Chris Pederson's private videos of motor racing were taken down - and he got some nasty legal notifications.

However, in the last year I have had three videos removed by YouTube for copyright infringement under the DMCA.

Videos

The three videos are all of outdoor sporting events filmed as a spectator: two of motor racing at Brands Hatch in England and one of the Red Bull Air Race over San Francisco. I have uploaded the three videos to Vimeo for reference, although I do not know how long they will last before being asked to be removed.

It's hard to believe, but it looks like the corporate mass are getting ready to take the internet to slaughter. Finally person to people communication is possible and it will be shut down.

As individuals, we'll have to fight back - putting videos up on our own servers - but it's difficult as ISP's are pretty much obliged to take anything down on first notice.

The patent says: "User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc)."

Sue Charman of online campaign Open Rights Group said....

"Whenever you have large amounts of information it becomes attractive to people - we've already seen the American federal government going to court over data from companies including Google."

And no I wouldn't want to be giving my profile out to Google or any other corporation.

I could easily see this information as being open to subpoena, even hidden subpoena.

I try to use Google not logged in these days. It looks like we might have to go back to the days of regular cookie dumping.

Alas, those of us on fixed IP's (not massive corporate firewall) can be pretty tightly profiled just off of IP.

The total information that Google owns about most of us is scary stuff.

• what we search for
• what sites we own/manage (AdWords, Analytics)
• at least part of our financial records (AdWords/AdSense)
• our weblogs (for those using blogger)
• what videos we watch (YouTube)

Add personality profiling to this - and you've just entered the Matrix.

Nod to Threadwatch: Google Profiling Technology.

Curiously cellphone studies with negative results - cancer, loss of brain capacity - for the industry lead to research funding removal and persecution. At the same time the big cellphone and mobile network providers are taking out huge liability insurance contracts. I don't have the time now to document the above but at one point I did do the research and will stand by those statements.

Sticking a mini-microwave beside your head is not going to improve your health or mind. End of story.

It turns out that cellphones are not only harmful to people but absolutely fatal to bees.

Radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned....

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left"....

German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.

Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.

Birds and the bees sounds better.

The spread of the problem sounds likely to me. Blanket coverage by cell phone base antennas came first in the United States.

I imagine that the base antenna has to be quite close to the hive (or on the route to food) to cause this problem.

Countries with limited cellphone converage will be fruitful.

Perhaps mankind will eventually learn not to believe big industries claims for healthiness.

Cigarette manufacturers claimed for decades that smoking was good for your health, before finally admitting that it was neither bad nor good. Only after decades of lawsuits did they concede the obvious which is that smoking is bad for your health.

My mother told me this story from her childhood in Vancouver.

They used to go to Woodwards to do their shopping. In the shoe department, there was a very neat machine that the kids liked to play with. Put your foot under a panel and then pulled a lever. On a screen in front of your eyes, you could see the bones of your feet.

You could use it as often and long as you liked. The machine was there to help the shoe saleman scientifically find you the right pair of shoes.

If you haven't guessed already, the machine was an xray machine. And children were spending whole minutes radiating themselves with no lead protection.

It was only a few years later that Woodwards removed the xray machine. I hope not too many of those children have bone or blood cancer now.

Later in the same article some other cellphone studies are cited:

Blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

If you value the long term health of your brain, don't use your cellphone for more than a minute or two at a time!

While you are at it, stop believing the claims of major companies that their products are good for you or your dog. They just want your money. As long as your dog doesn't up and outright die, they don't mind how sick the pooch might get eating their manufactured poison. But that's a story for another day.

I've mentioned David Allen's Getting Things Done in the past. It's a great introduction to one man's system for organising work. David Allen is a highly esteemed productivity consultant and GTD was written in the prime of his worklife.

Strangely, GTD has become something a cult spawning entire websites devoted to Allen's methods.

When starting to come to grips with running a company of five instead of two, the book was a good starting point for redoing my systems.

Personally I think GTD a little bit of overkill. I'm not sure one can function as tightly roped down as Allen wants one to be. It kind of fits the Polo shirt and place in the suburbs and on the golf course middle manager but I'm not sure it would do for Michaelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci.

