Category: Web

Google Handwrite Mobile Search

Long overdue. Works too, me likey!

Handwrite enables you to search by just writing letters with your finger most anywhere on your device’s screen—there’s no keyboard that covers half of the screen and no need for hunt-and-peck typing.

wikileaks.beecher.org

Wikileaks is having to play a ridiculous game of musical chairs this week. They were forced to move their hosting to Amazon, from which they were promptly booted; and then the DNS for their primary domain name wikileaks.org was deleted by EveryDNS. Their primary domain name is now wikileaks.ch, but if that disappears too you can use wikileaks.beecher.org to access the website; I’ll update the IP address if it changes.

Julian Assange’s personal life is not a factor here, and not just because the timing of the Swedish arrest warrant and Interpol red notice are so incredibly coincidental. Wikileaks is just an intermediary, it isn’t leaking anything, it’s just channeling it. It hasn’t broken any laws, and the likes of PayPal’s assertions that Wikileaks “encourage[s], promote[s], facilitate[s] or instruct[s] others to engage in illegal activity” is a blatant cover-up for their own engagement with – probably actually illegal – government pressure.

What’s truly sad about this nonsense is that leakers feel more comfortable sending this info to Wikileaks and not the mainstream media. If the media got their fingers out of their holes – or rather their publishers stopped cutting costs at the expense of their core business – perhaps Wikileaks would be moot, and Assange wouldn’t have to do their job for them.

Follow Your Tweets As They’re Retweeted

This is for AJ, and any other Twitter addicts out there. It’s a very cool little webapp that maps your tweets as they get RT’d, developed by Foot.ie user tetsujin1979. Here’s the deets:

Hello, and welcome to ReTweetGraph, a site for displaying the progress of a tweet as it is retweeted by users and their followers.

Login at any time by using the login link on the left

Click Create Graph to begin creating a new graph.

Click Gallery link to see a list of previously created graphs

Click Links to see a list of related sites and a contact form

Yes, I should really have posted this on Twitter, but posts here are forwarded there anyway, and I’ll do anything to avoid actually visiting that goddamned awful website and the vast majority of total fucktards that populate it. Apart from my followers, obviously, salt of the earth donchew know. At least ye’re slightly more intelligent than FourSquare users. A bit.

Justin Mason’s Nose Flute

Is there any end to that man’s talents? Between his 1337 skillz on the nose flute and his highlighting of the crap Justice Charleton parroted in his judgement on UPC v Dumb Greed Merchants, you have to wonder. Course he’s just parroting “Gambra” on thumped.com, but that’s neither here nor there!

Long story short: Yay Charleton for deciding in favour of UPC. Boo Charleton for parroting makey-uppey numbers for “piracy”. Boo Charleton for essentially suggesting that Gov.ie enact legislation to allow the labels to skip proper due process. That’s two boos to one yay, you lose Charleton.

Nice Homepage

Makes perfect sense once you get over the initial confusion.

(Via Wired.)

Mozilla Account Manager

This is brilliant, a Firefox account manager that standardises the handling of authentication on websites, including registration, login and logout handling, account cancellation, password changes, etc. It’s similar in some respects to the likes of LastPass, but it’s more focused on functionality than data, and in reality should actually be able to tie into current managers as a data store. Web application developers and major website owners need to implement this asap!

Account Manager is a prototype to dramatically simplify how you connect to sites. It implements a new protocol for websites to integrate with your browser, so you can sign in and sign out right from your toolbar. Look for the key icon, to the left of your URL bar.

(Also see the draft spec and the wiki page.)

Zuckerberg the Douche

I’m sure I’ve called Mark Zuckerberg a scumbag here before, usually because of his total disregard for privacy. This is the other reason.

I don’t feel all that sorry for the guys at Harvard that were done over, their handling of it must be a constant embarassment to the college with one of the most respected business schools in the world.

I don’t agree with the opinion that that’s “just how America works” though, and it certainly doesn’t stop Zuckerberg’s behaviour being that of a total doucehbag. I don’t doubt for a second that he’s still running the website and the business the exact same way today.

Interesting IE Domain Drops

I’ve been meaning to do a regular post about interesting IE domain drops for a while now, but wading through the list can be very dull. So instead of a comprehensive list, I’ll just troll through everything up to 10 characters, and after that ye can shag off and check yourselves.

The domains are linked to the ordering system on my biz site, with a reduced price of €20 cos I love ye. Only until the end of the month though, cos the price changes then; I’ll update with a new offer if I remember. The discount is applied at the checkout.

(Pardon the corporate shilling, I’ll post these on the business blog when I get it back into WordPress, where it belongs.)

  • damn.ie – For a blog. Probably not a great corporate domain…
  • flag.ie – Tempted to register this myself for the Foot.ie flag.
  • ramp.ie – Are sk8ers too cool for websites?
  • brown.ie – For Mr. or Mrs. Brown. Or perhaps you just like brown.
  • drive.ie – Still a lot of room for improvement on Carzone.
  • energ.ie – AKA ‘Energy’.
  • shark.ie – Great blog for one of those arrogant corporate wankers I hate so much.
  • women.ie – A large segment, so to speak.
  • bigday.ie – People still get married during a recession…
  • dapper.ie – Fancy yourself as a bit of a dandy?
  • ducati.ie – Oops. Silly trademark drop.
  • rimmel.ie – Ditto.
  • hobbies.ie – Hobby shop?
  • mulcahy.ie – Surname
  • decorate.ie – People that can’t afford to move do what?
  • corkscrew.ie – People also drink more during a recession.
  • corktyres.ie – Nice local domain that should SEO well.
  • dreamgirl.ie – Targetted dating.
  • pushchairs.ie – Microsite for the likes of Smyths.
  • rondomondo.ie – This is just here for the nerds. Remember them?
  • speechless.ie – Another nice one for a blog.