Posts tagged with "<rant>"

Films and TV need money to cover their extravagant budgets but is product placement the right way to cover those funds? Warning: media/bandwidth-heavy post.

Posted by Oli 36 days ago in sony, film & <rant>. Continue reading »

Then please read this before you do. English is a seriously complex language, something too many of us take for granted. While modern browsers can help us with our spelling, they do little for grammar. Read this post to boost your grammatical karma and avoid my wrath.

Posted by Oli 3 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

Many aeons ago, digg added a social aspect to their news site: friends. Hailing it as a new way to find news at a more personal level, it was seen as a good way to follow your favourite diggers. Now there's a new game for would-be spammers: add whoever you can and shout your crappy submissions at them.

Posted by Oli 5 months ago in digg & <rant>. Continue reading »

Last year while moving to Linux, one of my 300gig disks from the just-broken-up RAID5 array decided it was time to call it a day and died. It's within warranty but that doesn't mean that much when the support is run by Seagate.

Posted by Oli 6 months ago in hd, rma & <rant>. Continue reading »

Zookoda, the RSS to email republishers have been spamming me since a newsletter I was subscribed to closed down. I've complained several times yet the junk keeps coming. Not on my watch.

Posted by Oli 6 months ago in email & <rant>. Continue reading »

In light of some of the feedback surrounding my last post, I address the core problem I see with good causes like FreeRice, namely that they don't do nearly as much good as they could and probably harm other charitable causes.

Posted by Oli 8 months ago in charity & <rant>. Continue reading »

FreeRice.com is a site that tries to educate and feed the world at the same time, but just taking a quick look at their figures shows there is a massive potential of earning money from this "philanthropic" gesture. Just how much is the owner keeping?

Posted by Oli 8 months ago in charity & <rant>. Continue reading »

If something adverse can happen, chances are it will, just to spite you. I've just had my first hard drive crash in years and it waited until just after I dismantled my RAID5 array. Just perfect. Strong and colourful language in this post.

Posted by Oli 9 months ago in raid & <rant>. Continue reading »

They warned you but Apple decided to follow through and give those iPhone enthusiasts exactly what they wanted: shiny, bricked iPhones. Well done Apple. Way to meet the needs of your customers.

Posted by Oli 10 months ago in apple, iphone & <rant>. Continue reading »

Stats are a tricky thing. When you're trying to push an argument and you have raw statistics by your side, it's usually very easy to feed them to your audience in a fashion that misrepresents them. Using that as a base you can form conclusions varying from just misguided to outright lies...

Posted by Oli 10 months ago in statistics & <rant>. Continue reading »

Another day, another "unlimited" claim. This time from the mouth of O2's CEO regarding their new "unlimited" data plans. What he didn't tell people at the iPhone unveiling is that unlimited actually means just 35megs. Spot the difference.

Posted by Oli 10 months ago in o2 & <rant>. Continue reading »

Video: watch a simple download crash explorer over and over again. This really reminds me how feeble the underlying systems are in Windows.

Posted by Oli 11 months ago in windows, crash & <rant>. Continue reading »

While the internet continues to grow in both size and complexity, the speed that rural ADSL users are almost completely stagnant. Something needs to be done before the gap between urban and rural ADSL harms the online economy.

Posted by Oli 11 months ago in internet, iptv & <rant>. Continue reading »

I really wish that reporters would get their facts straight before they publish articles... Especially when the core idea behind the subject is my own little brainchild.

Posted by Oli 12 months ago in kittenauth & <rant>. Continue reading »

Dvorak is a complete nonce. I mean that in the kindest possible way because sometimes he's hilarious to listen ranting on and occasionally I happen to agree with him but now he's predicting the second downfall of the Internet...

Posted by Oli 12 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

After Apple introduces DRM-free tracks into iTunes people are getting in a hissy after they found out their personal information is injected into bought tracks

Posted by Oli 14 months ago in apple, drm & <rant>. Continue reading »

As a reviewer, I expect people to disagree with points I make. Everybody has their own opinion. But is it okay when the project leader of a maturing Linux distribution calls on his users to "hammer" a site because of its outcome?

Posted by Oli 14 months ago in linux & <rant>. Continue reading »

Oli gets mad as hackers converge on his server... But the problem is none of them have a brain cell between them. Sigh...

Posted by Oli 15 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

9rules has long been a community site that aggregates hand-picked blogs, representing some of the best content on the web. For a fairly long time, they've had public forums called Notes. Notes has traditionally been a place to talk about stuff and occasionally post links to other places

Posted by Oli 15 months ago in 9rules & <rant>. Continue reading »

I've made so many rants about using JavaScript correctly over the past couple of months that I'm starting to lose count! Now, I would seem quite pretentious if I expected every web designer on the Internet to have read them but I'm not the only person preaching that JS/CSS should be used

Posted by Oli 16 months ago in webdev, javascript & <rant>. Continue reading »

Hello. My name is Oli and I'm a Windows enthusiast. [image] The mere juxtaposition of "Windows" and a derivative of "enthusiasm" in the same sentence may seem perverse — bordering pornographic — to some people, but I'm proud of my computing

Posted by Oli 17 months ago in windows & <rant>. Continue reading »

Dear Browser Makers, I have been designing things on the Internet for close to the same amount of time that I've been using it. Something that seems to be taking up an increasing amount of time is making things look and work the same in every browser you case to churn out. Problems

