To cut a long story short, I pieced together a Greasemonkey userscript called 'Youtu.be Shortlink' that (surprisingly) adds the youtu.be link to the page, in the bar just above the video:

youtube_shortlink.user.js

There are 3 options which you can set by editing the script and changing the value of the setting variable. (Since you're still reading this you probably know how this works, but just in case: right click the Greasemonkey icon > Manage User Scripts... > select 'Youtu.be Shortlink' > Edit.) These options are:

1. Just the shortlink (default);
2. A button that sends the shortlink to Twitter;
3. A button that sends the video's title and shortlink to Twitter.

If this userscript works as good for you as it does for me, you might also enjoy one of my other Greasemonkey userscripts.

Update 2010-06-24: Youtube has now added as short link switch in under the url-box in their 'share panel, rendering this userscript a tiny bit superfluous.

I don't get it. And I don't even see how anyone could get worked up about this.

The only time you get see those backgrounds is when you navigate to Google's home page. And who does that anyway? Every browser has a search feature build in, which takes you straight to the search results. And those pages remain as white as ever.

So, c'mon. Explain this 'problem' to me like I'm a six year old.

And then there was this other thing I found.

Whatever permutation of the keywords "Meat Loaf Nightline Beatles 1995" I fed to Google, numerous sites popped up showing roughly the same excerpts about Brian Wilson saying the same thing too on a 1995 Nightline Beatles tribute.

Apparently, someone likes the Beatles so much that he or she copies (roughly) the same reply over and over and over again on various websites where people confess that they don't unquestioningly adore the Beatles. (Disclaimer: I don't get the Beatles. I recognize that they were a very important band, but their music does next to nothing for me. I mean, Na na nana na, hey Jude, na na na nana? Yougottabefuckinkiddingme!)

I find this fascinating. And this, and nothing less… THIS is why I love the internet.

Still, there's one bone I have to pick with his epistle. In response to Adobe's claim that Flash is open and Apple distributes a closed system, Jobs says,

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. […] HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Anyone following what's going on with HTML5 will see the elephant in the room, and Jobs mentions it a bit further on: Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

And there you have it. First, Jobs says that Apple strongly believe[s] that all standards pertaining to the web should be open but then he won't say that the only video-format that his company's browser will support is the closed source, proprietary H.264 format. Which makes that bit about strongly believing in the open web sound a bit, well, phony.

So, ehm, mr. Jobs: either put your money where your mouth is and start supporting open video in Webkit, or just STFU, 'kay?

While Apple is being vague what "iPad-ready" really means, from the language on the page and the accompanying Technical Note one can infer that a website that uses the latest web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, javascript,etc.) and no plug-ins (most notably, Flash, as Apple refuses to allow those on their iPad en -Pods) should be ready. Which is all fine and dandy. No problem there.

Today, the leading news site of the Dutch public television announced that their website was now "iPad-ready". By which they probably mean, "In certain cases, after some browser sniffing, we serve a page with an HTML5 <video> element instead of the default Flash-player." Now that kinda, sorta worries me.

You see, I don't think that HTML5 video is quite ready for general use on the world wide web. Reason the first: so far, no version of Internet Explorer can handle it. And reason the second: at the moment, you need at least two versions of the same clip to make it work in every other browser, due to, well, a video-format war. If you can't be bothered to produced two versions of the same clip, you need to jump through all kinds of technical hoops to provide your content to the browsers that do not support the format you decided on. Not quite the 'code once, work everywhere' utopia we have been promised.

So, if you think that making your website "iPad-ready" means that you need to use the <video> element to serve MPEG-encoded video, well, you clearly have a lot to learn about the open web.

(Of course, it's quite easy to envision a scenario where Apple is using the iPad/iPod to manipulate the browser market into adopting MPEG as the de facto standard for web video because, well, everybody knows that everything Apple does has the potential to be the cure for cancer and can bring about world peace. But I'm neither a Apple fanboy nor a tinfoil hat wearing, paranoid conspiracy theorist, so I won't go there.)

Then it became clear that this song, "Los Angeloser", was to be the first single. Slowly the demo page started to generate some traffic. Three weeks ago the song made it's debut on BBC Radio 2. The following day I noticed that for the first time ever my website had over 100 visitors, so I put up a stub for the new album. Since then the initial peak died down, but the number of visitors is up. Before I was terribly pleased with 40 to 45 visitors, now it seems quite steady to be up and around 65 visitors a day.

