Oh all right then, I'll blog, if you insist. Things to check out today: Those clever people at...

Oh all right then, I'll blog, if you insist. Things to check out today:
  • Those clever people at Infogrames (makers of... er, not nearly as many games as I thought) have come up with Monopoly Tycoon, allegedly a sort of cross between SimCity and Monopoly that I am in no way utilizing quasi-legal file-sharing technology to download ASAP.
  • The FDA has licensed an HIV test which gives results in 20 minutes. Why hasn't this been more widely reported?
  • I have been doing big, overcrowded busloads of research into various web standards, including RDF (too theoretical), XHTML 2.0 (way cool), XFrames (dumb! very dumb!), XForms (exceedingly clever), XSL (complicated) and XML namespaces (necessary, but I have doubts about the implementation). This all being background reading for my excessively ambitious third-year project, Web2.
  • If you set up Internet Explorer to use a proxy server that doesn't exist, you can stop KaZaA's popups without breaking KaZaA. This of course breaks Internet Explorer for you as well, but since you should be using Phoenix anyway, this isn't really a problem. Better still, if the proxy exists but requires authentication (you could set up your own on your own machine without much trouble), then you can give permission to yourself, but not to KaZaA. Which is nice.
  • Your true fact to keep you awake at nights for this week is the news that the earth's magnetic poles are about to flip, temporarily destroying our magnetosphere. That doesn't sound very scary until you remember that said magnetosphere is the only thing standing between us and death by radiation from the Sun. But with any luck, this will just cancel out the also-impending ice age, and no-one will notice. It's pretty clear that scientists are just making this stuff up anyway.
  • The WayPath Project is an attempt to group together weblogs by their content. It's interesting, but I'm not really sure how effective it is.
  • The very amusing Orisinal.Com gives us Bubble Bees, one of the most entertaining Flash-based games I've ever played.
  • A really large study has revealed how people evaluate a website's credibility. Hint: online, just like real life, people are shallow. How much did it cost to find that out, guys?
  • A bunch of stuff on my favourite subject, user interfaces. Firstly, Matthew Thomas points out some stupid interface design that has been with us so long that we don't notice it anymore (did you know that you can right-click-and-drag in Windows, and that it does something completely different to left-click-and-drag?). This led me to the User Interface Hall of Shame. Guess how many Microsoft products turn up?
  • Microsoft has finally noticed that slagging off Linux isn't working
  • If you live in the US, you probably pay for more cable channels than you want. And that can be fixed.
  • A somewhat strangely-prioritized list of 101 Things Mozilla can do that MSIE can't. Do we really want to take credit for supporting the BLINK tag?
  • I went back to the dentist again, and now am back on antibiotics. These ones are way more powerful, and make me feel ill. Yuck.
  • I may apply to do a master's in Informatics at Edinburgh. If I ever stop blogging, that is. There are a bunch of people who might be suitable tutors for me there.
    Woah, marathon! I'll stop now.
    Update 10.57pm: Somebody has just pointed out that the writer of the HIV test article is called Sheryl Gay Stolberg. Hur hur hur.
    Update 11.55pm: (I should be doing my French homework) And now, I am proud to present the winner of the award for taking blogging way too seriously. Since when did something as easy as recording your thoughts every day get to be considered a major cultural event?