Internet

Visagetome Gets a Makeover

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

When I logged into Facebook this morning I was greeted with a message asking if I spoke English and, if so, whether I would like to help with a project to translate the site into that language.

No, they were not trying to fix their grammar, or get rid of txting spellings, they wanted to translate the site from American to British, for the benefit of us poor Brits who can’t understand it when people talk foreign.

I wasn’t tempted, and that’s just as well because I have just begun reading George Mann’s jolly Victorian steampunk romp, The Affinity Bridge, and I would be sorely tempted to translate aspects of Facebook into an English that was not only correctly British in nature, but which was of an entirely polite and appropriate nature as befits interactions between Persons of Quality.

Dear Sir or Madam, I would be most delighted if you would do me the signal honour of allowing me to count you amongst my acknowledged social acquaintances…”

Yer, or Oi cud ‘ave writtun zum ov it in Mummerzet.

Silly People

~ Cheryl

For the first time ever I have had to blacklist a comment spammer because he was a persistent idiot who kept hitting me with junk despite the fact that none of it ever made its way through the filters; and of course because he was daft enough to always post through the same IP address. Sigh.

For those of you who are wondering, the IP address was in China.

Spam of the Year

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I don’t remember getting one of these myself, but it may have got lost in the flood. Ellen Kushner, however, has highlighted it:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

And so on. Hilarious.

The Perils of False Assumptions

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Last week I posted about Facebook’s odd idea that you are only supposed to Friend people you actually know in real life. Well, that policy appears to have informed this piece of research, because it concludes that you can tell who is a narcissist by looking at their Facebook profile. Because, you see, narcissists have many shallow relationships and non-narcissists have small numbers of deep relationships. So, um, all the well-known authors on Facebook are narcissists then?

Back to Normal

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

One thing I could experiment with while my main laptop was busy doing work stuff was the wireless modem. I took the laptop offline, swapped the modems, and fired up the Asus. It found the Internet just fine. So I re-enabled wireless networking on the laptop, and lo, all is well. Conclusion: probably some incompatibility between the AVG firewall and the hardware firewall on the old modem. Normal service has been resumed. Don’t all boo at once.

Web Weirdness Update

~ Cheryl

The problem with Google that I reported yesterday is not (directly) Google’s fault, it is a firewall issue. If I disable my (AVG) firewall then it goes away.

Quite why this is happening is another matter. Firewalls can have this effect. There was a Windows update back in July that broke ZoneAlarm. This may be a similar issue. It only affects a handful of web sites that I have tried, but one of them is MLB.com so if this is a new problem I suspect we’ll be hearing a bit about it. OTOH, if it only affects people in the UK, or it is because my local system has got screwed up, than I’m on my own.

I think the next thing to try is uninstalling and re-installing AVG. Then maybe updating to 8.0, which is apparently free. But I can’t waste time doing that (or sorting out the wireless modem0 while I have urgent work projects to complete. In the meantime, if anyone else in the UK is having similar problems, let me know.

Which Country Am I In?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

It was raining in the Bay Area when I left. When I got to Heathrow the weather was like California only about 10 degrees colder. I am confused.

I had a really smooth trip. The flight went fine. Passport control and baggage claim were very smooth – the move to Terminal 1 seems to have been good for United from that point of view. And then I just walked on and off trains in sequence managing the whole journey back to Darkest Somerset in a little over 3 hours from touchdown.

Settling back in has not been so smooth. My wireless modem may have given up the ghost. Fortunately I have a (non-wireless) backup so I could still get online. I’m mostly caught up, but I can’t go through my blog feeds because Google’s UK site appears to be offline. I always log into google.com as a matter of course, but when I’m in the UK that automatically redirects to google.co.uk, and that site is down. Or at least I can’t get to it. Very odd.

Warhammer Goes Online

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The BBC Reports that Games Workshop is launching an online version of their Warhammer role-playing game that will compete with World of Warcraft. As a retired game designer, I took an interest in some of the things they were pushing as advantages of their system:

Ditched in WAR has been item damage which sees weapons and armour degrade in quality as they are used until they break. Also gone is the need to ghost run from a graveyard back to a corpse when a character is killed. From the start everyone also gets a bag big enough to hold all the loot they gather.

Well, it is a “fantasy” after all, so who cares if equipment never breaks and one small backpack can hold thousands of gold coins and several suits of magic armor without getting heavy, right?

Still, I did like what they said about providing an open gaming environment rather than creating an objective for playing that everyone has to aim for.

Meanwhile another BBC report reveals that computer gamers are actually fairly fit compared to the general population, but they are more prone to depression.

Facebook Mystery Solved?