Yesterday, the official video was spotted on a German site (it has been removed since, probably because of an exclusive deal with Vidzone—don't ask me about that link, it's what mr. Loaf tweeted) and tonight the number of visits spiked again. It made me look at the monthly stats:

Graph showing the monthy number of visitors to mljs.evilnickname.org

I quite like what I see. There's been a steady increase in visitors ever since I last revamped the site, and unless something weird happens, it looks as if last's months record will be shattered. Mr. Loaf should release a new album more often.

(Disclaimer: my laptop runs on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix for over a year, and I love it.)

So far, I'm mildly positive. And that's despite the two failed attempts to get things running: the raid-controller (at least, I think it is) that controls my third hard drive was being a pain in the ass. Unplugging the drive seemed to be the solution.

Next problem I had to tackle was my Terratec EWX 24/96 sound card. It was being recognized, but the channels were messed up, so I got no sound. After some searching I found the answer to my problem. Adding two lines to a config file and a reboot later I had sound.

There's still a few things I need to work out. The most important amongst those is getting my computer to recognize me as it's lord and master over the files on my hard drive. At the moment I can play my music just fine (which is good), but if I want to change the tags, it says I don't have permission to do that (which is bad). There must be some way to recursively change the permissions on all files. Or maybe I'll just have to add myself to another usergroup. Tips and advice go in the comments.

Another thing that might take some time is to find out what programs to use. Sure, I know the usual suspects: Firefox for surfing the web, Thunderbird for mail, Gimp for image manipulation, Audacity for audio manipulation, etc. But I don't have a clue what media/audio-player to use. (I'm trying out Quod Libet now.) What's the best CD-ripper? How the hell do I convert a wave file (or whatever the Linux equivalent is) to a Ogg Vorbis file (which I've been using for, ehm, quite a few years now)? Again, comments in the comments.

While I'm not a total n00b, there's still a lot I need to find out. Is there way to get rid of the annoying Default Keyring Password prompt? Is there a simple screensaver which shows just the time, plain and simple? Can I get rid of the icons for my external hard drive on my desktop? Will developing my totally leet Linux skills improve my popularities with the ladies? If I double click a file, shouldn't it open in the associated program or is that just my Windows habbit kicking in? Why can't I just use alt-codes for umlauts and accents—and let's not forget the em-dashes—instead of something called a compose key? Questions, questions, questions.

If you got tips and you're on the right page, imagine me looking down and pointing at the comment box below. When you're not, imagine me doing a fancy pantomime indicating that you should go to the appropriate page and add some useful insights, tips and tricks in the comment box there.

• 'Sociale intelligentie van apen overschat'
• Reusachtige gasstroom is ouder dan gedacht
• 'G-spot bestaat toch niet'
• 'Levensloze' eiwitten kunnen evolueren
• Zonnestelsel is iets jonger dan gedacht

Scientists have discovered that the social intelligence of apes is being overestimated, that a giant gas cloud in space is older that we thought it was, that the G-spot doesn't exist after all, that lifeless proteins are able to evolve in a similar way to 'higher' lifeforms, and that the solar system is slightly younger than we thought.

And it make me once again realize that science doesn't mind admitting it was wrong, that there are no scientific dogmas and that new evidence can lead to a better understanding of the universe. Go science!

It also made me wonder what Biblical scholars will do with the discovery of evidence that Noah's ark might have been circular.

Those vistors came from 77 countries (one more than last year) on all six continents. Top 5 countries with the most visitors (and last year's position):

1. The Netherlands (1)
2. United States (2)
3. Belgium (3)
4. United Kingdom (3)
5. Canada (8)

Search engines account for 38.04% of my visitors, and once again Google is the most popular among them. Bing is a distant second. A grand total of 852 different keywords has been recorded. Apart from the the always immensely popular searches for a (random) book title generator and evil nicknames in general, the quote screws fall out all the time. the world is an imperfect place. was quite popular too. After that, it's a blur of evolution and atheism related keywords.

Last year, I pieced together 199 posts. That's 84 more than in 2008. Compared to 2008, last year's most popular posts weren't as popular:

1. Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place (84 pageviews)
2. Top 5 Meat Loaf Songs (73)
3. Foldertjes (72)
4. Motown Turns 50 (56)
5. Least Favorite Meat Loaf Songs (44)

But The Book Title Generator 2.0 is still doing quite well, with 789 page views. The only page that gets more visitors is the front page.

Finally, the browser stats. IE is down 0.98% compared to last year. Firefox is down 3.78%, which means that the other decent browsers must be up. And indeed, two of them are:

1. Internet Explorer (59.45%)
2. Firefox (31.58%)
3. Safari (4.10%)
4. Chrome (2.40%)
5. Opera (0.96%)

Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are virtually tied around 45%, and IE6 gets 9.83%. Strangely enough, one idiot still used IE5.5. For fuck's sake.

As always, thanks for stopping by.