Cool Site Of The Day

[perth]

paint-by-number

~james

[hermit22]

I've run a few weblogs in my time, but I invariably give them up after a while. I started a new one a few weeks ago that I think will last longer, however.

The unique thing about it is this: I'm a fairly liberal kind of guy (if you couldn't tell from my posting here), and I'm starting a graduate program in what essentially is International Relations. Almost all of the professors find themselves on the conservative side of the scale. So I'd like to track my intellectual progress, and provide a recording of how my thoughts grow and the direction they take.

So anyway, the site is kind of sparse at the moment. I'll have time to update the design after the end of the quarter. You can find the link here. I'd appreciate any commments or views.

[perth]

hermit, cant comment on the content because im an idiot, but i do like the design. ill bookmark it and do some reading, maybe ill learn a thing or two.

~james

[elSicomoro]

Interesting stuff hermit. Keep at it.

Hopefully you will be kind enough to visit my own blog.

[Nic Name]

moonthewhitehouse.com

Is this what Gore had in mind when he invented the Internet?

[MaggieL]

The Prime Number Shitting Bear

[Nic Name]

http://www.ghostzilla.com/

[El Phantazmo]

EVILCLOWN
pee mail
Greatest wallpaper and image site out there.
Redmeat -funny comic
Gluemeat Excellent Movie site
Push a guy down the stairs for points! What more do you want?

Ok I'm done for now. Enjoy, and this is a pretty cool site BTW, I'll be back!

[El Phantazmo]

Forgot another cool one. Flashface.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Nic Name
http://www.ghostzilla.com/

Yeah, saw that one on /. Pretty cool if you're forced to run Windows at work, which a lot of people are.

You OSX folks who can't run gKrellm (actually, maybe you *can* run gKrellem if you install X, I dunno) might be interested in iPulse , it's freeware and compresses a mulitidimesional picture of your system state into only a tiny bit or real estate on the screen.

[Nic Name]

www.canadiantire.ca

For a company whose mascot is a penny-pinching Scotsman, Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd. certainly spared no expense when it came to building its e-commerce Web site. Surely Sandy McTire is tearing out his bushy white hair over the more than $28 million the chain has spent developing canadiantire.ca.

That's only US$17,755,230.

OK, they can afford it, but did this company get screwed, or what?!!!

That's what we call eekommerce.

[Undertoad]

Re Canadian Tire: after 6 years in the biz I have seen worse atrocities done more expensively, most notably the USPS site circa 1998. But in 2002 we're supposed to be PAST this kind of problem.

Looks like a committee design combined with a "religious" IT decision to make the entire thing jsp. Add a pinch of clueless demanding upper management. And I bet the whole thing sat around for a while, as various VPs put their two cents in. "My Canadian Tire"? That's so 2000.

[Nic Name]

Canadian Tire officially not 'Crappy'

The World Intellectual Property Organization has ruled that Canadian Tire Corporation has no legal right to control "crappytire.com" -- the Internet domain name registered to Mick McFadden of London, Ontario.

In its March 16, 2001 complaint to WIPO, Canadian Tire claimed that it is "frequently colloquially referred to or known as 'Crappy Tire' by the public." The corporation argued that its trademarks should be extended to include the phrase because its stores are "closely associated" with the slang expression. It also charged that McFadden used his site "to make rude, untrue and libellous statements about Canadian Tire."

The corporation's claim hinged on the idea that crappytire.com is "confusingly similar" to its trademarks. Canadian Tire noted that Internet searches for "Canadian crappy tire" result in many references to the corporation.

McFadden's response to Canadian Tire's complaint argued that the corporation has not trademarked the offending phrase. "Since when is the word 'Canadian' interchangeable with or similar to 'crappy'?" he asked.


Fun facts from the Canadian Tire WIPO complaint:
90% of adult Canadians shop at Canadian Tire at least twice each year.
40% of adult Canadians shop there each week.
85% of the Canadian population lives within a 15 minute drive of a Canadian Tire store.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Undertoad
Looks like a committee design combined with a "religious" IT decision to make the entire thing jsp.

Only the truly devout would think using JSP would rescue a bad design. I very much doubt that the pricetag is a result of using JSP. True, there's probably a boatload of licence cost due to using EJB on Weblogic....but these guys probably have enough volume to justify an EJB approach....which has very little to do with Java Server Pages, of course.

Of course,. it *could* have been executed in ASP or .NET...then it would be a *proprietary* version of the same design, and immune to being ported to a more economical server base; if the archetects of this site have resisted using Weblogic-proprietary APIs, they can migrate pretty easily to another app server, or even mix app servers from different providers to carry this sites workload. The coolness of this would be the ability to examine which app server platform gives them the best performance on a live workload.

At least it continues to work if you refuse cookies. Many ASP-based shopping carts don't.

The site itself doesn't really look to me like a very *bad* design, although it does have that "circus poster" feel that most big ecommerce sites have Every department in the company is entitled a slice of the incoming eyeballs. They tell the stockholders that this is "synergies" and "economies of scale". ;-)

Speaking of religion, one wonders how much of the 17 mil went to making the site bilingual.

[Nic Name]

GovEngine