Posted by Oli 17 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

In the war against terror piracy, various film producing bodies have cited several reasons why people shouldn't buy pirate movies and more recently, why they shouldn't download them. But when you look at these reasons, they start to fall apart. [image] A common reason

Posted by Oli 17 months ago in piracy & <rant>. Continue reading »

What I'm about to say will probably make some of the more hardcore Apple and Linux users cringe down to their bones but stick with me... I've got good reason: [image] Zombies That's it. One word. A zombie

Posted by Oli 17 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

When making a design these days, people are far too keen to plaster background images around without wondering what happens if the site cannot load the image for some reason. This is not normal behaviour but when did anything work as you wanted it 100% of the time? Some common reasons for

Posted by Oli 18 months ago in accessibility, webdev & <rant>. Continue reading »

Am I the only person when Government blunders into unfamiliar territory and starts trying to make waves? [image] The owner of the eyes, Home Secretary John Reid (terrible website, by the way), is

Posted by Oli 18 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

Reading some of the tripe that splats out of the Apple section of Digg, I got thinking that somebody (unknown) is testing out the Infinite

Posted by Oli 18 months ago in apple, digg & <rant>. Continue reading »

Locked in a room with the following three people who would you shoot if you had a gun with only two bullets in? A spammer making thousands getting that occasional click-through? A spyware writer? Hitler? There's a poll at the bottom but

Posted by Oli 18 months ago in poll & <rant>. Continue reading »

I've had two seventeen inch screens for a while now and they're really quite good for most desktop and gaming needs. The problem comes when you have a wide screen video, which accounts for most of them these days. You either lose all the height or you split it across the displays (using VLC

Posted by Oli 19 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

Most people that know me would never expect to see a pro-Apple post on this site but having seen both the "keynotes" from the big camps, with a little reflection and having read an internal Microsoft email from

Posted by Oli 19 months ago in apple, microsoft & <rant>. Continue reading »

I know it's a little late in the year for airing resolutions but too many of those seem to be prohibitive so it seems fitting that a week and a half after New Year's Day, when most people have given up with their silly "I'm never going to again"

Posted by Oli 19 months ago in 2007, crusade, quest & <rant>. Continue reading »

The other day, Seopher had a post on how the internet is like the universe and in my comment I got caught up in just how much content there is rolling out and how we're unequipped to consume it all.

Posted by Oli 19 months ago in future, hci, zombies & <rant>. Continue reading »

I didn't really. I listened to Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt about 100 times and through the power of YouTube I can share this with the rest of you.

Posted by Oli 19 months ago in music, video & <rant>. Continue reading »

Aren't cameras awesome. More specifically, digital cameras. I've been playing with my Fujifilm Finepix s5600 lots recently and alongside learning how to do decent exposures and bracketing (for HDR imaging), I've started to use Photoshop for it's real purpose on this world... Photo editing. [image]

Posted by Oli 19 months ago in photos, photoshop & <rant>. Continue reading »

I've been making web pages long enough to notice the massive changes that have happened over the last 5 years in web designers' approaches to web design and how we use browser functionality to aide our efforts to deliver both working and aesthetically pleasing sites. We've been progressing

Posted by Oli 19 months ago in webdev & <rant>. Continue reading »

When reading through blogs, "via" is something you will often see. It's a method of referencing that gives a way of shifting liability onto the original source in case the company the post is about decide they don't like it. The problem is, if you're blogging something that you've

Posted by Oli 20 months ago in <rant>. Continue reading »

Warning: This post contains a high level of truth about the PS3. Sony fans be advised. [image] Before I get into this too much, it looks quite obvious which side of the fence I'm on but you're wrong... ish.

Posted by Oli 20 months ago in sony, ps3, pr & <rant>. Continue reading »

This thread is really going to bite me in the arse one day, but this needs to be said: advertisers should not be allowed to use breasts to sell things (unless its directly related; eg: bras). Take this fine example. [image] You're just looking through a site and suddenly you're waylaid

Posted by Oli 21 months ago in advertising, internet & <rant>. Continue reading »

[image] I have no problem with patching in general. It's a very good thing for companies to improve their products for the people that have already bought them. My "beef" starts when you buy a game the day it's released and you run the updater to find a whopping great big 82meg patchfile

Posted by Oli 21 months ago in nwn2, patches, games & <rant>. Continue reading »

Let me just qualify "consumer" as home user with mild-fair Windows knowledge. Not sysadmins that know everything inside-out, back-to-front, etc. Oh my god. I go through two cycles with my gradual migration towards Linux: Virtualisation of the latest builds

Posted by Oli 21 months ago in ubuntu, linux, windows & <rant>. Continue reading »

With so attention being made of Web 2.0 and it looking like there's going to be more than enough attention for Web 3.0 considering they've already started thrashing out the idea for it (even

Posted by Oli 21 months ago in web 2.0 & <rant>. Continue reading »

I've just started work in a WebDev thread on Experts Exchange over the importance of using WebSafe colours. If you haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, the WebSafe colour palette was designed as a standard

Posted by Oli 21 months ago in webdev, websafe & <rant>. Continue reading »

There's nothing original about any of this. My good friend Steve of Seopher.com started his rant-acuo-us section, ranting about all the little things that manage to piss him off in

Posted by Oli 22 months ago in news, hardware & <rant>. Continue reading »