Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I’ve just added two little cute features to the main page of my website. They don’t do much more than improve the usability and aesthetic of the front page by a tiny margin. The first is quite practical–it alerts you and sets the 404 status code if you loaded my site through a domain or subdomain:

The second is a Flickr badge across the top of my page, with a custom-made Flickr logo to take you to my Flick page:

But this is Web 2.0, and I use the Thickbox script in other places on my site, so why not here too?

It’s fun tinkering around with your main page. I need to add a cookie-rotator to the image on the front page, rather than make it time based. Then people can see different versions of me everytime they come back, rather than the current “new elliott at 1 AM” business.

I don’t know if this is new or old, but check out the latest design of Twitter, which features three panels for the questions “What?”, “Why?”, and “How?”. They look really quite nice, so I thought I’d drop a couple screenshots here for you:

I know I complained about the reliability and uptime of Twitter recently, but I’d really like to applaud the designer and company here for producing such clear concise work. I love the washed out colors and ultra-minimalist style. The large type and boxiness also work well.

More interesting than their streaming quotes coloring bug, today I signed on to Google Finance to see that Technology took a hit last night, down -250141000.00%:

The problem is the ticker ASML (ADR), which appears to be suffering from integer overflow. The ticker (according to Yahoo finance) just changed to ASMLD, and Google probably got a near-0 floating point value for the price that caused its asymptote to spike. Or at least that’s what I hope for a stock with a price of $9,223,372,036,854,775,807 and market cap of -9,223,372,036,854,775,807. Here’s a link to the quote for this symbol.