Seriously Microsoft IE 8, just fuck off

Seamonkey for Linux

Safari for Windows

Safari for Mac

Konqueror for Linux

Internet Explorer 8 for Windows

Galeon for Linux

Firefox for Windows

Firefox for Mac

Epiphany for Linux

WearRadio.co.uk goes live!

I’ve been working every hour Dawkins sends on http://wearradio.co.uk for the past 3 weeks and it is finally ready for primetime.

The big headaches were getting it to look as intended in Microsoft Internet Explorer, surprise surprise, and of course all those little things you come across now and then that are sent to try you—like why certain graphics refuse to load and why the site occasionally takes more than 3 seconds to load on an empty cache.

All in all though I’m happy I plumped for WordPress as the main platform—although I can see how further down the line we might want to expand into a more dedicated CMS—but that’s the job for someone else.

For now I’m looking forward to actually getting “on air”. We have a soft launch of the site and other back-room management type information we need to share with the presenters and DJs at this Thursday’s first full staff meeting and other than the fact we don’t have any content yet, everything is going GREAT!!

Happy Halloween

Just a quick note to say I am starting a new job on Monday. I don’t know how much time I’m going to have to blog as regularly as I have over the last 2 years, but hopefully I will be still able to start new topics and follow-up discussions as and when they come along.

Day to day I am more likely to be twittering than posting full-on blog entries and so I’ve made a widget of my last three tweets more visible in the side-bar opposite.

Thanks for all your messages of support and, once again, this isn’t goodbye – just a note to say I might not be as available for answering private emails and topic replies as I once was.

For pity’s sake YouTube. FIX ACCOUNT SETTINGS!!!

The below is a screenshot of the Playback Settings pane for my YouTube account. I’ve set it up so clips always show in HQ when available. I’ve also chosen not to show those annoying pop-over annotations.

Here is a screenshot of the cookies which match ‘youtube’ in Safari’s cache:

If I then go ahead and remove all YouTube cookies and open a video I know to be in HQ with annotations I see this:

The annotations are turned back on and the HQ button is deselected.

So, big deal, we’ve proven that YouTube account settings are stored in a cookie and not on YouTube’s side. But why? If I want to browse YouTube in Firefox and Safari on the same machine, or in Konqueror and Opera browser on Linux, I shouldn’t have to manually go in and set up the same account every time for each individual browser. It should be a setting stored along with my account.

But that’s not the most annoying part
One of the most frustrating things, which all of these people on YouTube’s own support forum have been complaining about since the feature was first introduced, is that YouTube will periodically simply “forget” the user’s settings when the user logs out of his or her Google account.

Yes, that’s right. Because you can sign into YouTube using your Google credentials, when you log-out of, say, your main GMail account and into one you’ve perhaps set up for spam or general mail, the session cookie for YouTube expires at the same time.

So you have to manually go back into your account settings and start over again, simply to watch clips without the annoyance of annotations and in the higher quality playback format your high speed connection can handle.

YouTube. Pretty please with a cherry on top. Fix this annoying and pointless “feature”!! We want our account settings to be stored with our account, not in the individual browser we happen to be using at any one time. Thanks in advance!

Who are the real victims here?

more about "Who are the real victims here?", posted with vodpod

An open letter to Conde Nast Digital – owners of reddit.com

Over the last week, stories submitted to the /r/atheism section of reddit.com appear to have been affected by a number of changes. Firstly in the way reddit’s algorithm adjudicates whether or not a submission is genuine content, or spam and secondly in the way genuine stories are promoted to the front page of the site.

Firstly, I agree that it is a good thing that reddit.com staff, regularly monitor and adjust the way measures designed to prevent spam and to assure quality content reaches the front page of the site work. Technical glitches in this adjustment process usually result in disruption over a day or so and this is both understood to be normal, by reddit users, as well as being something reddit staff would prefer not to have happen at all, despite being occasionally unavoidable.

