Looking for a few pictures of Toblerone to send to a friend I came across a funny little webshop today. I don't think that requires a lot of explanation, so here it is without further ado:

If this blog post made you hungry I have an irrefusable special offer for you, valid until the end of the month: For the unbeatable price of only 29 USD plus shipment costs you can order a 100g Toblerone bar from the rubli.info web shop. That is almost 10% less than the price of comparable offers. The first ten purchasers will receive a Sweden flag for free! E-mail now to toblerone@rubli.com.

Have you ever heard of Panoramio? If not, chances are you've still seen it in Google Earth. Panoramio is a cool website that allows you to search for pictures taken around a given place. Try it by searching for "Ayers Rock" for example.

Some of the pictures available in Panoramio also show up in Google Earth, which looks something like this:

(Note the enabled 'Panoramio' feature in the 'Geographic Web' section to the left.)

Since I already have coordinates for most of my gallery content, I thought I'd give it a try and start uploading a few pictures from my Coast Line to Santa Cruz album.

You can either see all my Panoramio pictures or, and this is much more interesting, go explore an area like this one. This is a great way to find nice places to visit if you're ever looking for a trip!

My meteo page is finally back online in its intended form. As of 17:00 today the archive of the Swiss rain radar is being updated again and you can enjoy on-the-fly animations of arbitrary timespans once again.

(I just love to know when it's raining outside without having to take my eyes off the screen! ... I'm kidding here! ;-)

A little while ago, I announced that I had moved to Boston. Well, at that time, the map part of a certain search machine considered it a good idea to place me based on a single simultaneous occurrence of my name and the Free Software Foundation. Today I'm moving again.

This one is a little less subtle. I'm announcing my new home address on my blog:

Martin Rubli
26 Tamarama Marine Dr.
Sydney, NSW 2026
Australia

Why Sydney? If you have to ask, you don't know me very well, now do you? ;-)

By the way, Thomas also put some coverage of my moving to the land Down Under on his blog. Ta!

I've decided to download the Office 2007 beta to be able to build my own opinion about the UI changes that seem to have no end in sight.

At one point, after (re)registering with my e-mail address, the following sentence attracted my attention:

To better protect your privacy, Microsoft requires that you verify ownership of your e-mail address prior to sending you information.

Huh? How on earth does sending me a confirmation e-mail protect my privacy--or anyone else's for that matter?

I have two explanations how we've come this far:

1. Whenever people see the phrase "protect your privacy" they immediately switch their brains off and put a happy smile on instead, actually believing that somebody cares about their privacy.

2. People have given up any hope of somebody protecting or caring the least bit about their privacy and have resigned to the ubiquitous requirement to give out their personal data.

With the recent wiretapping scandals here in the US and in many other countries I'm fairly confident the second explanation beats the first one by a landslide.

When's the last time you've filled out a web form with the truth?

The Washington Post reports that an ad on MySpace has possibly infected thousands of computers with spyware.

The numbers in the article seem somewhat contradictory because just from the number of served ads it's hard to tell how many machines were actually infected, but it's still another reason to bash MySpace. :-)

The "White House Gift Shop" sure does. There's lots of hilarious stuff on that page, so next time you have a few minutes to kill while you wait for [fill in your favorite workflow blocker here] to finish, you know what to do. :-)

According to Google Maps I have recently moved to Boston and taken a new job with the Free Software Foundation.

Feel free to post congratulations using the comment form!

(Since Google content never lasts, here's a link to a screenshot of what the above search looks like at the moment of this writing.)

Does anyone else get the impression that the number of Google text ads grows at the same exponential rates as spam did a couple of years ago? These days, I seem to come across them wherever I go; news sites, developer information, even mailing list archives.

For a while, banner ads were predominant in the World Wide Web. They had a considerable annoyance factor, especially the animated ones, but the big advantage was that they were easy to filter for the eye. Everything colorful and about five times wider than high was guaranteed not to contain any useful information.

Text ads are different. They started off by appearing in side bars and other less prominent places. When their number increased, they slowly made their way into places that was once reserved for the actual content. Contrary to banners, they smootly blend into the text that you're actually scanning for information and are therefore much harder to just ignore.

The human brain is very efficient in identifying the stupid Viagra spam that fills our mailboxes on a daily basis. What is much harder to ignore is the tons of useless "real" mail traffic that reaches you. Let me give you an example:

At my university the mailing lists to reach all students of a department or even the entire EPFL student body are officially moderated. In practice, however, they are as open as a door frame with a curtain instead of a door. Surveys from students doing projects, unnecessary CCs, newsletters from organizations you've never heard of and don't care about, or I-lost-my-USB-key-in-the-computer-room notices (there's a lost and found office, for cryin' out loud!). About a year ago, there even was even a medium-sized scandal when somebody sent a link to a Tubgirl website from someone else's account--in disguise of a survey.

On busy days the volume of all the mailing lists a student is subscribed to (there's no opt-in or opt-out, we just are) can easily reach 20 messages. Since most important communications are made through e-mail, playing trigger-happy with the delete button can get you into a lot of trouble. That's the sort of spam that's annoying and costs time.

Google ads are like that. Mostly useless information where you expect real information. So are Google Ads the spam of the web? Or are they perhaps worse? Happy googling, everybody!