Rich Bowen has been posting podcasts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Simply brilliant! Sadly it doesn’t look like we’ll get to the final stave by Australian Christmas so I’ll most likely have to wait until I get back in the new year to hear the end. All the same, it is a very entertaining reading of one of the classic stories and I can’t recommend you listen to it enough.

Scoble:

I would love it if my blog tool could tell me more about the things I link to. For instance, how much traffic did it send to that person? How many people linked to it after my link (that would tell me the viralness of an idea)? How many times have I linked to Graham? How does that compare to the number of times I’ve linked to Dori Smith or Dave Winer? What’s the reciprocity of a link? (Did Graham link back and continue the conversation?)

Queensland Transport provide an online form to allow you to change your address details:    +5 brownie points

The form pops up in a new window:    -2 brownie points

The new window expands to be full screen:    -4 brownie points

The new window hides the location bar and all other window decorations:    -10 brownie points

The SSL certificate is self signed:    Do not pass GO, do not collect brownie points. Go straight home and tell your mother what you did.

I’ve caught up on the backlog of stuff to write about from the past couple of weeks where I’ve been preoccupied with moving house, mostly by dropping it off the list because it’s just too old to be worth commenting on now. So now I’m off to the Gold Coast for christmas holidays with my darling fiance and her family. It’s a tough life sometimes. Anyway, that means I won’t be posting much here for a while again, possibly until the new year. So merry christmas all!

The Boston Globe:

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers’ own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

Why does that not surprise me? In the end though this is very bad for consumers who are paying for internet access and deserve to get the best speeds possible for the best price possible for whatever services they want to use it for.

Berin Loritsch:

I’ve discovered why I’m lacking motivation for our Software Design Document at work. It’s tedious. It isn’t the creative part of the effort. It’s boring!

The trouble with boring design documents is not just that they’re boring to write, they’re boring to read as well – so noone does.

In our most recent round of design documents at Ephox, we took some advice from Joel on Software and started injecting humor into the docs. So instead of just anyone inserting a table into a document, now it’s Miss Piggy creating a table of Kermit’s good and bad points – complete with a picture of Miss Piggy and Kermit. At one point we actually had half the engineering team rushing off to read the specification documents just so they could laugh at the stories.

Ben Laurie:

…because it actually affects peoples lives, and not in a positive way: studies have shown that if people believe they are being observed, then they tend to alter their behaviour to match what they think the observer wants to see. I want people to be able to do their thing without fear of consequences from bigots or The Man or even “ordinary people”. None of us are ordinary and the world will be a poorer place if we were made to be.

There are just so many elements to this story that seem so wrong. First a teacher brings porn to school on their laptop. Secondly that students were suspended for accidentally coming across it but mostly that they were suspended for hacking because they answered an obvious question when prompted:

“The hacking involved a dialogue box coming up on the screen which asked which car do you drive,” one of the boys’ parents told the paper.

If by any chance you happen to be trying to get a Ubuntu system (or probably any Linux system) to talk to an Apple Airport (in my case the original 802.11b UFO style), don’t try to use the plain ASCII password for the WEP key – Linux and Apple seem to have different algorithms for converting the password to the actual HEX key.

Instead, open the Airport Admin Utility, double click on the base station in the list to open its configuration interface and then choose “Network Equivalent Password…” from the “Base Station” menu. Enter the hex key it gives you into the Ubuntu networking dialog as a Hexadcimal key type.

Jensen Harris: Help Is For Experts

One of the most interesting epiphanies I’ve had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: “help” in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts.

How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to use the software already and eager novices would be poring over the documentation trying to learn how to be more effective using it.

Jonathan Boutelle talks about how he made a wiki work with his software developers:

• Start off maintaining existing documents
• Make it easy to login
• Insist on Wysiwyg

So, so true. The first two could be a little more generalized: Start with a reason to use the wiki and make it easy. Making it easy encompasses insisting on Wysiwyg but the editor is the most important touch-point of a wiki that it’s worth stating separately.

Interesting argument between Tim Bray and Robert Scoble about what benefit standardizing Office 12’s XML format will provide.  Tim Bray suggests that Microsoft should use the open document format as the basis for its XML format with custom extensions when required.  Scoble argues that documents are more complex than Tim believes and that it would be impossible to create a compatible version of Office around the open document format. Maybe Tim Bray has done a lot of work with Word documents and office documents in general that I’m not familiar with – I know he’s done a lot with XML but that’s not enough to comment on the needs of a office-style document format¹.