This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Hoorah! My Zaurus works again! Turns out that if QtopiaDesktop crashes while syncing, it scrags the Zaurus, which means that its drives need fscking. I just rebooted it and it came back up perfect. Fantastic news. I spent all weekend plugging it in, unplugging it, rmmoding the usbdnet module, insmoding it, rebooting, taking out modules and putting them in...argh. And then a bloke calling himself W|bble in #zaurus on irc.openprojects.net suggested a reboot. I never thought of that. And I felt like a moron when it worked. But, hey, I don't care :-) -----

Friend of mine told me yesterday that, were he to go into business, he'd only do it if I'd be part of it. I thought that was rather nice, that. Having said this, I have no good business ideas. I have a few crappy business ideas that I probably would have got ninety million in VC for in 1998, but the arse has dropped out of that particular market. Actually, I can't remember the last time I heard about the launching of a big tech venture -- you might find that the markets are totally avoiding the whole tech arena. Some kind of more thoughtful essay on this might be a good idea, if I had more time and more thoughts, which I don't. -----

The 5K competition entries are up! Now I just have to go and view them all :-) -----

Mark Pilgrim's latest usability tip concerns using the "javascript:" protocol in links; or, more precisely, not using it. In general, good advice, although I have some reservations about one of his comments. Mark does say, though:

Don't even get me started on those dynamic Javascript-based menu systems. They make you look cool like smoking makes you look cool. Use real links.

I don't agree with this, necessarily. What you should not do is have those menus be your only navigation. There's no problem with providing easier means of navigation for browsers that can cope with it, as long as you don't cut off browsers that can't. This is an unusual turn for Mark; up to now, his "accessibility" series has related very neatly to this principle, suggesting ways in which your code can accommodate those working with limited browsers or with disabilities but without impinging on its current structure if you don't want to. This latest comment smacks a little of making everything "accessible" by designing solely for Lynx, and that's not what the point of things like CSS are; it's so that all browsers can get to your content and some can provide an optimised view. We could reduce the web to just being text, but if you want gopher then you know where to find it. -----

A list of free tech books from Simon Willison. I love all this. I read etexts all the time, and having really useful resources like this available on the net is a real help. One that I'd personally add is the W3C specs, if you're involved in web development. They're impenetrable at first, and not the things to learn from, but if you're already up on the subject and need a reference for all the little bits you've forgotten then they're indispensable.

VisCheck (via diveintomark's continuing series on web accessibility) simulates a colour-blind viewing of your web page. Mark's article boils down to: don't distinguish stuff from other stuff solely by colour. I pretty much try and stick to this, mainly because I miss links that are only on colour and I'm not even remotely colour-blind :-) Good advice, though, as is the rest of his 30 days to a more accessible weblog series. -----

Since Will Young's number 1 with Ain't No Sunshine, I've been listening to the song. But my version's the original, by Bill Withers. It's a very good song; all too true. Ain't no sunshine when she's gone It's not warm when she's away Ain't no sunshine when she's gone And she's always gone too long Any time she goes away

Haiku Licensing (via benhammersley.com/): Geek-joke-tastic. Mine own efforts below. Pretty funny, this, which probably says something.
Old-style BSD: Use our code freely / but credit us forever / you know it makes sense
Microsoft: Buy all new products / Loyalty means nowt to us / July 31st -----

A frisbee with computing power in it. This bloke is mental. Funny as hell in his descriptions, though. And he wrote some very cool Sharp Zaurus software. Regarding the frisbee, he says at one point:
"128 bytes of main memory may not seem very much (this workstation has 56 MB), but the computational demand of a frisbee is relatively light and workstations cannot usually stay airborne long enough to replace frisbees despite their superior processing power." Har! -----

PWC have created a brand site at introducingmonday.com to publicise their name change. Shame that they forgot to register http://www.introducingmonday.co.uk/, isn't it? (requires Flash; link via Kam) On the one hand, I'm not supposed to approve of this sort of thing; domain name theft is wrong. On the other hand, we don't own our domain names, as Dan Benjamin points out. On the gripping hand, it is damn funny :) -----

Stand: 2002-06-19: RIP Order: Sometimes, you win.:
STAND comments on how the government's climbdown over proposals to extend the RIP Act was influenced by the weight of public opinion. That means us, people. This is a refreshing change. There was a weight of public opinion about the initial passing of the RIP Act -- I faxed my MP and got involved with the Foundation for Information Policy research, and none of it made any difference. But this has, much like the weight of opinion in the US striking down the Communications Decency Act. This is great; the massed voices do make a difference, sometimes. It's nice to not feel entirely powerless. -----

BBC Radio 4 have made comedy programmes, including I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue available through their "Listen Again" facility. Yay! Yay again! I shall now have to set up a cron job to grab that once a week, I think. Fantastic, fantastic news! I always miss it!

