Mr. Speaker

Yesterday’s Radar in The Sydney Morning Herald had a nice big ad, I mean, article about Channel 9’s breakfast program Today. Channel 9 have launched a new print campaign for the show featuring the Today team on the front of a cereal box, along with a bunch of wacky news based cereal puns, and cereal based news puns.

I don’t (and until my soul is crushed completely by full time employment, will never) work in advertising, so I couldn’t tell you how much cash the designers of that hilarious campaign earned. But I betcha it was more than $100.

So I’m sure Channel 9 will be kicking themselves when they find out that they could have saved a bundle by doing what the designers did - purchase a copy of “How To Cheat In Photoshop” by Steve Caplin, and follow the 3 simple steps in Chapter 10’s Building Boxes.

You don’t even have to change the orange sunburst or anything. Just change that little black box on the side to the channel 9 logo, and hey presto - deadline met!

Channel 9 - No Fear, No Favour. Tonight - “Terrorism. Are we doing enough?”…For those not old enough to remember, the world at the beginning of the new millennium was a joyous, peaceful place. Children danced in the street singing and smiling. World leaders came together in harmony to organise tree planting operations and beach side barbeques. Big Brother delighted us all in it’s first season.

But all that was to change… forever. One sunny September day, I forget which one precisely, the metaphorical towers of global happiness and goodwill passed away and turned over it’s inheritance to it’s evil next-of-kin.

Welcome to the second installment in this series of back-flipping articles regarding some pretty stupid uses of AJAX, and that ever-adorable XmlHttpRequest object. In part one - The Fonz uses XmlHttpRequest and AJAX to spy on you, we took a rather negative view of the “developer and AJAX sitting in a tree” love of remote scripting, and applied our paranoia to a simple text adventure application featuring Arthur ‘Fonzie’ Fonzarelli.

This time round, taking the results from The Fonz test, we will temporarily leave the dark side, and use the forces of remote scripting toward the purpose of enhancing the “user experience” by building a live help system.

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Everyone (who is a nerd) loves the XmlHTTPRequest. It’s awesome is why. The web starts behaving like applications. Things work how they are supposed to, and mum and dad don’t need to know anything about post-backs and submit buttons - “Submit? Submit to what?!”

There are a myriad of examples of Asynchronous Javascript and XML (errgh, ajax? I give it two thumbs down. But I’m too lazy to think of something better, so I’ll shut up on that front) that show why it’s the greatest thing since the 1 pixel gif. (Check out fiftyfoureleven.com. That’s got some swanky stuff)

For all its goodness, however, something smells a little funny about this holy grail of web communication… like beer and chocolate before it, there is an evil side to what - on the surface - seems pure and innocent.

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ABBA recorded songs in 5 different languages. Although their songs would be classics in any language, by re-recording the songs in the native tongue of various countries they strengthened their fan base and spread their message effectively. NBC’s comedy the office has taken a leaf out of the ABBA marketing guide and re-released BBC’s The Office in American.

“Longhorn” is the rather ridiculous name given to the next version of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It has been a long time coming. Frequent delays have forced Microsoft to omit various features that were going to make their debut in this release. But they have to get Longhorn out soon, ‘cause they need some more cash.

Pictures of the new version have been circulating, and a review of it can be found on the winsupersite site. I had a look around and noticed some pretty weird stuff about these leaked images…

The most shocking discovery was that the screen shots appear to have come from a person who has a relationship of some description with the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard. Could this be Bill Gates’ machine, and if so, why does he have a “stack” (as it’ll be called in Longhorn) of documents about our main man?

Mr Speaker is not one to speculate without valid sources, but it would most certainly seem that John Howard and Bill Gates are planning to create a small Internet start-up company that will sell “virtual-handicrafts”.

More details as they come to hand.