graeme-s-houston.com

One sided media - a material so thin, watch you don’t cut yourself on it! I remember reading something about a group of protesters who were lobbying against Al Jazeera opening up a channel in Canada. Well that’s just stupid. Apart from the fact that Al Jazeera is one of the best news networks out there, these clowns are denying themselves and others the opportunity to at least look at the other side of the story. You might think I’m crazy saying that Al Jazeera are the best, but I’m not crazy. Watch fox, and then watch Al Jazeera, then wonder to yourself what could possibly be bad about Al Jazeera? The people at Al Jazeera are out and about in the streets reporting the news as it happens. The people at fox are sitting in the studio talking about what Rupert Murdoch thinks the news should be about today.

The big problem we have today is that the news stations are all so very narrow in their view point. And that leads to the people who watch these channels being narrow in their viewpoint. Closing down the other point of view is the last thing we need.

Go out and make a big fuss about fox who just make stuff up, who feed their viewers opinions, bulls***, and political propaganda. Once fox are reporting the news (hell will freeze over first) instead of making shit up, then you can close down Al Jazeera if you like (though it’s still a bad idea).

You’ve got to love their catch phrase “we report, you decide” - say that enough times and Fox watching morons will really believe it. So the fact is, if you want to get the whole story you have to watch CNN and then watch BBC, and then Al Jazeera, and then a few more - and only then through these disparate lenses do we start to get a glimmer of the truth. Reporting isn’t and has never been objective, and alas things are getting worse.

I couldn’t help but pick out an example. This is from way back but it’s short and sweet and hits the bullseye. From BBC news:

Tsunami fund ‘hacking’ is probed
An attempt to hack into the website of the Disasters and Emergency Committee (DEC) that was set up after the Asian tsunami, is being investigated.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Computer Crime Unit have begun an inquiry after BT blocked the attempt on New Year’s Eve.

A 28-year-old man from east London was arrested and released on bail in connection with alleged offenses.

So they are examining his gear and he’s been bailed, and due to return to court at some point that week etc etc. The article goes on to say.

A spokesman for the Met said the DEC website continued to be secure and the systems in place meant the attempted breach was identified and blocked very quickly.

The DEC, which estimates to raise £200m to help tsunami victims, said it was alerted by BT staff.

Chief executive Brendan Gormley reassured the public that “every penny” donated over the internet was safe and had reached the DEC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4195339.stm

That’s what the BBC reported. Sounds really serious doesn’t it. Over on boingboing we get the other side of the story. The title reads “Jailed for using a non-standard browser”. Basically the guy was using Lynx which is a text based browser (I also have it installed) commonly found on Linux/Unix systems. He was on Solaris 10. Lynx is also used by blind people, who naturally have no need to see the pictures. Lynx saves a lot of trouble and they can hook that up to text to speech and have their computer read web pages to them. So for donating to the Tsunami appeal using this odd combination of Lynx on Solaris 10, the poor guy ends up having swat style police smash into his home who arrest him and seize his equipment. How exactly this happened, no one knows, but presumably some stupid little twerp at British Telecom looked at the log files and got it all wrong.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/27/jailed-for-using-a-n.html

But what’s most interesting about this is the fact that if you only ever get your news from the BBC news website then you are going to be in the dark regards to the reality of the situation. You’re going to have a really warped perspective of the world. Not only did the BBC report this from a completely obnoxious perspective (the Big Brother “look at all these nasty things your government is protecting you from” perspective) but they completely missed the interesting story, which is: be careful or you’ll be arrested by morons for doing nothing wrong. Worst of all, the news has happened, been and gone. You’ll never find a link from the BBC saying - yeh look we now know what happened - here’s the truth. That article, in its present form, is locked in stone on the BBC news website for all of time. Think about where you get your information.

Jacques-Louis David painted ‘Oath of the Horatii’ in 1784, before the French Revolution, depicting the Roman salute. It was commissioned by the Administrator of Royal Residences in 1784 and exhibited at the 1785 Salon.

French governmental structure was previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy. During this time it underwent radical change, following Enlightenment principles of nationalism, citizenship, and inalienable rights. Violent turmoil, executions, repression and warfare involving every other major European power came along during these times of change. Following this, France would be governed variously as a republic, a dictatorship, a constitutional monarchy, and two different empires.

The theme of the painting has an extreme patriotic and neoclassical perspective and the work itself became inspirational for future painters who would model their own work upon it. The painting helped David become more widely and ultimately won him the right to take on his own students.

