Charles on… anything that comes along

iTunes 2nd-week Euro sales surpass 1.5M says Billboard Bulletin, which is a slightly misleading headline; what it’s referring to is the total. So that’s 800,000 in the first week, and 700,000 in the second. (Hmm, did they really give out 100,000 free songs to the hacks who came to the launch? £15 or 20 Euros each.. times about 100… )

Anyway, it’s very smart marketing by Apple to have the 100-million-songs promotion going. The best link to the running total is Apple’s front page which is doing the count, er, up.

That’s by the by, though. I realised this morning as I listened to the woeful sounds of The Best of Thin Lizzy - and thought Ker-ist, this stuff was crap and I never realised it back then - that in the future songs will go the way of films.

Just as you have straight-to-video films now, you’re going to have straight-to-download songs and albums that will never have a physical release. Which in some cases would be a good thing.

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• Quantum lighting, nano scratching suits, and cochlear implant promises, promises.. (25 October 2005; score: 17.95%)
• Time for a Manhattan Project to combat global warming (9 March 2005; score: 14.05%)
• Is it really so hard? (7 July 2004; score: 0%)

Another Internet Explorer flaw found at C|Net News details yet another way around the stuff that Microsoft insists has to be completely integrated into the OS. This latest is a flaw that isn’t fixed by the patch issued last week.

What’s remarkable is that people can read these things and believe it’s not happening to them. Or is it only the Mozilla (KHTML, Safari etc) users who find articles like this? Does everyone else cover their ears and say “La lalalalalala”? I’d really like to know.

I’m actually a touch concerned that Apple’s Dashboard system will, because it uses HTML+CSS+Javascript, and access all sorts of system information, very gradually open up similar weaknesses in OSX. I’d be interested to know how well Dave Hyatt’s team are securing that.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• When readers bite (because reviewers don't) (6 November 2006; score: 72.46%)
• Oh, Mozilla, how *could* you? (9 July 2004; score: 64.75%)
• My latest at the Guardian: why Internet Explorer is like the Tower of Pisa (3 February 2008; score: 47.86%)

It’s very interesting to watch Dave Winer discovering the real difference between bloggers and journalists (principally, that journalists try not to bring their personalities to the keyboard).

He writes: “In the last flamefest” [over his abrupt disconnection of weblogs.com] “this is what separated the real reporters, professional or amateur, from the space-occupiers. Did they care what the actual story was, or were they just bloating the blogosphere with more uninformed crap. There was a lot of the latter, very little of the former.”

This is also why I think that John Gruber may get an unpleasant surprise in his desire to become a full-time journalist (which is the thrust of all the T-shirts and Gmail giveaways, unless I’ve completely misunderstood what he’s on about). Sometimes this is a dull job, and it’s surprising how difficult it is in any field to make the transition from enthusiastic and well-regarded amateur to enthusiastic and well-regarded *and successful* professional. I can enjoy writing software, but I also suspect I could hate doing it full time. What you don’t see as an amateur is the grinding nature of doing anything day in, day out. That’s why the reporters could get it right about Dave: it’s no different for them from reporting on who’s going to be the next vice-presidential candidate, or what Tony Blair said in the Commons.

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• At last, Dave Winer is famous in Illinois, and all because of blocked email (26 August 2004; score: 47.28%)
• "That wasn't supposed to happen" (22 November 2004; score: 41.47%)
• What is codecasting? Dave Winer's new name for Fraser Speirs's appcasting idea (2 March 2007; score: 38.73%)

By the way, I’m only just getting the hang of CSS, which I’ve managed studiously to avoid all these years; this page is a slightly modified version of the Wordpress normal template. (Praise be to the marvellous CSSEdit by MacRabbit software, which makes the whole thing completely WYSIWYG.)
Any suggestions on things to change to improve how this page looks welcome. (Unless of course you’re viewing it in IE6… ) I’m already thinking the grey (#cccccc as I write) isn’t as welcoming as it could be. Perhaps a bit more white later this afternoon.
(Update: changed this pm to #eeeeee. On the road to that row of ffffs..)

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This is slightly maddening. So CERT Vulnerability 713878 (which is now the second-most pointed to result when you Google “CERT Vulnerability”) says that IE really isn’t such a clever product to use.

So what do we find? An article by Paul Boutin offering to “virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes” which also notes you can easily drop $100 on useless anti-spyware and anti-adware, and that AV stuff isn’t so hot either.

But the advice does not include the simplest one: just stop using IE. Get Mozilla or Firefox (which is just the browser) and use that. Straight away, your life will improve - guaranteed. You’ll even be web-standards compliant.

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• Why the "photo iPod" won't do video: it's all about battery life (14 October 2004; score: 17.4%)
• The sole design flaw in the iPod shuffle (9 March 2005; score: 15.63%)
• Two data points on the iPod's continuing popularity in the UK (19 October 2004; score: 15.48%)