Does anyone know where the RSS feed is?

Not to be a Steve Job’s fan boy but he understands my needs when he says I want to “own” my music and not rent it.

It is not the legal side of renting music that bothers me so but rather the technical side. You need to connect with a server every now and then to keep listening to your library of music. If you don’t the music stops playing. Not only do businesses come and go but the standards and systems they support change. They don’t always provide an easy path from one system to another either (Microsoft recently dumped their Plays For Sure system with the Zune system. Your Plays For Sure music won’t play on a Zune.)

I doubt very much that a library of music I rent now will continue to work as is in 10 years time. There will be breaking changes between now and then.

The same is true with DRM stamped media.

At least as a technically savvy user I know I can keep my non-DRM, non-rented music library playing for as long as I want. As changes happen I’ll either find tools or make tools that bridge the change.

It will be a lot harder to bridge the change with a rented or DRM stamped library.

Image concatenation has been around for awhile now but it is nice to have a fully explained article aimed at how to use the technique in web interfaces.

My question though is; favicons. Those annoying 16×16 icons browsers show in the address bar and next to bookmarks.

They are wonderful to see but as a developer of a web interface that wants to use them I can tell you they are highly annoying to support.

Does anyone have a good idea on how to use image concatenation for favicons? Is it workable?

Decent survey from ALA. Add your 2cents and lets see what state the industry is in.

Go on South Africa! Go on!

I remember seeing photos of the Audi Q7 before it hit the roads and thinking it looked pretty good. It looked big but not monstrous. Sadly within 2 seconds of having seen one in the flesh I changed my mind and realised it was monstrous. The Audi Q7 is an ugly automobile.

Along comes the above design, a “concept” called the Audi Cross Coupe quattro, and I am thinking it looks terrible. Audi design in general has gone off the rails in the past few years. The A4 went backwards and the A6 just looks dull. The only car worth looking at in the Audi range is the A5.

More photos of the Cross Coupe quattro concept.

Sticky Windows is a nifty little app. that allows you to create little tabs on the edges of your screen that are attached to windows. Click a tab and the window is brought to the front, click it again and the window disappears. It is simple and useful, especially for the many terminal windows I often have cluttering my desktop all day long.

I’ve written before on how Mac OS X has the ability to loosen my wallet. Synergy was a $5 app. that I had no problem buying. Now Sticky Windows is also useful and to my eyes is also a utility app. Certainly the coding behind it is more complicated than Synergy but that isn’t how we should price apps. Sadly Sticky Windows is too expensive. At $15.95 (come on guys, make it $16) I just can’t justify the expense.

At $5 I would buy it without thinking.

At $10 I’d think about it but probably buy it.

At $15 I think about it and decide not to buy it.

I never really found StumbleUpon to be useful or even entertaining. I get enough new websites through my feed subscriptions everyday not to need random suggestions of where to spend 5 more minutes online.

Google though have hit on something a bit more interesting. The Google Toolbar now includes a dice icon that uses your Google search history to recommend a new site.

It will take more than a few minutes to see if it really works but basing recommendations on queries you have typed into Google in the past rather than votes by other users seems a better strategy.