Spontaneous Monotony

One of the foremost innovations in Firefox - now used in all major browsers - was adding a search engine box to the right of the address bar. Now we all use it naturally, and searching by going to the address bar and typing ‘google.com’ (or ‘yahoo.com’ or ‘msn.com’, or more likely back in those days ‘altavista.com’) seems like a ludicrous waste of effort.

However this search bar is no longer just the portal to Google/MSN/Yahoo like it was when first released. The use of extendable Sherlock search plugins, later replaced by A9, mean that any site which has a search function can be accessed with the same ease as search engines. Seen a review of a DVD player and want to buy one? You’re no longer stuck with the abysmal price-comparison services that review sites often have affiliate deals with. Just click the arrow next to your search icon, and you can search Amazon or eBay or just about any other site in existence.

Doing this, of course, requires installing the search plugin for your site(s) of choice. For both privacy and performance reasons, Firefox doesn’t check sites you go to and ask if you would like to install search plugins for them. The biggest obstacle to doing this is that in Firefox 3, the ‘get more search engines’ option no longer takes you to the vast repository of search plugins that has built up over the years, but to a god-awful Mozilla Addons site that displays a small handful of them. I’m sure that those displayed have no commercial connection to Mozilla as the default search engines do.

Anyway, luckily the proper search addons site is still alive and well. It’s called the Mycroft Project. The site might look a bit 1999, but all you really need is the ‘Site Name/URL’ search box in the middle of the homepage. If you want to be completely meta about it, you could install the Mycroft Search Plugins Search Plugin.Anyway, I digress. Just search for the name or address of the site you want to add (e.g. YouTube) which will present a sometimes bafflingly long list of options (hint: don’t type in ‘Game’ - the UK games seller’s site isn’t compatible anyway and there is no ‘whole word only’ option!).

The obvious advice is to pick whatever one is actually for the site you want. Beyond that, there is a certain hierarchy of usefulness. Any plugin with a red X next to it doesn’t work, so ignore those. Each plugin will have either an Apple or A9 logo next to it (for Sherlock and A9 plugins respectively). Both will work just the same in Firefox 3, but if you’ve got a choice between a Sherlock and A9 plugin for the same site then pick the latter just in case later versions of Firefox drop support for Sherlock. Also, bear in mind that any plugins which say “Support Mycroft” in their title redirect all your searches through an affiliate link, so steer clear of those if you’re a model for tinfoil hat magazines.

All that messing about (and a 500-odd word blog post) will mean you can finally take full advantage of Firefox’s search bar without being impeded by the abysmal Search Plugins section of Mozilla Addons (which is good for other addons). Oh and while you’re at this search-editing stuff, why not delete the junk search engines that come with every Firefox install - such utter carp as Answers.com, Creative Commons etc.

External Link (if you missed it in the body of the article)

• Mycroft Project

Depending on whose figures you read (and for which continent), the Xbox 360 is either slightly ahead of or slightly behind the PS3 in terms of sale (with both having given up first place this generation to the Wii). That means there’s a lot of satisfied 360 owners out there - the game selection is good, the console itself performs well when it isn’t RRODing - but the console could still do with a few tweaks beyond the Mii-a-like dashboard update coming this autumn. So, in no particular order (other than that in which I thought of them), here we go:

1. Parallel downloads
Come on Microsoft, this isn’t funny any more. I can appreciate the desire to limit downloads to one file at a time when playing games for performance reasons, but why on earth does a 360 that is doing nothing else still have this restriction? My EeePC (which, though I love it to bits, is slightly less powerful than a 360 :P) can download multiple files simultaneously - this is not the 1980s.

2. Support for playing media from network hard drives
OK, so Microsoft has its Media Center Extender thing to push. I don’t think that necessarily precludes allowing the 360 to load media files from a NAS any more than it precludes allowing it to load media files from a USB key. The 360’s status as a media center is precarious enough given the noise. Without the ability to load media from a NAS of some kind the 360 will lose much of the ground it has in this area to the likes of the Netgear EVA8000, which can act as both a Media Center Extender and a network media player in its own right. EDIT: Commenters have told me that MS can’t do this because of some ridiculous legal restriction in the DVD spec. Thanks for clearing that up folks.

3. FLAC support
In a similar vein to the above - home media archives will likely be based on either the FLAC or ALAC formats. The latter is a non-starter since it’s Apple’s format, but FLAC has no such issues and there’s no reason that I can see for the 360 to ignore it.

4. DVD upscaling over component

I’m at a loss to explain why the 360 upscales over VGA and HDMI but not over Component. There are plenty of people out there with pre-HDMI 360s for whom Component is the only HD connection option - at least until the Autumn Update sorts out VGA. Even that won’t be perfect, as VGA is far from being ubiquitous on HDTVs. EDIT: Gary Fleming has said in the comments that this is because legal restrictions by the DVD Forum prohibit upscaling over component. Why this is the case I don’t know, but it’s true. Subtract one  demerit from MS then.

