I’m confused as to why they’ve chosen to exclude “Winnipeg Transit” from the branding. Bus rapid transit  is more or less completely integrated with the non-rapid transit system. It’s not like it’s going to be a separate division of the transit system. Winnipeg has a long history of public transit, dating back to the horse-drawn Winnipeg Street Railway corporation in the 1880s ( less than a decade after the City’s incorporation). Winnipeg Transit itself and the iconic flying “T’ logo have over 40 years of brand recognition. It’s usually a good idea to build of existing brand cred, isn’t it? The designer of this logo has chosen to ignore all this history and start over.

It logo itself is a rather predictable attempt creating a London underground style icon, with the “r” and “t” sort of resembling the lines on a subway route map, as One Man Committee points out. Again, how does this make any sense? We don’t actually have a subway system and there are no plans to build one. Where did the colours come from?

I’m simultaneously confused and bored.

Also, can you see “RT” without thinking “retweet”?

In related news, the new rapid transit corridor features a tunnel, so there’s that.

So the thing is, I agree with the poster, it would appear that the general story arc of How I Met Your Mother bears a striking resemblance to Friends. Where I disagree with the poster and Reddit in general, is the implication. I do not thing this makes HIMYM good or bad. I feel like the three-camera sitcom format was perfect in the 80s or 90s and I am not surprised to see similar story arcs emerge. As someone who grew up with the ‘filmed before a live studio audience” shows of TGIF shows and a fan of even older 3-camera shows, I was pleasantly surprised to see the return of the format a few years ago. If the writers of the show are giving a nod their influences, then even better, imho.

That is all, Reddit STFU.

Tech News Today

Back in June 2010 Tom Merrit left CNET to start a daily tech show on the TWiT network. It’s serves as my main source for tech news, like a 6 o’clock news for tech.

• Official Site
• Wikipedia
• iTunes Link

Industrial Strength Nightmares

I’m fairly musically agnostic. I really like a lot of different genres of music. ISN Radio is my main source for Industrial music. Not a huge fan of the host (sorry), but the music makes up for it. If you’re interested in expanding your music horizons, check it out.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

CBC’s Spark

It’s from the CBC it’s about technology, they interview smart people and it’s awesome.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

The Talk Show

Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber is kind of like the Rush Limbaugh of Apple punditry. He mainly talks about how awesome Apple is.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

Film Sack

Four extremely nerdy men in their late-thirties review bad movies. If that is not great enough, their “Bonus Sack!” commentary is especially great.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

Due to a whole slew of – perfectly legitimate reasons – it’s fairly uncommon for a website to post clearly identify the parties reasonable for design, development, hosting, support, etc. It can be a little difficult to figure out sometimes.

Typically when trying to figure out who made a website I take the following steps (in order):

1. Google the domain name (in quotes). If the site is listed in the body of the portfolio, it’ll often show up in the first page of results. You could probably throw other keywords – like “portfolio” or “design” or something – into the search. I usually don’t bother.
2. Take a look at the HTML, Javascript and CSS source. Sometimes the comments contain copyright notices, author names or other clues. companyname.js is always a good one.
3. Do a whois lookup of the domain. Sometimes the designer will be listed as one of the contacts or the design company will actually run their own nameserver. But with domain privacy services this is becoming less fruitful.
4. When that fails I load up robtex.com. Among a variety of other tools, the site has a utility (under the “shared” tab at the top) that lists domains sharing the same IP, sharing the same name server, sharing the same mail server. If you’re lucky, one of those domains will be designer.

Number 4 was my old pro-tip that made me feel smarter than everyone else online.

But…

Recently I’ve discovered Google Analytics ID databases.

A Google Analytics ID is the part of Google Analytics tracking code that identifies a website, it sits in the tracking javascript running on every website using Google Analytics. The look like “UA-#####-#”. Each site has a unique ID, except when you set up a website’s profile under a parent account, the first part of the ID is shared by all the child accounts. So, UA-12345-1 and UA-12345-2 are in the same account, probably controlled by the same person or company.

Evidently, there are a number of services that crawl the intertube recording which Google Analytics IDs are found on which sites. ReverseInternet.com seems to be a good one, but if that fails, you can always Google the ID (in quotes).

TL;DR: This is how I found out isitchristmas.com was run by @klondike, before he tweeted about it.

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Looks like Siri is not fully functional in Canada.

Referencing location (eg. “Where am I?”) results in an error message stating that directions and maps are unavailable in Canada.

Update: Now with a screenshot.

I came across MySQL bug #2095 today:

full-text search for words containing hyphens won't work
Submitted: 11 Dec 2003 6:15
Hyphen '-' characters break literals at the moment.
A search for something like "GATA-D22S690" finds
all entries containing GATA and not the full
hyphenated text.

~ Link

MySQL disputes the fact that this is a bug.

But in reality – as the submitters points out – there are many cases where hyphens are part of words. The example I ran into tonight was product model numbers (eg. “00-17″ or “j-35″).

The MySQL docs recommend recompiling or modifying one of two system files.  None of these options are feasible in a shared hosting environment.

I can’t believe this bug exists. As far as I’m concerned this is a complete and utter deal breaker for any application that needs to search non-word strings containing hyphens. I’ve been exclusively using MySQL for my entire career and I now know that a bunch of sites I’ve worked on in the past 10 years were launched with this bug.