Paintings that urged loyalty to the state were common during the times leading up to the revolution. Despite being painted nearly five years before the revolution, this painting became one of the defining images of the period.

“This painting occupies an extremely important place in the body of David’s work and in the history of French painting. The story was taken from Livy. We are in the period of the wars between Rome and Alba, in 669 B.C. It has been decided that the dispute between the two cities must be settled by an unusual form of combat to be fought by two groups of three champions each. The two groups are the three Horatii brothers and the three Curiatii brothers. The drama lay in the fact that one of the sisters of the Curiatii, Sabina, is married to one of the Horatii, while one of the sisters of the Horatii, Camilla, is betrothed to one of the Curiatii. Despite the ties between the two families, the Horatii’s father exhorts his sons to fight the Curiatii and they obey, despite the lamentations of the women.”
Link to quoted article

In the painting three brothers express their loyalty to Rome before battle. They are urged on by the support of their father, and are willing to lay down their lives for their patriotic duty. The men stand firm, resolute, taut outstretched limbs solid and unyielding, symbolizing the highest virtues of the Republic. Meanwhile the women weeping and mourn, content to wait to find out the fates of their loved ones. The woman dressed in the white is a Horatii sister. The woman dressed in brown is a Curiatii sister who weeps for her husband and her brother. The woman in black is holding two children of the Horatii husband and Curiatii wife.

It suddenly struck me as I was lying on top of the bed and gazing out of the window, listening to the thunder in the distance, that both gambling and astrology are actually quite closely related. Memory is the thread that binds these two aspects of human culture together, or more precisely selective memory.

Let’s take gambling first. Remember the old saying, “The house always wins”? Well that’s true. In my teens I knew someone who had a ton of old slot machines in her garage, in storage for someone who ran a small warehousing company and had just run out of room, and asked her to keep these dozen or so machines. They took them all away and left one. I can’t remember why. It was broken, so we fixed it. While inside the machine I couldn’t help but notice the difference in size between the holder for pay outs (1 tiny tube about a foot high, that held one single column of coins) and the holder for takings (1 large box, 2 feet cubed). Clearly someone’s winning and it’s not the players.

While that impressed me at the time, and discouraged me from bothering much with gambling, it was later when I was studying Psychology, I found another piece of the puzzle - schedules of reinforcement.

Reinforcement is really where you reward a behavior (hence increase the likelihood that the behavior reoccurs) . You are reinforcing the behavior. For example, rewarding a rat with a food pellet every time it pushes a lever will reinforce that behavior. It learns to associate pushing the lever with a food pellet. However instead of just giving the rat a pellet every time it pulls the lever you can give it a pellet using different schedules. You might give it a pellet every ten times it presses the lever, or you might give it a pellet at random, here are some schedules of reinforcement (source wikipedia):

• Fixed ratio (FR) schedules deliver reinforcement after every nth response.

• Continuous ratio (CRF) schedules are a special form of a fixed ratio. In a continuous ratio schedule, reinforcement follows each and every response.

• Fixed interval (FI) schedules deliver reinforcement for the first response after a fixed length of time since the last reinforcement, while premature responses are not reinforced.

• Variable ratio (VR) schedules deliver reinforcement after a random number of responses (based upon a predetermined average).

• Variable interval (VI) schedules deliver reinforcement for the first response after a random average length of time passes since the last reinforcement.

Here’s a very handy chart that gives some idea of when responses are being given in relation to time with each of the schedules;

So if you use a continuous ratio and then you suddenly stop giving a reward then an interesting thing happens; the learned behavior dies off relatively quickly (known as extinction). It turns out that Variable Ratio gives the best results, producing both the highest rate of responding and the greatest resistance to extinction. Well wouldn’t you know it but slot machines use a Variable Ratio schedule of reward. Now when I look at slot machines, I get a mental image of a rat hammering away at a lever for pellets. They have a huge box inside to rake in all the cash and a tiny tube with winnings… who wins? Not the player.

I mentioned selective memory, here’s where the selective memory comes in. The player spends $25 at the slot machines. He wins $10 and is very happy because he’s won. He forgets that he’s $15 dollars down. Happens all the time with gambling - the combination of Variable Ratio schedules of reward combined with selective memory, makes for a powerful combination.

Astrology is similar. The reward is once again based on mathematical probability, only this time it is based on the laws of chance. The reward itself quite complicated (the satisfaction of believing that we were party to foreknowledge?). It’s based on whether or not the extremely general statement made by the Astrologer actually happens. Again the reason it works is all down to selective memory. We generally forget when they are wrong and remember when they are right.