It is increasingly apparent, however, that in the case of these recent changes, far from being a technical glitch, information gleaned by the /r/atheism community suggests that the sub-reddit as a whole is being actively censored.

When news of this began to spread throughout the reddit community earlier the week, starting Monday 24th august, 2009, it came hot on the heals of another article posted to a non-atheism subreddit about the retail giant Sears, who allegedly forced reddit management to pull a story rising up the ranks which was critical of the Sears brand. Alarm bells began to ring that reddit was going through some changes, behind the scenes, which perhaps suggested a tightening of the rules on what can and can not be said on the site.

Now, it would appear, from a series of investigations by active members of the reddit community, not all of whom are avid subscribers to the /r/atheism subreddit, but who are nevertheless intrigued as to how a previously open and ostensibly egalitarian system could become closed and restricted almost overnight, show that stories which the algorithm previously identified as being of rising interest, and therefore qualified to appear on the front page to both signed-in users and new visitors alike, are now being removed or “down-voted” altogether.

It would be easy to jump to conclusions as to why this might be the case. Many different kinds of interest groups, who use reddit to promote their message and encourage conversation, have historically complained about a perceived “gaming” of the system, by their detractors, in order to silence or stifle informed debate, from all sides of a given opinion.

Occasionally this is sheer paranoia. Occasionally it is borne out by the evidence. In the case of the Presidential election, for example, it was clear that both Republican and Democratic party volunteers, in great numbers, were signing-up for multiple reddit accounts, to inject partisan editorial pieces from single-issue blogs and front organisations. While this is not entirely democratic, it is you might say nevertheless all in the game of a Presidential campaign.

But the discussion which needs to take place around the world, on the pressing subject of how we ordinary, moderately well educated people are best placed to cut out the cancer of hate and religious supremacism in our society, is not subject to the winds of political change in the way a single campaign might be. It is an on-going conversation and a struggle against the steady drip of fear theology, which we will only win by encouraging openness and freedom of information.

The irreligious are not going to go away and “leave people to think whatever they want to think”, for as long as what they think informs the decisions they make that in-turn affect the lives of people who do not share their delusions on war, race, healthcare and how we carve a better world for ourselves through reason and intellectual honesty.

Atheists are more numerous a voting block, in the United States, than the Jewish lobby and the African American movement. And yet, thanks to a false conglomeration of atheism with social Darwinism, propagated by the very mainstream media which social bookmarking sites like reddit are in such a strong position to counteract, atheists remain among the least trusted group in the whole of the North American political spectrum.

Reddit represents an extremely attractive alternative to the old way of doing this kind of dishonest politics, for so many people, that I can’t help but feel a great sense of personal disappointment that someone, somewhere in the Conde Nast family appears to have lost sight of this amazing opportunity.

So I ask, Conde Nast Digital, on behalf of everyone who discovered and encouraged others to explore reddit, as an alternative to many other sites of its kind, precisely because of the /r/atheism subreddit receiving such a prominent front page slot, to please consider re-instating /r/atheism as a default category on the front page and re-instate it as a default subscription for newly signed-up users, as it was previous to the changes made this last week.

Thank you for your time.

More reading:

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/9em07/a_note_from_the_creator_of_the_atheism_subreddit/

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9ecaa/i_dont_mean_to_spam_the_rest_of_reddit_with/

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/9e8×5/so_we_all_know_were_censored_now_and_we_should_be/

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/9e20p/looks_like_the_god_squad_is_going_through_atheism/c0cepsi

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/9efxf/an_explanation_of_why_the_atheism_reddit_does_not/

EDIT: 00:06 Friday 28th August. It would seem that despite /r/atheism remaining one of the top ten most popular sub-genre on the popular social bookmarking site, evidence has been unearthed that it was deliberately removed from the front page to make room for the /r/Christianity sub-reddit. I think I smell a threat from advertisers rat. Stay tuned.