Wednesday, February 7th, 2001
CNET documents the annoying trend employed by low-rent websites: spawning new windows when you try to exit. The new windows contain all manner of advertisements, inducements, and crap you are certain to have no interest in.
I’m told porn sites have been doing this for years. I have no direct experience with this, of course.
One workaround is to surf with JavaScript disabled in your browser. This is not a great solution, though, because too many sites rely on JavaScript for basic site navigation.
As I mulled this over, I saw a potential solution.
First, the technical background… The annoying window-spawning behavior is enabled by an event handler called onunload, part of the JavaScript/ECMAScript language. Any JavaScript statements that appear in the onUnload attribute of an HTML document’s <BODY> or <FRAMESET> tags will be executed when the document is “unloaded” — when the browser window is closed, or when the user follows a link to another page. (Experiment here.)
And now, the solution: browser makers should give users a way to suppress this handler. For example, perhaps by pressing a key on the keyboard while closing the window, the browser can be instructed to ignore any onUnload calls. Or there could be a preference setting. There is a precedent for this: page authors can control whether links open in a new window, or target a specific frame, by giving a TARGET attribute to the <A> tag — and yet the user can override this through a variety of keyboard shortcuts or menu selections, e.g. “open this link in a new window” or cmd-click (on MacOS).
There are multiple benefits: less Internet congestion, fewer browser crashes, less disk space wasted by unwanted browser cache files, less meaningless traffic logged by advertisers, higher clickthrough rates on advertising, and overall less-annoying user experience (not that any of the advertisers seem to care about that one).
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posted to channel: Web
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
Tuesday, February 6th, 2001
Last week I had occasion to arrange rendezvous with a number of people I had never previously met. The challenge was to establish a rule for identifying one another without undue stumbling around. It is my opinion that the maximum number of false-positives a reasonable person (such as myself) can tolerate is 1 — and personal comfort requires that the potential for false positives is reduced to near zero.
And yet, how can people identify themselves by description? Think it through… Chances are, the one identifying feature that an unknown party is certain to recognize from 30 feet away is the characteristic you are least likely to call attention to. “I have, ahh, a receding hairline and a huge nose”, I might have said, or “I recently set fire to my eyebrows, so I’ll be the guy with bloodied bandages wrapped around his face.”
All the superficial things polite people are not supposed to notice are precisely the stuff of first impressions. They are, I regret to say, the most certain way to identify an unknown person in an unfamiliar setting. “I can tell from the missing front teeth and the apparent colostomy bag that you are the person I am supposed to meet.”
I was tempted to inject some levity into the process — to tell the people I was arranging to meet “I’ll be the guy in bad sunglasses,” and then show up in an Oakley Overthetop headset, or to say “I’ll have a dark blue suit on,” and wear the suit, but also wear a codpiece the size of a casaba melon. Imagine what would be going through the other guy’s mind: “That must be the guy… Wait, what the hell is that thing on his crotch? Yeesh, tell me this is not the guy..!”
And yet, I did manage to meet a number of parties with minimal confusion. Nobody had to admit to debilitating facial tics, bloating, recent constipation, maxillofacial surgery gone awry, etc. At no point did I and any of my rendezvous mates sit for 20 minutes fifteen feet apart wondering if the other guy is the guy we’ve been waiting for. And at no point did I inadvertently meet someone other than the person for whom I was looking, only to find out later that I’d just spent a half hour with some totally random person who vaguely matched the description I’d been given.
Still, there was always that moment of uncertainty… the moment just after eye contact, when you’re either about to extend hands in greeting, or turn away quickly before the other party wonders if you’re just some loon staring at people as a precursor to a religious or political diatribe or, worse, a sales pitch.
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posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
Thursday, February 1st, 2001
Constantly exploring career alternatives, I have baked 4 batches of bagels this month. Here are a few bagel-making tips.
- it is not necessary to boil bagels prior to baking. But if you don’t, your bagels will suck, and people will laugh at you.
- when overnighting shaped bagels, packing them in edge-to-edge on a sheet pan results (the next morning) in a single coagulated 12x17-inch matrix of perforated dough, not unlike those plastic 6-pack holders (except much larger, and not made of petroleum products).
- shaped raw dough cannot be easily removed from parchment paper. Such bagels need to be peeled off the paper, which stretches the bagel shape into a flaccid loop about seven inches across. Once again: people will laugh at you.
I, of course, didn’t make any of these mistakes. I point them out merely as a public service.
Peter Reinhart’s sourdough bagel recipe (from Crust & Crumb) is excellent, and provides a great base for a variety of bagel types: pumpkin seed, sesame seed, cinnamon, chocolate, whitefish, WD-40, or iron filings.
(OK, just kidding about the whitefish.)
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posted to channel: Bread
updated: 2005-03-01 13:58:18
Wednesday, January 31st, 2001
This book was intended to provide a snapshot of life in Silicon Valley in the last third of the 1990’s. Po Bronson, a contributing editor for Wired Magazine, is as close to the “inside” as someone can get in Silicon Valley, a place characteristic for not having an “inside,” or as Po points out, even a “there.”
The book tells the stories of a handful of people and companies — from immigrants living on time borrowed from the INS, trying to build an enterprise as quickly as they can, to successful companies on the day of their IPO. Bronson absolutely captures the flavor of the dot-com craze.
Especially intriguing are the stories of Sabeer Bhatia (founder of Hotmail) and Danny Hillis (of the Long Now Foundation and its 10,000-year clock), as well as anecdotes about programmers and salespeople. Bronson captures some outrageous, hilarious dialog, and his retelling of stories makes this book a must-read.
It’s easy to get a preview; the book was excerpted in Wired as well as Salon. Further, some of Bronson’s other articles in Wired seem to have originated with the same notes and interviews that led to this book. For example, see his profiles of Sabeer Bhatia and Danny Hillis.
The saturation-level press received by the book is typical of anything having to do with Silicon Valley in 1998-1999. Since early March of 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, there’s been no way to know where this industry is headed. Whether it recovers or not, though, this book will always remind me of the insanity that was rampant in the industry for so long.
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Non-Fiction
updated: 2004-04-19 02:17:27
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I’ve just confirmed that spammers troll ebay to collect email addresses. The message below was sent to an address that I’ve only ever used on ebay.com.
Reply-To: m0056@switchboardmail.com From: @hotbot.com Subject: How Would You Like.................................... To: hoover@decaturnet.com Bill Problems? What Is Your Next Move? Debt Consolidation! ... [typical e-crap deleted]
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posted to channel: Privacy
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
