Matt's Blog

Archive for March, 2008

April Fools: TechCrunch Suing Facebook for $25 Million

Monday, March 31st, 2008

TechCrunch v. FacebookTechCrunch is apparently suing Facebook for $25 million in statutory damages. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington alleges that Facebook has allowed advertisements that use his picture and name as an endorse without his permission. Here’s the details about the “lawsuit”:

In truth, there hasn’t been much in way of actual damages to back up the lawsuit. But where we’ll really be able to stick it to Facebook is the $750 per incident statutory damages. It’s a stretch, but we’re going to argue that every impression of an ad that includes my name or likeness is an “incident.” Based on our calculations and recent comscore data, we estimate the number of impressions to be in the hundreds of thousands at the very least. Multiplying that number by $750 gets us to damages of at least $150 million.

At this point we’re prepared to settle the case for $25 million in Facebook stock (priced at the employee option price, not that ridiculous $15 billion Microsoft valuation), a small fraction of the amount we’ll almost certainly receive if this case goes to trial, plus guaranteed exclusives on all new Facebook product releases. A recent case involving Taster’s Choice, for example, had an award of $15.6 million in damages.

This is actually a pretty good April Fools joke, much better than last year’s (which was also pretty good).

April Fools: BlueFur Changing Name to YellowFur

Monday, March 31st, 2008

YellowFurAh, and so the Online April Fools jokes start. This year, BlueFur is claiming that they’ve once again come across copyright infringement allegations with their new name, and have decided to change their name to YellowFur. They had this to say about it:

We at Manticore Media Group Inc. would like to announce the change of the name of our hosting business from BlueFur.com to YellowFur.com due to allegations of trademark infringement again.

That post eerily reminds me of something, I just don’t know what. Come on BlueFur, you can do better than this.

Hello iPhone

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

iPhoneSo, I got an Apple iPhone! It’s pretty awesome, more awesome than I had imagined it would be. I got it unlocked/activated/jailbroken with firmware 1.1.3, but that wouldn’t do (:P), so I restored and upgraded to 1.1.4 and then unlocked/activated/jailbroke it using ZiPhone, which worked perfectly. I got the 16GB model.

This phone is definatly an upgrade from my old RAZR V3i. Sure, they both have iTunes (never used it on the RAZR though, it sucked), but the RAZR has physical keys and no touchscreen, I mean, what’s with that? 😛

Went down to the Apple Store in Seattle to buy a case for it (bought the iPhone in Canada and the case in the US…) and bought the Speck ToughSkin and Power Support Screen Film to protect my iPhone. Something I don’t like about this case is that it collects dust easily and there’s an outdent (is that a word?) for the sleep button, but on the inside, there’s no indent for it, so if the case isn’t positioned correctly on the phone, then the sleep button will be held down, causing the phone to ask you to “Slide to Power Off”. However, the iPhone just look as sexy with a case on…

iPhone without case

iPhone with case

The only problem I’ve encountered with the iPhone is that when listening to some songs, part way through the song will be cut off, and it’ll skip to the next song. However, this doesn’t happen to all the songs and quite a few iPhone/iPod Touch users have reported this problem. I’m not sure what’s causing this, possibly something while syncing, or maybe when I imported my music into iTunes. I noticed that the latest songs I added to it don’t have this problem. The only difference is that these were MP3s to start (with bit rates around 200kbps), compared to most of my music that was WMA (with bit rates around 1000kbps).

This is definitely a sweet device! 😀

New Theme

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

I just put up the new theme I’ve been working on for the past… well, who knows how long. The point behind this new theme was to create a clean, simple and good looking theme. The old theme had numerous problems including being hard to read, being downright ugly, having cross-browser compatibility problems and being cluttered with useless stuff.

I believe I have addressed all these issues in this new theme. All the blog post text is black text on a white background, for easy readability, it looks nice, it looks practically the same in the four most-common browsers and I’ve thrown out the useless junk that was sitting around.

Here’s a before and after of Matt’s Blog (click the images for a larger view):

Before:

Old Theme

After:

New Theme

As you can see, it’s quite an improvement.

If you’re in a feed reader, click here to see the new design.

Any feedback on this new theme for Matt’s Blog?

WordPress 2.5

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

WordPressEarlier today, WordPress 2.5 was released. WordPress 2.5 includes some major changes and improvements. Here’s a list of the more important change in 2.5:

  • The Administration area of WordPress received a complete redesign. I’ll let you decide whether you like it or not. 😉
  • The WYSIWYG editor used in WordPress (TinyMCE) was updated to the latest version available.
  • A new Media Manager
  • Better Tag Management
  • Protection from two users editing the same post/page at the same time.
  • Automated Plugin Updating – WordPress now includes functionality to allow you to update plugins to their latest versions with just a few clicks.
  • Better password encryption
  • Lots of backend changes

WordPress 2.5 also ships with two different colour schemes for the Administrator Panel, “Classic” and “Fresh”. You can change the colour scheme in your user profile (click your name in the top-right hand cornor). The default is “Fresh”.

If you have not upgraded already, it is highly recommended that you do. I’ve upgraded already, and everything seems alright.

Download WordPress 2.5