Lets just say that an astrologer predicts that you are going to have a life changing event happen to you in the next month. The first thing to note is that it’s such a general statement that anything could fulfill it. That’s right; you could become pregnant, or if you are a man, your wife could become pregnant; or your long lost son could turn up at the door; your house could catch fire; your car could explode and you could end up in a wheel chair; you could discover an inner talent; suddenly a business opportunity could turn up; you could read a life changing book; you could find yourself moving to another country; someone close to you could die - basically anything could happen to fulfil that general statement. The chances of something life changing are quite high. It’s not so amazing at all. Being such a general statement, we humans can and do apply it to anything. Interestingly enough, if the astrologer tells this to enough people he/she is bound to get a few hits (just like Nigerian Scam emails).

Worse still, even if it doesn’t work, we still tend forget the numerous occasions where the astrologer got it wrong - selective memory - and only recall the occasions where the astrologer was right. It’s like a lottery in which only the winning numbers can be seen. We don’t think, oh well if this was really an astrologer then the astrologer would have known exactly what life changing event is going to happen and when. We run the risk of being impressed by something which isn’t all that impressive if looked at objectively. A lot of astrologers say that astrology is science - but it isn’t - it’s art - the art of bullshit.

We can easily test, scientifically, whether astrology is real or not. Of course, there have been few experiments and that’s mainly because no one takes it seriously enough to conduct experiements, who would fund it? And we have real science to get on with. Fortunately in the interests of exposing the intellectual fraud that astrologers partake of, some people such as James Randi (a magician who has dedicated his life to exposing quackery and lies) have conducted experiments which reveal the way these things work.

http://www.randi.org/

In this experiment conducted by Randi, a class of students were asked for their names and birth dates, and then each of them were handed out a ‘personalized horoscope’. They were then asked to rate how well the horoscopes matched with their own lives. Most rated them 4/5 or 5/5. They were surprised to find that they had all been given the same horoscope.

Astrological readings and horoscopes are written in such a manner that they couldn’t help but apply to anyone, at any time. We even go so far as to try and make it fit in with our lives. Spiritualists play on this when they drop names to see if they get a reaction (one would imagine that if they were really able to talk to the dead then they would be able to get a name at least). If they can’t even catch the persons name, then how can that be considered communicating at all? Really they just look for cues, reaction, changes in body language that tell them they are close. The same tools used by confidence men and tricksters.

So before we believe something, we must ask ourselves if this belief depends more on what we are forgetting than what we are being told? Ask ourselves if it really fits, or are we making it fit? Chance is like a lottery in which only the winning numbers are seen, and there are those who will use that to trick others. We must remember not to let our own selective memory trip us up.

Or why IE centric designers better learn to love the bombshell:
1 out of every 4 users use another browser

Most designers spend a lot of time getting their design right so that it works in all browsers (although getting it to look the exact same in all browsers may not be possible). If you are such a designer then very probably you can safely ignore this whole article. These thoughts started life in my earlier blog post about obnoxious web design. I posted pages that claim only to work in IE, as one of my pet hates. This is an expansion of that.

Link to earlier post: Pet Peeves Internet Web Design
http://graeme-s-houston.com/archives/216

The reason we have this problem in the first place, is that Microsoft has always consistently failed to follow the web standards that are designed to make sure web pages work in every browser. Every browser out there will more or less render web pages the same - they are all singing the same song - except for Microsoft’s attempt at a browser. IE is off key, and it’s got a few strings broken to boot. Most designers will agree with me here that Microsoft has done nothing but add time and money to every web-design project ever started. Recently they took a very noble step forwards, the details of which are outwith the scope of this post, but it doesn’t change the fact that the web industry today is still suffering from Microsoft’s deliberate policy which we can all agree was designed to do nothing more than lock in its users.

But there is a small minority of companies and designers which have taking a rather obnoxious stance in this matter - they produce web pages that only work in IE. Within this group there is a wide range of diversity, some just don’t render well at all while at worst - some have the unmitigated effrontery to stick in annoying scripts to make sure you won’t see anything except a page that tells you to download Internet Explorer. The scorn that this evokes from a Mac or Linux user is intense beyond words. Who are these hill-billies that have never looked beyond their one platform, who have never used our very human ability to picture ourselves in someone else’s shoes?

