Nota bene: I wished these were exactly the words I dreamt.
But unfortunately I'm not too sure how much I managed to recover/restore. Sorry!
Why I found it noteworthy nevertheless is the fact, that I actually dreamt a specific poem word by word being the story of a winter dream within this dream of a summer. And all this in 3D-Technicolor®, of course :D
Which leads me to think that there's room for improvement… :)

There's a new feature in Google Reader, that allows everybody to create a custom feed of any website, even one that doesn't offer any RSS or Atom feed.
For all the bloggers out there this news isn't interesting at all, because I'm sure most of us use the possibility of Wordpress, LJ, Blogspot etc. to just blow them feeds loudly out into the vast desert of the interwebs.
But there are others, who are more shy or who have relatively static corporate websites for the reason that changes of content just aren't trackable automatically too easy, to mention only two scenarios of opposers to this idea.

For those the helping information on how to prevent Google Reader observing your content is here.
What you have to do is add this meta tag to every single of your pages you don't want to be "observed":

<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

The other mentioned option to exclude the Googlebot absolutely from your website by means of robots.txt would apply only to very few cases, I think. And those have their arms up already for some time.

Just in time for my previous rant  on the topic of web angst the admirable Robert X. Cringley wrote his article "Mobile 2010 Predictions: Apple, Google & RIM, Oh My!" in which not very many favourable things about Nokias perspectives over the next years came up.

Now we all know that Nokia is No. 1 in the mobile phone business and a technology giant.
But nevertheless he's right with many of his observations concerning Qt and the difference of strategies between Apple, Google here and Microsoft and Nokia there. (Unsurprisingly Sony-Ericsson isn't even mentioned in the article as a player, just like Samsung and the others.)

But I don't agree with Bob's vision of Nokia being doomed at one point: Nokia is not only a typical hardware company that doesn't dig software.
Nokia started with tires and rubberboots a long time ago.
From this rather uninteresting industry they travelled a long and successful journey to todays' Nokia Maps and Ovi, not even mentioning the firewall appliances and mobile phones.
This is true for the originating country Finland, too: from an often looked down upon as a poor "soviet satellite state" to a culturally leading European hightech country is not something you would expect to be easy and achieved by anybody.
So in this respect I'd rather compare Nokias transitions with the homecoming of Steve Jobs to Apple and the road (t)his company has been on since then.

This isn't Sculley's Apple any more and it isn't the company of the founders, too, this is a whole other force.
I think that Nokia is a company with much of those "Change" genes, which really has the power to re-invent itself every now and then.
Maybe Maemo 5 is the milestone for such a quick and dirty enough turnaround.
if you read vowe's observations on the N900 eg. you get the image of a gem.

I own it's predecessor and remain sceptic, because IMHO the whole device integration process at Nokia is broken and I can't see how this can be cured in short time.
The gap between Nokias awful PC Software - with nearly no offerings for Mac or Linux, and if, then eternally "beta" -, their flashy, pre-Web 2.0 catalogue like web site and the original device experience is so big, the holistic product experience so broken that nobody who knows the alternatives will even consider this an offering in terms of competition.
Maybe the management was too busy feeding their cats to get the upcoming work done at the turn of the millenium.
Maybe the sky was too open. I have no idea who told them that S60 would be enough and the world would happily wait decades for a S100.

But I'd not be astonished to see a next generation of engineers in their footsteps building up another modern and from the ground up leading company already.
Maybe American opera glasses are not enough to estimate the strength of the procedures that are already taken.
How the issues at the mobile phone industry front resolve in the near future remains to be seen.
And if only for the knowledge that the raptors, the so-called "carriers" are still out there in search for their prey.

A good friend of mine made me aware of a little questionnaire on HammerKit's Twitter with the following points:
- What is your web angst?
- What makes you scream when doing stuff on web?
- What annoys you in #webdesign? IE? Flash? Tables? Share with us!

Since I've suffered from headache for the last two days I thought my brain might need a couple minutes of pleasure, so I answered those right away.
Not sure if my head feels better now, but let's just pretend my rant skills have just been improved by 50XP :)

@1. IE hast just recently officially imploded, so is there anybody out there still coding for it under the age of 85? (Exept in some perhaps mainly German ministeries, that is… but this joke's worn out, that's how bitter the truth is.)

