Google’s New Seach Suggestions Is Really Annoying and Not Blind Friendly

Google’s search has this new drop down search suggestions box at their site. It’s very annoying because it intercepts the key presses on my keyboard. I’m a keyboard person, using Opera. I often use Opera’s Shift+Arrow keys to move up and down the search list and then hit the ENTER key to select the item on the search results to go to that site. With Google’s search suggestions javascript intercepting my keystrokes, the ENTER key no longer works.

Even though I search from Opera’s search toolbar, the suggestions JS still comes back to bite me, because I can’t actually get to the page linked from the results. Not unless I use the mouse anyway. What happens to blind people who are totally reliant on the keyboard?

It’s very irritating. I initially disabled JavaScript for Google at first, since Opera makes it easy to disable JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. Then I found that I couldn’t log into my Google Accounts because the latter uses JavaScript (how stupid).

I can’t stand this new seach suggestion thingy. Please get rid of it.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Web Design.

Favicon on WordPress.com

I wonder whether there’s a way to set a favicon on a blog on WordPress.com the way you can on normal websites, like this article on favicons says.

I tried looking into the Media section, but it’s just a list of pictures I’ve attached to posts or my banner. I’m not sure if I’m looking in the right place though. Or whether such an option is even available.

Filed in WordPress, Web Design.

Microsoft Office 2007 SP2: So Much for ODF Compatibility

Rob Weir did some tests of the new Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, which is supposed to provide support for the Open Document Format, ODF, out of the box. From his tests of an ODF spreadsheet, ODF files created by Office 2007 SP2 can be interpreted only by Office 2007 SP2 and no other application that supports ODF. And Office 2007 SP2 cannot read/interpret ODF files created by any other application. And we’re talking about a large number of applications here: OpenOffice, Google Docs, KSpread, IBM Symphony, Sun’s ODF Plugin, and the CleverAge ODF plugin.

Interestingly, all the other applications are able to create ODF spreadsheets that are readable by each other, except in the case of the old version of KSpread, which the reviewer used for reasons given in the article. So it’s not the case that the ODF format does not give enough details for spreadsheet formulas to be properly interpreted. Everybody else managed to implement it correctly.

Is this a case of Microsoft paying lip service to standards, so that they can gain inroads into governments’ procurement systems that demand open standard document support? If so, it means that they think all government officials are suckers and idiots.

If that’s not the case, then you’ll have to blame the Microsoft developers: are they so imcompetent that they cannot implement an open standard when everyone else and their grandmother has implemented it correctly? And it’s not as though they cannot see how the others have implemented it: OpenOffice is open source after all. Perhaps they will say ODF is not clear where spreadsheet formulas are concerned. Then how is it every other application is able to implement it correctly?

Filed in Outraged, Opinon, News, Software, Windows.

Hilarious April Fools’ Day Jokes 2009

As usual, there are lots of interesting April Fools’ Day jokes around. Here are 3 that I found amusing.

• The UK newspaper, Guardian, is about to switch completely to using Twitter for news and are even in the process of converting its old news archives, dating back to 1821. Old articles that have been converted include: “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more” and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”. This is the best joke I’ve heard this year.
• Google now allows you to search your brain. You are, however, requested not to use Brain Search on others without their permission.
• In a shocking development, Warner Bros acquires The Pirate Bay. It was the only way they could deal with the dismal showing of the prosecution against the Pirate Bay in the ongoing trial.

Somehow, I found Google’s joke this year to be less funny than previous years, including last years’ search the future joke. Maybe it’s getting old.

Update: Another good one is Opera’s Face Gestures.

Filed in Humor.

Why Does WordPress Insert Its Version Number into HEAD?

I just noticed from my other blog that uses the downloadable version of WordPress that it inserts the wordpress version number into the HEAD of the blog pages. Why does it do that? Leaking this information in this day and age only lets hackers know that a particular blog is vulnerable, if it hasn’t been updated yet.

It’s interesting that blogs on wordpress.com do not have the version number inserted into the HEAD. So why the hypocrisy?

Filed in WordPress, Security.

Microsoft.com is Not Compatible with IE8 Standards View

I got a good kick over this: Microsoft.com is on the list of sites that is incompatible with IE8’s standards view. As mentioned there, the list can be obtained by typing res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml in IE8’s address bar.

Filed in Browsers, Web Design, Software.

Can You Spot the Trick? It’s Not What You Think…

How observant are you? Take a look at this Color Changing Card Trick. Can you spot the trick? Well, it’s not what you think…

Professor Wiseman has a few other interesting videos at YouTube, as well as a website called Quirkology that deals with these quirks of psychology. It’s worth checking out.

Filed in Entertainment, Humor, Science, Video.

