I don’t really understand microsoft, over the last few days, their live network has been experiencing problems every time I’ve tried to logon to access my email. Who knows what my 8 emails contain which are hidden within live mail, I certainly don’t. You would think that more people would be in uproar about this – I mean what if these were payment requests, final demands or quick response business proposals? I could be loosing out on some serious money here.Apparently, even they are unsure of the problem – it could be that “This site may be experiencing a problem” or “The site may not be a member of the Windows Live Network”. These seem quite vague, I mean obviously the sites experiencing a problem as everything would be fine and dandy if not and I’m pretty sure that Live mail is a member of their Live network too. Why don’t you try telling me something that I don’t already know?
Archive for November, 2006
The amazing Zach Braff has made an appearance over at threadless to show off the t-shirt which was designed to promote his new film, “The Last Kiss”. Apparently according to the audio interview he gave, he also was going to try to wear it on scrubs at some point, with a cheeky reference to the film. It’s also featuring as part of their current $10 sale in the run up to christmas. I myself have purchased 3 more to add to my collection. Although its nice, Zach’s design wasn’t one of them.
Registration is open for the Future of Web Apps conference in London 07. I’d love to go, loads of great companies/people talking (good to see Last.fm making an appearance), loads of schmoozing (if thats the appropriate word), but unfortunately absolutely jack to do with my PhD, so no funding.
I was thinking about this earlier and was trying to make an educated answer. What I would note is that it is primarily content which drives users to use sites, we can see that through all manner of feeds and low bandwidth sites across the net. Without content, theres no point in sticking up a website. You can see demonstrations of that assertion here from time to time. It’s also fairly visible through all manner of seedy content on the web as users will be quite happy to sit through the many pop-ups and poorly formatted text to get to that bunch of images which they’re after.Design ends up just being the icing on the cake for users, but for other (perhaps) more hardcore users such as any number of programmers, it can be an ultimate turn off to see the horrendous environment which content which we thought we might be interested in is displayed.I think the reason I’ve been pondering this is the huge amount of extremely popular social networking sites which I’ve accessed which just don’t seem to abide by the rules which those of us who have been programming on the web have become accustomed to adhering to. I am of course referring to web standards and their apparent lack of appearance at myspace. They’ve recently risen to light (as if they ever went away) as myspace have been in talks with O2 about the possibilities of accessing pages via mobile. How can they get away by flouting design rules? Have we been lied to? Should we never have bothered? It’s kind of a joke that an application so recently on the scene is so buggy.I for one feel accomplished at the end of the day knowing that whatever I’ve produced is beautiful code (or at least my best attempt at it). It’s going to work well, and hopefully for a long time if standards are adhered to by browsers in the future too. It doesn’t need other applications to make it navigable either. Despite all its buggy pages though, myspace must be good at something, right? It’s not just all for the kids? It’s allowed people and artists to listen to full tracks by one another and browse for similar music via those peoples friends. Oh what? – That’s it?A recent perusal through a free music mag “salvo” from my local fopp shows that out of the 10 up-and-coming artists listed, none are without a myspace page, and none offer any other point of contact. It’s kinda nice when communication is provided like this to those who want/need it, but for my part I’d much prefer if they had a wordpress blog sat on their own domain, or at least used wordpress.com.
Carson Systems is showing the details of how dropsend stacks up in terms of monthly profit. Ryan states that at a conservative estimate by December ‘07, it’ll be making $21k/mo. He also seems to be beating off a bit of bad feedback on the advertising which has/hasn’t been done.
I love it when I get useful error messages such as those often uttered by hotmail.
DropSend is up for sale
Nov 6
Carson Systems DropSend has recently been put up for sale by Ryan Carson. He states that currently they don’t have enough time to give it the attention it deserves, although the application is profitable with customers accumulating month by month.
DropSend allows users to email huge files to one another via uploading them to dropsend and sending an email to the reciever to detail where it can be collected from. It’s quite interesting as the costs involved in its building are quite detailed within Ryans talk at a previous Future of Web Apps conference (also broken down here at 37 signals). For those who are interested, it cost around £26k. It will be good to see what kind of profit the team is able to achieve.You can read about DropSends sale progress over at their barenakedapp website, which previously was used to divulge the details of the building of their most recent project, amigo.
Techno Graveyard
Nov 3
Our front room is looking a bit of a technology graveyard at the moment. Not only do we have the two archaic computers which have been there since forever, but now we also sport an unused fridge which has been replaced by one of our housemates parents (much larger) hand-me-downs.
This time last year saw the cleaning out of the Cardiff Department of Computer Science’s cupboards, with a large amount of the machines having to be “properly disposed of”, due to their burden of having huge crt monitors from yesteryear. Presumeably this means they are taken to be properly disassembled and resused if possible – somewhere like wastechnique in wales for example. When it was suggested that they be offered to charities who would re-use the machines sent to third world countries and the like, the idea was rejected because the scheme had never been attempted before.
It’s quite crazy how disposable technology has become in modern life. I suppose I notice it more now due to having that much more of it myself, I have 3 past mobile phones in my possession currently, not counting those back in Yeovil. I wonder what little gadgets we’ll be chucking out 10, 20 years down the line…..