Microsoft's Touch-Sensitive Table: "Surface"

Nice Bug, Windows Vista Edition

Apparently Windows Vista ships with some pretty amusing bugs, one of them being an error message which reads "Error. The operation completed successfully." Microsoft will hear that one ringing in their ears for years. Anyway, someone turned this bug into a great bit of culture jamming in Prague...

[Link] Thanks, xenmate.

A Brief History of the Emoticon

CNet delves into the history of the emoticon. From the article:

The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.

"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.

"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."

More at the link.

Nice Bug

Photo by andyket, discovered in the Public Computer Errors pool on Flickr. This is one of those interesting cases where the computer error does not just disrupt meaning, but contributes to a new one. The popup window plays the role of a geisha's fan.

It would be interesting to see wheatpaste or other graffiti simulating such glitches on non-computer-generated advertisements. Anyone seen this?

ASLC Educational Software of the Year

The American Library Association's goon squad, otherwise known as the Association for Library Services for Children, has released their list of the year's best (last year's best?) software for kids. Get your little friends hooked here.