Month: July 2016

Election. Yeah, right!

This Google blog post titled “A voice for everyone in 2016” made me chuckle:

Every election matters and every vote counts. The American democracy relies on everyone’s participation in the political process. This November, Americans all across the country will line up at the polls to cast their ballots for the President of the United States.

It sounds like a true effort to make things better and enhance democracy and what not.  But in practice, is it really an election? One by one, the candidates are falling of the ballot.  Day by day it becomes more obvious that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the USA.

The more tools and technologies we have to enhance our lives, the worst the content on which we can apply those tools becomes.  The better the home cinemas became, the worse the movies got.  The better audio systems we have, the worse the music gets.  And politics just follow the same trend, unfortunately.

Emails, WordPress, and lots of Archives

I’ve been running this blog for a very long time now.  The Archives page links back to all the months and years (all the way to the first post back on October 21, 2001) of all kinds of posts – random rants, movie reviews, technical posts, and day summaries.  But who does read the archives ever, right?

Well, if you are running a WordPress site with lots of content, and you want to rediscover some of your old gems, there is an excellent plugin that helps with that – “This Day in History“.  I have a widget, powered by that very plugin, both on the front page of the site (showing posts from the same day in previous years), and on every post page (showing posts from the same day of the post in different years).

Today I found this short post about email and Microsoft Outlook:

There was a time, when I used to love email.  I loved receiving email, and reading it.  Replying to email.  Or just writing up some new email.  Occasionally, forward email.  I loved searching through email.  Or categorizing it.  Or archiving email.  I loved quoting email.  And I loved email with attachments.  But now, I pretty much hate all of that.  Thank you, MS Outlook.

Which made me think of the IT Crowd TV series, the very first episode of the very first season, where Jen was going through the interview:

I’ve always been a big fan of IT Crowd, in particular for its accurate take on the corporate culture.  Obviously, I thought of myself more like the Roy character, not Jen:

Given that the post was written in 2012, and this episode came out in 2006, I was probably mocking it, but I don’t remember for sure. Anyways, it’s fun.

Oh, and by the way, if you were wondering what’s a better email client, here is the post just for you.

Facebook security policies – WTF?

For a while now, whenever I post a new blog post to this site, and try to propagate it to my social network accounts, I get an error from Facebook – something about security and content policies this or that:

Social Facebook

The automation broke a few month ago, but I never cared enough to do much about it.  From then on, I don’t push all the posts to Facebook automatically, but a select few, with manual posting of the links.

Today, even the manual posting broke.  I got this:

Facebook error

OK, I thought.  Weird, but this happens.  Gladly, the error message contains the link to let Facebook know about the problem.  And so I do.  Just to get to this point:

Facebook other error

Now that’s not good.  But then again what can I do? I guess it’s a good thing I still own all of my content and have my own place to publish it at.

Hopefully, this will get resolved all by itself soon.  Or people will have only kitten pictures to look at…

CySEC copy-paste logo design continues

A while back I blogged about Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission website using a copy-paste design of the logo from the United States Department of Health and Human Services.  Since then, CySEC website got a new look and feel, as well as a new logo.  Well, it looks like they haven’t really solved the problem of the copy-paste.  Have a look yourself.  Here’s the updated CySEC logo from their current website:

CySec logo

And here is the logo from the Money Project:

Money Project logo

Arguably, not exactly a copy-paste like before, but way too similar not to fall into the plagiarism, which is just a fancy word for the copy-paste.

Web Development With Assembly

The other day I was joking with a colleague of mine about how much fun it would be to do the web development in Assembly.  All the usual stuff – pages would be super fast, and the whole subject makes it for some fun interview material, as the candidates mention Assembly pretty much on every CV.

WebDev with Assembly

And then I decided to do a quick Google search.  To my (not so great) surprise I got to hilarious this Reddit thread, which, among other things, links to MiniMagAsm, a web development framework written in Assembly.  It compiles into a native binary and can be executed as a CGI script.

I’m not going to use it any time soon, but I think it’s super cool, and way more than a simple “hello world” page that I was expecting to find.