Dylan Greene dot com

The screenshot to the right is from a brand new Lenovo N100 laptop (formally IBM) .

Why do hardware manufactures ship machines with such abuse of the Start Menu?

"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
- New Yorker, 1943

I hope Windows Vista gets a major overhaul in this area, and not just a way to search this mess. Companies should be disciplined for littering our Start Menus like this.

A friend sent me a story that was mostly true, but some details were changed. I found this out through the urban-legend-busting site Snopes.com.

We've all seen a blog entires about stories that seemed real enough but were actually urban myths, totally made up, or originally posted on parody news sites.

Here's my idea: A tool that automatically looks up content on resources like Snopes.com and lets users know when something they are about to email, post, or share is not real. It would work behind the scenes, the same way anti-phishing and anti-virus software.

A tool like this would help make all of us smarter by reducing the amount of fake information clutter we run into every day.

I already have an idea for version 2: political spin detector. Of course there have to be several different editions of that one depending on which resources our users trust for their information.

I listen to a few podcast, and since I'm going to Gnomedex in a couple days, I figure I should load up a bunch on my cell phone (which doubles as a kick-ass mp3 player) to listen to on the plane ride. The trouble is that I haven't found a software package for downloading the mp3 files that works the want I want it to.

First I tried the Smartphone program Skookum, formally known as iPodderSP. It got good reviews and people seemed to like it. There was no demo but it only cost $9.99 so I bought it. I hate it! It's useless to me!

Problems with Skookum/iPodderSP:

• There's no way to set it to download just the newest files. I don't want the last six months of podcasts on my phone, just today's and maybe yesterday's.
• There's no desktop component - I really thought it would download the files on my desktop and then transfer them to my phone via ActiveSync. Instead it uses the internet connection on the phone, which is about modem speed and I can't wait 30 minutes for each podcast to download.
• It uses Windows Media Player to play the files, which is okay, but I prefer BetaPlayer, which saves your spot when you exit or turn the phone off so you can continue from where you left off, and is much easier to use. BetaPlayer is a better media player for the Smartphone than Windows Media Player and it's free, there's no reason not to use it.
• You can't see the titles or descriptions of the podcasts, just the filename. Maybe this is deficicy in the technology/standard?
• It crashed. A lot. It's 2005. Programs shouldn't crash anymore. Catch those errors and return some kind of error message. This is unacceptable.

Next I tried Doppler, a Windows program. I should have been warned when I noticed that they sell t-shirts for their software, but they don't even have screenshots or their documentation online. Doppler downloaded most of the files I wanted, but it has no feature for syncing them with my cell phone. Well, drag-and-drop works fine, and Windows Media Player can be used to sync files too, but what files to sync? Again, I only want the latest and greatest broadcasts, but there's no way to sort by "air" date. There's no searching of the content within the files (I want all of the podcasts that mention Gnomedex!), or even to see who the guest speakers are without going to the web site, but there's no link to the web site.

Bah.... So there's some issues with podcasting still.. I'm not totally turned off by the concept, but it's a rough start, even for someone who's very tech-savvy.

This reminds me of another blog entry I wrote about 17 months ago - 10 Reasons why RSS is not Ready for Prime Time. Like RSS, I believe it's just matter of the tools becoming more mature, and a few kinks get worked out.

In the meantime, I'll be listening to some great audiobooks.

My guess is that eventually users will choose Microsoft's or Apple's operating system just like we choose Coke or Pepsi in any restaurant today.

Restaurants today offer Coke or Pepsi, but never both. Deals and/or discounts insure that. The same thing will happen with operating systems.

When you buy a Gateway, it might come with Windows.

When you buy a Dell, it might come with OSX.

It's that simple, and it's something you don't really even give much thought to anymore.

And if you're in a bind, the "other" OS will be offered as "add-on" - installed to run in a virtual machine, but you won't care, because thanks to abstraction layer frameworks, most programs will be available for both systems, and will look and act nearly the same in both.

Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others have decided that the new best way to prevent comment spam is to use an HTML tag that will prevent Google (and other search engines) from following links that could be spam links.

That new tag works as so:

<a href="url" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

When indexing sites, this will prevent Google and others from "following" these links. Normally following those links helps a site's PageRank, which makes those sites appear higher in search results. The theory is that if spammers aren't getting their PageRank improved, then they will stop spamming blogs. Ha!

My prediction is that this change will not prevent comment spam because of the following issues:

1. The text of the spam messages will still be indexed by search engines.
2. Humans will still see the the spam messages.
3. Humans will still be able to follow the spam links.
4. Most importantly: Spammers can still post spam messages.

In short, all this does is make life a little easier for Google. Their PageRank system, which might just be flawed, has been abused and blamed for the onslaught of comment spam. Now they have an out - an excuse to to say it's not their fault anymore. I'm all for better search results in Google (ever try to search for a specific hotel?), but their solution simply does not prevent comment spam.

What do I recommend?

1. For automated spam bots: To prevent bots from posting spam comments, I require JavaScript. When a human user clicks the Submit button, JavaScript to renames field names before the comment is submitted to the server. Fields are unique named every time the page loads, and the server will only post comments when it gets the field name it is expecting. This prevents the automated spam attacks because the software spammers are not able to predict the field names.
2. For manually entered spam comments: I have basic spam filtering mechanism similar to many email spam filters. It looks for common spam words, URLs, and topics, and prevents those messages from being posted.
3. Either way, I have a RSS feed which shows me whenever a spam comment is attempted, along with IP address and other information so I can track the progress, and watch for false positives (real comments that the system thought were spam), and easily ban IP's of known spammers.

Something important to me is that my solutions stop comment spam without requiring any extra effort from my users, Some sites now require registration or a CAPTCHA input to add a comment. I feel that this is just an unnecessary pain which prevents people many busy people adding their feedback. I also feel that the links in comments are often important enough that search engines should follow them, therefor always putting a nofollow tag will ultimately be unhelpful to those small sites that should get a higher PageRank.

And most importantly, unlike the nofollow "solution" from Google, my recommendations can actually prevent spam comments from appearing on sites, and that's what we all want, right?

Coming soon: Faster connection and CSS compatibility for non-IE users.