🏷️ web

I thought sidewiki was awesome. I Also know a lot of people that use Google desktop. Not that I ever trusted it.

So, in relation to my last entry. Petra Ecclestone also recently picked up the Candy Spelling Mansion for $85 million. It was one of the most expensive real estate transactions in the US but it was almost half off as it originally had a $150,000,000 asking price. She is clearly a bargain shopper as I already pointed out.

According to the LA times, Petra wasn't into all the antiques in the 120+ room mansion, so some antique dealers came in to bid on the stuff. Discussing a chandlier one dealer said:

"It's a $10,000 investment just in order to get it ready for sale," Boltiansky said. Anticipating a price in "the low six-figure range," the antiques dealer will not discuss exact figures until after the sales and then only with buyer permission.

Boltiansky is the president of Jan & Company in LA. And the LA times article links to their website: On the site it says, "Our 24,000 square foot showrooms in Los Angeles, California is filled with furnishings acquired from some of Europe's most prestigious residences."

But does this seem like the website for a place selling six figure chandeliers? Maybe they are just 100% committed to antiques of all genres, after all I would argue that the site qualifies for status as an antique web site.

Its so old it still has the inline dreamweaver javascript detecting netscape navigator 4 which was released in June 1997

function MM_reloadPage(init) {  //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
  if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
    document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
  else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);

Poking around on the site I found this page which had the dates for the aquisition html templates:

Which brought me to the spelling mansion one.


Wow, that is one seriously impressive residence. Imagine greeting people at the front door.

Back to the site. Clearly managing the site involves a lo of copying and pasting template html pages and FTPing them back to the server. It seems like they could really benefit from something a little more automated. Something more 2011. Something with 3d views of the antiques. Maybe its time to re-invest some of that money in an upgrade of the web presence.

Clearly, those people are experts in antiques but web design - not so much. Maybe its a case of reaching out to student grandkid who didn't follow through with that career path.

On the upside they do have a very interesting glossary you budding antique enthusiasts

The world's richest bride Petra Ecclestone got married this weekend in Rome . Her father is billionaire Bernie Ecclestone -

They got married at the same castle as Tom and Katie Cruise. Everyone tacky and famous was there. Fergie with the Black Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys and Eric Clapton played. Paris Hilton was there, sigh. The only thing missing was that @mike and I were left of the guest list as an apparent oversight. Someone needs to get fired.

But really oversights like that are to be expected on such a shoe string budget -- it only cost $5,000,000.

At first that figure seems shocking. Like $5,000,000 could feed or blow up a small country (depending who is doing the spending and if we deem the inhabitant terrorists or underprivileged). I know, I know - "its too much excess", "the rich gets richer while the poor get poorer" --- blah, blah, blah but then when you really think about it $5,000,000 seems really like a dollar store wedding for a father with a billion dollar fortune.

I mean guys making $40,000 give their daughters $10,000 - $20,000 weddings. I would expect this guy to at least throw a $20,000,000 wedding and that still really kind of thifty for his fortune. Maybe the problem is really just that nothing is expensive enough.

Sure every guest had Chateau Petrus wine at $6,500 a bottle but any self respecting billionaire dad would have had each guest a personal kegger of cristal.

In a way, the rich splurging like this is a good thing. Think about all the money that changed hands, how many people got paid. Its like we are finally seeing trickle down economics really pay off.

Fatass Susanne Eman is trying to become the world's biggest fatass ever. She wants to make it to a ton. What the hell is wrong with her? Imagine the output on this diet.

Breakfast: 6 x eggs scrambled, cooked in butter 468 cals. 1/2 pound bacon 1,168 cals, 4 x potatoes as hash browns 672 cals, 6 x pieces toast with butter 600 cals, 32 ounce cream shake 1,160 cals. Snacking 1 x bag of animal cookies 1,950 cals, 2litre bottle of soft drink 800 cals, 1 x 10.5 ounce bag of barbecue flavour crisps 1,650 cals, 3 x ham and cheese sandwiches 1,576 cals.

Lunch: 3 x beef, bean and green chilli burritos with 1 x cup of sour cream 1,453 cals. Salad (1 head lettuce, 1 cup cherry tomatoes, 1 cup carrots, 1 cucumber, 1/2 cup ranch dressing, bacon bits, 1 cup crumbled cheese, 1 cup chicken 1,479 cals.

