Life is grand

England got quite the thrashing from South Africa this evening in Paris. 36 points to nothing. Fourie du Preez was quite sublime, directing the game at every turn with great support from the rest of the Bok team.

I only really posted though to say I respect that man Robinson. He had guts and skill tonight, winning hard fought high-ball, penetrating Bok defense and putting every ounce of himself into his game until he quite literally broke down. Limping blood splattered from the field he deserved a standing ovation. If England had a few more players like him this evening the story would have been different (not a win for England but certainly some pride.)

So the iPhone $100 rebate system is out and no surprise here; hacked iPhones with no AT&T number can’t take part.

As this Salon author states; please, all iPhone users, get over it. Some of you are getting back $100 you don’t deserve. You knew what you were paying when you bought the thing, you could afford it. Those of us with hacked iPhones, you aren’t getting $100 you don’t deserve either. Just get over it, please.

I was joking around with my good friend Jon about ringtones and the iPhone. We both have ours with the default ring and were wondering what songs would be good as ringtones (my conclusion? none.)

It then struck me. How about the Steve Jobs Ringtone? It would be an absolute gas moment for Steve Jobs to record himself saying “ring ring, ring ring” and then providing it as a free iPhone ringtone.

We’d all be walking around with iPhones that had Steve’s voice saying “ring ring, ring ring.”

How about it Steve, think you could make our day?

20/20 cricket commentary is as condensed and speeded up as the game itself. It is hilarious for it:

Flintoff is dropped at cover again, this time by Dabengwa, and then it looks like he’s been bowled - but the ball rebounds off Ziggy’s knee and rebounds on to the stumps. Flintoff then hoists Chibhabha over long-on and is well caught… by a spectator in the crowd as it goes for six. Then he really is bowled for 13 off the last ball of the over.

UPDATE: Oh, it gets better:

Brent gets the last over, but it’s a bad day at The Office as Schofield slashes one to third man where the Zimbabwe fielder only succeeds in pushing the ball over the boundary for four, while his trousers simultaneously fall down. But Broad is then despatched by the third umpire as he’s run out at the non-striker’s end. He looks about as pleased to be given out as his dad used to - but he has to go, and we get Jimmy Anderson coming to the crease with two balls of the innings left.

2/3 of the content has only one subscriber.

That is a really interesting statistic from Google Reader. It says that 2/3 of any user’s feed subscription list is composed of subscriptions to personal feeds. Name searches, personal domain searches and feeds from other services that they use e.g. their Flickr feed.

Looking at my subscription list I see a much lower ratio than that. I have a “personal” folder with about 10 feeds that I bring into my reader. I only do this to archive the items, not to re-read what I have done on other sites. And I have long given up on name and domain searches, the Technorati and Google Blog Search tools are very poor when your name is Paul Watson and some sea captain generates hundreds of articles a day. Many of them in Japanese. Highly annoying.

What about you? Are 2/3s of your subscriptions to unique feeds? It seems hard to believe.

As a happy iPhone user I don’t think Blackberry users are stuffed-shirts or that utilitarian Nokia supporters, I was one until recently, are deluded. Motorola users aren’t fashion obsessed kids and Sony Ericsson users aren’t music addled wankers.

Slate author Paul Boutin, a Blackberry users, though thinks that iPhone users are dorks and unproductive time wasters.

He makes plenty of good points, for and against the iPhone, for and against the Blackberry. But Paul seems to think we are all Paul Boutin clones who need to SMS while driving or from underneath boardroom tables. He reckons that because the iPhone isn’t productive for him it isn’t productive for me.

I hope Paul realises that hammers come in different sizes and shapes. Find the right hammer for you and let others find the right hammer for them.

Overheard a new name for Facebook today:

…Had to share this with you…last night I was showing my mom Facebook because a friend of hers invited her to it. But her friend said to her “hey, you should really check out FACEBRICK, it’s great”…

That made me laugh. Facebrick it is then.

Brian White reports that the software-only hack for the iPhone is now freely available. He reported success with it. I have yet to do and it will hold off for awhile as my iPhone works fine with the TurboSIM hack.

My main concern is that seemingly the hack relies on a buffer-overflow bug in the iPhone software. Apple may issue a fix which renders the hack useless. Jason Madigan though reckons it isn’t much of an issue.

$399 for an advanced 8gb mobile phone that works on your network of choice. Nice one Apple.

Ryan of 37signals has spoken on Lightboxes and he doesn’t like them. Neither do I. They make it difficult to link to screenshots, they jump out of the context of the page, they often require vertical scrolling and the worst offenders make it hard to click out of.

The only chaps who do lightboxes well are VIRB. They call it “lights out” and it is a fantastic effect for video and would work well with a smooth transition for a larger photo.

This article on good URL design has some good “don’ts” and many “do’s” but seems to leave the answer as “use a date.” e.g. http://domain.org/2007/09/11/abba

I get that. I really do. It makes sense if your only goal is ensuring a URL to a resource still works 2 years, 10 years or 100 years from now. Anything else can change but the date of creation can’t (and if it does then you are probably into Creative Accounting too.)

Of course if time travel finally happens then we are a bit screwed but hey, there will be more important problems (don’t sleep with your grandma OK) than URL structure.

A date still bugs me though. Great for dependability, poor for discoverability. Sure, it helps you find all resources created on a given day or month or year but how do you find all resources created by Bob in Management?

I often look at the URL structure in sites and am able to figure out other related articles by the subject in the URL. But subjects in URLs are bad for long-term URLs. I experienced that first hand.

So how does one design URLs that are dependable but also discoverable? I have a half-baked realisation in my head that there is a difference between a URL to a resource and a URL to a “listing” page e.g. http://flickr.com/photos/tags/http. Sadly I see that the first result in that page is http://flickr.com/photos/daneelariantho/1345898949/ which has the username in it. I’d think http://flickr.com/photos/1345898949/ would be better as usernames can/should change.

It is still rather hard designing good URLs. Hopefully my name never changes and I can retain this domain. But already I see a problem in that I have put “journal” into my URL. What happens when I grow sick of journal and change it to blog? Shouldn’t be part of the URL I guess.