I haven’t posted for an entire week now (I thought I would keep you all in suspense as to whether I’d fallen off the face of the Earth), but when I saw this, I felt compelled to post it:

According to British web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet.

Wow. A couple of years ago, no one even knew what BitTorrent was. Fast forward to now, and it’s accounting for a full third of the Internet’s traffic? Amazing.

Update: Oops, here’s the article at Wired I was reading.

Posting your personal and private feelings and experiences is sometimes difficult enough without having to worry about losing your job or being sued. Well, it’s happened in the past, and it’s still happening.

Last year, a Microsoft employee posted (on his personal blog) a photo of a stack of G5s arriving at a Microsoft office. A few days later, the guy was fired; the termination was a direct result of the earlier post.

Earlier this year, an employee of Friendster just happened to make two posts regarding what work she’d done at Friendster. A couple of weeks later, she too was fired.

More recently, Sun’s CEO’s personal blogging regarding HP’s business strategies has landed him into some trouble with HP sending a nasty letter. Of course, Sun isn’t going to back down (I wonder what they’d have done if it wasn’t their CEO?) and responded telling HP to get stuffed.

A bit worrying really; I can see the reasons for the actions taken against the (now) ex-employees but to be honest they’re a bit over-the-top and I’d hate to ever be in such a position just for writing my opinion.

Yesterday I attended a website accessibility forum run by the National Information Library Service (NILS). The main focus of the forum was website accessibility (funny that, given the name) but much of the methodology can be applied to any software/computer-y design.

I didn’t learn too much technical stuff, but it was quite interesting to see (well, hear) how a text-to-speech web browser handles a website (and they’re a lot more advanced than you’d think!) or how a visually impaired (not blind) person deals with a website using tools such as screen magnifiers.

For instance, I never imagined that putting a * on the right-hand side of a field to indicate it was manditory could be bad. However, when using a screen magnifier, you never even see the * tell you it’s manditory. Same goes with a “back to top” link, which is generally on the right-hand side of the page if at the bottom of a page (though they’re normally inline if in a FAQ type page) — they never get seen.

The really interesting (well, sort of) thing I learned is that it’s OK to use JavaScript. Some JavaScript stuff is bad (like an onChange event on dropdowns (tab into a dropdown and try to select something on this site, go on!) though much of it is actually fine. I’d always tried to shy away from using JavaScript for accessibility reasons but to be honest it’s not these users that have it disabled.

So yeah, some interesting things were learned and some new approaches will be made on our work’s website. I know this because the web manager was there with me furiously taking notes on some things. NILS puts out this great toolbar which unfortunately requires IE5+ (kind of backwards since they want accessibility) which is similar to the web developer toolbar I spoke about ages ago. I have spent an hour or so today trying to figure out how to modify the web developer toolbar to use some of the NILS accessibility features. I shall call it “mega-toolbar”.

Oh, and Bobby and Hermish are accessibility testing tools, before I forget to mention them.

I know some of you reading this website are Beatles fans, so I thought I’d post an image I just spotted. The image is (supposedly) a rejected advert for a Beatles TV show.

Read more here

For those interested, Richard pointed me in the direction of the blogger code generator. I’ve already done a bunch of other codes (like ‘geek code’) etc, but here’s my blogger code anyway:

B9 d t++ k- s- u– f i o++ x– e l- c

… with the Pan of Ages.

According to Technorati I have a massive 6 links from a gigantic 5 sources. Oh yeah!

So, with all those readers, just imagine what could happen to your traffic when you get bludged (bludgered? bludgeoned?)*… Just think about it.

* Like slashdotted (or /.ed), only way crappier.