Following on from A Journey into Facebook I have now come to a conclusion about the vastly popular social networking platform after over half a years evaluation.

The bottom line is thus, 97.34% of it is crap. That's not just a random 97.34%, that's an exact calculation formed using highly scientific research results picked fresh from my mind! More...

What's the problem?

Ever since I moved from Linux to OS X Eclipse I have become a little too fussy with the presentation of desktop applications. Eclipse is certainly the ugliest OS X app I own. What a shame this is as its one I spend much time looking at. In fact I jumped ship to Coda for a while for its lovely interface, however, Coda is not Eclipse and Eclipse is the best PHP editor I have used. I just had to go back to it.

Can it be fixed?

Hm... sort of. I have spent a few hours customising it so it's somewhat presentable now. Given it a new syntax highlighting theme that's based on tango colours, hidden the toolbar, got rid of the blue styled tabs, given it a minimalist interface and removed the default ridiculously small interface font.

Is there any hope?

I'm running an Eclipse 3.5 built that runs on the Cocoa SWT port which put simply it's built with the same stuff that nice looking OS X apps are built with. So why doesn't it look nice yet? Well I'm guessing, hoping that part will come later? Certainly porting SWT to Cocoa is a step in the right direction.

Recently, I have seen lots of advertisements around my university for the national student survey which I have no intention of taking. I can't quite understand why in my last year but a few months left I would want to complain about my university, I have plenty to say but its too late in the day to say it to be of any benefit for me.

Anyhow, I was just phoned by the student survey by a chirpy sounding girl who asked if I wanted to take the survey. I told her I was too busy, she wanted to phone back at a more convenient time. I told her I didn't want to answer any survey questions. She said if you want us to stop calling you you will have to answer some questions. Huh?! Blackmail now with the threat of forever being pestered by a telesurvey person. Scary but I wasn't budging. I replied with a firm "no" and bid her farewell.

On the National Student Survey Website there is a link on the bottom right allowing you to opt out from various forms of pestering as I believe is required by law. Hopefully I wont be disturbed again.

If like me you are a student who couldn't care less about fuelling some company who is making money from statistics collected by wasting your time I recommend you opt-out too.

Perhaps those of us who own them will have noticed a few odd quirks in the iPhones text prediction system. I know my friend Tim complains often enough about such quirks he finds to Twitter

What I find rather interesting is the ability for the predictive text system to learn new words and corrections of spellings. The system has learned of my girlfriends name "Risa". That's great, it even capitalises it for me when I type it in lower case which is indeed a handy function. However, my name, an English name instead of a Japanese one which I'm guessing was already in it's dictionary never gets offered the privilege of being correctly capitalised. Only recently has it seemed to have been able to actually learn my name too. For a long time typing my name would produce errors.

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Flickr = photo sharing. YouTube = video sharing, Twitter = status sharing, del.ico.us = URL Sharing, my blog = me sharing. Facebook =

Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites on the Internet but what is it's purpose? I can share photos, vidoes, status updates, URL's if I want. Don't I already have better ways of doing this? Short answer, yes. Long answer yeeeeeeesssss. So like Oscar Wilde once said "I am going to ignore these Facebook features because they are crap." and well said.
Anyhow, I shall continue with my trusty steed Safari (a pure breed web browser) on my noble quest to find Facebook's purpose. Hurray and cheer! More...

For a while now I have been thinking that I own too many things and owning too many things is not good for things are enemies of time. The more things you want the more money you need to get them and the less money and time you have for other activities. More...