March 7th, 2006
This reddit.com thread has enlightened me to the simple effectiveness of the Slashdot comment moderation system. For all its troubles, it’s still the best out there, and here’s why: Moderations are all positive, except for inappropriate or abuse flags, like troll/spam/offtopic/redundant. This tends to discourage downmodding comments which are on-topic but with which you disagree. Contrast Digg and Reddit: people seem to use the -1 button (down-arrow in Reddit, thumbs-down in Digg) to bury comments they disagree with.
The way I see it, if you can cause others’ arguments to disappear from conversations just by the vehemence of your disapproval, you ruin any chance at meaningful discourse. Because Digg and Reddit allow you to mod down for any reason, users feel freer to mod down for the wrong reasons.
(I’m still not entirely sure where I fall on the whole “everyone gets mod powers” vs. “only the karmic get mod points, and then only sparingly” debate. Thoughts?)
March 7th, 2006
Fig. 1. Mel Gibson is weird.
March 7th, 2006
Take a look at the new python.org and see for yourself. The bizarre, quirky, pseudo-unnavigable, recognizable blue design has been replaced with…what, exactly? It’s not quite a facelift. More of a Botox treatment—seemingly smooth and youthful, but upon closer inspection weirdly plastic and static. And while I do like the new logo (at right), it seems a little feeble in execution—I feel it could be made stronger.
March 7th, 2006
Thanks to this hint and Sony-Ericsson’s HID tool (warning: very buggy), I was able to bang together a quick and dirty iTunes Bluetooth remote control (for the Bt-enabled Z520a): ds-iTunes.hid. Send this to your phone (Bluetooth OBEX will do) and it ought to be usable immediately. The UI is passable but reasonably blurry and ugly; this is what you get for creating it entirely in Interface Builder with Unicode dingbats for button icons, and then scaling it down to fit the phone’s display. (Like I said, Q&D.)
I haven’t tried the keystrokes on iTunes for Windows, so some of them might not translate quite right. You’ll have to try it and let me know.
