So as everyone knows, the east coast of Australia was covered with a massive dust-storm.

The fiery haze was the result of the sun hitting the blanket of dust, Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Jane Golding said.

"The reason for the dust is we had some really strong winds in the inland areas of NSW and in South Australia for a sustained period yesterday," she said.

"That’s lifted a whole lot of dust off the ground because it’s quite dry out there. Many of those areas are still drought affected."

The lifted dust had been carried by the winds into Sydney.

"I’ve not seen anything like this before," Ms Golding said.

My wife has some photos from our house this morning showing what it looked like when we woke up:

Weatherzone has some satellite imagery showing the dust, but it’s mixed up with cloud cover too. The Japanese MTSAT satellite has a good wide shot of Australia showing the dust cloud stretching all the way up to Queensland.

But by far the best footage is this video from Broken Hill in western NSW. (For those who don’t know this is where Broken Hill is)

So the latest news is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has nabbed 10% of the US search engine market and is now the fastest growing search engine. If Jason Calacanis is right, and every 1% of the search market is worth US$1billion then this is a nice chunk of change for Microsoft. 

However I contest that these results should not be encouraging for Microsoft, for a couple of reasons.

1. They’re still in a bit of a honeymoon phase with Bing.  They’re still releasing new functionality (You need to switch to United States to see that) and people are experimenting with it.
2. But more importantly I think, a lot of IE6 users had their default search set to Bing (and for a while there, couldn’t change back).  But none the less a significant proportion of the browsing public still use IE6. Around 25% at last count, and a significant proportion of these will have the default search engine set.  Defaults matter.  Also, a fairly large chunk of these IE6 users will be corporate users who cannot change what browser they use due to (often misguided) corporate IT rules. 

   

What this means in practice is that a lot of those using Bing aren’t choosing to do so (or are just giving it a shot), and if & when they are able to choose, they’re likely to go for Google.  As corporate environments ever so slowly upgrade, they’ll allow users to at least move to better versions of IE, and possibly other browsers.  When you install IE8 it asks you what search engine you want to use, and browsers like Firefox just set it to Google.

So while the month-on-month growth that they’ve seen over the last few months may be real, I’m not convinced the base numbers are really representative of persistent usage.  If overnight people dumped IE6 for something better (oh please, Dear Lord, make it so) I think you’d see Bing’s usage numbers go through the floor.

I’ve just uploaded a new WordPress plugin that was inspired by my wife setting up her new site.  She was adding people to her blogroll and having to keep copying their urls and going into the WordPress admin section.  This was getting tedious, so I’ve made a plugin that creates a bookmarklet you can add to your browser that pops up a form to add the page you’re on directly to your site’s links.  It’s similar to the built-in ‘Press This’ bookmarklet, except for links instead of posts.

There is a more detailed description of the plugin & how it works on the plugin page, and you can install it directly through your WordPress admin section or download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

This image is part of the signup form for the now Fairfax-owned site Essential Baby, an Australian parenting and pregnancy website. To register for their site you have to fill in a surprisingly convoluted signup form, which includes this ‘Your stage of life’ option.  The available choices seem lacking somewhat, especially considering that two questions earlier it asks you for your gender.

So I can say I’m a male, but I have so say I’m either a ‘Curious Onlooker’ of my family (man, doesn’t that sound creepy) or ‘Other’.  Seriously?  I mean you couldn’t add ‘Dad’ or just say ‘Parent’?

What’s even funnier is this is that these are two of the lead articles:

So we’re ok as something to read about, but they don’t really want us around there.  Come on Fairfax, get it together.

Since I upgraded both my iPod Touch & iTunes to their latest versions, when I view albums in the iPod a lot of them don’t have their images.

I’d say it’s about half of the albums missing their images.  Viewing them in iTunes shows all the album covers fine, and also if I play a track the album cover shows in there too, which is weird.

I’ve re-synced the iPod a couple of times with no effect, I even tried clearing the album artwork in iTunes and re-downloading it, but that didn’t help either.  This is crazy, and really annoying.  Apparently I’m not the only one with this problem too:

• http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=783012
• http://twitter.com/tasteofyourlips/statuses/3895209853
• http://twitter.com/MattHealey/statuses/3891570956
• http://twitter.com/timothyhanson/statuses/3890323135
• http://twitter.com/EugeniaLoli/statuses/3871935161

One person mentioned that de-authorising and re-authorising my work, but I don’t really want to do that because you only get to do that five times before everything stops working.  I’ve just removed all the music off the iPod and now I’m re-syncing it back on, I’ll update once it’s done with the result.

UPDATE: Well, it seems that worked, so the solution is this:

1. Go to the iPod/iPhone in iTunes and go to the Music tab
2. Untick the ‘Sync Music’ checkbox
3. Sync the device, this will remove all music off the device
4. Go back after it’s finished syncing and tick the ‘Sync Music’ checkbox
5. Sync it again.  If you’ve got a lot of music, this will take a while.

Apple, this isn’t really good enough, I shouldn’t have to jump through these hoops!