Guy Kawasaki has published a list of 10 cardinal crimes that you can commit to stop your web business taking off.
I agree particularly strongly with his number 9, (not allowing you to use your e-mail address as your account name for logging on).
The Guardian lists some things you can use your microwave for, other than cooking food. Such as sterilizing the dishcloth or dyeing material.
Julian Beever is a pretty amazing 3D pavement artist. Just take a look at some of his pictures here.
Carrying on with our idea of watching DVDs that have a Spanish and an English sound track to improve our Spanish, we watched Bandidas (Penélope Cruz / Salma Hayek in the star roles) last night – in English to get an idea of the story, before we watch it in Spanish again in a few days time.
The summary on the DVD cover calls it a “...hilarious action-packed adventure”, which is a little over the top. It is a funny – even silly – story, pretty much detached from reality. A bit like Thelma & Louise, but set in Mexico at the time of the Wild West, and shot on location. The two girls – Maria and Sara, in this case – come from very different backgrounds, Maria the poor farmer’s daughter who owns a remarkable horse that can play tic-tac-toe and understand spoken instructions, Sara rich and educated in upper-class European society, band together to revenge the killing of their respective fathers by the same man, the evil Tyler Jackson who owns many of the local banks. One of the scenes I particularly enjoyed was the sight of Maria riding her horse up a series of ladders to take up position on the roof of one of Jackson’s banks before they break in.
Not as good as Cruz’s previous film Volver, but it moves along fast enough that it is enjoyable and its saving grace is the cast – Cruz, Hayek and Steve Zahn and Dweight Yoakam, rather than the directing or the dialog. All in all: good fun, plenty of laughs, and we shouldn’t find the dialog too demanding in Spanish when we watch it again.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has very nearly 11% of the global market share – almost identical to Firefox’s global market share, according to OneStat.com. The global market share of all versions of MS IE is nearly 86%. There’s quite a few local variations – in the UK, the market share for MS IE 7 is already 28%, whereas in Australia and Germany the market share of Firefox is over 25%.
OneStat’s statistics are based on 2 million web visitors sampled in 100 countries measured during the last week.
Given that MS IE 6 and earlier versions are horribly bugggy, do not conform to standards and are a nightmare to program for, the rapid take-on of MS IE 7 is good news for web developers, even if it is still not completely conforming to the current web standards.
There are some original portraits on portrait-photos.org.
From yesterday’s New Scientist:
People who are fully bilingual and speak both languages every day for most of their lives can delay the onset of dementia by up to four years compared with those who only know one language, Canadian scientists said on Friday.
Researchers said the extra effort involved in using more than one language appeared to boost blood supply to the brain and ensure nerve connections remained healthy – two factors thought to help fight off dementia…
So you follow the usual advice and have a password which includes capital and small letters, some digits and special characters such as “$” or “%”? You substitute “3” for “e” and “1” for “i” in a word and add a numerical suffix, such as a ZIP-code to it?
Not good enough, says Bruce Schneier in Wired. It might work where you only get three guesses at an ATM, but it isn’t going to save your bacon if someone is trying to get access to a password protected file or account, where they can try thousands or hundreds of thousands of passwords each second.
Read the rest of this entry »No, that’s not my opinion – I love good marmalade – but sales of marmalade in the UK dropped by 4.4% last year; 441 000 households stopped buying it altogether in 2006, and more households buy honey or jam than buy marmalade, reports the Guardian:
Marmalade’s slide has been attributed to its not being sweet enough for young consumers. Fans of marmalade tend to be older, with 81% of all marmalade sold eaten by the over-45s.Those young consumers are presumably the same ones who are overweight.
Starting in mid-2007, the USA is going to scan in all ten fingerprints of people visiting the USA (at the moment they scan in 2 fingerprints). This allows the prints to be stored in a format compatible with that used by the FBI’s database. The fingerprints will made available to the FBI and international intelligence agencies with no restrictions on their use. Countries subject to the new scheme include America’s staunchest allies as well as other less cooperative states: Britain, other European Union nations, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, for example.
Additionally, according to today’s Observer:
...[travellers] already have their credit card details and email accounts inspected by the American authorities following a deal between the EU and the Department of Homeland Security. Now passengers face having all their credit card transactions traced when using one to book a flight. And travellers giving an email address to an airline will be open to having all messages they send and receive from that address scrutinised.
The demands were disclosed in ‘undertakings’ given by the Department of Homeland Security to the EU and published by the Department for Transport after a request under the freedom of information legislation…