Nielsen pulling percentages out of his hat again "If we were starting from scratch, we might improve the usability of a site by 1% or so by having a navigation rail on the right rather than on the left. But deviating from the standard would almost certainly impose a much bigger cost in terms of confusion and reduced ability to navigate smoothly."

For once, Jakob Nielsen gets it spot-on "For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon." -- Jakob Nielsen

Problems with Firefox 1.5/i386 on Ubuntu amd64 The suggested solution almost works, but I had to find a different pangorc because it doesn't exist on my system. I had installed vmware and it includes a pangorc file I could use, so I just edited /opt/firefox/firefox to include export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/ export PANGO_RC_FILE=/usr/local/lib/vmware/libconf/etc/pango/pangorc

El Reg reader competition - black helicopters all over the place

Classic essay by Vannevar Bush - shared bookmarks predicted in 1945 Oddly prescient, this essay by the father of the U.S. National Science Foundation is deservedly a classic. He speculates about a yet-to-be-invented machine which he calls a "memex" and describes it in a way which sounds a lot like a personal computer. Missing from the picture, but easy to imagine, is the Internet. But the image of scientists making "trails" of annotations and sharing them with each other is closely matched by ... surfers collecting bookmarks, tagging them using ad hoc tags, and sharing them via the internet. The stuff about the "memex" is only towards the end - skip to section 5 if you find the first pages boring. As is my habit, I have linked to the "printer friendly" version of the article. The authoritative location is . There are also various more or less legitimate copies all over the net. Oh, he misspelled "Hollerith". Sorry, couldn't resist noticing.

Po. "häipynyt turhaa ilmaa"

Mark Russinovich exposes the pesky XCP rootkit DRM used by Sony What I find the most amusing is that the vendor who created this rootkit malware apparently included the GNU Lame mp3 library in violation of its LGPL license.

Stupido Records #59 - Music from The Code Stumbled over this in the library yesterday. `/usr/bin/banner 'camp!'` By $dmr, how I wish they hadn't printed the lyrics on the inner sleeve ...

"Because 2005 is 21 years too late."

More on HTTP teergrubing, including a nasty Location: loop I experimentally set up a CGI which feeds stuff from /dev/random at a glacial pace, and ScriptAlias a number of frequently requested security holes to that. Lessee what I have in the trap tomorrow ... obPeeve: The guy could learn how to spell "teergrubing". (The German word "grube" has a long "oo" sound in the middle and a short "uh" sound at the end.) See also http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entry/51442