This is too funny to pass up. Take a look at the home page for the Palm m100, and then look at the 1993 Saturday Night Live parody commercial for the Macintosh Post-It. Once again, parodies of early Apple products end up being accurate predictors of the future...

Notice any similarities?

My favorite part is comparing the tagline for the m100: "Mobile, Modular, Magnificent." to that of the Mac Post-It: "Versatile, Intelligent, Sticky."

Some stars say they don't really see themselves as famous until the day they find out they have a stalker. Well, on the internet there aren't as many cases of stalking (unless you're Jenni or Jamie) but I've discovered an equivilant.

I found out today that somebody has cybersquatted AOLiza.com. They registered the domain on August 29th, the same day that the ABCnews and CNN articles came out.

As regular readers of the site know, I'm all for the rights of domain name holders who have legitimate purposes for their sites, even if they happen to conflict with the trademarks of large companies, but this is just mean. The word "aoliza" didn't exist on the net, not even once, prior to my putting up the site in mid-August, and they go and grab the domain for what? To get the mis-hits when people try the domain? To bribe me with it? Grumble, grumble.

Actually, looking into the service, namedemo.com, a division of the internet registrar Register.com, they'll let you get use to any one unused .org .net or .com domain you choose for free, but their agreement states:

"As part of the NameDemo.com service, NameDemo.com grants you a limited, non-exclusive, personal, non-transferable, non-assignable, revocable license to use the .com, .net, or .org domain name selected by you solely in connection with the NameDemo.com service. You acknowledge and agree that NameDemo.com, not you, will be the registrant of the domain name selected by you, and that your rights to that domain name are solely those of a licensee. You also acknowledge and agree that there is a one domain name per user limit. You further acknowledge and agree that your NameDemo.com domain name is subject to the terms of this Agreement."
--Excerpt from namedemo.com terms of use

Basically, this is legalese for "You can't give or sell the domain to anyone. We own it, we'll let you use it until we don't want to anymore, and if we want to let someone else use it at the same time, we can." The only rationale I can think of for a company to do this (and an ICANN authorized domain name registration company, to boot) is if there's a clause in their ICANN agreement prohibiting them from simply doing a domain-name grab for themselves. This way, they're ostensibly doing it at the request of their legitimate customers (who aren't paying anything), and if they find a use for the domain, they can take it away from the customer for any reason. Further, the terms of service ensure that the customer can't move the domain to another registrar (or even ISP), as namedemo.com is listed in Whios as the registering party and domain name owner.

I'd wondered before what would stop one of the domain name registrars from simply grabbing a huge number of domains and hold them. Now it looks like we've found one that found a way to do just that.

Try to never, ever run out of disk space... It can do nasty things to your MySQL database (and pretty much everything else on your system...)

I'd like to thank Rick Wayne for the great AOLiza article in the Wall Street Journal today (Section B, page 14). It's a shame that when the New York office trimmed the story from 20 inches to 11, they also omitted the URL for the site...

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Update: Thanks go out to Jonathan Dube at MSNBC for adding a link to the WSJ story on that site.

Well, it's three weeks in to the semester and it's time to start thinking about grad school applications again. I have my GRE scores. Now I need to get back to work getting recommendations and working on my statement of purpose.

I'm basically decided on applying to the Human-Computer Interaction masters programs at CMU and Stanford, both of which are excellent. Stanford would also mean staying local, but CMU would mean finishing in one year instead of two.

It's either go straight for my masters, or go back to work as an Information Architect after I graduate this Spring. Both paths have their appeal...

Funny. Every month I get an email from StatusFactory, letting me know that they received the bill they sent to themselves, asking me to pay for their service.

This morning I got an email from them saying I should call them and ask them when they're going to send the bill, because they expected to recieve the bill (from themselves, to themselves) by the 10th of the month but they haven't seen hide nor hare of it yet.

And these are the people I trust to handle my financial transactions...

A few days ago I got into a lively debate about the merits of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) versus command-line user interfaces (CLUIs), specifically in regards to the just-released MacOS X beta, which includes a command-line interface for those who want to use it. My standpoint, of course, was that each is faster/better for different tasks, and for different people, and that a choice is the best option, especially when having both doesn't detract from having either.

One of the points in favor of a CLUI is that you don't have to keep moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. With this in the back of my mind, I came across a paper presented in HCI 96 on a study performed at the University of Toronto, about using existing full keyboards as half-keyboards for people who only had one hand to type with (by design or circumstance).

The model they used for typing with one hand was a simplified chording system where the hand types characters on its side of the keyboard naturally, but holds the space bar down as a modifyer to type the other keys, mirroring those keys to keys on the hand-s side of the keyboard. The idea is that the brain maps keys to fingers, not positions, and as such, people would quickly adapt to typing, say, the letter 'i' with their left middle finger instead of their right middle finger.

It's a great piece, with good strong data. I don't know if follow-up work was done on this, or if software was released to the public, but it's definitely worth a read nonetheless, especially as there are more and more applications for one-handed typing, and any system that leverages off of what the user already knows will be more readily accepted than a new system, such as chording.

Pictures of an IBM prototype based on this system can be found here.

I couldn't help but notice the throng of people coming to AOLiza from Pixar, but the referring page is behind your firewall! Any chance anyone can send me a copy of the page so I can see what you've got to say?

Thanks!

Okay, so I try not to lift links straight from slashdot, but this is just too idly amusing.

Some people think Windows is going to take over the world. Taking a closer look at Microsoft's tech support site, it may already be taking over your kitchen...

Okay, taking a closer look at the product in question, I'm starting to wonder if it's really a good idea for children to play with blenders. From the site:

"Inspired by Steven Spielberg, Someone's in the Kitchen features animated kitchen appliances that come to life with narration, sound, video and animation!"

Wow. Just like real kitchen appliances! Only they come to life with sound, animation, blood, and lacerations! Then again, maybe that's why the product is discontinued...

Today's chuckle comes from gaijin. This is the handbook for the wannabe geek: How to be l33t.

The only addition I would make to this list (read the list first) is "If you already have your MCSE you're studying to upgrade it because goddamn Microsoft is retiring the NT 3.5, SQLServer 6.5 and IIS 3 exams you worked so hard to pass. Damn Microsoft. (See? Two birds with one stone!)