alex.mullr.net/blog

YouTube recently announced an HTML5 beta. Here’s the numbers, using Safari 4.0.4 on a 2.2GHz MacBook with 4GB of RAM:

I saw some of the talk about the Express article on the BBC’s Twitter presence, but never bothered to go in search and read it. After seeing Rowan taking it apart, I had to see the original.

Oh. The Express site reports that:

The article you are looking for does not exist. It may have been deleted.

Pffft. They’ve already lost my respect, but they could have perhaps clawed a tiny part back by leaving a proper apology in its place.

So, now I wanted to see the original even more. It’s fantastic; here you go:

Oops!
You shouldn’t have turned it over until you’d finished!

I love the copy on the bottom of this Pizza Hut box. Clever, friendly, perfect.

A while back I posted about how Jack Waterhouse was causing a stir on Facebook. In case your faith in the average person has been somewhat restored since then, I thought I’d draw your attention to the latest group to spring up: “fuck praying 4 Haiti some thing needs to control the population”.

This is troubling on at least three counts (that I can see):

1. Facebook doesn’t seem to have sufficient power to deal with stuff like this cropping up. They’ve plastered links to ‘report’ posts all over the place, but there’s no indication this actually does anything.
2. There’s still no accountability here, even with this being linked to people’s online identities; it’s too easy to play the “ahh, somebody else did this using my account” card.
3. People exist who are actually this stupid.

Charisse Rosati writes:

Id like to thank the 7.0 earthquake for visiting Haiti, Thats a few less aids infected Peices of shits that will Invade our country with their filth and disease

Eloquent.

If you’d like to help people less fortunate than you, Google’s put a link to the crisis response page on their homepage.

I recently got a 23″ Samsung monitor, my first LED-backlit display. I hadn’t noticed there being a big difference before, but my MacBook display now looks dim and hard to read.

If you’re a brand strategy/web development/whatever we’re calling it today company and your homepage (and therefore, my first impression of your company) looks like this, please change it. Like, right now.

(I use the very excellent and very open source ClickToFlash by Jonathan Rentzsch.)

Our broadband speed has looked like this for the last ten years. Here’s hoping we get to 50Mbps within the next year or two – and who knows where we’ll be in another ten years.

Here’s where we’re going at the moment:

• BT is saying that 40% of homes will have the ability to have a 100Mbps connection by the 2012 Olympics: GigaOM
• It’s possible to get 50Mbps from Virgin Media at the moment, for £30-£40 per month
• Virgin promise 100Mbps by 2010: TechRadar

After writing about spending time online, something obvious to everybody else quickly became obvious to me. I spend far too much time on the computer. An unhealthy amount of time? Probably, actually. (Dear me, I sound like my mum.)

So that’s what I’m going to do less of this year. And, because anything that doesn’t include nice big numbers makes me feel queasy, I’m going to use a computer to show me that I’m spending less time on the computer. I’m sure there’s something wrong with that.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with all that free time. Might possibly… read a book? That’s very last decade, I’m sure. If I manage to finish one this month, it’ll be Chris Frith’s Making Up the Mind, as recommended by David far too long ago. Might even do some work. Crazy, I know.

I’ll let you know how things unfold, partly to keep me motivated. And I’ll see you in the flesh sometime? It’d be a nice change to your Twitter profile picture popping up now and then. Have a great year.

I got bored this evening and decided to create a graphic showing where I spend most of my time in the browser – the data is pulled from my Wakoopa account. I’ll probably get round to publishing the source sometime.

On the ‘social’ web.

This is how foursquare displays the map for CJ’s Cafe in London. They got “The Vale” part right, but it’s totally in the wrong part of the city. If you take the address including the postcode and put it in Google Maps, you’ll see that it’s actually in Acton. This is a huge problem for their site, affecting many venues (in London at least). And this makes checking in much more difficult, possibly leading to duplicate venues, and bigger problems.

For some reason, foursquare only looks up the first line of the address to map it. Not the business name, or the cross streets, or the postcode.

Guys, you have to fix this soon. For the time being, Gowalla wins.

(All these new location-based games and sites are fantastic, by the way. You should check them all out and decide which you like best. Mashable wrote a nice comparison of these two, if that’s your thing.)