Can someone tell me why FireFox is displaying scripting.com in Chinese characters?

I downloaded Mozilla FireFox on the first day version 1.0 was released. I was impressed and glad. I could finally switch from Internet Explorer to another browser.



However, two days ago things started going wrong. First FireFox started showing little black diamonds on this site.

Yesterday I was reading Dave Winer's daily newsletter in Outlook and clicked on a link to his site. I got the above result - all Chinese characters. It also doesn't matter how I open the site either. Rebooting doesn't help. I've tried changing fonts and default character encoding but that doesn't seem to make any difference.

I've changed back and have made IE my default browser again. It's a bummer...

I recently picked up a copy of Content by Rem Koolhaas and OMA. Naturally, the book has a lot about architecture. But it also has a lot about trends, ideas and the state of the world. It provides a lot of food for thought. If you see it somewhere be sure to give it a look.

I found the analysis of Wired magazine's success (and demise) very interesting. I was involved with Wired when it was still Electric Word ("the least boring computer magazine in the world") and based in Amsterdam.

Content's analysis is entirely based on demographics and consumer profiles.

During the boom, the genius of Wired was to create a vehicle where four typologies of geek could overlap.

Wired captured a moment of historical change with iconic perfection - the advent of the Internet, the triumph of the market economy, the optimism for a technologically enhanced world and the promise of a digitally fueled political revolution: all found their voice in Wired's alchemy of four distinct audiences. The geeks that ruled the '90s can be classified into 4 typologies, and Wired consistently identified the fronts on which all could unite.

Geek Typologies
Pragmatist aka Venture Capitalis
Idealist aka Hippie
Technocrat aka Organization Man
Nihilist aka Cyber Punk

Content - Rem Koolhaas/OMA

While this might be true to a certain extent. I think the Content analysis lacks insight into the main thing that made Wired interesting.

Wired was about people not computers.

Louis Rossetto, the founder of Wired, wasn't a techie or a corporation man. He was interested in trends, the future and the people that made things happen. Above all, he had the insight to see that most computer magazines of the day were essentially extremely boring, and that a market for a "people and trends" magazine about the computer business existed.

Electric Word ran up huge phone bills interviewing key people, and trying to understand what was going on. They regularly got [the late] Timothy Leary up at 3 am (California time) to hear his opinion.

Also a lot of Wired's success was due to Louis' own enthusiasm and hard work, and the group of enthusiastic and interesting writers (including Dave Winer, see also here) he gathered around him to form Wired.

When Louis Rossetto left Wired magazine and was replaced by some magazine publisher found by Conde Nast, the magazine took a nose dive. That was long before the end of the tech boom.

To reduce everything to geek typologies is really quite insulting. But it is food for thought, as I said

Tonight I went to the Scipting News Dinner in Amsterdam, which was held at De Waag on the Nieuwmarkt.

I have read Dave Winer's Scripting News for several years. It is one newsletter that I always skim every day, and I almost always find some link that I am interested in.

Dave Winer (of course) and Adam Curry were there. It was interesting to see how varied the people were who turned up. There was Jon, a Canadian from Vancouver, a Dutch photographer who had interesting stories about his assignment in the North of Iraq, Ed whose company does lotteries via SMS, Peter, Jort, Andrew from Harvard, and Daniel, a Parisian living in Amsterdam.

It was interesting to talk. We really neeeded more time but I did meet some interesting people. I hope we can get together again some time.

Thanks for paying for the dinner Adam.

I tried to fix the washing machine yesterday. It's (or it was) an AEG Öko Lavamat 6450, about 9 years old.

It stopped working last week. Instead of turning it would just make a whirring noise. I got around to opening it up two days ago and it turned out that all that was wrong was that the belt between the motor and drum had frayed and come off.

So a simple repair, I thought. Just get a new belt from the electical parts store.

I paid through the nose for one: 18 euros. The parts store (or the manufacturer, or both) charge ridiculous prices. Their price point seems to be determined by how much they think you're prepared to pay. In any case, I duly replaced the belt. It all looked fine. I did a small test wash and all was okay. So now to catch up with the washing...

The washing went fine. I looked every now and again. All okay.
All was fine until it was spinning. Well even the spinning seemed to be fine...

All of a sudden the power in the whole house went off.
I took a look at the washing machine - it was smoking!

Smoke was seeping out of every crack and opening. And there was a terrible electrical fire sort of stench. It kept on coming too. More and more of it.

I opened up the back and the motor was smoldering. Luckily it seemed be slowly getting less.

So that's the end of an AEG washer.

I'll never buy an AEG washing machine again. We've had no end of problems with it. And two families we know also had so many problems that they have also vowed never to buy another. Maybe that's coincidence - AEG is supposed to have a good name - but it's too much coincidence for me.

Their #$%# washer could even have burned the house down. And that burnt stench is still there to remind me, grrr...

This is my first blog post. I've spent my spare hours during the last week getting the software installed and working on my server.

I chose to use the b2evolution package. Mainly because it uses PHP. Moveable Type was also a possibility, but as C/C++ veteran I'm much more at home with PHP than the (for me) strange syntax of Perl.

Everything installed fairly easily. Although, as is usual on Unix/Linux boxes I had to tweak various files and permissions to get it working. The b2evolution modules are quite flexible and the source code is fairly easy to understand. I've tweaked some of the files. (I might regret this later when upgrading to a newer version).

What has taken me the most time, however, is giving the blog page a look that I like. I did not like any of the skins provided. And the whole skin switching idea is something that the programmers are probably proud of but probably doesn't really appeal to many blog authors. The way my blog looks also says something about me. The Guadeloupe skin is simply atrocious.

So I've been fiddling with my blog's main PHP file and the related CSS style sheet. It takes a lot of fiddling! Partly because I need to ftp each changed file to my server ("Do you want to overwrite file...") and then reload the page to see the difference. I realize I could put up a local server with PHP, but that was something I didn't really want to get into right now.