Comet McNaught And Glebe Island Bridge

Posted on January 17, 2007 by James McParlane

Ben sent me this great picture of Comet McNaught over the Glebe Island bridge.

Enjoy!

Posted in Downtime, Music & Art | Leave a comment

Being Paid To XBox

Posted on January 10, 2007 by James McParlane

I’m consulting with the big M and a few other companies at the moment on adapting an application to the XBox 360. The result of this is that they sent me one to play with.

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The team came up with the following testing scenarios.

  • Test application after a cold reboot.
  • Test application after a warm reboot.
  • Test application after CPU has been heated up by 8 hours straight play of “Gears Of War”
  • Test application interface under influence of beer/vodka/wine
  • Test application when controller covered in pizza grease
  • Combinations of all of the above.
Posted in Hardware, Massive | 3 Comments

iPhone – I Love Your Body, But…

Posted on January 10, 2007 by James McParlane

Dear iPhone

You better have UMTS or you are dead to me.

Although I love your design and interface, where it matters for a phone I find you lacking.

According to the specs you are just quad-band GSM.

And no GPS? Is that even legal in the US now since the E-911 mandate?

What will probably kill the you is the normal obscure telco guild turf cartel plan stuff that only makes sense to marketeers.

The networks they bundle you through will be your weakest link if they tie you down to special “providers” like they have US with Cingular and AT&T. 

I’m not going to switch down to a 2.5G network to use you and I certainly won’t buy you from the US to get you a year early just so I can do 2.0G GSM. 

Posted in Hardware, Rants | 2 Comments

Banner Views Increased Because of XP Service Pack 2 and IE7

Posted on January 5, 2007 by James McParlane

I know this is probably a little late, but I just had a thought.

When you download something using IE6 under Windows XP (The current majority platform) you get that little yellow bar at the top that calmly warns you that what you are doing could be attempted suicide for you machine.

When you click on the yellow bar to allow it to download the file, it reloads the whole page. The same when you allow pop-ups for a website.

This would result in double the views for a rotating banner ad, and probably double the chance of a click-through ipso facto ergo elk, double the revenue.

So if you go with the flow, you can get users to see double the ads if you use pop-ups, or download from a redirect, and blame XP SP2.

I wonder if the XP SP2 (August 25, 2004) caused the mini boom in Internet advertising?

IE7 carries on the behavior.

FireFox does not behave the same way, so if my theory is correct we should see an inverse correlation between FireFox update and banner add revenue 🙂

Posted in Axonomics, Web2.0 | Leave a comment

Lela Made Me Do it

Posted on January 3, 2007 by James McParlane

I feel the need – the need for James!

Which movie was this quote from’

Get your own quotes:
Posted in Downtime | Leave a comment

Its Not A Bomb

Posted on December 13, 2006 by James McParlane

Its just a very naughty civil engineer..

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One Two Three Four

Posted in Downtime | Leave a comment

Some Other Progress

Posted on December 12, 2006 by James McParlane

For those who have suffered through my detailed answer to the question “so what have you been working on lately?”, here is a simple progress report in pictures. No doubt it makes as much sense as my addled answer, but I assure you its a Very Good ThingTM.

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Posted in JavaScript, Web2.0 | 1 Comment

Humans Bad – High Radiation Good

Posted on December 12, 2006 by James McParlane

lelak says:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4489792.stm

James says:

fear them

lelak says:

After reading this article yesterday, I can’t help wondering if it’s all part of some larger plan:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4923342.stm

James says:

So as far as animals are concerned, humans occupying an area is worse than high radiation…

lelak says:

Apparently so. Send in the killer black squirrels.

Posted in Rants | Leave a comment

More Anti-Wii

Posted on December 12, 2006 by James McParlane

Looks like Leisa has done some research into Wii problems and has found a link to a site dedicated to issues and accidents – aptly named http://www.wiihaveaproblem.com/

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The New Nintendo Thumb

Posted in Hardware, Rants | 3 Comments

Wii Gorilla Arm

Posted on December 10, 2006 by James McParlane

Everyone seems to have a Wii now.

I’m still waiting to see if “Gorilla arm syndrome” kicks in. 🙂

Posted in Coolhunting, Hardware, Rants | Leave a comment