@2. Flash in ads doesn't annoy me any more, it's just disrespectfully avoided. If Adobe doesn't come up with amazing stuff soon their shiny plugin might just join the way of the Dodo. Of course our everyday Joe Surfer would have a totally different POV here, but you asked me.

@3. I haven't actively noticed tables used in web design in a long time. Do they still matter somewhere?

4. I hate applications that don't respect my browser's "Back" button and when in their error messages the programmers try to explain to us that their underlying business logic is so superior to the world, the universe, everything that they couldn't be bothered aligning with usability and web standards.

5. I find it really really annoying when web people talk clients into "SEO" when what they try is just not to admit that they're cheating with "relevance", and fortunately it's only their clients reputation which is at risk.
This feels a bit like when back in the days suddenly "frames" and "spacer gifs" were needed everywhere: stupid ideas, gazillions of bad implementations and recovering from this shit is still an ongoing process.
SEO should be a term of quality assurance and not marketing gibberish for PowerPoint aficionados feverishly trying to hide their cluelessness.

6. Designers plastering the Internet with complex layouts for always bigger default screens. They're completely missing the point that even on a net book or 3.4" smartphone screen the user is king. Who loads your intro screens, who wants your background music, when CPU power and battery life are common enemies?

7. And finally: Designers Developers of "apps" with web sites that can't be instantly browsed from their target group's smartphones. This makes for an instant loss of reputation. Even if the app is for free. I wouldn't drink these peoples' milk even if they showed me their cow on Skype!

8. Oh, and one more rant, in a humble recognition of Mr. Jobs' upcoming public announcements:
Mobile phone companies with Flash 9 plastered all over their shops and community websites? Does any of this crap even load in a minor percentage of their products? Nooo? Poor decision makers. (This would include Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson and certainly many others. What were they smoking while employees at Apple and Google did their homework?)

Rant over. Friede den Hütten, y'all.
Illustration Credits (CC BY 3.0): Matthias Pflügner @ Peter Bihr

EDIT: There's a not unrelated Nokia afterglow, which I wrote shortly afterwards.

Q: Belle

Passend zum rauen WInter mal wieder was Lustiges. Und was zum Naschen.

Bei einem dieser PennyAldiLidls gibt es einen Ziegenkäse namens "Minette". Pur oder mit Kräutern.
Ich kann ja leider kein französisch, aber irgendwas blitzte da doch in meinem Hinterhirn auf, ein Funken einer Laclos-Reminiszenz oder ähnlicher Rokoko-Lektüre aus Jugendzeiten oder so.

fr.wikipedia.org to teh rescue, yay! Denn so viel verstehe ich gerade noch:


Die liefern mit diesem eigentlich harmlosen Käse also quasi als Bonusservice einen Produktnamen für Menschen mit Phantasie, wie nett und wie naheliegend!
Ziegen haben ja eh' so spitze… Tßungen Bärte!

Aber - bei aller Dankbarkeit für die Anregung - eine Frage bleibt: müsste nicht ein "explicit lyrics"-Warn-Aufkleber auf diese Schachtel?
Oder habt Ihr in dem Zusammenhang - anders als ich - doch eher an ein unschuldig miauendes "Kätzchen" gedacht?

Mr. Obama schafft also Arbeit via URI. Hmmmm.
Bei aller Freude über den Witz, ich hoffe er setzt auch noch auf andere Karten, nicht nur auf Drupal, Bankenschmieren und Aufrüstung ;)



Q: Rob Cottingham: Noise to Signal

If the REAL Sarah Connor would have been involved, I'd have understood the enthusiazm!
But this "Sarah the Sexy Singer" creature won't help us against Skynet at all.
Not a faking-high-note bit.

"Man brauche keinen Nacktscanner, um bei der FDP unter dem dünnen Mäntelchen der Bürgerrechtspartei die nackte Haut der Prinzipienlosigkeit zu erkennen" LOL
Q: Ulla Jelpke @ http://www.golem.de/0912/72115.html