The Times paywall, discipline and game theory
So today’s the day that thetimes.co.uk starts charging for access. You can still access the front page without paying, but if you try to read any stories it prompts you to pick a payment option (£1 for one day’s access, or £2 for a whole week).
Now I have to be honest and say that I was all set to pay my £2. It’s a legitimate business expense, and I reckon we could manage £104 per year; I know I’d use it, too, because I currently visit The Times once a day, and often more. However, perversely, this is what put me off.
I’m not an expert on Parkour, but…
…even so, I’m pretty sure these guys have taken it to a new level. Watch this video (it gets going at 0:45) and you’ll begin to believe that gravity is actually optional.
Can’t upload a Word document? You need to close it first.
If you are a savvy web developer, you almost certainly won’t allow users to upload any old file to your site in case it’s a virus or other malware. You’ll probably use MIME types to restrict which files people can upload.
The trouble is the for some reason, when you have a Word document open, it reports a different MIME type than when it is closed, which will scupper your upload routine. Since the type reported makes it look like an executable file (and therefore potentially dangerous) your code probably won’t allow it, and rightly so.
The solution, therefore, is for your user to close the document before they try to upload it.
I’m not sure whether this is specific to Windows/IE (I wouldn’t be surprised) but if you have trouble uploading Word docs, this could provide to solution. (When I have time I’ll test how other document types behave…)
It was late. I’d been up for 21 hours…
… and I was halfway through this article before I realised what they were up to. Do they have a special commissioning department for this stuff?
Yes, you could get in trouble for that
I presume you’ve seen this:
And you may have read this. But did you spot this?
Williams then alerted the emergency services on her mobile phone. “I wasn’t on hands-free, but I figured I wasn’t really driving the car,” she said.
Now I know why she didn’t come forward immediately; probably getting legal advice…
An elegant regular expression for finding URLs
so you can turn them into hyperlinks automatically…
A while ago I needed to write some code which would automatically recognise a URL in plain text, and turn it into a hyperlink. Being a lazy sort, I turned to Google, and found this article on DevX. The regular expression it gave there was not perfect, but worked reasonably well:
\w*[\://]*\w+\.\w+\.\w+[/\w+]*[.\w+]*
At the time, I was sufficiently rushed off my feet that I forgave its flaws and implemented it. Over time, however, it’s been bugging me, and as the service it’s implemented on gets more traffic, so the need to improve it has become greater. And so it came to pass that this evening I bit the bullet and tried to write a better one. After a couple of hours of testing various permutations, here it is (after the jump):
What on earth was Google thinking when it added the fade effect?
I am totally confused on this one: Google, so often a shining beacon of good interface design and elegant functionality, has for some unknown reason added an apparently unneccessary fade effect to its homepage. It starts off sparse, then the rest of the content appears once you move your mouse in the window.
Check out my tasty simulation after the jump.
How websites reward ambition
In a nutshell: Because they scale really nicely.
This was brought home to me recently when I was drawing up a proposal for a client who plans to set up a new business networking group, or more accurately, a network of networking groups. Our M.O. involves a lot of upfront business analysis, so it was clear that the optimum solution involved much more than a simple website with some card payments for bookings.
Never give up
This made my day.
Russel McPhee, a stroke victim paralysed for 20 years, has been able to walk again after injections of Botox. Apparently, Botox is comonly used to treat the muscle stiffness experienced after a stroke, but usually shortly after the episode, not two decades later. The difficulty is that Botox relaxes the stiffness, but also the muscle tone, which makes controlling the newly relaxed muscles very difficult.
But here’s the bit that really grabbed me:
Crucially, Mr McPhee had repeatedly, over the years, attempted to get out of his wheelchair and stand on his own.
He was not successful, managing at most a few seconds on his feet before he collapsed.
“Often I would lie on the floor for hours, just hoping that someone might drop by so they could pick me up again,” he said.
Those repeated, heart-breaking attempts to stand built up a core muscle strength on which his doctors and physiotherapists were able to work.
This is a guy who simply refused to give up. Even though bitter experience, built up over 20 years, must have told him that attempting to stand unaided would lead to failure, that walking was impossible, he never stopped trying. This immense willpower, sheer bloody-mindedness really, meant that when modern medicine came up with the tools to unlock his body, he had the core strength to make the most of it, and finally walk again.
What makes you happy?
This article, and the underlying study, is so good that I almost don’t dare talk too much about it here. You really should just read it.
In a nutshell: for the past 72 years, a sample of 268 men have been followed and their entire history - medical, familial, physical, emotional, mental - recorded in great depth. The study is coming to end, mainly because only half of the original group are still alive, and they are in their late eighties. It has a huge amount to teach us about how our lives shape our personalities, and vice versa.