There have been interesting attempts to bring GTD to the web browser via javascript but there was too much data loss to make that a viable solution.

For those who are into GTD and on Mac OS X, a Polish programmer has put out a lovely Cocoa version for free called iGTD.

You are a busy person, aren't you? And there's an easy way to track all things that have to be done... and to get those things done! iGTD takes some concepts from Getting Things Done methodology and makes them easy to understand and use in your every day life.

It's a gorgeous application. Simple icons, standard OS interface widgets.

Igtd

Other pluses. Feature: iGTD uses the existing databases for iCal and Address Book. Benefit: No duplicate data entry - finally an application designer figured that one out. Feature: Linking to documents in the Finder. Benefit: No hunting for the missing file when you need to get to work. Feature: Instant Task Search. Benefit: Easy to find your task notes quickly if you are on the phone and have to look something up (although GTD rules out the telephone most of the time!).

Still I'm not going to try to move into iGTD myself. At least not now. I don't find time spent overorganising brings commensurate dividends (oh if I could have the months of my life back spent playing around with a PDA (Palm) before 3 years later moving back to a simple black book).

But if you are in the mood for reorganising from the ground up, iGTD would be a good place to start.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has put the full organisation into iGTD about database reliability under stress and whether iGTD brings a productivity boost over the long run.

I've had trouble renewing domains with them over the last year. It would take me four to six support tickets to get a single domain renewed at times. Sometimes, I would be charged two to four times for a single renewal. Finally in early January, the inconvenience and risk culiminated in taking all my domains and fleeing to DynaDot.com.

It looks like I got out just in time:

While the two 50% shareholders fight for control, the company's hundreds of thousands of customers are getting angrier and angrier. In a normal situation they would be leaving the company in droves. The only problem is their domain names are locked up, and their authorization codes are being withheld preventing transfers to alternative registrars. Domain names reaching their expiry date are simply being lost. With many of these involving Web sites a large number of customers are losing complete businesses or at the very least, important business tools. Compounding the problem is that many of RegisterFly's customers are managing domains and Web sites on behalf of others.

What's worse is that it appears enom was actively participating in attempts to destabilise RegisterFly.com and to steal RegisterFly.com customers' domains:

Enom.com who Registerfly.com was the reseller for and enom was actually the registrar, must stop selling the names in dispute. There is fraud here. It it is just Registerfly.com taking money for renewals and not sending it on to Enom for registration but showing customers it was renewed. Enom must have know the problems but keep selling domain names thru their auction. One of mine is for sale right now for $5,000.00 by company who bought it from enom.com. I predict that Registerfly.com, enom.com and icann will be in court for many years along with all of us.

A bit hypocritical of eNom as they sent a mealy-mouthed pitch to help RegisterFly.com customers to save their domains in January, by switching to them but at $20 or $30/domain instead of the $7 to $10 RegisterFly normally charges:

Subject: Notice regarding your RegisterFly account Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:35:47 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-OriginalArrivalTime: 06 Feb 2007 23:35

Dear Domain Holder:

This is a formal notice to owners of domains which have been registered through eNom via its reseller, RegisterFly.com.

YOU MUST TAKE ACTION NOW TO RETAIN FULL MANAGEMENT RIGHTS TO YOUR DOMAIN NAME.

Although you purchased your name at RegisterFly, eNom is the actual registrar of record for your domains. As we are severing our relationship with RegisterFly, we are aware that this may have an impact on you as the domain owner. Therefore we would like to offer this opportunity to assist you in securing control of your domain name directly with eNom.

Over the last year, eNom has become aware of an increasing number of complaints from dissatisfied RegisterFly customers.

As an eNom reseller, RegisterFly is contractually bound to adhere to certain standards of customer service in a speedy and diligent manner. Therefore, effective immediately, we have terminated RegisterFly as a reseller of domain names through eNom.

Hyenas all of them.

Dynadot has just started offering bulk pricing to those who qualify ($500 spend or more per year). So the last reason to consider any of these other Registrars is gone.

