Blogs In Portugal - The Pioneers Strike Back

If you're Portuguese and have been paying any sort of attention to the recent explosion of the Portuguese "blogsphere", you've probably noticed my earlier rant, which coincided with an in-depth roadmap of what makes for a good blog over at Cafeína - now translated into English here and here (nice to see Ed finally using his Wiki)...

But the best take on it, as far as I'm concerned, has got to be rage's new post, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

(For extra brownie points, check out the HTML source as well :))

I wish I could say I agree with him. Heck, I do. I even wish I'd written some of that (with knobs on), because we seem to share a certain perspective about the differences between the "real world" and weblogs (and the new kids on the block still act as if they haven't a clue).

Are you listening? Don't write up the rants, mind you. Just try to get a decent spin on the cluessness of the invading hordes - that's where the story is.

Reporter Sniffs 802.11b

I stumbled upon this over at Techdirt, and found it priceless: The Inquirer is running a great story about a reporter who recorded everything he grabbed off the air.

We're back to pre-SSL days here, folks. As usual, people aren't aware of the security issues, don't use secure services, or don't have access to them.

An interesting twist on the encryption/security front and the lack of working, deployable and inter-operable ways of securing Wi-Fi (I was going to say "standards", but 802.1x is a bona fide ratified standard with around 0.1% effective footprint) is the fact that something like HotSpotVPN actually exists. They effectively sell the service of terminating PPTP and IPSec tunnels to the open Internet, encrypting data over the radio link and the WISP's infrastructure.

What a strange world we live in.

According to this, monitor resolutions of web users are distributed as such:

1.  1024 x 768  48.3%
2.   800 x 600  31.7%
3.  1280 x 1024 13.6%
4.  1152 x 864  4%
5.   640 x 480  1%
6.  1600 x 1200 1%
7.  1152 x 870  0.2%

Most self-centered egotistically brainless web designers will look at this and go "See? See? 1024x768 is it! Our pages should fit that size screens, and the 800x600 folk will eventually upgrade".

Oh, grow up. I hate those stupid sites where the browser takes up the whole screen or that force me to scroll around for basic navigation - and I have a 1024x768 screen. I just don't waste all the acreage with a browser.

Oh, and the new theme is ready enough to be the default now. Hope you like it - it's much, much easier on my eyes late at night.