I’m taking my AIM nick out of this page, because annoying teenage girls keep IMing me because they actually want to chat with a bot and they can’t tell which one of these is me. (Maybe they just don’t bother reading the article). So where you see “Me” below, imagine you see my nickname.

Me > What are you, and how did you get on my buddy list?
spleak > Hi, I’m Spleak, your guide to everything celebrity, from Lindsay Lohan to My Chemical Romance. What’s your name?
Me > ew
spleak > Very creative name, but I’m afraid it’s too long for me to type over and over again. Can you please try again with a shorter name?
Me > Shorter than two letters?
spleak > Okay, I will call you Shorter than two letters?. So… I’m a 21-year-old girl. How old are you?
Me > 205
spleak > 205? Ha ha… are you sure? Please enter your age again… your REAL age, that is …
Me > 2
spleak > 2? Ha ha… are you sure? Please enter your age again… your REAL age, that is …
Me > 8
spleak > Sorry, you are not eligible to talk to Spleak at this time.
Me > Hurray!
spleak > Sorry, you are not eligible to talk to Spleak at this time.

So, yeah … apparently this is some new form of advertising.

Just for fun, I’m not going to try to debate that. It’s absolutely true (as he points out) that practically all of the “in the wild” viruses, trojans, and other malware target Windows. Of course, it’s also true that practically all of the software in the world targets Windows. Yeah, there’s plenty of Mac software, and plenty of Linux software too … but numbers-wise …. Yah, anyway. I said I wasn’t going to debate that … instead, I’m just going to poke fun at his ridiculous arguments.

Still, no matter how much you might consider this comparison an unfair shot, it is real. The Mac is a better platform when it comes to security and malware attacks.

I’ve used Macs since 1984, and I’ve been infected by some malware twice. Two times.

Now, I’m sure many of you can echo what I’m about to say, but with longer dates. I got my first PC in high school, sometime around 1990. Since then, I’ve been running DOS and Windows. The closest I’ve ever come to being infected was when I put other people’s infected floppies in my PC to run a virus cleaner on them … or maybe when I had a look at the source code for the Melissa and “I love you” javascript bugs… I’ve literally never been infected. Sorry David. That’s not an argument about macs vs. PCs, it just shows you’re not very careful.

By my reckoning of the installed bases for each platform, there should be many more exploits for the Mac. Depending on how you calculate the number—2, 3, 5 or whatever percent—shouldn’t there be that corresponding percentage of viruses on the Mac in these lists?

... Scripting News listed the site’s readers by browser. Firefox was the largest (49.76 percent), and Internet Explorer came in second (23.43 percent). However, Mac-only browsers Safari and Camino were next in line (21.31 and a guesstimate of 2 percent, respectively).

Well, I didn’t want to debate exact numbers … but now you’ve got me riled up. It’s preposterous to even mention the visitor logs of a single website when discussing computer market share …

It’s certainly true that there’s been growth in Apples market — they set all-time records for sales of Macs in 2006. In fact, they almost tied Gateway for third place in the third quarter … which means they got almost 6% of PC sales in the US. Of course, that was at the tail end of the year we all spent waiting for Vista. This year they were in 5^th place with 5% in the first quarter … at least, in the USA.

Worldwide, however, Apple’s sales suck: last quarter their relatively expensive PCs dropped them right out of the top ten computer makers worldwide for the first time ever and their share of the global market is down from 2003 … to only 1.7%.

The core argument is completely flawed anyway. X% of computers are macs, therefore x% of viruses should be written for it? Why on earth would you say that? Last time I checked, the primary motivation for virus writers is either fame or profit. You don’t get either by spending time learning how to crack and infect 2% (or even 10%) of the computers in the world. You focus on the big targets because you can only infect a small percentage of the computers that are theoretically susceptible to your attack anyway.

Malware writers want to affects 100% of Fortune 500 companies, to turn 200,000 PCs into zombies every day, or to infects — read this slowly — more computers in one weekend — in China — than Apple sold in that entire record-setting quarter.

You get fame by writing a virus that sends 40 million infected emails to AOL in one day, causes $36 Billion in damages, and gets a $250 million bounty put on your head. And no, you don’t get those kinds of numbers by picking on a platform with less than 2% saturation worldwide.

