irony in action

A page on "mystery meat navigation". Of course, you have to "navigate" through it, because he didn't put in a redirect of any sort when he moved the page.

update: on further investigation, it's in the Michael Moore style of writing - there's a point to be made, plenty evidence to support it, and yet the pages on the topic flail around almost randomly, only occasionally being effective. Let me summarise, quickly:

• On the web, people are ruthless about choice. If it's taking too long to get to the part of the site you're interested in, or it's not immediately obvious how to do so, you'll take your traffic to another site that does the job better.
• Mystery Meat Navigation (which is what this person calls mouse-rollover-based nav, as best I can tell) is bad because it obscures the correct option until you run the mouse over it. To prove this point, he uses the distinctly straw man argument of roadsigns that don't tell you what they're pointing at until you get close to them, and thus "proves" that this Mystery Meat Navigation is dangerous (hint: if you find that using websites is dangerous, perhaps you shouldn't do it while driving)
• The examples he's given on a separate page have the rant first and the linked site right at the bottom. So you've no idea what he's talking about unless you first scroll down to the end of the rant.
• He doesn't appear to make any distinction between plainly obvious icons and non-obvious images. The latter is indeed mystery meat; the former is not, and can be far less mysterious than single-word menu entries when properly done.

found in /etc/fstab

# /u6 was destroyed in a horrible plane accident in 1967. The recovered
# parts were folded into /u5.

I've a sneaking suspicion I did that myself, but I'm not sure...

best product review evar

The Archos: Look at this. None of your weedy iPoddery here. This mp3 player is METAL. And it's got RUGGEDY bits on it. This thing has been dropped on the pavement outside pubs, pushed off shelves onto wooden floors by cats that are just begging me to microwave them, had shit spilled on it, was once kind of accidentally exposed to fire, and it still works perfectly. It is immortal. This is a Man's mp3 player. Archos -- For Men. It's shorter than an iPod, slips in the inside jacket pocket easily. Using a pair of general Sony street-style phones with it at the moment. It's about half-full -- ten gigs. Just loaded a bunch of Kinski, My Bloody Valentine, Mum, Young People, Secret Machines, Jillian Ann, DeathBoy, Chion Wolf and Curiosity Valentine on to it for the flight on Wednesday. -- Warren Ellis, gizmodo interview

maybe my role in life is to be cranky web guy

Hi. Your site uses cookies. That's nice. What I object to is the following:

• one attempt to set cookies should be enough. it's easy to test if your cookie-setting succeeded, and if not, abandon any other attempts.
• blocking access because I don't have a cookie is okay if the site uses cookies for auth. If the site uses cookies in some other way that prevents me from using it, I am no longer happy with you and will take my reading elsewhere.
• if you are blocking on a login, and you redirect me from where I wanted to go to your login page, you should be forwarding me right back to that page once I've accepted your cookie. You should not be leaving me at a generic login page (thank you, washington post) because I'll just not bother trying to relocate the page I was looking for.
• That bit about one attempt? How about ONE COOKIE? If you give me a single cookie, you can stash it away on your site with any other information you need to keep about what I'm doing. You do not have to send me multiple cookies.
• Wait, you do want to send me multiple cookies? How about not sending them from multiple servers? Are people still doing this "one server for images, one for cgi scripts, one for, oh, I don't know, exploiting Internet Explorer security holes? It's annoying, it is. Can't you just set a single top-of-the-domain cookie, and use that to key everything else?

Sigh. I think it must be time to go home.

oh yeah

while I'm whining about cookies... it'd be nice if I could tell mozilla to never, ever accept a cookie of the form "*WEBTRENDS*" or something.