With UbiKann, I Can Be Everywhere
Take a look at the recent advert for Apple’s iTunes & iPod, featuring Bob Dylan. The advert plays with the well known shadows concept commonly used in both iPod and iTunes ads, however each person in the ad like Dylan is recognisable regardless of the shadow effect…
Enjoy 
Part of my family live near Leeds, while my close family live in France. I was looking to compare prices for flights from Paris to Leeds and a little green thing caught my eye next to the results on Google.
My mum’s flight from Leeds to France a few weeks ago was just after the foiled terrorist attacks story and she complained how little passenger alert information she had found on the Jet2 site. So I thought I check their site to see if they had added anything…
First of all I thought Google had started putting company logos on ads but then I realised, it was an icon not a logo. So I hovered over it first but no title info appeared, then I clicked on it (PS: I added the red arrow to indicate what I’m talking about) :
When you click on the arrow a mini form appears where you can add your telephone number and Google (out of the kindness of their hearts) offer to put you in contact with Jet2 via telephone “for free” !
Wow, if it wasn’t past 12 o’clock at night I’d take them up on the offer just to give it a try !
Note also the fact that they suggest remembering your telephone number so that you don’t even have to type you number in next time they offer the same call-back service
This is certainly a post I’ll be tagging with the word ‘Trend’.
I just came across a very interesting Google Video from Google. Luis von Ahn, a Carnegie Mellon professor, discusses the Captcha concept used to stop automatic systems from filling in forms and how currently Spam companies are trying to get around it.
Captcha is used to describe a system that allows a computer to automatically generate random numbers and or letters and then obfuscate them in order to render reading them by a computer highly unlikely or impossible.
This was interesting for me since I had worked on a similar concept for stopping people from requesting lost passwords on Significant-Media.
The video below then goes on to explain how human computation i.e. people solving problems rather than computers can be useful. With the Captcha system for example, computers are not capable of providing correct answers.
Then the ESP Game is explained and the process for it is pretty amazing from a thought process point of view. Anyone who has to come up with new ideas in their company should find this part truly fascinating :
The part I found really impressive, in view of a successive set of procedures, was when von Ahn explains the different combinations of possible player modes, as well as anti-cheating mechanisms…
The guy seems like a great teacher as well, if the seminar is anything to go by !
Placed in context this image tagging system is what early users of flickr were used to when they add tags to their own photos and is now pretty common procedure. Flickr was bought by Yahoo and Google well may have found a novel way of catching up here, if you read between the lines…
Update : interesting article over at the washingtonpost.com concerning a way to ‘turn the tables’ on the phishing techniques using images from the banks
Google, via it’s evangelist Adam Lasnik is starting to provide SEO classes. As you can see here the seminars are cheap and open to all.
It begs the question about Google asking people to create web sites for people and not for their robots. However, it is true that the best idea is to build your web sites for your target population while respecting W3C standards, and then optimise your code for search engines.
Once you have read a fair amount about Search Engine Optimization, you realise that most people are just guessing what is working and then try to make you think they have the real deal when it’s likely that they only have half the story. Optimising pages is partly logical on the basics and then guess work on what may be used by Google to define the order of their results. I personally think they should spend more time dealing with the weeds like domain name parking with pages full of adverts/links…
I just came across this photo set of the same view using a time lapse intervelometer device. I was lead to it from a remixed version over on flickr : by ‘narphorium‘ (he explains how he did it in the comments with Photoshop)
Do check the original and the remix, both are really good pieces of work.
On the original page if you go down to the second picture, you’ll see that you get all 6 pictures used in both cases by hovering over the image either from right to left or left to right !
A CD from Sony that can tell how many times you have copied it !!!
I can remember that Martin, a flat mate at University, used to leave his copy of New Scientist hanging around in the kitchen for us to read. Since that time I have often bought a copy and now check the website. A pretty astonishing catch in this months issue concerning a patent from Sony.
First of all it’s not astonishing from Sony since you may remember that they already made a complete mess with their previous attempt. Second, well, will they learn it’s easy to hack whether they try to use software or hardware ? Third this could easily backfire on them, I’m not sure how but a company that has been so stupid thus far is bound to mess up again ! People have figured out how to spy on which links you visited using CSS so spying on what you played with this type of device installed would probably be feasible.
Allowing people to transfer the music to play on mp3 players is obviously not in Sony’s interest. It’s not like they make mp3 players (can you hear the sarcastic tone?).
Maybe Sony should read Architectures of control and “PRM†over at ‘The Flowing Candy Bees’, they might realise how they could be liable again.
Jeremiah Grossman demonstrates an issue with CSS and visited links which allows sites to verify the sites you have visited prior to theirs.
The issue/bug/vulnerability isn’t new, as comments explain, it was first discovered in 2002 and is well documented here at the seclist.org site.
CSS has a feature that can be abused to exactly the same ends. It is simpler, more accurate, and more easily abused than the timing attacks described in the above paper.
There is a demonstration here of how it works, on top of the Grossman post :
https://www.indiana.edu/~phishing/browser-recon/
It seems variations enable this hack on IE, FireFox, Opera and Mozilla unless there are plug-ins that block the browser from comparing with its history function…
A personal page service that allows you to choose what and where you add content, isn’t new, but when it just does that, then it quickly provides more than the others, with more freedom in the what (you add) area.
I recently finished work on a plug-in that provides personal page functions, so I appreciate the value of WebWag, it is very impressive. Both functional and usability aspects are good. This type of product is capable of easily expanding services and functions as well.
You can add pages that appear as tabs at the top of the page, rename the whole area, add, move delete the boxes that correspond to the different functions and content that appears. I didn’t find a way to edit the way the page looks (colours, font size, column width, page width). Also it could be me, but I couldn’t place search anywhere else but in the middle column.
The system is impressive however and I think it will only get better…
I have just published an article that covers the subject of testing your site/pages and the compatibility with different browsers, several different services and solutions exist. I aim to cover as many solutions as possible in the article.
The main areas of the article are :
- Hardware based solutions
- Software based solutions
- Standalone solutions
- Remote Testing Machines solutions
- Cross-Browser screen capturing
- Standards Compliance
- Load and Stress Tests
A screenshot from the Browsercam tutorial.
Well I just came across this AJAX based Word Processor system called ajaxWrite that can actually read and write MS Word documents and several other formats. It is AJAX based so it just works directly in your browser, it’s really cool !
But I then realised that this was just the tip of the iceberg. There is a ajaxSketch that can read and write SVG type documents and it all just works seamlessly as you can see from the screenshots in your web browser.
I then clicked on ajaxTunes and this “is a web-based music player that lets you play high-quality streaming music straight from the Internet on any computer” Not only that but it seems to link to remotely stored music. It’s amazing !! I am impressed !
Oh and the first song that appeared ‘Breathe Me’ by Sia is also a sing I really like so these guys got everything right first time with me, bravo !
But as these guys are really good they have actually got the system working so you can add the code to your pages so I’m going to give it a try. My page will not validate anymore but it was already giving me CSS errors anyway so here goes :
Listen to Sia’s ‘Breathe Me’ right now !
Update : It works in FireFox, IE and Opera. Sia’s singing to me from my blog, this is great
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