Dominic White

I just read Colin's entry about how The Times have 'partnered' with Google and included a Google search on their website. I though it was quite strange that he used and advertised this with the term 'partnered' over something both easy to do, and many sites have been doing for several years now. My suspicion is that every now and again these "Web 2.0 Journalists" get far too carried away with buzzwords. Although I do think Colin is a sooper guy.

So, I had a quick look at how this magic 'partner' search works. It's quite simple really, you make a call to google.co.za/custom and pass it all the colours you want in the 'cof' var, along with some other miscellaneous junk (the client and channel vars may be some sort of poor authenticator), including the good old 'sitesearch' var.

Continue reading ".tHE pRODUCT Search, powered by The Times, powered by Google"

Posted by Dominic White

In December I received an EMV card from my bank in South Africa. I won't mention who they are as this isn't specific to them. In general it has annoyed me, as now I have to type in a PIN, which often necessitates me moving my lazy ass from the table to the waiters pay area and standing around while the steam punk mechanics work themselves out. And, I am *more* liable for fraud on my account.

Continue reading "Chip & Pin Cards are a joke"

Posted by Dominic White

I'm really enjoying the hype around the firewire hacks, originally presented by Maximillian Dornseif in 2004, breathed new life in 2006 by Adam Boileau and now re-hyping in 2008 thanks to Adam releasing the last bit of scripts to unlock a Windows machine (illegally!, gosh). I think Adam sums this up quite nicely:

Yes, it's a FEATURE, not a bug. It's the Fire in Firewire. Yes, I know this, Microsoft know this. The OHCI-1394 spec knows this. People with firewire ports generally don[']t.

Continue reading "The Fire in Firewire"

Posted by Dominic White