How you you know you just walked straight through a worm hole and reached 1985?

Spinning Beachball of Death; Source: WikipediaWhen you try to unmount an unreachable network drive and instead of succeeding after a little while, you get a spinning beachball of death leaving you -- after waiting naively for 15 minutes (I went to get my mail etc.) -- with no other possibility than hard-resetting your computer.

While I like my Mac a lot, this is one of the days when I want to ask:

Apple, when do you finally reach the 21st century?

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Scarface DVD Cover; Quelle: IMDBIn meiner Freizeit versuche ich gegenwärtig meine "habe ich gesehen"-Quote in den IMDB Top 250 der "besten Filme aller Zeiten" zu verbessern:

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In den USA wurde heute die tiefste Arbeitslosenquote seit 5 Jahren gemeldet (4,4 Prozent). Zum Vergleich: In Deutschland sind es im Moment 9,8 Pozent.

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Es macht einfach viel zu viel Spaß über Tokio Hotel zu bloggen. Das letzte mal hatte ich 633 Kommentare von Menschen die bis heute den Unterschied zwischen einem Blog und einem Diskussionsforum nicht verstanden haben.

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It's the second time in only a few days that I read this, so I guess I have to comment on it.

Today I had some minor problems loading my GMail account, so it showed me an error as follows:

Google: Switch off your Firewall

Alright, so imagine I am a naive computer user who just got this message and I obviously believe what they are saying. Now I am going to go ahead and disable my firewall altogether and live happily ever after -- until I come across the first script kiddie that turns my workstation into a spam bot, virus nest, or both.

Similar issue: That blogger on MSDN.com who nicely suggested to switch off the Phising protection altogether when the CPU usage of your new instance of MSIE 7 spikes on some AJAX websites. -- While he meanwhile revised it to an acceptable "add these individual sites to a whitelist for which you switch off the phishing protection", his initial suggestion was just as bad as the one up there by Google.

Come on, people. Not everybody is a computer geek. People actually believe what you are writing there.

So please start thinking before you type. Having people switch all their security features off first (but burying the information that this might be a bad idea somewhere deep inside the help files) is harmful and -- sorry -- just plain stupid. People will switch it all off, they will see that "everything works" and they will stop reading about the issue right afterwards.

If you really, really, really have to have them switch off part of their software (which is not too surprising for some paranoid security products), at least spend half a minute explaining how the workaround can be done securely, and only for the page in question.

You owe this to your customers. Or, to put it differently: If you handle your customers' privacy as carelessly as you handle their web security, I sincerely hope nobody ever tells you their social security number.

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alexa -- a search engine that provides traffic rankings about web pages too -- currently lists the first five websites on their "movers and shakers" list from Mozilla.

This blog is ranked #6 with an 80,000% growth and a weekly traffic rank of 4,277.

Chances are that's the one of the biggest growths Alexa has ever recorded for a single website :) -- I'm impressed!

fredericiana.com on the Alexa movers and shakers list

Update: I am number 2 now! :) The growth percentage has fallen to a less impressive 460% this week but I guess being higher in the list is nice too ;)

Alexa, number 2

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So, the MySpace DNS admins seriously point one address of the round-robin record for myspace.com to localhost. Smart move.

$ host -vv myspace.com
Trying "myspace.com"
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 61932
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;myspace.com.                   IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
myspace.com.            8282    IN      A       127.0.0.1
myspace.com.            8282    IN      A       216.178.32.48
myspace.com.            8282    IN      A       216.178.32.49
myspace.com.            8282    IN      A       216.178.32.50
myspace.com.            8282    IN      A       216.178.32.51
...

While 127.0.0.1 is most certainly "my space", I don't think many people host a copy of MySpace on their workstation...

Wonder how many people have to blog it until they fix it ;) In any case, Thinkgeek already has the right t-shirt for them.

(via OpenDNS and Elliot Back)

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Happy Halloween from the Mozilla headquarters, people!

Halloween at Mozilla HQ; props to Window for the photo

More photos here!

I, by the way, am the Alien in the picture. (Funnily in real life I am an alien too, here in the US...)

Update: Even more photos? Here.

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Ich will ja nicht in die gekerbteste Kerbe hauen, in die man so hauen kann, aber:

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Ein Passant vorhin zu mir in der Innenstadt:

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