There is a slightly strange advert on British television at the moment. It shows some motors from cars driving down streets with a voice over that points out some interesting points about Climate Change. Nothing odd so far. The advert however finishes not with a phone number or web address but a search query.

It says: “Search for Act On CO2″. And here’s what you get if you do…

It seems that the government has decided that it is not worth buying a domain specifically for the campaign when they are already number one for the campaign name. Oddly though they have paid to have a sponsored link for the term on Google. Biazarre. This behaviour is all very well but if the government site was to fall from the number one spot in Google’s organic listings then someone else could get a lot of traffic. This would be Googlebombing with free advertising…

Late nights on ITV normally turn into ITV Play. This is a adfree show or collection of shows (that was infact once it’s own channel) which involve live puzzles which callers can phone in and solve to win cash prizes. The puzzles are always very straight forward and normally have many solutions. Callers who phone in which correct answers are told that their answers are “not hot”. And the prize money remains with the presenter.

For instance on the program called “Glitterball” they have one game in which you have to complete the start of a word or phrase. The start given was the letters “FULL”. The answer could have been anything. When I watched FULLSTOP sprang to mind. It was guessed by a caller soon after I thought of it… but it wasn’t hot. Other incorrect answers for the game included FULL STEAM AHEAD, FULL MOON, FULLY, FULL UP etc. Someone even guessed FULL METAL JACKET. But it was unfortunately also incorrect. Seven answers had apparently been singled out by the production team in advance to be “hot”. With the number of possible answers literally infinite, the number of calls to the show in a minute being just under a thousand and the average number of calls taken to air per 5 minute period being roughly one the chances of you being a “lucky winner” are not very high. In the time I watched only one of them was guessed (FULL BODIED).

Here is one of the puzzles from tonights show. Just see how many answers there are to this one. You have to make a four letter word by taking one letter from each line of the letters below. E.g. DIRT is one correct answer.

C B D S

O A I E

N L R ?

E D L T

(I forget the fourth letter on the third row.)

Many many solutions. Definitely more than 30. In this game only 5 were “hot” and would win prizes. The chance of you winning anything is next to nothing… and with the calls costing multiple pounds to make and the presenters ramblings to pad between callers being severely irritating ITV Play is worth a miss.

See them LIVE in Manchester on March 17th, in Birmingham on March 18th and London on March 20th. Full details and buy tickets.

Update: According to the official website this tour has been rescheduled for an unannounced time later this year.

I happened to be on the output point of Windows Live blogs at msreadr.com today, and I caught wind of an update to the Live Mail feature set that was live/going live at the time. Code named M7 I think. One of the features really caught my eye, it said that they were adding checkboxes. Now this isn’t an odd feature for a mail application what I thought was odd was that I hadn’t noticed they were missing when I first reviewed the product. But when I thought more about the interface that they have adopted it made more sense of course they hadn’t had checkboxes in their setup the messages are treated like much more square rectangles than anywhere else I have seen, and you are encouraged to drag them around rather than (I suppose) using checkboxes to select messages for movement. So I was sort of interested in how their checkbox implementation was going to work.

Luckily I have a Live Mail account that has a pretty constant stream of 6 or 7 spam messages every day flowing into it. So I have a place to play with the product, and mail to play with. I have to say it is a long time since I have seen anything as awkward as the way these checkboxes work. The first thing is that they are not always visible. They have them appearing in the place of the envelope which indicates whether a message has been opened or not when you hover over a message. So you hover over a message, the envelope vanishes and is replaced with a white square. Only on the message you are hovered over note, not the whole column. If you click at this point the box gets itself a green tick and when you move the mouse off the message it doesn’t regain it’s envelope icon. Instead the tick remains and it takes on a blue shaded background.

Here is the list of emails	Hover over the first email. Colour/Icon change.
Click the checkbox. Get a green tick.	Miss the checkbox. Lose your first tick.

Ok that doesn’t sound perfect, but it sounds reasonable in the circumstances. What is so hilarious? Well lets take a look at what happens if you miss the checkbox. It looks like you’re in luck, the message is still selected and gets it’s green tick like any other would. But the surprise is that any messages you have previously ticked on your way down the list marking the spam are automatically unticked. I have done some tests, and I havent been able to tick more than six messages in a row without missing one and losing the lot. This also means that when you have selected a message for reading just by clicking on it, the checkbox automatically gets ticked. Well this is no real problem, who cares if the box is ticked or not. Ok. Try this for a scenario. You check your inbox see you have an email from a friend and also four messages that are clearly spam. You click to read the message from your friend. Then you tick the boxes on each of the four spam emails and drag them to the trash can. Now you better hope that you notice that it says five items as you drag them over as your message from the friend will of course also be selected still. Oh heavens…

As an aside: the images above are real screenshots of the best view of the inbox you can get in Live Mail. Anyone else think it is just too limited? The information provided is cluttered with that terrible text overlap when someone’s name is too long. Compared to the snippets you can get in Gmail with the interface looking nice, it seems pathetic.

