Overheard on the train

On the last train home from Edinburgh on Saturday night (i.e. it’s always full of drunks), overheard a conversation between a middle-aged man and woman. They were evidently friends who’d gone to a speed dating event together, and were discussing what they wanted from a relationship. Despite being a short, balding guy with a beer belly and not particularly good looking, the man thought he was God’s gift to women; he didn’t need any chat-up lines, women would chat him up because he was such a good catch, and he had a big house. The woman was trying to talk a bit of sense into him.

He came out with this brilliant philosophical line:

"Ah suppose what I’m looking for in life is just to get rat-arsed."

Interesting ASCII art spam

Received this today, a clever use of the old ASCII art technique, in order to circumvent spam filters.

77    83   45                                              13
36    77                                                  6142     06       61  660857
 33  80                                                  272725  1576     0617  01
 13  68    11    2762     28035   3877    7857           8266      07       86  27
 33  86    18       70   28  86   613        51          4158      18       87  10413
  4460     03    45062   52  36   76      21112   87850   7012     04       06  32  04
  2135     22   06  26   81  71   88     42  10            4372    67       68      03
   66      81   05  82   54  31   70     08  07            5735    58       80      73
   54      17    82781    37075   04      40606          727082    15       04  32  47
                             15                           2487     34  04   56   4122
                         23780                             68                                 

                                                          82
  2316      87              41    15                     1244      13         7735     7362
 71  51                     32                          526356   5714        55  72   16  73
48    07                    43                          3331       23        62  24   33  26
27          74     2642     56    33     116            7150       50        46  43   25  50
68          08        14    48    81    52 70            6713      16        66 564   34 052
56          65     05187    58    75     70      66426    1363     63         48665    88262
32    44    72    24  54    13    61      43              1700     80            75       73
 55  88     07    35  41    78    27    81 37           075044     06        06  72   70  82
  1504      32     47152    48    73     404             5641      22   23    7806     8822
                                                          31 

There was also a domain name listed in the same fashion, removed for obvious reasons.

How not to do error messages – Air France

Decided I wanted to find out more about the Self-Service Kiosks for checking in on an Air France flight. Clicking the link gives me the following useful error message, in Firefox 3:

What did you do in the Browser Wars, Daddy?

In the news today, Google have announced the imminent release of their browser, Chrome. From the sounds of it, they’ve taken ideas from Firefox, IE 8 and other browsers, and added their own special sauce.

Interestingly, they got Scott McCloud to create a comic explaining what it’s all about. McCloud is the author of Understanding Comics, and while perhaps not the most exciting artist visually, is probably the best technically to tell this tale. Check out some of his early online comics. It’s not often you hear phrases like ‘cryptographic hash’, ’sandbox security’ and ‘garbage collection’ in a comic; that’s probably a good thing!

Google Chrome comic by Scott McCloud

The default new tab, with the 9 most-visited sites as thumbnails, plus list of recent searches, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs, sounds great. Probably the sort of thing that could easily be done in a Firefox extension, if there isn’t already one.

Like the upcoming IE 8, Chrome has a private ‘incognito’ window option, that won’t store any information in history, cookies, etc. Just like Microsoft, they’re claiming this will be ideal for, er, gift shopping. As The Register rightly points out, this is obviously ideal for the internet’s #1 application, pr0n.

How does this affect the existing browsers? Firefox currently holds about 20% of the market. The most likely initial users for Chrome will be the early adopters who’re probably already on Firefox, or Flock or whatever (but not IE). Probably Google will eventually achieve high market penetration just like they have with Gmail and many of their other applications, but will they ever challenge IE’s continued dominance of the market? For many people, the internet is still synonymous with the big blue e on their desktop.

Two new things Adobe

Two unrelated things that might be of use if you’re a CF developer, or even if you’re not:

1. Sherif Abdou has set up some discussion forums for Flex, Coldfusion, Flash etc. There’s been similar forums in the past, however this one looks really good. He’s split it into many separate areas, and even included forums for C++, PHP, Ruby etc.

2. If you’ve ever wanted to vent your spleen at Adobe, you can do so through the Dear Adobe site. It’s not run by them, but apparently they are paying attention to what’s being said. You can also pick your product when doing so; for some reason Coldfusion is not listed in the ‘Primary apps’ list, but in a list of some secondary applications. Not sure how they chose which applications were primary.