Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave a talk on Django at Google for BayPIGgies.

By asymetrical subscribe/unsubscribe I mean a web service that has one way for subscribing and another for unsubscribing. Typically subscribing is easy - you input your credit card details on a web form and you’re done. If you can subscribe via a web page you should be able to unsubscribe via another web page. But a few online services make it very hard to unsubscribe - I think for obvious reasons. This only serves to annoy users even more - hence making it unlikely a user will ever re-subscribe. 

Now, if you have a field in a form that only accepts certain values don’t you think that it would be a good idea to tell the users of the form what those values are before they’ve filled them in? I am sick of the “invalid email” error after a form has been submitted. Why is so hard to indicate what valid values are beside the field? Or why can’t this be validated in JavaScript? It’s simply a lack of thought by the page designer/programmer.

Guy Kawasaki’s latest top ten list is for engineers. Ouch! 

The Economist has a survey on “New Media” Where have I heard that term before?

Lots of buzz and fuss on the net generated from this article by Barry Fox on Philips’ patent application to disable the TV remote control via flags in the broadcast stream. Good ol’ Bazza. If you’ve got a DVD player you’ve probably already experienced this. Try fast-forwarding through the copyright notice that plays when the DVD is inserted. On lots of discs you can’t. This is part of the DVD spec. - the disc tells the player to ignore the FFwd command. Of course, the player can ignore the request - just as some players ignore…

Here’s a video of Steve Jobs telling the Cupertino Council that Apple is building a new campus. He also tells them that Apple is their biggest tax payer and they should be happy that Apple is staying in Cupers. Oh, the star struck awkard grins on the councils faces. Apparently the proximity of Apple is not enough for the council to use QuickTime as their streaming video format - the council is using Windoze Media. Now that’s just not cricket.

David Weiss has a very interesting tour of Microsoft’s Mac Labs.

This weblog is (currently) running ExpressionEngine. I just had a bizarre problem: when I went to the home page it was only displaying a message saying “Invalid URI” Sometimes it would load part of the page though without the css. An intermittent problem - the hardest to track down. I searched around the forums and the net for why this could be - found nothing. Nothing changed as far as I know so it was a bit odd. There was also nothing obviously wrong in the logs. I fixed it by restarting Apache and MySQL - maybe only one of…

China Unicom is launching a mobile email service called Redberry.