Dinner: 12 x filled tacos + 1 x cup sour cream 4,906 cals, 2litre bottle of soda 800 cals, Dessert 8 x scoops vanilla ice cream 2,080 cals, 1 x small pan of brownies 1,200 cals.

Total: 21,962 calories

I find this interesting. The state in germany where I went to college has banned the facebook like button from being used on any website served within its borders due to data privacy issues,

The German State of Schleswig-Holstein has ordered all state sites to remove Facebook's "like" button. Sites that fail to comply could face fines of up to 50,000 euros, or about $72,000.

Schleswig-Holstein's data protection commissioner, Thilo Weicher, ordered the shutdown after an analysis by his office showed that Facebook builds profiles of users and non-users alike with the "like" button's data. Because such data collection violates Germany's data protection laws, Weicher has given websites operated in Schleswig-Holstein until September 30th to remove all "like" buttons.

I can't even believe this is real. There is now a 9PM curfew in Philladelphia for teens under age 18 after a series of violent and crime driven flashmobs fueled by social media?!!

Part of me wants to side with it being ridiculous to force curfews on all teens because of some bad ones and to blame the media for sensationalizing this as flashmobs when really its just organized crime. I mean I used to hate it when the police would harass us for being outside at night when we were teens. On the other hand, we didn't rob stores, well at least not as an organized mobs - we may have mis-weighed bulk food a little here or there.

All joking aside, the media is making this seem slightly terrifying. Its hard to tell what's real and what's not as you can cut facts and video any way you want. I wish I knew someone there.






Here is some actual footage from that. While it looks like a robbery, it doesn't look particularly violent


Yet, the mayor seems to believe it now.


Here are some mobile videos from the evening that seem to be a little more balanced. Strangely, there is barely anything violent in the video which makes me question if the media is sensationalizing the issue. You could easily recut these into a news story that was totally against excessive police force. It just depends how you want to spin it.

Part 1 - I love the long haired white kid at 8:00 who sings about the police treating people like shit.


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Here it is cut up to make those video's seem way more crazy violent on Fox News.



At the end of vide one some surely white guy comments and says "Show me one video of a white flash mob" The thing is there are hundreds if not thousands of them but they are dancing. I hope the action here and in Britain doesn't replace the term flash mob in our cultural vocabulary to mean some scary and violent.

This korean news is hillarious, holy crap

Wow, could it be any more like facebook. I mean, I like it - I like it even more but it feels the same. Its going to be so hard to get people into both. I don't understand how people can possibly have enough time in their lives for all of this social networking. Maybe google is going to do an even better job with it.

Popular science published its magazine as a chrome web app . It seems to work ok in other browsers.

It was a pretty awesome experience flipping through the magazine on the TV and the stories were pretty good. There is also an angry birds app - It also works in firefox.

copyright infringement != theft
Theft occurs when one deprives the owner of the original.

Taking a picture of art in a museum can be considered copyright infringement, but it is certainly not the same thing as thieving the original.

This is a stupid practice for anyone. Never make your username/password the same thing, never make them both tiny numbers.

I can't believe there is this commercial paging and directory software for hospitals/government organizations that exists where the vendor must be encouraging customers to use login/password combos that are both that same publicly available ids.

Its so silly because the numbers are so low, even if you didn't have the lookup ability you could just guess, say 4004/4004 until you got it right. Clearly, you can't 100% blame the vendor on this as anyone in their right mind would recognize that is not a secure setup. Especially for an app on the open, public web.

It kills me because I want to tell the people so bad that their data is totally vulnerable but at the same time, I don't want to get involved. Its a real moral dilema.

Even worse, older versions of the software simply let you set the cookie to the ID you want and you are in. That is just lunacy. They fixed the cookie issue after I contacted them by phone a couple years back. Looking back it was so funny trying to explain to their software engineer how insecure using that cookie was - he was not getting it at all.

Sadly, some of their customers haven't upgraded. If I was the vendor I would give away free upgrades because if anyone does exploit this, they will lose all of their credibility.

Its even worse because the vendor lists the organizations right on their homepage.