The best registrar in the world just got better.

Ryan Carson and UK team enjoying his gorgeous studio

If the above sounds critical, it's not necessarily entirely so. Ryan Carson is actually sending the work to Russia which is not at all third world but a strange mix of brilliant minds and upside-down economics.

Still if a successful small UK house won't employ local talent, what does that say about the future for programmers?

A number of people suggested that quality control would be an issue.

Slobodan Kovacevic answered that it was a question of paying over market (golden chains) in your targeted labour market.

Claim that long term cost is higher might be true in some cases - usually when you get extremely cheap developers. If you pay someone $7/hour (like most Indian Elance developers ask for) of course that you can expect that, as the project progresses, any quality that was in the code will disappear and you will end up paying someone to fix it or lose money since your product won’t work. On the other hand if you find a trusted developer and pay him properly (or even a bit above usual price for an offshore developer - which is still a lot cheaper than hiring an UK developer), he’ll be happy and you’ll be as he will produce quality code.

Of course as a project leader for an offshore team, that's what Slobodan would say. But he may be right.

Happily enough, the discussion led me to oDesk.

What's cool about oDesk is that the programmers/providers earn a living wage. oDesk also takes a fair cut (10%) instead of a bunch of hideous fees.

oDesk home page - links to review

Sometimes technology can make for a better world.

Sometimes capitalism can lead to constructive innovation (as opposed to A-Bombs exploded over Japanese/Iranian cities).

I've been searching for a way to easily turn flash off yet keep my computer stable. With the amount of Flash video turning up on the web, I am not as tempted as I used to be to just rip the Flash code right out of my plugin folder.

In any case, for work reasons, I have to keep Flash around just to see what other people are doing with their sites.

Until two weeks ago, I still hadn't found anything lightweight to kill Flash in either Safari or Firefox, my two primary browsers. But good things come in twos. There are two great plugins to kill Flash, one for Firefox and one for Safari.

Amazingly enough, neither have destabilised my browser.

Minus the flashing lights and used car salesman in the side bars, I might even start liking the web again.

Firefox

I was trying to deal with a javascript problem in Safari while working over an invoice in the excellent Freshbooks. I was wondering if there wasn't a better javascript browser under OS X. I found this lovely performance graph over at Macintalk.com.

Osx-Browser-Performance-Test

There was a lot of talk about web browsers, quite boring really, unless you are a geek or a web developer. But there was one gem in there:

I keep trying to leave Firefox, but I can’t browse any more without the noscript extension. Even on Linux, Firefox is a dog, but noscript is just too good to browse without. (At least Firefox is a universal binary now). Noscript disables all javascript by default and allows you to easily turn it back on on a server by server basis. Adblock is good, but lots of browsers do that now. noscript seems to be unique.**

Here is a link to NoScript.

Most media sites seems to be programmed by horned devils these days. There must be seven scritps running per page. Frankly even our own sites have too many (2) javascripts running. Frankly 90% of these scripts are useful to the people who wrote them but no use to the visitor. They slow down page loads but even worse they cripple the visitors computer, causing CPU loads to spike for minutes at a time. Even my dual processor G5 2.5 GHz regularly shows processor load of 30% to 80% just browsing with Safari or Firefox.

But turning off all javascript all the time isn't a very good option for somebody who uses productivity sites, like our project management system or Statcounter or our current photo solution.

I had never realised there was a tool out there to allow the user to selectively allow scripts for certain sites and turn them off for all other sites.

Even more astonishing than ScriptBlock's script blocking capabilities is its ability to block flash. With just a simple checkmark all flash is gone from Firefox unless you click on it:

No-More-Flash-Os-X

All past flash blockers I've looked at for Firefox have been buggy and top heavy.

Lightweight Flash blocking in Firefox at last!!!

Safari

If you are looking for lightweight flash blocking in Safari, look no further than SafariBlock. If anything Flash is even more pernicious in Safari than in Firefox as Flash well and truly cripples Safari. A single Flash page lurking somewhere in a background tab and your computer is brought to its knees, difficult to even switch between tabs to find the offending animation.