David, you want to know why the Mac OS is more secure than Windows? It’s not because nobody who owns a mac could possibly want to hurt one (although there is something to be said for pricing poor third-world virus writers out of the market) ... it’s because virus writers really just can’t make money (or fame) attacking such a small fraction of the world’s computers. As long as Apple only gains ground in the US … there’s probably no need to worry about anyone other than security researchers noticing the holes .

This has nothing to do with anything in particular, just that it’s been a very long time since I wrote something creative for no purpose other than to be creative … and when this came to me this afternoon, I figured I should post it publicly and see if I can pick up the thread of creative writing again — as bad as this first effort may be .

We got this “Word Whammer” from LeapFrog this week. They make these fridge toys that come with a bunch of letter magnets, and three slots that you can put the letters into. When you put a letter in, it reads it and pronounces it phonetically, like: “Eff! Eff says fuh, eff says fuh, every letter makes a sound, eff says fuh!”

Except the Word Whammer is special. It can pronounce whole words! Well, only three letter words, but still. If you put P-I-N in, it says: “Letter Pee, Letter Eye, Letter En. Press the three letters to hear your word” ... and when you do, it says: “Pee, Eye, En; Pin! Pih, iih, nuh; Pin!” and then encourages you to play some more … if you put C-A-T in and press all three letters, it says “Cee, Aeh, Tee; Cat! That’s one of my favorite words! Kuh, Ah, Tuh; Cat!”

What’s amusing is that LeapFrog is so careful not to offend people …

If you put G-O-D in, it doesn’t know the word, so it just says: “Gee, Oh, Dee; Guh, Oh, Duh” and then suggests that you do another word — now to be fair, that’s just the default behavior for words that it doesn’t know, but really, I mean, if you’re teaching it words, why would you leave out god?

It gets funnier if you put D-I-M in, it will say “Letter Dee, Letter Eye, Letter Em. Press the three letters to hear your word” and then you press them, and it says “Duh, Eye, Em, Dim! Great word, try another one” so you just switch out the I for an A, and it says: “Letter Dee, Letter Aeh, Letter Em; Let’s build a word! Put three new letters into the Word Whammer!” Yep, it won’t even phonetically pronounce it! Nothing you can do will get it to do so … all it will do is repeat the letters and then tell you to start over with three different letters.

Anyway. His latest publicity stunt is a trip to stand around looking like Robocop in downtown Toronto, in hopes of getting a military contract to produce Starship Trooper-like suits for the Canadian military. While this seems like the perfect occasion for a series of jokes about the Canadian Armed Forces, what I really want to know is: What happened? Supposedly he was going to do this on Saturday, and yet the only mention of it (other than the original Hamilton Spectator news) is on the usual silly news sites which are just reporting on the Hamilton story.

Well, since there’s no further news, feel free to watch these old Discovery Planet videos: Fire Jeep, and Fighting Fire with Fact, and read about how Berkeley’s got the perfect partner to this suit working in their robotic exoskeleton.

Technorati Tags: ProjectGrizzly, BulletProof, FireProof,Science, Technology, Canada, Hurtubise

My first reaction was to think that Microsoft is loosing it’s mind, and is so fractured internally that one group is actually trying to prevent the distribution of Internet Explorer 7. However, after visiting the download site I quickly realized that this “Blocker” only blocks automatic deployment by Windows Update. It doesn’t stop people from installing it by hand (through the update site or otherwise). Essentially, it’s a tool for corporate IT departments that want to postpone the upgrade until they can thoroughly test it — not trusting Microsoft to decide when IE7 is ready for prime time. OK, so it’s still slightly wierd, but at least in this light, it doesn’t look like Microsoft in-fighting .

Edit

I had a look around, and they’ve got screenshots of the upgrade process on the IE Blog, and I’m now midly reassured that I’m not going to get a phone call from my mother trying to figure out what happened to her browser. I mean, I may still get a call … IE7 doesn’t look at all like IE6, but at least she’ll know what happened (from the looks of it, there will be a clear screen letting her know she’s upgrading IE), so she’ll just be wanting to know how to get her old interface back, and I’ll be well prepared with the easy answer: Just download Firefox mom.

