As I suspected, the block for non-U.S. viewers has to do with deals Comedy Central has with local TV stations.

I'm hoping the following is just due to some sort of technical difficulties:

The above image is a screencapture from the usually excellent online video player showing new episodes of The Daily Show with John Stewart every day.  The video player is replaced with a black screen and the text Sorry. Full Episodes of The Daily Show are not available in your area. There's no other message, so I assume area refers to non-U.S.  I've previously praised both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for their willingness to "compete with free", and judging by the ire on The Daily Show forum people are not happy with this step backwards:

WTF... What are you people on comedy central thinking disabling The Daily Show to the entire world. Don't you guys want to make some money of the ads??? The only result of your actions is that your viewers are forced to download this show from other sources. (eztv, TPB and so on, and so on...)

I'm not sure I agree with the statement; no one is forcing anyone to download anything. There could of course be hundreds of reasons to pull the online feed for non-U.S. viewers (not the least the fact that foreign tv channels buy episodes of this show), but if we make the assumption that The Daily Show managed to draw people away from watching their show through torrent downloads I think it's a shame they haven't managed to maintain this positive development in some way, whatever the reason for the block.

Somewhat related is this NRKbeta-article (in Norwegian) where Øyvind Solstad criticises the official Britain's Got Talent Youtube channel for being fabulously late after their Susan Boyle video went viral - and then after actually publishing the video online themselves the video is cut (half the size of the fan-published version) and crippled (no embed allowed so you can't publish the video on your site).

It's no good trying to compete with free if the free product is better.  And I think the above illustrates the NRKbeta doctrine as well as anything. Publish it quick, make it easy to download - even if we have to pay for it somehow, and above all let your content flourish by allowing people to be creative with and around it.

Bah, what do I know?

I do know this:  my daily Daily Show has been disturbed, and I'm mad as hell - and so on...

Update: It's due to the foreign tv deals.

Cool update of an incredibly useful tool for web developers today. Yahoo!'s YSlow was bumped to version 2.0, and this website client side optimisation helper is more handy than ever with a much nicer GUI, links to more tools for optimisation and with more tests it runs on your site. YSlow is a plugin for Firebug and forms part of an indispensable toolset for me. Client side optimisation really shouldn't be underestimated either, YSlow can help you detect cache problems and teach you clever tricks for speeding up the time it takes for your content to be displayed.

Via Daring Fireball, lots of candid pictures of Obama and company on flickr, all Creative Commons licensed. I especially like this one:

Photo by by Pete Souza

Reminds me of the Swedish Royal Family on Youtube and the Norwegian crown prince couple on twitter, except, you know, the White House seems to actually keep their account updated and posts pictures with a certain amount of honesty and openness in contrast to the stiff service announcements from the two latter parties.

The excellent web browser Opera is celebrating 15 years by reminding us of the good old web of yesteryear.

Shame the HTML source isn't as authentic as the look!

If you're using the excellent HTML Validator Add-on for Firefox you'll probably notice it crashes Firefox 3.0.9.  The culprit is a bug in Firefox apparently, and Marc Guery, author of the Add-on, has released a quick fix that'll tide us over until Firefox 3.0.10 appears.  Another option that also fixes the problem is to disable the Highlight lines with errors options in the Add-on preferences.

The latest version of the linux distro Ubuntu is out.  I've been using the beta for about a month already and it's stable and fast.  They have a live CD, so this is your chance to take a free, user friendly and fast operating system for a spin without having to install anything on your computer.  Just download the image, burn it to a cd and boot from the CD.  Ubuntu will run for as long as your machine is on, and when you reboot without the CD in the drive you'll be back to your previous operating system.

Go on, you know you want to. Give it a go for a day!

The swedish Pirate Party has had an explosive growth in members during this weekend after the Pirate Bay guilty verdict.  It is up to 30.982 registered members as I write this and is Sweden's fourth biggest party by that count, well on their way of overtaking the third at 47.866 members.

Also related, the Norwegian Pirate Party makes another start attempt with what has to be the worst domain registration choice for a political party ever:  http://www.piratpartiet.biz.  Biz??  Still, Norway needs a serious a debate about this topic as the Swedes are having so I hope they do well.

Brilliant idea: update warning for IE6 in the form of a standard looking ActiveX warning.  I am aware that probably a lot of IE6 users are so against their own will, corporate environments and such, but this is funny nonetheless.

This guy has my understanding and sympathies - and got me laughing.  I'm not a big Tarantino fan but I can get behind anyone wanting to see IE get roughed up by the bigger lads.

Related, both in theme and its source - Reddit - 10 cool things we'll all be able to do once IE 6 is dead.  24 bit PNGs without hacks and attribute selectors are favourites of mine.