I don’t mean the pages that genuinely don’t work because they require an active-x control, this is obnoxious in a different way, (by locking out users of other platforms). What I’m taking about here are the pages that, after all the song and dance about downloading IE, work fine on Konqueror (a linux browser) so long as I tell it to report itself as IE explorer. In other words we don’t need IE explorer, the page renders fine, so why force it upon us? Do you get a commission from Microsoft? Do you enjoy alienating potential customers?

The fact of the matter is 1 out of ever 4 web users are using another browser. Just look at that pie chart. If you told the board of shareholders at company ABC that you were smacking 1 out of every 4 customers with a baseball bat at the entrance to the store, then the shareholders would be up in arms. 1 out of 4! A whole quarter of all the customers! Think of the profits! Oh dear they would be going bananas.

Yet amazingly the web based equivalent goes unnoticed. I implore obnoxious IE centric designers and companies everywhere to take a long hard look at the figures, and put themselves in the shoes of someone who isn’t going to download IE, who has been there and isn’t going backwards.

The fact of the matter is, once people discover that they have the choice to try different browsers and use whatever they like, then they do exactly that. The more people who use alternatives, the better. It forces designers to design pages that work in all browsers, and it forces IE to follow the standards. It makes hiring a web designer cheaper for everyone, it makes web designing easier for everyone to dabble in, and it makes the world a more open place.

I got my figures, in fact I got the whole chart, from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Quick Update
I couldn’t help but notice that the Latest figures from Europe indicate the Firefox use is up to 23.2%. Australasia is about the same at 23.4%. North American stats for Firefox are about the same as the pie chart above.

Or more accurately the milky way is twice as thick as we previously supposed,  12,000 light years thick, rather than 6,000 light years. A light year is the distance it takes like to travel in a year. By comparison light can travel around the earth 7 times in one second. The galaxy is 100,000 light years across.

Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler, of the University of Sydney, led the team that made the discovery by sifting through our current data. Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.

“We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn’t find any mistakes,” they told the press.

“We used data from pulsars: stars that flash with a regular pulse,” Professor Gaensler explained. “As light from these pulsars travels to us, it interacts with electrons scattered between the stars (the Warm Ionised Medium, or WIM), which slows the light down. In particular, the longer (redder) wavelengths of the pulse slow down more than the shorter (bluer) wavelengths, so by seeing how far the red lags behind the blue we can calculate how much WIM the pulse has travelled through. If you know the distance to the pulsar accurately, then you can work out how dense the WIM is and where it stops - in other words where the Galaxy’s edge is. Of the thousands of pulsars known in and around our Galaxy, only about 60 have really well known distances. But to measure the thickness of the Milky Way we need to focus only on those that are sitting above or below the main part of the Galaxy; it turns out that pulsars embedded in the main disk of the Milky Way don’t give us useful information.”

http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2163

Image: Spiral Galaxy NGC 3949 - similar to the Milky Way. Image Credit: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: S. Smartt (The Queen’s University of Belfast).

I think when it comes to KDE openSUSE 10.3 is my favorite distribution. Certainly it’s the one that I keep coming back to. I went through a spate of trying all the different distributions and yet here I am back at openSUSE. Of course, a Linux master might prefer something like slackware which is fast though hard to use. OpenSUSE on the other hand is very easy to use.

I’m getting quite fond of Yast package management. Although it has been a pain in the past, it’s getting better. It used to take an age to fiddle about syncing with the repos, that delay has been cut down considerably.

Surprisingly when I tried the other distributions I didn’t really like the feel of their package managers. Perhaps it’s just a question of familiarity. PC LinuxOS had an okay package manager but again it just didn’t have the same feel as Yast. OpenSUSE now (from 10.3 onwards) has a new one-click-install, which is rather handy. It also has a one click, no fuss install of MP3 and other media support which is a refreshing change from the days of 10.2 when all the stuff to handle MP3s and DVDs had to be installed manually. Bear in mind that Freespire runs that gear clean out of the box. I find also that openSUSE always has a lot of packages available for it (although I think debian must rank as the distribution with the most packages available).

Sorry about the screenshot - I’ve been fiddling with my setup so that I’ve got bars top and bottom. Standard 10.3 is just a bar on the bottom. I was a bit inspired by Ubuntu’s setup. Setting up the second bar was a bit of a pain because of a recurring bug, however once I looked it up on the internet I found a way to get around the bug (which only lets you change the settings for the original bar, despite clicking on the second bar) by going to [Personal Settings / Desktop / Panels] and selecting the panel I wanted to adjust in the drop down box.

