What is a “blog”? A silly question, yes? A blog is a site consisting of posts/articles, right?

Well… no. I’ve found that many people who are not comfortable with blogging or are new to it, tend to confuse the taxonomy, and are interchangeably talking about a “blog” as a site, as well as a “blog” as a post/article within the site. “I’ll do a blog today.” “Your latest blog was great!” “Should we do a blog?”

It’s a bit confusing if you’re used to thinking of a “blog” only as a collection and not as an item, but there’s no point in opposition. Just make sure you know what people mean when they talk about a “blog”, so that there’s no confusion if you need to work together. I guess this illustrates that the bloggers have not been horribly efficient in educating the greater public about the craft and the terms used, or that it just takes more time for the concepts to settle in.

UPDATE: at least part of the confusion is due to myspace. Look at these guys’ blog controls. They use “blog” both as article and collection.

FeedDemon is a very nice piece of software for RSS reading.

It has, however, one bug which drives me nuts. When adding new feeds, sometimes after entering the new feed address, the mofo just DIES on me. Like… totally. I have to manually kill the task and then restart all over. And it has messed up some of the unread data in the process, meaning next time I start, some of the stuff I already read are still marked as unread, and I have to go over it again.

What’s worse, looks like new feeds are only saved during exit. Which means that during the session, if I added two feeds and it crashed while adding the second one, the first one is also lost in void and I have to recall what it was and re-add it.

The problem has been there way back since 1.6. I hoped it would be fixed in 2.0 betas or final, but nothing so far.

UPDATE: haven’t had this any more with 2.0.0.22 or newer. I guess this got fixed under the “connectivity problems”.

I see so many bad interfaces and interaction models during my daily life and work that it is a real delight to come across a system that just works, manages to hide complexity and do what you need it to do. I’m happy that my car’s onboard navigation and entertainment system belongs in the latter category. Studying it provides, at least to me, a good lesson of how to work with human-machine interfaces in the future and how to design interaction for someone operating under stressful circumstances and limited comprehension, which driving at unknown/foreign locations certainly is.

Somehow I had not come across this series before. Trackmania is a fun arcade driving challenge on crazy tracks. There are no mods, no weapons, no anything that disturbs pure driving and stunt challenge.

It reminds me of quite a bunch of older similar titles. More than 10 years ago there was Stunts — one of the best arcade/stunt simulations ever and fun to play even 10 years later, regardless of how immensely the technology has gone forward. Then there was Indy 500 and TM Nations with its stadium setting feels also a bit similar to it. There was also another title even older than Stunts, whose name I can’t remember, where you had to hold spacebar to keep racing across high-rise tracks with big jumps with EGA/CGA graphics.

So Trackmania brings it all back. TM Nations is made specifically to promote the Electronic Sports World Cup 2006 and features heavy ESWC and Nvidia ads across the game, but nothing really annoying. Your mission is to drive across crazy tracks in a stadium setting, either in practice mode alone or in network with others.

I also tried the TM Sunrise demo. Somehow the graphics and look’n’feel were worse for me than with TM Nations, but it has a wider range of cars and settings. The tracks and stunts are similar.

I’ve been working on this little thing on and off a bit now. I didn’t want to blog it before because a) the layout (or rather lack of it) sucked, and b) we didn’t have anything for you to download and use and ping and contribute to the data. Both of these are fixed now so you can head over to the site and download the Pinger to contribute some data. Before downloading though, make sure you’re comfortable with what the article says. And bring on any feedback about any part of Moodgeist either to the Moodgeist blog or to myself.

I get a lot of scam emails and sometimes click on the links in them just for the fun of it. To see if the offending site has been taken down yet. To see how “well” they are done (recently it’s really impossible to distinguish a phishing site from a real one by layout, the scammers have got good).

So I clicked on a random PayPal scam again when this popped up. This is the first time that I saw this warning. I think it is a very effective security measure as it blocks newbies from proceeding any further and sends a very clear message. I’m not fully sure, but I think this comes from FF’s recent version of Google Toolbar that I have installed.

The only sad thing here being that I took that shot above while jerking around with window sizes to capture the complete forgery warning bubble before it could reposition itself. In its “natural” state, the bubble was as follows, which is a shame since the “report” link is hidden away.

Bruce announced a movie-plot threat contest.

Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better. Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.

I’m not sure about what qualifies a movie-plot threat against a non-movie-plot threat, but this got me thinking about what I would do if I was evil to disrupt America. I don’t think these thought exercises are anything evil — sometimes it’s helpful to put on the black hat and see stuff from the “other side”.

I tend to choose carefully what games to buy. First since it’s economical and secondly since I don’t have too much time to play anyway. Mostly I “get it right” but sometimes not. PoP Revelations is one I got wrong.

The main problem with it? It’s simply a recompile of Warrior Within for PSP. Cutscenes, flow, gameplay all totally the same. The intro says there are “more than 20 new levels and maps” but I haven’t seen any yet (ok, I haven’t made it horribly far either, but still).

The French are just about to pass a new labour law that makes it easier to hire and fire people under 26.

I don’t know all the details, but on the surface, it doesn’t really seem right. The history of Europe and really the whole Western culture has been a history of fighting against discrimination. Abolishing wealth census on eligibility to vote and universal suffrage were great advances of democracy, as well as equal employment laws, laws against discrimination of people with disabilities etc, which are great achievements of the European thought. And now suddenly, here’s a classic textbook case of age discrimination???

Age discrimination is no different from race, gender or other kinds of discrimination — it is preventing one group of people from performing adequately in the society and gives an unfair advantage to the others. There are perfectly valid reasons to treat people under 18 differently from the rest, and in some special cases the age limits are even higher, such as being allowed to run for a seat in the parliament or becoming a judge or president or the like.

But in case of universal employment law, treating people below 26 differently from the rest to me just sends a signal that France is not really serious about its reform plans. It should be easy to hire and fire everyone, not just young people. Maybe they thought that if they only focus on the younger age group, they won’t go backlashes, because if they did it for everyone, all the workers go on strike and it won’t work? A welfare state is nice, but I myself really don’t believe in strong labour protection, permanent employment and trade unions — I believe that great individuals can stand up for themselves, constantly learn to adapt to new realities and make their own career choices without needing the state to bully employers on their behalf.