This is the first is a series of articles that I am publishing on this blog to detail in considerable detail what is involved in switching from the Windows platform to using Mac OS X. I will discuss what is different, what is hard to get used to, what I miss, what is better and what I could now never do without. If you have been a regular mac user for some time then this is probably not of interest. I am really targeting people who may be considering a switch and would like to know first hand what the need to be aware of to use Mac OS X. I must admit that I am a new user of the operating system and I do in no way intend to present myself as an expert on the matter. I know very little, but it just happens that I think I know the little bit that is important to Windows switchers, since that is what I am.

Nothing Too Drastic

The first key point that I think needs to be made is that there is nothing drastically different between the two operating systems. What you exclaim? Why is any of this necessary then? Well yes there are differences, millions of them but all in all the basic structure of the way things work is pretty much as you would expect. You have a desktop for instance, and you have a window to browse through your files too like Windows Explorer. Applications appear in windows which are draggable around the screen, just like in Windows. You have a mouse that appears as an arrow on the screen. Right clicking gives more options to the user to preform regular tasks or change settings. There is a control panel like area where user options can be enforced. There is a clock in the corner. Lots of things work just like you’d expect them too. These few things may be consistent in all operating systems, but as a Windows user for life how am I meant to know that. What I mean to say is that in the same way as a Ford and a BMW are both cars and both have tonnes of familiar bits to them, Windows and OS X have lots of similarities. You will not have to rethink the way you use computers.

Lots Different Though

Although there is so much that is near identical in both systems, you are much more likely to notice the many striking differences between the interfaces and the ways of doing things when you run OS X. The interface works differently. There is no start menu to get your programs from. There is this bar across the bottom of the screen instead. There is no place that lists all the open applications like the task bar in Windows, although this bar on the bottom (the Dock) will take up windows when you minimise them. Another huge difference is that when you first start up you will have a blank desktop except for one icon, your hard disk, in the corner. On Windows you are much more used to loading up the computer for the first time to see a smattering of free AOL trials, and other bundled programs or offers. That isn’t to say that you don’t have bundled programs on a Mac. There are plenty. But they don’t appear on the desktop, they are in this dock thing which is always visible so there is no need for them to be on the desktop itself too. There is no recycle bin or equivalent on the desktop either. Instead the trash can is again tied to the dock. And another big difference is that all the menus for your programs don’t appear at the top of their associated windows. Instead they all appear right at the top of the screen. This is a pretty big change and it takes time to get used to. There is also no maximise, a slightly different (and confusing) way to close programs and to top it all off these buttons all appear at the top left hand side of the windows. The opposite to what you’d expect. In dialog boxes the Ok and Cancel appear the other way round with Ok on the right. And there is a prominent search box enlodged in this bar along the top.

They are just a few flavours of the little differences between the systems which hit you first. There is much more to be said about each of them, and I will discuss them in turn as I proceed through this series. Continued soon!

And we all move forth. With Flock.

It has just been released as a public beta. It has been kicking around as an alpha for a long while, but this is their first step towards making a disciplined and stable release. And I have downloaded and installed it and I am very impressed. Flickr has never been so accessible. And it adds (or in fact removes) a whole step of the del.icio.us posting model that I use to get things to the links log. This is definately something to check out, I am even blogging direct from Flock for this post.

Today Philipp Lenssen releases his first book, 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google.

For those who don’t know Philipp has been tracking Google for some years now as it has evolved into the huge global company it is now. He documents everything on the Google Blogoscoped blog and discussions continue in the forum. From this huge stock of information he has selected 55 fun things related to Google. Philipp is one of these people who does everything by hand. His blog is super popular, is it WordPress? No. His own build. His forum is super popular. Another own build. For this book he built a wiki too (one chapter is edited by the public I believe). There is no doubt it will be a brilliant read.

Buy from Lulu.com, or spread the word at Digg.com.

There are a number of things coming up for this site now. But all of them are coming towards the end of June so you will have to be patient. I am probably going to cut back on the ads I recently added to the education section and upload more content. I am also going to reinstate and update the Hotmail feature, update the dormant web section, make a notes section lifting the code essentially from the riddle forum, publicise the links blog more heavily on the main site, update the PHP zone to include working versions of all my PHP projects and to have the source code from them freely available, post a full review of Mac OS X to this blog, add set 4 to the web riddle, better integrate my pictures into the sidebar, work on the UI for an exam results project (remotely controlled of course), completely recode the website editor to incorporate different levels of authority as well as moving files, PHP transfers etc and finally reorgnise the backend of the site deleting unused content and updating old pages where needed.

Is that it? Nearly. I also want to completely redesign the CSS for the site, and get all pages on one common (and new) stylesheet. This will tie in heavily with the new editor which should be capable (via JavaScript) of adding such themes to the code. So there is a fair bit to come, and I will post more information nearer the time on the dedicated Site Log.

… and I think that is all I need to say.

Too right. It is in the post.