Having lived under a rock for a while I've managed to miss this great new feature in Gmail: Muting or ignoring conversions

From their help text:

"you've no doubt been subjected to the 'thread that just won't die!' If you're part of a long message conversation that isn't relevant, you can mute the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox."

That is such a smart feature. Interestingly I didn't even think there was a solution to that problem. I sure I have many times needed something like this. Now, let's hope I can remember to actually use this feature.

Ever since we started building SnapExpense we ask people we meet how they do their business/travel expenses at their company. Almost always they say their software is annoyingly bad and it's a right pain in the ass to process their expenses. Today I heard another such horror story from a friend about: GlobalExpense (www.globalexpense.com). Apparently it's dreadfully slow to use and it never remembers or adapts to what you have entered previously.

So my friend went to the website on my computer to show me how crap it was but that didn't work because GlobalExpense doesn't work in Firefox! What?! On SnapExpense, about 30% of our visitors use Firefox (with 31% using Internet Explorer).

I'm glad to see that the competition is lagging behind. Gives me heart. Especially as I have recently added Google OpenID log in to SnapExpense so you can log in or register with your Google (or Yahoo! or any OpenID provider) account straight away.

This is going to be useful to keep handy when I move to America.

According to my analytics the most popular Google search for getting to Crosstips.org is exactly crosstips.org which clearly proves that a lot of people type in the domain name in the search field these days. I do it too.

The second most popular search is "word whomp" which Crosstips has a dedicated page for. What's cute about that is that it was just a little side project I threw in yet it has grown to become one of the most popular features. You can never predict these kinds of things. I think the next thing I'm going to add is a Hangman solver which shouldn't be too hard.

So fellow Word Whomp cheaters, go for it!

Came across these amazingly beautiful photos from the Katrina hurricane. I can't believe I missed these before! In a sense I wish I could have been there, but in a safe place.

We might be able to pool together and poison the earth with our pollutions but every now and then mother earth reminds us we're just ping pong balls in her game of tennis.

It's of course a simplification but is it not true? Come on, admit it, isn't there something to it?

What do you think? As a man I must admit that it does feel like that. I don't know about the girls perspective so I'd love to hear what you think (keeping it mind that it's an exaggeration)

Spotted this website called Healing Food Reference which is what the name says; a reference of food and their healing "power". From the home page:

"This site is part of a public education project created by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and hosted by Truth Publishing. Its purpose is to educate and empower consumers with information they can use to prevent and even help reverse degenerative disease. There are no commercial sponsors of this site, and neither Mike Adams nor Truth Publishing was paid anything to create this site."

Basically click on a type of food, for example tofu and you get a list of things it can help with such as fever and then from the fever page you can more foods that help.

At first I was a bit taken aback by the home page and huge amounts of text on it but once you're in it is so easy to use. Perhaps the reason the home page is jam packed with content is for his search engine optimization.

If you want to just remember one single password and you want to use different passwords for different site then Oplop might be right for you.

For those who use last.fm and like to visualize stuff with pretty graphs. For the really curious, here's mine of the last year (15 Mb)

The Fail Blog is funny but sometimes disgusting and borderline sad. Fail Dogs is almost better. A lot of the headlines they put on the pictures just makes it twice as fun. For example this one or this one

Enjoy!

A very sweet result to the Alan Turing petition ("Petition to: apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death.").

It goes to show that there is hope for undoing wrongs in the past. Great work John!

If you met someone from Nestle, Pfizer, Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dow Chemical or Monsanto in a suit and who is proud of her job, would you punch her in the face? No? But would you pretend that you don't know about the ways of her company?

Eco blogger Eco-Chick has written a great write-up on some of the worlds greediest and least irresponsible companies. A great read if you're one of the millions of people who understand that corporate ownership of the world is a bad thing but don't necessarily know any specific details or examples.

When you're desperate for money you can do crazy things like rob a bank or mug an innocent old lady. But decisions to mug an old lady is 100% yours whereas office workers for irresponsible corporations are usually just a cog in a wheel, and therefore they all blame their destructive practices aren't their own idea or initiative. That is was someone "in upper management who decided". Would you dare to confront those excuses at a dinner party if you met one?

