When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · November
· · · · 13 (3 entries)
Activa vs. Mrs. Lanteigne · That would be Mrs. Louisette Lanteigne of Waterloo, Ont., who has an extremely amateur GeoCities website that she’s been using to post illustrated complaints about what look like dangerous, shoddy, and environmentally damaging construction practices in her neighborhood, illustrated with her own pictures. Activa, one of the developers she’s been complaining about, has slapped her with a 2-million-dollar libel action. Plus, Slashdot knocked her site off the air (Google cache here). The litigation seems a little over the top to this non-lawyer; are there any good Waterloo-area geeks who’d like to fix her up with a higher-grade Web presence?
You’re Being Watched · I just signed up for Google Analytics and installed the code, but only on the home page, which many (most?) regular readers never see. Among other things, it downloads a 17K (!) chunk of JavaScript. I’ll report back on whether it does anything useful, and if so, will consider deploying it on more pages. I currently have a pretty rich set of Perl scripts that tell me a lot of useful stuff, but there’s certainly more to know. I don’t think they claim to do anything to track the people who read this via RSS/Atom, which means that it will become less useful with time until they address that, which I’m not sure is possible. I write this because my more paranoid readers (and there’s no doubt about it, they are out to get you) will probably object to having Google track what they read, so now is the time to start cooking up Analytics-blocking GreaseMonkey scripts, or equivalent. [OK, it’s working now, I was fooled by the fact that it’s broken in Safari. So I republished the whole site with Analytics turned on, and I’ll publish the pretty graphs next Sunday after it’s had a week to run.]
Polamalu · The kid and I were watching Sunday night football, Steelers and Browns. He & I have had a soft spot for Pittsburgh since last year, probably just because they’re fun to watch. For example, Troy Polamalu made a terrific tackle and the kid said: “When he goes fast and he bumps into somebody, they fall down right away.” Yep. Then Charlie Batch improvised that no-time-to-think touchdown at the end of the half—with a broken hand! And as I was typing this, they pulled off that ridiculous showboat piece, double-reverse to Randle El to the stratosphere to Ward to the end zone, 51 yards later. Oh my goodness. Cleveland’s Dilfer and Droughns are fun, too; but they’re up against it tonight.
