Just seen the Download Day 2008 site, which is an attempt to set a Guinness World Record on Firefox 3′s release day by counting the most number of downloads in 24 hours!
Go to the site, enter your email, and you’ll get a reminder on the day, asking you to download Firefox 3, making you a participant in setting a world record.
You’ll be getting good value out of your download — Firefox 3 is looking totally awesome, and is going to be a rock solid release.
Just for the record, purchasing games with Steam running on Wine + Linux works fine.
steam:// URLs that websites tend to use to launch the Steam purchasing app don’t work when you click on them in your browser, but if you change to your Steam directory and add the steam:// as a parameter to Steam.exe (you can find it in the HTML source of the web page), it works:
cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Valve/Steam wine Steam.exe steam://purchase/469
The above command will launch the purchasing dialog for the Orange Box — substitute the parameters as necessary. To prove it works, here’s a screenshot:
The Wine version I used was 1.0-rc1, running on Ubuntu 8.04 (amd64).
Wikipedia has realised it’s the 21st century, IE6 is no longer the most important browser in the world, and updated their logo to be an alpha-blended PNG, rather than the shaggy aliased monster they had before.
It seems like the de facto standard in the media, advertising, and in conversations, to leave out the http:// part of a URL when referring to a website.
For example, a truck doing grocery home delivery might have written on the side of it “Woolworths Home Shop — www.homeshop.com.au”. Or a radio announcer might say “For more information, go to abc.net.au/triplej.” (pronounced as ABC dot net dot AU slash triple J)
In both examples, they are actually ambiguous as to what they refer to. Okay, Woolworths has a domain name called “www.homeshop.com.au”. Water is wet.
Let me go to abc.net.au/triplej. Um, I just looked for it in my street directory, and there is no such suburb called abc.net.au/triplej.
Okay, I’m not that dumb. I know it’s got something to do with the computer, so I paste www.homeshop.com.au into my Gopher browser. What? Woolworths doesn’t support Gopher? Damn, you didn’t tell me that.
You should have told me you only work with HTTP in the first place. That’s why you need the http://. How should my computer know not to access it via FTP, Gopher, IRC, etc.?
I know my saying this is falling on deaf ears, but I wish people would print the http:// part of URLs more often. After all, it’s a Universal Resource Locator, and HTTP isn’t the only protocol in the universe.
I saw the following image on Google.com a couple of weeks ago:
I recognised it because I’d seen the real artwork not a week before at the Guggenheim Museum while in Spain. Strange coincidence. If you go to this image and look closely, you can see the artwork on the balcony to the right.
It’s a cool piece of art. It looks like a bunch of party balloons, all very light and bouncy. In reality, the artwork is made of steel, and weighs quite a few tons.
Copyright © 2010 by Jeremy Visser and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License unless otherwise noted.