Safari-Block-Flash

Flash in Safari gone as well.

Yes, I did donate. And if you hate Flash, you should too.

* Frankly I don't find Omnniweb as fast as that nor Firefox as slow as that. But this test was performed with just a single page open so it doesn't really reflect real world browsing. At lesat not for me. I rarely have less than ten tabs open.

**I don't agree with the poster about Firefox. The web development extensions are a godsend. But for speed reasons, Safari has become my default browser. I have keyboard shortcuts to switch back and forth between the two browsers and stay on the same page.

Le Monde just relaunched their blogging services. Their several thousand blogs are now powered by WordPress (they used to be on TypePad).

Why would a large French media organisation want to hamstring their operation with a cooperation with a closed-source American company which would like to become the Microsoft of weblogs?

Answer: they got out as soon as they got a chance. Good move.

For example Skipper had about the same negative experience of Typepad which I've had (and continue to have):

We cancelled our paid Typepad account about a week ago, after only 3 months of use. After using the typepad for only a few months, it became clear that we could not continue to run a professional people search and public record blog for our visitors using their unreliable service.

We installed WordPress directly on our site at http://www.skipease.com/blog and couldn’t be happier. We got out just in time to save our blog information, but now we are 3 months behind in building our traffic thanks to Typepad.

New and experienced bloggers would do well to take the time to register a domain name of their own and install WordPress or other blogging software directly on server space provided by a reliable service provider. We should have done that right from the beginning.

Absolutely right.

As I mentioned to Anil Dash recently, the only thing Typepad could have going for it over any other weblog system right now is support. And due to the shoddy support from Brenna and her crew, they don't even have that.

As usual the rot starts from the head, the head of Typepad Doug Bryan being extraordinarily unhelpful. Instead of issuing instructions for someone to enable a couple of templates for me (five minutes work), Doug Bryan turned in into a three week correspondence course on how not to help customers.

Unbelievably shoddy service.

I have clients and a circle of friends and colleagues in five countries - five locations - so the disorganisation was getting to be very confusing.

Steps to clean up:

1. gather the dross
1. make sure that all your telephones have been added to iSync
2. sync all your telephones as is, to make sure you don't lose a stray contact entered directly into the telephone
2. get rid of the junk
1. create an Unknown group
2. move any telephone numbers without a name or name without a number in there
3. export that group as a vCards (option drag)
4. delete all those numbers
5. eliminate duplicate contacts
1. go through contacts one by one and make sure that any distinct individuals with the same first name have a last name (if you're like me, you've got several Martinas, Annas, Johannas and Karins in your address book - you don't want to mix up their numbers) or in the worst case an identifying word for last name
2. at this point you can freely run the Look for Duplicate Entries command until all the duplicate entries are merged (there are several stages to the process)
3. categorise
1. create current contacts and old contact lists (i.e. Paris and Paris Old)
2. put every contact into at least one group (there is a very useful applescript to help you find Orphans). You can also hold down Option key while a Contact is selected and all the Groups to which the Contact belongs will be highlighted in yellow (one Contact can belong to multiple Groups).
3. create a Mobile group
4. move the Groups you want to have with you in your telephone into the Mobile group (yes you can put Groups inside Groups - it took me a while to figure this out)
4. sync back clean to all the phones
1. reset all devices (this will replace the telephone's existing address book with the clean one you've created)
2. choose to Sync only the Mobile group you created earlier
5. enjoy usable address books where you have only the names you might need

One big advantage of this cleanup is that not only does one have fewer names to flip through but all of the names should mean something. This clarity prevents unnecessary mental distraction when trying to find a phone number.

In a more extreme case, this process could be refined to set up each telephone with slightly different master groups. I.e. in your French phone you keep Paris and Paris old and Vienna but no Moscow. In your Vienna phone you keep Paris, Moscow, Vienna, Vienna old. I've just used a single group called Mobile for now.

I've written this documentation up as nowhere is detailed information about Groups or using iSync with Multiple phones gathered in one place. I hope it is of use to you.