I like the Suse menu. It rocks, and groups things in sensible ways: Favorites/Applications/Computer/History/Leave which makes navigating options much easier. KDE menu is also available by right clicking on it and selecting “Switch to KDE menu style”.

I tried GNOME on suse but I wouldn’t really recommend it. From what I could see, Ubuntu is much better. So if you like GNOME then Ubuntu is the way to go, but if you like KDE then openSUSE 10.3 is definitely the way to go.

Overall I think openSUSE is definitely a very mature flavor of Linux and is ready for normal computer users who want to give Linux a try. To that end it now comes on Live CDs. I’m just such a normal computer user - I was extremely comfortable with windows but not what you’d call a power user. Switching was a breeze. Sure I had problems but overall they were nothing too severe. I think I’ve learned a lot in the process and freed myself from a few lock-ins in the process. If you know how to search the internet for solutions to problems, or log into IRC chat, then you’re ready for Linux. There are plenty of users who are always willing to help, so that’s the great thing about the community. Just make sure you back up your data - but then that’s something which applies to every OS, not just Linux.

Have fun, try them all.

On the seashore

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.

The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

–By Rabindranath Tagore, from Gitanjali

Kakistocracy is an interesting word. It means a government ruled by the least qualified, most stupid members of society. I think if you happen to live in a kakistocracy then you’re in deep trouble. The word comes from Greek kakisto, which means worst: + crasy, which we all know means government.

In the wonderfully messed up language of the internet, Kakistocracy would mean “rule by fail”, hehe.

Not to be confused with the similar sounding “kleptocracy”. A kleptocracy comes from klepto+kratein and means “rule by thieves”. It is a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively known as kleptocrats) at the expense of the population. A kleptocratic government often goes beyond merely awarding the prime contracts and civil service posts to friends (which is a common feature of corrupt governments).

Ludwik Leibler and his colleagues at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI/CNRS) in Paris have created a new kind of rubber which has self healing properties. It consists of “fatty acids” — short chains of carbon atoms — linked together via hydrogen bonds which form a network. The material behaves just like an ordinary rubber and can stretch to several times its normal length when pulled.

Dr Ludwik Leibler told the press; “A piece of normal rubber is actually a single molecule with billion upon billions of smaller units chemically welded together to form a giant tangled network. The elasticity comes from the fact that the strands within the network are buckled like a concertina: pull on them and they straighten and elongate; let go and the buckles reappear. But break a rubber (or most other solids), and the chemical welds - known as covalent bonds - are also broken. These cannot be remade. Nor can a piece of rubber be remoulded or reshaped. We wanted to see if we could make a rubber-like material using small molecules.

By replacing the covalent bonds in rubber with weaker connections known as hydrogen bonds Dr Leibler and his colleagues were able to make a material where each molecule interacts with its neighbors like hands clasping together which let go when broken. Dr Leibler and his colleagues then realised the implications of this new material, that not only can the new rubber be recycled and remoulded many times over, but that cuts and breaks could be repaired easily by joining the ends together and allowing the hydrogen bonds to bind again.

Possible applications for the new rubber include self healing clothes, toys that can be reformed, self repairing tires, adhesives, cosmetics, printing, as well as numerous medical applications. The material was developed with the support of the French company Arkema, which is already investigating whether it can be turned into a commercial product (or indeed products).

A long time ago I started up my own website. It was a philosophy website and featured sky background with marble plinths in the foreground upon which the text, usually gold, was written - and it looked not bad at a time (1998) when most ‘user made’ websites featured black background, centered text (and a billion [ugly] animated gifs). Indeed I went for a subdued peaceful, easy on the eyes look - it was after all a philosophy website - so I tried to capture a little Zen. In those days zero-attempt at formatting and centered text was the standard that most websites followed. There’s nothing worse than centered text on web pages! My old man would say that he’s not so sure; “being hacked to death with a machete must come a close second.” But yeh, centered text is one of my pet peeves, and there is no need for it in this day and age, a decade has now passed, but I still come across it regularly. There are so many websites that still look as if they’re from the internet circa 1996. Here’s a list of some more of my pet web page design peeves:

