Alden Bates' Weblog

Google has this awesome search suggest feature, which shows you what the most popular searches are for the query you're starting to type in.

Hmm, lotta hygiene conscious women out there.

And a lot of people with dogs that eat poop.

Like part 1, I pretty much knew what to expect, as it was typical of just about every Davies finale thus far. Despite it having many good moments, it felt ultimately like a bit of a let down. This was Davies' last chance to write a finale, and instead he more or less repeats himself.

Continue reading "The End of Time, Part 2"

To summarise in advance: The End of Time, Part 1 is an example of a typical first part of a Russell T Davies finale. If you're seen his previous finales, you'll know what to expect.

Right, from here on, spoiler warning apply.

Continue reading "The End of Time, Part 1"

Today the Transformers Wiki passed 10,000 articles. There are many Transformers Wikis on the web, but only one dares to have more than 10,000 articles!

Of course, to put this in perspective, Wookieepedia currently has 72,759 articles (Fair warning, they are hosted on Wikia, so you will probably see many pictures of almost-naked fat people if you go there) but TFWiki.net may catch up yet!

Helpfully under the cut, in case you're one of the few people left who hasn't seen it. Spoilers included, obviously.

Continue reading "Doctor Who: Waters of Mars, in a nutshell"

Google rolled out a beta release of Chrome the other day, and unfortunately it's introduced a rendering problem when viewing the Transformers Wiki:

The left-hand column is inexplicably pushed down under the content area, making it virtually useless. I've seen it happen on a few other sites as well, and I've submitted a bug report via the reporting mechanism built into Chrome, so hopefully it'll be fixed in the next release.

This time, with UNIT fighting Cybermen. Seriously the BBC should give this guy a job!

previously: Doctor Who Anime - yes, I realise it's still halfway down my main page. I am so terribly slack of late.

So the NZ government has made a right hash of things supporting various bids for the screening rights for the rugby world cup. After toing and froing between various people, it's decided that TVNZ, TV3 and Maori TV will essentially share the rights and games will be broadcast on all three channels. After all this, hypothetically, the All Blacks are knocked out in a shock result in the first round by Tonga.

How funny would this be on a scale of 1 to 10?

I discovered these links after the webcomics in question advertised on the Transformers Wiki:

The Dreamland Chronicles - Not a gag-a-day comic, but one ongoing story, all rendered in movie-quality CGI. The Dreamland Chronicles tells the story of Alex, who suddenly finds himself dreaming of the same fantasy world he dreamed of as a young child and has to deal with encountering the same characters he knew long ago, only grown up.

Weesh - and at the other end of the spectrum, Weesh, which is a gag-a-day strip (or at least every few days) and with a clean, simple drawing style. Three kids have a strange animal named Weesh, who has the power to grant wishes, so long as he gets enough licorice.

Both comics are family-friendly.

AKA jumping on the topic du jour.

Google's latest release is "Sidewiki", essentially a new feature on their toolbar which allows you to open up a sidebar and add a note about the page you're currently viewing. Other users can then rate your comment, and all the comments on a particular page are ordered by how useful other users found them. So essentially it's a commenting system with ratings. I'm not sure why they chose to have "wiki" in the name; Wiki implies modifiable content, but so far as I can tell you can't modify notes anyone else has added.

What does this give us? Well, in practical terms, it means every page on the Internet has a Google-controlled comment forum which the site owner has little control over, but which is displayed alongside their content. These can be displayed in any browser, even if it doesn't have Google toolbar installed - observe this Sidewiki comment on Wikipedia's main page. Now, Wikipedia's main page already has a talk page to comment on, which is modifiable by anyone, so the Sidewiki is providing a second redundant comment forum albeit, as the comment points out, one not under the control of anyone at Wikipedia. As a side note, this also means that blogs with the comments disabled now have comments again.

This post, too, has a section at the bottom for visitors to leave their comments, but it also has a Sidewiki. When someone posts a comment here, I get an email alerting me, so I know to come and reply to it. If someone posts a comment to the Sidewiki, I don't. Perhaps this is something Google ought to look at as an enhancement to their Webmaster Tools service? By verifying my site on sitemaps, I ought to be able to access a page showing all of the Sidewiki comments.

I'll be interested to see how long it takes before the first libel case results from something someone said on Sidewiki. I went to check the Scientology site to see if anything had been added there yet, but their site crashes IE on my computer, and I can't get Sidewiki to install on Firefox, so...