Tonight, thanks to Twitter 0-day information, I managed to snag an invite for beta-testing viewzi.com

Viewzi is a new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.
Oh, and it’s bolder, richer, and more fun. 

That is certainly true, as the whole interface is very nice and, after a quick-run through the different views offered, the purpose of each becomes immediately obvious. Picture searches, video searches, shopping searches or just plain’ old trying-to-find-some-information searches.

Therein, however, I feel there may be a minor problem. «Continue Reading»

I would not say it was really either a ‘minor’ thing — those happen pretty much every week — but it’s not really mind-blowing either. I spent a couple of evenings changing my theme. While the current layout used as a starting point my old theme, DarnSlick, I feel the number of tweaks and changes, complete with icon redesign where applicable, warrants it that I call it my own. PUREtext is it’s name, aimed at simplicity and clarity to permit focus on content rather than anything else.

Let me know what you don’t like. I keep tweaking things anyway, but I’m more than curious to see what breaks in your browser and what breaks your focus when reading. I have tested in Safari proper, WebKit nightly, Firefox 3ß5 and Opera 9.50. One of the reasons I started changing things was to try and get a fluid theme, so it should scale on most resolutions (granted, it will generally look weird below 1024 x 768, but not broken from what I can tell). More importantly, however, I wanted to do something that will make content self-obvious.

I am probably missing something very important. The description below, taken from the “Stunnix C++ Obfuscator” page on Apple’s Downloads Website

Obfuscate/scramble (make unreadable), watermark or compress C++ or C source code (e.g. for giving out some library in source form) by renaming all names, uglifying strings and integers and stripping comments out. [emphasis added] (link)(screenshot)¹

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1. Yes, the interface is as ugly as the screenshot makes it to be. It’s a web application of sorts, but the colour scheme will make you puke after prolonged exposure. [↩]

The output supplies more decimal places than we need and uses labels that may not be helpful [...] But, as usual with software, we can ignore distractions and find the results we need.

The above is taken from my Statistics book. It was written as a comment to an illustration of the output of some statistical software. It is the embodiment of what is wrong with software nowadays, why a lot of people still don’t get it and don’t use it.

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To continue on my rant about “points of failure” on the Internet, it seems that http://urlTea.com isn’t responding anymore. OpenDNS hints that the domain is not registered with DreamHost anymore.

As a commenter mentioned on my old post on the topic, DreamHost has allegedly shut down url(x), though I do not believe they have something against URL services in particular. Most likely, as Alex King pointed out a while back, some of these services do not have a revenue model, and with arguably lots of traffic, they become hard to maintain.

RandomKitty via Alex King

I wanted to give Twitterrific another shot, but I have really gotten quite friendly with Tweetburner over the last little while, and the former application lets Twitter use tinyurl for your URLs. Until either Twitterrific lets users choose to use Twurl — or maybe Twitter does — I wrote a quick AppleScript to use as a Quicksilver plugin. Invoke the script, give it the URL and it will put into your clipboard the twurled version, which you can paste in Twitterrific (or wherever else you want).

Script is here.

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The only reason I’m writing about this comes from the fact that the application caught my eye in the RSS stream from Apple’s downloads site. Just a friendly warning about the ’security’ of the application.

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Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

George Bernard Shaw

As children, all of us passed through a “why?” stage. In the brain’s pursuit of adjusting to the world, our parents were bombarded with inquiries into the most mundane of things, so that we would learn and understand. They might have hated our incessant questioning, but we grew, listening intensely to their answers, and the world started to make sense.

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Ars is running a lengthy piece on modularized Windows and why it would suck. There are quite a few reasons why I do not believe this to be true, mostly looking at the increased control modularized Windows would bring to all categories of users.

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I have recently attended a talk given by Michael Geist on the subject of “E-Publishing and the Law” through the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Here are some of the things that Dr. Geist spoke about, as well as some of my observations.

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