Google have extended their archive of Usenet postings back to 1981. Thus I have found evidence of myself posting during my summer placement at Hewlett-Packard in 1988, and as a graduate student (briefly) at the PRG (as it then was), and offering advice on HTML usage in February 1994 (before HTML was fashionable!). But that is probably enough ego frenzy for now.
I added a Google sitesearch box to
the front of this site. It has been interesting watching
www.alleged.org.uk infiltrate the Google
database—for a period of a few days, one Google search
would find this site, and the next would claim it didn’t
exist. My guess is that different subsets of Google’s
gigantic server farm have different databases, or something like
that.
Search boxes belong near the top right corner of web
pages—that’s where people look for them. To
accomodate this I rejigged the layout of the front page.
I would like to be able to boast it was all a simple case
of tweaking the CSS
code, but in practice I found it expedient to add two
div elements, surrounding the contents of the main
and side-bar sections of the page—before that each section
had its own div and that was all. Not sure if the
result is better or worse as far as structure goes!
I am still annoyed with Bjarne Stroustrup for naming his C-with-classes
C++ rather than D, P, C2, or Objectastic-C. It isn’t just that no-one
seems to have been able to decide whether C++ code files should be
called foo.cpp, foo.cxx, foo.cc, or foo.C, it is hard to
punctuate sentences mentioning it, and that you end up with names like
C++/CLI, and so on. What makes it worse is that it inspires people to
name their languages things like [incr Tcl], C# (which is spelled C#
but pronounced C♯), and Cω. To say nothing of More
Th<n, Yahoo!, Samsung Ch@t 335, etc.
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When you buy an Andoid phone for the first time you want to set it up by entring your Gmail password. If you have set up two-factor authentication (also called 2-step verification) then you need a one-time application password to do this: your regular Gmail password will be rejected with a message suggesting wrongly that you have mistyped it. Having remembered this, you now want to find the page for minting a new application password. Now the usability nightmare begins. Read more