Paul Boutin has the winners of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton awards (named in honor of the novelist responsible for the prototypical worst opening line in history: “It was a dark and stormy night.”)
Here’s #10:
“As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it.”
Go read the rest. This year’s winners are an excellent crop. Of course, by excellent, I mean wretchedly bad.
From the Google Blog:
Now Google’s faster than ever on Firefox and Mozilla browsers. When you do a search on these browsers, we instruct them to download your top search result in advance, so if you click on it, you’ll get to that page even more quickly.
I’m not so sure I like this idea. It’s basically the “I feel lucky” option with an extra click. On a broadband connection, would I even notice the difference? On a dial-up connection, which I had to suffer with last week, it would impose a performance penalty. I’d prefer it if this were an option.
And why only for Firefox? Is there a technical reason why this can’t be done for another browser?
Updated: The more I think about this, the less I like it. What if the top search result contains content that is objectionable? If I do a perfectly legitimate search on my work computer, I have the option to avoid downloading that page based on its summary and title. But if the page downloads for me, it goes through my company’s proxy servers, where it gets logged as something I downloaded. It’s also cached on my computer. If that page happens to include porn or other unwanted content, I could get in serious trouble and even lose my job, even though I am completely innocent.
Google Help explains how to disable this feature in Firefox:
The default should be off, not on, in my opinion. A browser should never, ever download content from a site that you didn’t specifically choose to visit. What are Google’s developers thinking?
Updated again: In the comments, James Grimmelmann points out:
I agree with you that this combination is dangerous and that it should probably not be on by default for users. But I think the mistake is the browser’s, not Google’s.
After reading the Mozilla Prefetching FAQ, I think James is right. I’m particularly disturbed by this part:
A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache… Will Mozilla prefetch documents from a different host? Yes. There is no same-origin restriction for link prefetching. Limiting prefetching to only URLs from the the same server would not offer any increased browser security.
So, if I understand this correctly, a Web page designer can stuff a whole bunch of links into a page and tag them with the “prefetch” relation type. If I click on that page, all those links will begin downloading to my computer automatically, even if they are on other servers. And if I do a Google search using Firefox, this will happen automatically for the first page in the search results list.
I really, really don’t like this. It’s especially ugly if someone identifies a browser flaw that allows code to be executed automatically from a page that triggers a buffer overflow or exploits an unpatched scripting exploit.
Yet another update: See this follow-up article.
MSN Search Champs? I coulda been a contender!
Phil Rodemann has some kind words and a question: How do bloggers do it?
What tools should a committed blogger use? If you are committed to drawing traffic, what helps keep the workload to a manageable level?
I have two tools that make my life easier. One is NewsGator Outlook Edition, which bringsin my favorite RSS feeds automatically. Phil, be sure you sort your feeds into folders. I subscribe to 200+ feeds, but there are only a handful I consider indispensable, and they go into an Essentials folder. When I subscribe to a new feed, it goes into a New Additions folder, where I can monitor it for a while to see if it’s a keeper.
For posting, I use a wonderful little utility called BlogJet. It acts as a universal front end for Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger, and about 20 other bogging packages. (I especially recommend it as an alternative for the horrible Blogger editor.) Its best feature: You can save drafts of posts locally and work on them when you feel like it.
Those two tools make me efficient. I’ve also found that anyone can be more confident and prolific by writing more often. Short posts are fine and useful.
And keep an eye on your referrer logs to see who’s linking to you. You can find someinteresting stuff that way.
Back in the dot-com heyday, I reviewed five online file-storage services for an article on a Web site that long ago crumbled into pixel dust. Two years later, only one of those companies was still in business. Most people, it turned out, weren’t willing to pay for the privilege of saving files to a distant server.
Fast-forward to 2005, and take a look at Box.net. This new online service, barely a month old, is trying to revive the online-storage business. I was skeptical at first, but after a few days of using the service I think they might have what it takes to stick around.
Via Search Engine Watch comes this news of a Top Blogs Search feature at A9.com, the experimental search engine from Amazon.com.
Search a constantly updated set of recent blog entries from over three hundred of the most influential English language blogs on the web.
Imagine my (pleasant) surprise when I searched for “Firefox” and an entry from this blog popped up.
You can add the Top Blogs search as a column at A9.com. For an overview of how this search engine works, see Why use A9.com?
Oh, and here’s a money-saving tip: If you’ve been meaning to experiment with A9.com, try launching your searches from the Amazon.com home page after signing in. Do this once or twice a day for a few days and you’ll earn a 1.57% discount on Amazon purchases. (Why 1.57%? I have no idea. But who am I to turn down an easy discount?)
Start your day with some light reading: this remarkably complete treatise on methods and materials for completely getting rid of the Earth. The good news is that it won’t be easy.
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.
Fools.
The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary.
Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.
This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.
It is meticulously footnoted and wickedly funny. It also, for some strange reason, makes me want to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is, not surprisingly, listed in the footnotes.
Via Bruce Schneier
Hmmm. This looks interesting.
Update: As Steve Rubel points out in the comments, this is nearly a year old. Oddly, it doesn’t appear to have advanced much during that time. Does anyone else think Google has more “live” beta software than any other company in the history of computing?
Woody and I write books together (Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP, for instance), but because we live on opposite sides of the earth, we rarely see each other in person. So it was a real surprise and treat when I discovered that Woody and his family were in Redmond last week and we had a chance to have dinner together.
Woody’s doing well. He lives in Phuket, Thailand, which was devastated by the tsunami but is swiftly being rebuilt. And he’s got a new Web site. Go say hi at Ask Woody. (And tell him he needs an RSS feed!)
For the past few years, Carl Siechert, Craig Stinson, and I have maintained a group at MSN to help readers of Windows XP Inside Out. When we published the second edition last year, we promised to create a new Web site and forum with more features. It took a few months longer than promised, but the new message board is almost open for business. We could use some help shaking out the bugs, so come over to the new place, sign up for a login, and get the conversation started:
Ed Bott 