The Occasional Blargh

That 12 megapixel consumer minicamera from Best Buy will likely be crap...

Yes, this is too late for Christmas but it's probably worth knowing anyway. More megapixels do not automatically make for a better picture. More megapixels actually could lead to worse pictures! According to a number of testers, the best quality came from around 6 megapixels. The explanation is complicated, but as summarized by Tim Bray: "As you make pixels smaller and closer together, you lose sensitivity and increase visual static." The pictures start looking like a pointillism experiment gone wrong. Remember this, especially now with camera manufacturers using that one number as the "More Power Arrr Arrr Arrr!" number. 

Snap Decision. . .

You know what's annoying. Those sites where moving the mouse pointer over a hyperlink displays a huge, page-obscuring pop-up balloon (with a convenient advertisement within). So, yes I found and turned off the new Snap Preview feature. This guy wrote a good essay as to why Snap Previews suck, but for here the fact that it annoyed me is enough to kill it.

Another Questionable Test. . .

	I received 56 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz

The Sci Fi Quiz Test

This particular quiz has a hidden link to this web address -- http://usingthecanons5is.blogspot.com. The weblog is 5 posts on using a particular brand of camera. There is no word as to why that particular link exists in a quiz testing your knowledge of audio clips from Science Fiction Movies, or why that test is hosted on a site called SheGoddess. You get the suspicion that the internet is an elaborate graft machine.

Anyway, the only reason I'm posting this is because improbably, I managed to score a 56 on the test which classifies me as a "Major Sci-Fi Geek." In all honestly, I only knew the answers to the first two questions presented to me and guessed all of the rest.

The Blog-Quiz Trick isn't an Isolated Occurrence

The same cash advance blog scam is being perpetuated by the Blog-Movie Rating Quiz. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the quizzes at Just Say Hi.com generate that hidden link. I just can't check since their site is running so incredibly slowly right now.

The interesting thing about that one is when I used Technorati to search out people who linked to that quiz, you discover that that particular quiz has hidden different advertisement/spam links through its history.

You all are going to have to be more careful when you do online quizzes.

You don't need a high school education to be suckered into advertising cash advances!

What a clever scam this was, notes Charles Arthur!

I saw the "Blog Readability Test" a few weeks ago, and I played around with it. Currently, both the journals hosted on Vox and on LiveJournal got grades of "High School Level" writing. I didn't post either results to either page. But I would have been easily suckered by it had I not been too lazy to write a surround post to the test.

As with most of these tests, they give you the means to display the results on your website. Most people just cut and paste the HTML code, without regard to what it does. Most people probably don't even understand HTML, or even want to. So it wouldn't be hard to sneak in a bit of code to stealthy advertise some website. Which is exactly what the Blog Readability Test does.

Let's look at the code.

<a href="http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/readinglevel/img/high_school.jpg" alt="cash advance" /></a><p><small>Get a <a href="http://www.cashadvance1500.com">Cash  Advance</a></small></p>

Note what I have bolded. Hidden in the code is a link to some Payday Loan website which uses the same color background and similar fonts as the Blog Readability test page. This Blog Readability test really did pop out of nowhere. It's hosted on a site called CriticsRant, which would seem to have nothing to do with the Blog test except that all three share the use of a similar design with similar fonts and colors. (Both sites like using Trebuchet MS as the main font with headers in orange, and a gray background. Though one of the stylesheets used, credited to Keith Donegan of Code-Sucks.com, gives anyone permission for wide reuse.) That said, CriticsRant is strange that there is very little information on the site about who writes it, or owns it or anything of the like. Something suspicious for a major site like that.

QotD: My Holiday Wishlist (1 of TBD)

What's on your holiday wishlist?

I need this.

Sixty-Four Bits: Yahoo! vs Some Yahoo. . .

Who can first release Yahoo Messenger for Vista so that it runs on the 64-bit version of the OS, Yahoo Inc., or some anonymous yahoo? Oops, too late. Anonymous yahoo won.

Tragic, isn't it.

(credit: Long Zheng)

Well, credit should be given to Yahoo. They released their update to get it installed on x64 systems, today.

Yahoo Messenger's Frosty Reception

Frozen YIM Window

Honestly, I thought their developers were long since deceased. But after eleven months, Yahoo managed to release some evidence of work on Messenger for Vista. I don't know why they're celebrating, as even they admit that it isn't feature complete. Nor beta-stable. In fact, as long as it took to develop makes me wonder about the viability of WPF as a UI language. Likewise the slowness in some areas. Though then again, it may just be Yahoo themselves. The Mac client is glacial, as are the frequency of updates, too. At any rate, after leaving us in the ice about its progress for 11 months, it is getting rather frosty receptions. In my case, relaunch left it frozen as a frosted pane of glass.

Bizarre Google Ads

Google "Nader" Ad

I never got what is so special about Google's advertising system.  Google promotes its ad program by saying its text crawlers that index sites allows them to present advertisements that are relevant and targeted to the audience reading the page. That's great in theory, but in practice I usually see bizarre nonsensical text links like "Ralph Nader Music Site". That is what I saw on Variety's site, a few moments ago. It's like advertising copy written by folks who don't understand the language.