via There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges + Jury Rigs.

Ok, maybe it’s not the best use of Duct Tape ever, but it’s a pretty good one. I’d say there’s a lot of impressive uses of Duct Tape out there.

On Tuesday evening Google decided to announce that it was working on a new operating system called Chrome OS. Since then it’s pretty much the only thing my feeds have been talking about (despite the fact that no one really knows anything about it – it’s all just hearsay).

I’m incredibly bored by all this talk, and by the announcement in general. It doesn’t really feel like that big a deal to me, and I’m not sure why. When Google announced Wave, that was something that really stuck in my head. In my every day work and use of the web I’m constantly seeing situations crop up where a light goes off in my head imagining just how much easier that situation would be when Wave becomes a reality.

I definitely think Wave has the potential to have a much deeper and long lasting impact. Linux based OS’s are a dime a dozen, in fact, they’re not even that, they’re 0 cent a dozen, but Wave is a new protocol which, if widely adopted, could really change the way we approach online communication.

Anyway, just some thoughts that were going round my head. As a random need for an antidote, I figure I should share something else entirely. If you have, or have had, a cat in your life, sit back and enjoy Simon’s Cat:

The good people over at wordpress.org have just announced the launch of WordPress 2.8.1.

It’s pretty much a roll up of bug fixes to the 2.8 branch, showing that even with a decent beta and RC testing phase, you just can’t catch all the possible issues!

Great work on getting it out, and here’s to 2.9.

WordPress 2.8.1 fixes many bugs and tightens security for plugin administration pages. Core Security Technologies notified us that admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked. Not all plugins are vulnerable to this problem, but we advise upgrading to 2.8.1 to be safe.

What else is new since 2.8? Read through the highlights below, or view all changes since 2.8

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

via WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.8.1.

Well done to Aza Raskin and co for getting the latest version of Ubiquity out the door. You need to manually update and note that some of your old commands might break. Also, you’ll need to be on Firefox 3.5 for this to work.

Today Mozilla Labs is happy to announce the release a major upgrade to Ubiquity. This release, Ubiquity 0.5, focuses on making the instructions you give to Ubiquity feel more natural and human, as well as bringing Ubiquity’s power to many more languages.

This release brings:

• The first internationalized Ubiquity, where even non-coders can help bring Ubiquity to their language
• A more natural, human, and robust way to give Ubiquity instructions.
• A new, game-inspired interactive tutorial.
• Experimental smart suggestions: type “pasta” and Ubiquity recommends Yelp. (This feature needs to be enabled on the Ubiquity settings settings page).

via Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Announcing Ubiquity 0.5.

I came across this odd but delightful short video on Vimeo the other day and thought I’d share it out here.

And when I say short, I really mean short – at 8 seconds you don’t have to hang around too long to take it in.

The Off-Button on Vimeo

Having discussed my nerdiness recently, I continue the process of coming to terms with it and publicly showing the things that get this ‘nerd’ side of me going.

Below is a video which I found far too impressive for my own good. Behold the magnificence of 24 x SSD Drives running in RAID0:

So Opera had their big announcement today where they promised to reinvent the web. I was somewhat intrigued as to what it would be, and it’s called “Opera Unite“.

First, completely unresearched impression

This doesn’t feel like a reinventing of the web. It appears to be a good idea, with some potential, but the fact that it’s limited to Opera browser users sort of instantly puts it down a peg in my mind.

Here’s the first sentence from “Getting started with Opera Unite”:

To get started with Opera Unite, you only need to install an Opera build with Opera Unite

That just sounds to me like a desperate attempt to increase browser share. Maybe it’s a system that will be implementable in different browsers, but if you really want to reinvent the web I feel that you need to release something open source which can become an open protocol for all and sundry.

Please note that I haven’t even installed this, researched it, this is just an instant, unconsidered first impression!

Update

There’s an excellent post which encapsulates my thoughts/suspicions about this over at FactoryJoe.com

Perhaps further demonstrating my transition to complete nerd, I found the below video quite amusing. There is no hope for me now.

I’ve been undergoing some minor cash flow issues the last while. We may be owed a rake of money, but I don’t have enough money to buy bread. Nice.

Anyway, that’s not the point (though it should be), the point is that I hate banks. When things are going bad for you financially they love nothing more than to kick you in the knackers.

The bank rang me sometime last year and said, you’ve been having trouble paying some of your direct debits – would you like an overdraft facility as this might make life a little easier? Why sure, at this stage anything will help, I said. Now, I haven’t really used the overdraft facility much until I got staggeringly broke this month, and when you’re staggeringly broke, what better than to charge that person even more.

So I hit the bottom of my overdraft facility and then a loan repayment standing order attempted to leave my account. That’s a big no no. You don’t have enough to cover that, so we’re going to charge you €12.70 for not paying the standing order, and then, we’re going to charge an extra €25 because you attempted to go over the limit of your overdraft.

Nice, thanks bank.