Chaos'n'Coffee » asides

Italian newspaper apologizes for missing links to UGC source (yay!)

bru — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:57:49 +0000

In this post on the newspaper blog, Marco Pratellesi, chief editor at Corriere della Sera, apologizes for having published the gallery of the mysterious digital artist Paulthewineguy without link nor references. Babysteps, yet steps they are.

How to loose a game user

bru — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:29:47 +0000

From Tateru Nino’s blog:

Sorry, Portal. For nearly a half hour, you asked for wit and ingenuity. Then right near the end you started asking for reflexes. Sorry, I don’t actually have any of those.

Guess I won’t be able to finish the story. A shame.

Switching metaphor or required skillset half-way through a game (or story, or application, or whatever media experience imho) seems like an excellent way to loose audience.

An Italian tumble/side/bookmark-log

bru — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:36:34 +0000

Just to start the new year diverging from my resolutions, I started playing a bit more with my tumble log. It’s (mainly) in Italian, and it’s turning out to have a good affordance for being an “inspiration” dump. Which is quite in conflict with how I mainly used this blog so far. Blimey.

So this is my current knowledge toolscape:

how broadband can help save the planet

bru — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:11:00 +0000

Just a link to this article by Emily in SmartMobs that reports a study about how broadband access could spare the planet 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases.

How would faster downloads and Web page loads curb the annual flow of globe-warming gases, and by how much? According to the report:

– Telecommuting, a “zero emission” practice, eliminates office space and car commutes: 588 million tons.
– E-commerce cuts the need for warehouses and long-distance shipping: 206 million tons.
– Widespread teleconferencing could bring one-tenth of all flights to a halt: 200 million tons.
– Downloading music, movies, newspapers, and books saves packaging, paper, and shipping: 67 million tons.

Blinking in the fog

bru — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:54:06 +0000

a bit disappointed for not being in Berlin, but a bit relieved for being here too.
My Italian holidays are almost over, tomorrow I’ll fly back to London. My hometown this morning is already cloaked in mist, like it was forecasting in numb anticipation.

I spent so little time clackering these days, I feel a bit detox’d and a bit out of spin. Probably would be a good idea to try to get back on “track” in the next few days, maybe with one of the thousands of pet vaporware waiting in the dusty pages of wikis, google docs and email drafts.
Maybe the social news reading one.

But now it’s time for a shower and one more walk.

privacy: oh-so 20th century

bru — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:21:32 +0000

from SmartMobs:

Part of the unease arises from the growing realisation that the legal foundation of privacy law is being rendered increasingly irrelevant.

Ok, I’m not alone. And yes, mine was the “roughandnotpoliticallyscorrect” version.

iAble video out in the wild :)

bru — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:56:25 +0000

Good old Babele posted a video (in Italian) of the iAble, the office suite totally controlled through eye tracking developed at SRLabs (the last Italian company I worked with before moving to the UK).

…with too much energy in their hands

bru — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:50:13 +0000

Hat tip: Attivissimo

When Google doesn’t play nice

bru — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 09:45:07 +0000

While helping out $prettybigUKnanopublisher in optimizing their visibility, I came across these odd guidelines for Google News:

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.
[...]
If the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it.

Now, this is weird and quite evil.

CnC is now jQuery powered

bru — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:07:37 +0000

Thanks for revamped work by Michael and the rest of the K2 theme team, finally this website too enjoys the bliss of the jQuery library for all interface sugar (namely search and interactive archive navigation). Thank you!