"A table of countries lists every country and whether they drive on the left side of the road or the right side of the road."

I've been looking for something like this but thought I had to find an external VCAL file to import into my Google Calendar. Apparently Google Calendar has a whole bunch of useful public calendars. For example, UK Holidays.

To enable any of these click the little down arrow next to the word "Add" on the left hand side under the list of all calendars you have enabled.

The rest is easy and needs no explanation. I did however spot one "bug" or perhaps I just confused myself. When I went in the second time to take a screenshot of the list of public calendars available it had mistakenly unselected the ones I selected a few seconds ago. Perhaps a caching problem.

Typeracer is a game where you're competing with other typers by trying to write a text as quick as possible. One race takes about 1 minute.

Not only is it very well done and extremely "educational" but it's also fun. Unlike other games of the same genre you're not judged by your speed and accuracy. In Typeracer it's all about speed. Your mistakes is your problem since they stop your speed. It's hard to explain but it just works great. Play it and you'll see.

Having played this I realise that my spelling is absolutely terrible. I've grown to depend on the spellchecker in Firefox and when I'm doing programming I don't have to spell particularly much because I use auto-complete. At the moment I average around 55 words per minute which means I win quite a few races but still far far away from the high scores which start on 100+. Gotto to practice more!

I have for a long time been excited about getting one of those SSD drives to boost my laptop. Especially one of those SanDisk 40,000 RPM drop in replacement drives. Skimming around on YouTube there seem to be lots of videos showing how fast the new SSDs are at booting the operating system compared to HDDs.

BUT! These comments caught me attention:

chinesemilkman
"I've worked with those newfangled SSD Macs at my student computing support job and if memory serves, they run applications slower than your standard HDD Macs. I doubt any SDD storage product would run audio and visual as fast as a SATA II. Maybe one day they will optimize performance but in actuality, I have my doubts that any current SDD out performs top of the line HDDs in performance. AND COMPARING BOOTUP SPEED IS NOT A RELIABLE PERFORMANCE TEST! Lame marketing gimmick is what it is."

johnnyfast
"Interesting how NONE of the SSD tests show a real world multi-tasking environment.
I have an OCZ SSD 64 and it totally fails, as soon as my PC is doing 2 or more read/write multi tasks I get horrendous lock ups. It is going back to the shop as unfit for purpose.
SSD is a one trick (read speed) pony."

I mean, they "promise" speed, higher durability and lower power consumption. I was ready to almost accept the extreme prices and the disappointingly small sizes but if speed is only in boot up and single operations then I'd rather spend my money on RAM or CPU or something.

If you zoom in enough you can also see the label on Dick Cheney's wheelchair. I think we'll see more of these mega megapixel shots with Google maps like navigation.

But so does poking needles in at random places. Basically, this article talks of a study that proved that acupuncture does work to treat headaches.

"The Cochrane reviews involved a total of 6,736 patients, who were given acupuncture to prevent either mild to moderate "tension" headaches, or migraine attacks.

Following a course of at least eight weeks, acupuncture patients suffered fewer headaches than those given only painkillers."

That's interesting. So it is better than painkillers. But like my colleague Shane said "I bet it's because it's so relaxing to take a break and sit down and get the treatment unlike painkillers where you don't stop". The report continues

"The scientist leading the review said the results showed that putting needles into particular locations might not be that important."

If you're wondering. I take neither painkillers or acupuncture and I personally think both western and eastern medicine has merits.

A hard blow for the condom manufacturing business

"Abstract In a sample of sexually active college females, condom use, as an indirect measure of the presence of semen in the reproductive tract, was related to scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. Not only were females who were having sex without condoms less depressed, but depressive symptoms and suicide attempts among females who used condoms were proportional to the consistency of condom use. For females who did not use condoms, depression scores went up as the amount of time since their last sexual encounter increased. These data are consistent with the possibility that semen may antagonize depressive symptoms and evidence which shows that the vagina absorbs a number of components of semen that can be detected in the bloodstream within a few hours of administration."

No, I didn't read the paper. Just the abstract.