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Via danah boyd, I may have a solution to why I am getting a lot of friend requests from people I have never heard of. Apparently there are Facebook games out there that encourage you to collect friends. Also I’m apparently contributing to a “problem” for Facebook by accepting friend requests from strangers. In danah’s list of friend collectors I guess I class as with “micro-celebrities who feel awkward saying no to fans,” except that I’m more of a nano-celebrity and I doubt that many of the people who have friended me would describe themselves as my “fans”. Besides, I see Facebook as a similar sort of animal to LiveJournal – it is an RSS reader for people who are scared of RSS readers. If that’s against the Facebook Terms of Service, I guess they’ll have to throw me off or something. I’m not going to turn down someone who wants to read my blog just because I have never met them. As danah says, once you have created a software system, it is very hard to control how people use it.

Truth in Translation

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Via The Economist I discover that, due to an unfortunate translation error, several restaurants in China are offering bemused diners “stir fried wikipedia”.

Apparently it should have been a sort of edible fungus. Possibly the confusion arose because in Wikipedia you can sometimes find a few delicious items in amongst a pile of shit, but you have to know what you are doing because it is really hard to tell the edible stuff from the poisonous varieties.

Fame at Last?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

For some reason friend requests are coming in to my Facebook account in a fairly steady stream, mainly from people whose names I don’t recognize. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe they are former Emerald City readers who are discovering that I’m still alive. Maybe they are from the legions of Doctor Who fans that Paul Cornell told to tune in to my Hugo ceremony live blog (thanks again Paul!). Or maybe they are people I have met at cons but can’t remember because I’m slipping into senile dementia. Whatever reason, if any of those people happen to be reading this, thank you very much, and welcome!

In an entirely unrelated development, this morning I noticed a blog post in which an angry Republican was listing those people whose books he or she would not buy because they were raving left wing loonies, and my name was on the list! If I can just manage to find a Democrat who is refusing to buy my books because I’m an evil capitalist monster I will know that I’ve made it. (And it will mean that I don’t have to write any books because no one will buy them.)

Learning Chrome

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have downloaded the new Google browser, Chrome, and have been testing it on the various web sites that I manage. So far all seems well, but some of the font rendering in Chrome seems distinctly inferior to that in Firefox. Compare this site with the two browsers to see what I mean. John Scalzi also rates Chrome as “meh”.

On the other hand, the advantages of Chrome are supposed to be under the hood, not technoflash. Tim Anderson has been peeking at memory usage and is favorably impressed.

I’m hoping that Chrome will prove more of a threat to IE than to Firefox. Because it comes from well known brand rather than an open source community (though it is actually open source itself) it may get past the Great Gods In White Coats who staff corporate IT departments, and get used in business as well as by home users. Also the morons who insist on coding web sites specifically for IE will find it harder to explain to even the dimmest pointy-haired boss why they should cut themselves off from Google users.

Yes, We Want Covers

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Over at Boing!Boing! Cory is being very sensible. It would indeed be very useful if publishers made JPGs of all of their book covers easily available on their web sites. Somehow, however, I doubt that it will happen. When I was doing Emerald City I spent a bit of time trying to get publishers to create RSS feeds of their forthcoming titles. Everyone I spoke to said that it was impossible because they couldn’t get their IT people to do anything.

Revolution Advances

~ Cheryl

Remember that new online money service that I blogged about a while back? Yep, Revolution, that’s them. Well they have just sent me a card. No, not a credit card solicitation. A debit card for use with my account. Clearly they have noticed that people online are not taking taking payment from them, so they have cut a deal with various retailers instead. One of them happens to be Barnes & Noble. And I have money in my account (mostly free money thanks to you folks signing up for accounts through me). Can you say “free books”?

Life Imitates Science Fiction

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Yesterday I blogged about Karen Traviss’s gloomy predictions for the future of journalism. Today the BBC reports on a new news aggregation site where users will be asked to vote on whether they believe the stories or not. Rory Cellan-Jones is nervous:

My worry is that sites like NewsCred will become playgrounds for lobby groups and obsessives on issues ranging from the Georgia conflict to the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Isn’t it likely that those with passionate views will rush to judge the credibility of news stories according to their own prejudices, while the rest of the internet population just won’t bother?

The comment thread on the post is quite interesting.

Surely Not

~ Cheryl

See on everyone’s favorite SF gossip site:

io9 is seeking two interns for fall. An intern works 10 hours per week doing research, fact-checking, and contacting sources in the science and entertainment industries for story ideas and information.

Emphasis added.

Whatever is the world coming to?

Nice Blog, Gordon

~ Cheryl

It seems that having a WordPress blog is becoming quite popular. Some chap from London called Gordon Brown has just launched one. He has named it after his house. Apparently he’s quite big in UK politics, which is odd because the site is full of stuff from YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Anyone would think that Tony Blair was still in charge (although he’d probably be using Facebook instread).