5. A confirmation prompt on ingame shutdowns

OK so this is a PBKAC thing, but like point 9 the solution would be trivial. I’ve stopped counting the times where I’ve gone to turn off my controller when going to dinner, and turned off the console instead. A simple ‘Are you sure, Yes/No’ would sort this problem.

6. Play music from iPods like a dock

A more minor gripe than the ones above. The iPod connectivity on the 360 is brilliant, especially since it means I can substitute GTA IV’s poor talk radio stations (why do they have less content than their equivalents in the PS2 era?) for podcast episodes. However, the fact that the 360 essentially plays the files as if the 360 was a USB drive means that if I pause or stop the playback, the iPod won’t remember the place I was at in the 360. If, on the other hand, the 360 acted as a dock (ie with tracks being selected on the iPod itself) then this problem would go away.

7. A web browser

This is linked to points 2 - 4. The one thing that an HDTV with a 360 attached currently lacks is a web connection. Since the 360 is (according to game developers) essentially a PC with a streamlined OS, it surely wouldn’t be too difficult to port IE8 to the console. With the Messenger Kit addon (or of course a USB keyboard) this would give 360 owners access to the web including various ‘cloud applications’. This would allow the 360 to perform many daily computing tasks - email, basic document editing, and so on - potentially giving it a greater share of people’s time. After all, if you can check your Hotmail and Bebo messages from your 360 then why would you turn if off and put on a computer (which might not be a Microsoft device, after all). In fact, if you can check your email and such from your 360 console in your living room then you might not buy one of these potential Windows rivals at all.

8. Clean old demos from achievement profiles

Microsoft recently stopped demos of full and XBLA games from appearing as ‘0G’ listings in profiles. However this doesn’t help those of us who owned 360s in the years prior to that. In fact if you’ve played enough demos, Comparing Games with someone who doesn’t have any in common with you can mean that you never actually get to see what achievements they have - the screeds of 0G demos mean that you hit the maximum display limit for the list!

9. Open the disc drive from the dashboard - when it isn’t empty

This is just a minor convenience point, but i would also be trivial to do. If your 360 has no disc in the drive, you can open the drive tray from the dashboard. If there’s already a disc in the drive, you can’t. Why not? Obviously the A button is needed for the ‘press to run game’, but they could assign another button - L3 maybe? - to opening the drive tray whether or not it has a disc in it?

10. A streamlined MSN Messenger interface

The MSN support on the 360 is good, but it could be better. For example instead of having to have the Xbox Guide open to use it, there could be a small on-screen version. I’m thinking here of watching movies - the MSN interface could fit in the black bars most widescreen DVDs have at the top and bottom (so that the original cinema format can be displayed on a 16:9 screen) and allow people to chat while watching.

Now that the damned recount is finished, the SNP have just officially achieved the impressive feat of winning a by-election for an institution they would dearly love to abolish. The actual results were:

• Chris Creighton, Independent - 67
• Frances Curran, Scottish Socialist Party - 555
• Margaret Curran, Scottish Labour Party - 10912
• Eileen Duke, Scottish Green Party - 232
• Hamish Howitt, Freedom-4-Choice - 65
• John Mason, Scottish National Party - 11277
• Tricia McLeish, Solidarity - 512
• Davena Rankin, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party - 1639
• Ian Robertson, Scottish Liberal Democrats - 915
• Spoiled ballots - 45

Well done to John Mason. In addition, given that there will be several crucial votes in the London Parliament next year which could be catastrophic for our liberty, well done to the people of Glasgow East for reducing Neo Labour’s power in the London Parliament by what has in the recent past been a crucial margin.

External Links

• BBC’s live coverage (will probably turn into a written report once the by-election TV program ends)
• Glasgow East Labour
• Glasgow SNP
• Times Online analysis

The FIA boss Max Mosley has won his privacy court case against the News of the World. I honestly thought that the world had long since accepted that what happens behind closed doors between consenting adults is their own business. Apparently not so in England’s gutter press. If a lurid article was printed accusing someone of “sick filth” for being gay, there would quite rightly be an outcry. Parliamentary questions, new hate crime laws and probably the sacking of the editor involved.

So why then did the News of the World see fit to print a hate article about Mosley’s sexuality? If he wants women to hit him then that’s his business - not the state’s, not the News of the World’s, not anyone’s. It’s about time that nobody faced hate and discrimination simply because of their sexual preferences.

BBC News are claiming that the families of armed forces members are to get ’streamlined’ access to NHS treatment and school places - ie, they get to jump the queue. Of course, getting things to forces’ families quicker is a good thing in theory, but since we’re talking about public services with waiting lists that means that everyone else is pushed back.

So the soldier who needs NHS treatment on his/her return gets it quicker than other people who need treatment. I’m sure that’ll be of great comfort to the families of the people who will die unnecessarily thanks to their treatment being delayed because they don’t kill people for the government for a living