Webonaut

Couldn't find a straightforward tool to simply capitalise text on google, so I knocked one up: http://www.klikhome.co.uk/tools/capitalise.html actually very useful to me this morning, despite it's 5-minute dev simplicity - so perhaps it will be useful to someone else (IF Google spiders it.)

This is completely anecdotal, but my female friends on the whole opt for Facebook and my male friends Twitter. This could be a coincidence, but the girls seem to like the more voyeuristic nature of Facebook, with it's photos and insight into other people's calendars. A lot of it reads like a female coffee-shop discussion, with lots of personal issues and details being aired and shared. However Twitter, although still suffering from the banal, is more condensed, takes less time and is less personal. These may seem like negatives - but to us Boys, it fits in nicely with our more emotionally closed natures and desire to get straight to the point without all the chaff. Are Social Networks evolving rough gender lines? (Ian informs me that Facebook still has a place for goggling at pictures of hot friends though, apparently.)

Got the below message from Twitter this morning. The devil is in the detail, and once again a big company has tried to bury their more controversial changes in the small print. Here's the big deal: When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. We hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time. The competition is on: who will know the most about you? Google? Facebook? Or now, Twitter? Hi @jamestinman, Over the coming weeks, we will be making two important updates that will impact how you interact with Twitter applications. We are sending this notice to all Twitter users to make sure you are aware of these changes. What are applications? There are over 250,000 applications built using the Twitter API. To use most applications, you first authorize the application to access your Twitter account, after which you can use it to read and post Tweets, discover new users and more. Applications come in...

We've just completed our first foray into HTML5 at primvintagefashion.com It's a simple HTML5 intro, true, but for me it was an education in what is possible / what is not with HTML5. There's lots of HTML5 functionality crammed into this small space - the CANVAS tag (which scales to fit the screensize of the device visiting) - animation loop - CSS3 (that Typewriter font is downloaded - and rendered - by your machine on the fly) and the AUDIO tag. SO, HOW WAS IT? Well, the javascript extensions for HTML5 are actually pretty fun. Lower level than AS3 but way more powerful than what straight javascript/jQuery offer. It's always going to take longer to build something than with Flash, but with practice you could probably get it down to about 125% of the effort. That sounds bad, but it's much better than my original thoughts of double the effort. DRAWBACKS? - Well, the big one - and a surprise - was the differences between HTML5 engines. It's not as standard as Jobs ...

Facebook is close to jumping the shark. IMO it is where MySpace was it '05 and steaming towards it's own doom. Why? Two things... 1. The cool kids will shortly not be thinking that hanging out with their parents (or other dweebs) is what they want to do, and fickle, shallow scenesters want exclusivity - or at least to be PART OF an exclusive group 2. People naturally have (in these days at any rate) multiple, fractured groups of real-life friends - and have a persona with each of these groups that is inherently different. You have your parents on Facebook and suddenly you don't want to post pictures of your night out; or tell your work-colleagues what you get up to, etc. Whichever service comes up with a slick way of offering these multiple personalities will be next to take up the batton - (so long as they are also cool to fulfil 1. and drive the early adopters)

Not a great deal of thought seems to have been expended about what the wider effect will be when hard-drives, SSDs, Processors etc reach their natural limits. Our storage devices go up in density (according to Moore's law still?) and our processors accelerate because with each new cycle they are further miniaturised - packing more TB in and reducing the distance travelled by electrons round a circuit. So what happens when they reach the molecular level? I'm thinking of two things here - 1. Whether or not a theoretical physical barrier exists and 2. If it does, what are the implications for human progress, the economy, society as a whole. 1. Is There A Physical Limit To The Speed & Storage of Computers? - At first glance, you would have thought that things cannot be miniaturised past the atomic level. This may be true - or can smaller sub-particles support computation? - Will there be work-arounds - for example Quantum Computing taking over from traditional Von-Neumann CPU a...

After some considerable mucking about, I've cracked a particularly annoying and not much documented issue with sending HTML e-mails (in my case via PHP, but applies to any sendmail system) to Outlook Express / Windows Mail boxes. It's all to do with the headers - and specifically what characters you use to escape them. ALL lines should end with a \r\n escape sequence EXCEPT the MIME-Version: 1.0 which should be ONLY \n. Got it? This PHP works (certainly from a *nix server): ini_set("sendmail_from", $fromAddr); $headers=""; $headers.="From: ".$fromAddr."\r\n"; $headers.="Reply-To: ".$fromAddr."\r\n"; $headers .="Cc: ".$ccAddr."\r\n"; $headers.="MIME-Version: 1.0\n"; /* v.important NOT to put \r\n at the end as Outlook ends up escaping the WHOLE header */ $headers.="Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1\r\n"; $headers.="Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit;\r\...