Google Desktop Search

There's no doubt about it in my mind. This is going to be big. It's like having your own little Googlebot sat on your Windows PC, happily sitting there, ready to recall anything you might once have seen. With desktop PCs being sold to the non-geek section of society with storage measured in hundreds of gigabytes (a far cry from when I were a lad), it's likely that its indexing files aren't going to cause you to run out of disk space, and that there's going to be a whole load of files that can be searched.

Of course, there's problems. For one, it's Windows only - no Mac, and definitely no Linux support. And the other problem is it's only geared up for file formats and programs that I don't personally use; Microsoft Office, AOL Instant Messenger, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer - not one of them are installed on my PC (well, Internet Explorer's still on it, but purely because some - sometime utterly unrelated - software refuses to work without it).

But, for people like, well, my family, most of my colleagues and so on - this is good stuff, and I'm impressed. And pleased that Google beat Microsoft to it =)

Google Desktop Search

Worst e-commerce site. EVER!

Maplin Electronics recently redesigned their website. They went from a slightly ugly but fully functional design (with, to be fair, a whole load of rough edges) to this monstrosity.

Try and use it. Try and search for something. Try looking at the latest deals. The site's littered with programming errors (getting told there are no matching results for a search at the bottom of a page after about 70 matches; "Now displaying 101 to 100"). It's littered with missing pictures still holding test/placeholder images. It's littered with such monumentally poor design that I wonder if they've bothered actually testing it. It is impossible to use if you have failing sight or restricted movement. It's so utterly bad that I'm going to nominate it for a bad website design award. I thought at first maybe it's one of these websites where they haven't bothered considering Mozilla users and it only works properly under Internet Explorer, so you can imagine my relief/surprise when it looked equally shit in IE.

Seriously. Try and use it. Look at this brilliant example here, the Video and DVD section, and see how many things you can see that are just glaringly poor. (You can have the fact that they include floppy disks in Video and DVD for free.)

Different note - news in brief - my porch ceiling has collapsed due to the weather of late and the leak we've had, and we're getting a DVD recorder. More later.

Googlewhackage

Just a quicky. Another Googlewhack, preserved by TinyURL for your enjoyment. This one is to do with men from Wales with a tiny airport thing.

My server at home died last week. Bloody Mandrake has been more trouble than any of the other distros I've tried. Looks like it's time to go back to Debian. I'm currently downloading Gnoppix to try and FTP the files I want to keep off onto one of my Windows boxes (spit!). Gnoppix is like Knoppix but uses the lovely Gnome desktop instead of the heinous KDE.