1. day-glow-colour-bomb-text.
   I actually received a letter from a guy who had the audacity to tell me that my design was crap. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because who would want to buy anything from you, your site is a terrible marketing vehicle,’ he said. ‘But I’m not selling anything, this is a philosophy website,’ I told him. ‘Yeh but you need to do better,’ was his reply. Out of curiosity I checked his website, turns out he was a nutcase that thought he had unlocked the theory of everything. His webpage was a starry background. His lettering was centered. But most hilariously of all, no two of his letters were the same colour! Fortunately pages as bad as that aren’t as common these days. I just wish I had a screen shot!
2. Centered text
   Yes that’s right… unless you are a poet, and the text you’ve just centered is a poem, then DON’T DO IT! Centered text is the work of the devil.
3. Music in webpages
   Ughhh - most people are already listening to music while working/surfing, and they don’t need your music playing along and buggering up what they are listing to. Now with firefox and tabs, sometimes I inadvertantly open up such an obnoxious site and then its a case of hunt the tab… which tab is it? Once I find the culprit, I usually just close the page right away. Music just scares away your visitors.
4. Dithered, 1995 style gifs, animated or otherwise
   Gifs from that era are hideous things. We’ve all seen them. Basically back in those days computers had sixteen colours (256 colours if you were lucky), and so the idea of using dot patterns of two or more colours to make it look like there were more colours sort of came into being. The big problem was it looks like crap. It looked like crap then and it looks like crap now. The thing is most computers are capable of displaying several tens of millions of colours so there’s no way we can excuse or forgive the use of dithered gifs. Especially inexcusable are ones which have been enlarged at some point in their lives so that the dithering is especially obvious.
5. Jagged graphics.
   Someone decided to make his/her graphic transparent but decided that the project only deserved two seconds of his/her time. The graphic has a billion dots of white around it showing that despite the transparency it was once on a white background, and meanwhile it looks as if it was cut out by scissors which were based on a design taken from a Salvidor Dali painting.
6. Web pages that only work in Internet Explorer
   There is nothing that can excuse blatantly ignoring testing in the other browsers, because they are generally the ones that adhere to internet web standards, and if your page doesn’t open in them, then you might as well give up and do something more useful with your time.
7. Adverts/images that sit on top of everything.
   I can’t stand it when the idiots have put in fancy pop up menu that I can’t use because it pops up under their adverts (the adverts cover the menu options obscuring them). This is closely connected to number six, they tested it in IE, but they didn’t test it in other browsers. They fail. Related is adverts/images that sit on top of the content so that you can’t read that bit of the web page.

While researching for this post I actually went out to try and find some terrible websites to remind myself of everything I hate about deplorable efforts. So then I realized it would make a neat little bonus section in its own. A list of worst websites:

1. Yes the rainbow pattern moves, so don’t click the link if you have epilepsy.

The kindest thing that could ever be said about this design is that it is obnoxious. But I’m not really in a mood to be kind - if the person who designed this has found god, and will therefore be present in the afterlife, then thank god I’m an atheist and I won’t have to worry about eternal life in the company of the [censored] ******* *********** **** ** * ****** *** ******** **** ********* ** * ****** ** ***** ** **** *******[ end of censoring].

http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/

2. Candidate two

Black background, centered text, each line is a different colour, argghh… and that horribly fuzzy glowing text, just who are these people? I’m not deliberately picking on christians, it’s just that these are the examples that are coming to hand, in this order. And I’m using them as I find them. Sorry. Oh wait, I can’t help myself - Is this an example of ‘Intelligent Design’? hahaha

http://www.thecreationmuseum.org/

3. CPA Infrastructure

Winner of the “We’re too stingy to spend $1 for stock images that might help lend us a hint of credibility” award. This website has some of the worst looking clip art. Clip art that looks like it was tossed into a chipper, with the end product scanned in and inserted into this web page. To top it all off, they’ve then got one of those annoying talking puppets. I know these talking things are about $20 a month(ish), and they should have spent that on stock photos first - talk about misplaced priorities!

http://www.cpainfrastructure.com/

4. McCann Printing

Winner of the “I couldn’t be arsed” award, it does get bonus points for being fast loading and then quickly loses them again for being rather unreadable. Here is a hilarious quote from the page: “Everywhere from the self styled, in-house business creative department to the highly demanding, specialized Marketing/Advertising Agencies of the Midwest. We wonít be a name dropper, but youíll get the picture as you review the case histories displayed in this packet.” Gosh, if I needed a creative design department I’ll be sure to rush to McCann Printing.

http://www.mccannprinting.com/

And now to finish, some light hearted fun. Note that it takes some ten seconds to actually start to spot the mistakes.

http://producten.hema.nl/?%2F