Move Over Photoshop: Using MS Paint to Draw Mona Lisa

This video is absolutely amazing. This guy/gal used the boring old Microsoft Paint found in every Windows machine to paint a fascimile of Mona Lisa. And it really looks good!

From Youtube.

Filed in Video, Entertainment.

Careless Talk Costs Lives

The “careless talk costs lives” cliche from Hollywood movies may not be true in real life, as opposed to reel life, but such talk does have a price tag.

I realized that my own careless talk has brought about a big problem for someone dear to me. She confided in me, and I confided in a family member. That family member inadvertantly leaked the information. And now the person who shared to me faces big problems.

Even though that family member broke my confidence, the fault does not lie with that person. It lies with me. The confidence was not mine to share in the first place. The second party who hears that information does not have the relationship of trust with the original party. When I shared the information, I have in effect already broken the confidence.

I guess I’m not saying anything that makes sense, since I’m not revealing any details to help it make sense. But this breach of confidence is weighing heavily on me, and I can’t get in touch with the person whom I broke confidence with to apologize.

Unfortunately, there’s no catharsis in writing either.

Filed in: Personal.

Google’s Greatest Fear and Archilles’ Heel: New Developments

Google’s archilles’ heel is its dependence on links to indicate authority of a website. Which is why it makes so much noise about paid links, whereas the other search engines don’t really care.

The newest fracas came about as a result of the formation of a new company that promises to connect link buyers with link sellers. Predictably, this brought out Matt Cutts, Google’s part time mouthpiece and full time web spam engineer, who denounced the practice as illegal or some such thing. In response, others like Jeremy Schoemaker, of Shoemoney fame, called out Google’s hypocrisy in the whole thing. It’s illegal when others do it, but when Google does it, and it still does it till this day, it’s not illegal.

I think everyone knows that Google is no longer the company it set out to be a few years ago. There is widespread sentiment that it’s now a monopoly abusing its power and engaging in the same bullying tactics we saw from Microsoft in its heyday.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Web Design, Advertising.

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 Released: Very Promising

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 has been released, with a Release Candidate probably due on Nov 10 and a final by the end of the month. This new version is very promising, and is much more usable than the older one. I read their previous blog entries about how they got some usability testing done. I can’t wait for it!

Filed in WordPress, Web Design.

Monopolies: The Google Abuse of Power

Blogoscoped is on the rampage to expose a couple of what they regard as Google’s unfair practices as a monopoly:

• Google Uses Public Service Ads to Link to Own Election Page – where Google uses other websites’ advertising space to advertise its election biases without paying them. They abuse a feature designed for other purposes to this end.
• Another one where Google gets webmasters to treat Google specially while hypocritically saying that webmasters are to treat all visitors and bots the same.

They are not the first to try to expose Google’s hypocrisies. There are other examples having to do with how Google favors big companies by allowing them to spam the search engine index but penalizes small websites.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Advertising, Web Design.

The Return of the Crash-Prone Opera: 9.6

Opera 9.6 is even more crash prone as its previous version 9.52, if that’s possible. It even twice froze my machine solid. I had to power down to solve it.

I wish the Opera developers will fix their unstable browser. I was on the verge of switching to Firefox back when I was using 9.50 and 9.51. I hope that I won’t have to spend half my surfing time in Firefox again.

Hmm… I wonder if there’s a Firefox add-on so that I can configure the keyboard in Firefox.

Filed in Software, Browsers.

It’s Official: Next Version of Windows to be Called Windows 7

It’s official. Microsoft has announced that the next version of Windows, currently codenamed ‘Windows 7’, is to be named… wait for it, drums roll… ‘Windows 7’.

Hopefully it will be a much better OS than the disaster known as Vista. I think Vista has eclipse the horrors of Windows ME in my mind.

My other posts on Vista:

• Vista’s DRM Blocks Popular Shows: More Reasons to Hate Vista
• Tekzilla Pans Vista too
• Vista’s Problems are not Exaggerated
• Vista SP 1 cannot be Slipstreamed
• Microsoft: Vista is a Disaster – Microsoft Internal Emails Dissected
• Reports Say Vista SP 1 is Still 40% Slower Than XP
• Vista SP 1 for MSDN and Technet Subscribers OutCry
• The Missing Up Arrow in Vista’s Explorer
• Vista File Copy Performance: Relearning the Same Lessons Learnt Yesterday
• Vista’s Attempt at a Comeback

Filed in Windows, News.

Why is My WordPress.com Exported Posts XML Smaller?

I just added a new post to my blog, and exported the posts as usual for backup on my computer. And I noticed that the new export was about 300 kb smaller than my previous export, which is supposed to contain fewer posts. Why? I didn’t prune any comments or delete any spam or edit any other posts.

Did WordPress.com delete something from my export file? Why is it smaller when it should be bigger? Is there a bug somewhere?

Filed in WordPress.