Technorati Tags: IE, IE7, Firefox, BrowserWars, Web, Windows, Microsoft

Yep, you read that right. He started with a red paperclip, and bartered his way through a doorknob, an electric generator, a recording contract, and a snow globe … to end up owning a house in Saskatchewan in less than a year! (actually, he’s making the final trade on the anniversary of his first trade, so it technically took him a year to get from paperclip to house). Really impressive. He should be a used car dealer … or a horse trader.

There are a few legitimate reasons why you might need to use PDFs to provide downloadable content, particularly if that content needs to be usable offline, or to use mathematical formulas, or to be searchable. GeoShell, for instance, has an online wiki for documentation, but provides a downloadable copy of it as a PDF file so that users can access the documentation offline and have it be searchable and everything. But again, in general, you should not use PDFs as part of your website.

There are a lot of reasons why you should not use PDFs on your website. For starters, they’re generally bigger than HTML files, they force users to load another application, and they force a different form of interaction. Some (few) users might not even have Acrobat Reader installed (remember, Windows doesn’t include a viewer). Many savvy users resent PDFs and actively avoid them when possible because they don’t want to run the extra software (why do you think Google has a “View as HTML” option for PDF links?)

But the coup de grA?ce is usability. If you still can’t see why PDFs should be avoided, let me tell you story of how a PDF affected a friend of ours, and in fact, how PDFs may be affecting some of your users, those people you seldom hear from, who are actually the end target of all your labor.

I got a phone call earlier today…

Actually, it was a call for my wife — I happen to be at home sick today, still suffering from some sort of cold or flu — and the person on the other end had a question for my wife about cooking for hundreds of people (something my wife is very good at) ... but when she realized she had me on the phone instead, she said: “Hey, you’re a computer person, maybe you can help me with something…”

Now, many of you “computer people” out there are probably cringing, because you’ve probably spent countless hours both in person and on the phone trying to diagnose bizzare computer malaise, but stick with me. After we got the message for my wife out of the way, this caller (who shall remain anonymous for our purposes) went on to explain to me her problem:

“Ok”, she said, “You know they’re having this convention at Elim Fellowship this week. Well I went to their website to register for it, and I found the form, but it has that little hand, and I can’t type in it.” “Little hand?” I asked, thinking perhaps she meant the indicator we usually see for links … “Yeah, you know, the one they use when they don’t want me to be able to copy anything,” she said. Now, to be perfectly honest, at this point I was totally lost — You probably aren’t because I already gave away the ending of the story, but stick with me anyway.

After several moments of diagnosing, during which I determined that she was indeed trying to fill out a form online for a conference that’s running this week, and she was using “fox … fire … something, you know?” ... I had her reload the page, and she started talking about a menu she got from “clicking on the hand button that’s just like the hand cursor” which made me wonder if there was an extension or something … after checking that she had no extensions installed (yes, this is why Firefox should include some of their best extensions by default, but nevermind). So finally, I fired up my browser and asked her to read me the address. Just as she was getting to the file name … “2006_Conf…” it hit me! “Does this end in pee-dee-ef?” I asked, “yes, how did you know?” ...

So, I explained to her that the conference organizers probably hadn’t been smart enough to make their PDF a submittable form (although they arguably could, and should have), and as I was explaining that most people use PDF for forms only when they expect you to print it out and fill it in by hand and mail it in … she exclaimed that she had “hit the back button a couple of times, and found a link to a version I can fill out on-line” and thanked me very much for my patience.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you who consider yourselves web designers, but I’m personally a big fan of usability, and to me, this screams of something that should be avoided at all costs. Basically: the website had a PDF with a link like: “Here is the brochure for more information” ... because they’d spent all this money on the printed brochure, and wanted to show it off. As a result, there weren’t any details on the web page itself (forcing anyone interested in the conference to read the PDF brochure). The registration form was on the last page of the brochure, and thus, at the bottom of the PDF. The problem occurred when a user didn’t realize that this document wasn’t like other web pages … had no idea, really, that she was in a different application, embedded in her browser… so essentially, the PDF broke her web browser.