Google has discovered that just because a technology is “trendy” and geeky and has a cool name and is backed by a major corporation does not guarantee it will actually be useful.

How soon until the Twitter fad wears off?

As if I didn’t have enough reasons to hate that company already.

I have taken a personal vow not to use any Apple products, hardware or software. However, sometimes I have to interact with less ideologically zealous people, like my father, a “proud” owner of an iPod 5G who now sometimes curses his acquisition.

Previously, at his request, I uploaded a bunch of .m4v videos to his iPod using gtkpod. They all played correctly. This time (in Lucid), there was something funky with mountpoint permissions when I attempted to write to the iPod, so I tried to upload the new pack of videos from his Windows laptop, where he has iTunes installed. While iTunes did upload the new videos, it silently wiped the old ones without any prompts or warning messages.

I don’t know if this was some misguided attempt at customer care, or an active attack against third-party iPod software, but the fact remains: the files would have been lost if I hadn’t kept backups on my computer. Now I’ll have to re-add them.

Apple may be an easy target, but apart from all it DRM crusades, this illustrates my point: if you want to be in control of your own data, don’t use Apple products. As for me, my HTC Hero communicator doubles as a media player (with a nice UI, I should add) at the rare times I actually (gasp!) listen to music. I synchronize the music with it using Banshee, but the file storage uses no arcane filesystem conventions like the iPod/iTunes compatibility nightmare, and music files can simply be copied to the device with a file manager.

Holy cow, Google has already indexed a forum post I wrote ten minutes ago. Scary.

Igor Gomes drew my attention to the fact that Launchpad OpenIDs didn’t work in my blog. The OpenID implementation used here was self-written and only supported OpenID 1.0, so it’s no wonder — but still, when I looked at the replacement that I used, the PHP OpenID Library together with this component, it made me weep. OpenID 1.0 was elegant in its simplicity, and so was the authenticator code; is OpenID 2.0 bloated?

Still, Launchpad userpage URLs work in the OpenID box now. EAUT is supported too, so you can use an email address if you have one linked to OpenID.

Mibbit actually turned out to be more nifty than I thought, since it has registration and autojoin settings (alongside the much-required option to disable graphical emoticons).

I should probably change the coloration of “Your name mentioned” tabs, though. It’s one of those dark shades of red that I have trouble discerning from brown. I don’t know what kind of partial color-blindness I have — none of the standard descriptions from Wikipedia fit exactly, although I fail the protanopia and partially (depending on monitor brightness settings) deuteranopia test. What I know is that I have trouble distinguishing between dark brown and dark red, as well as between light green and yellow.

Damn you, Y chromosome!