Guardian Unlimited Football minute-by-minute coverage of the Mexico/USA game (via http://www.benhammersley.com/):
"When Tiger Woods was asked about the World Cup, his answer was: 'Not familiar with it. I've never been asked to participate.' For this alone, the US team should start all games with a deficit of two football points." Good shout, that coverage. I am amazed by how far the Yanks have got, here. God, they'll be insufferable if they do better. Hope that doesn't happen. -----

diveintomark: PyWebServices
Make any Python script available over XML-RPC. I keep meaning to try this sort of thing at work; I had not a lot of luck with the PHP XML-RPC stuff (allthe servers seemed to operate fine with their own clients but not the Python client or the JS client or whatever), so I fell back on ASP, which at least worked. But Python is greatness. :) -----

The Scotsman: US had role in Taleban prisoner deaths (via a close friend):
This is somewhat worrying if true. The American "war on terror" is founded on slightly shaky ground to begin with, despite the horrific attacks on New York last September. But the essential point about it is that it's a war on terror, not a war waged by terror. America has to be seen to have the upper hand, morally, for this "war" to have any kind of reasonable foundation. If their soldiers are committing war crimes then that can hardly be said to be the case, however much they may wish to avenge the insult and damage to their country. -----

The reasoning behind Mark Pilgrim's character sketches: becomes clear; it's all about accessibility.
I was wondering why precisely Mark was doing this; obviously it was going to have something to do with accesibility, but it wasn't clear what. It's actually a series called 30 days to a better weblog, in which Mark will examine accessibility points with a view of how to implement them on your weblog. Interesting. -----

Wired 4.12: The Transparent Society (via jwz):
An interesting look at how cameras on streets, which are here to stay, might be used for the better. I've already written about my concerns regarding privacy in the UK, or the lack of it. The recent changes in the law in the UK to allow practically any government agency to read private communications under the RIP Act are just the latest manifestation of this growing removal of civil liberties. I'm not sure whether the Wired article is a good approach or not; organisations such as FIPR are fighting the fight on this issue, but they don't, sadly, appear to be having any great impact. Maybe accepting that this technology will be brought into our lives and attempting to use it for good is the approach, but I don't like it. As Franklin famously said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -----

Check out the comment popups at Andrew Porter Glendinning's site. Very neat. Now I have to steal that idea. Bah, as if I haven't got enough work to do. ;-) -----

I fancied another couple of layouts for the pages on this site, so I borrowed Paul Sowden's stylesheet switcher from ALA. Look for more styles to come as and when I get the urge. And, by popular request: the return of the Ice style! I've got another one or two in the offing (which is to say, in my head, and may never get done) but I now have a framework in which to put them. -----

The The Web Standards Project is back. Their new site has a developer-oriented focus; I think we're now getting to the stage where professional developers have been convinced of the virtues of CSS styling, validation, and accessibility (although sometimes the real world gets in the way) -- the site's writeups may well be useful to convince those making decisions that the new way is the best way. -----

diveintomark: Jackie is an A student. She has been blind for 8 years.

I suspect that this is the beginning of a definitive case-study on accessibility, given Mark's comment at the end:
"She can read well-designed web sites even more quickly than she can read her audio textbooks."

Everyone is certainly assuming that there is some kind of message from this yesterday, Mark's only post of the day read, "Stay tuned. Tomorrow it will all be different." If the game is to get people intrigued, it's going well.

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TRON and the CBDTPA (via Aaron Swartz):
Disney's chief lobbyist angles for Tron-like controls over data passing through CPUs in order to enforce copyright. I'm really praying that we don't see a day when all this "digital rights management" (which the FSF suggest we should be calling handcuffware, and for once I agree with them) crap actually comes to pass. -----

A Very Useful UNIX Command (via Eric Meyer):
A man page for the paradigm shift command in Unix. This is just hilarious. I wish this was packaged for Debian. :-) -----

New writing: a short writeup on the Octobus, my superb plan for a toy every techie would love. As it says in the article, I'm entirely open to suggestions as to what should be in the Octobus. Let me know or append a comment and I'll take everyone's suggestions on board :-) -----

Via benhammersley.com: pathetic footballers. Now that you cannot help but laugh at, can you? What a glorious image. :) -----

Just discovered Blogdex; I'd heard it mentioned a few times before, but I finally chased it up after reading bobupndown. Interesting thing.

The index of sites thing looks vaguely fun, in that you get an instant "score" for your site. Fight to rise higher in the rankings! This could become Slashdot all over again.

Just dropped off a mail to the blogdex admin people suggesting that an XMLRPC interface to the data would be a very neat thing indeed. We'll see what comes of it.

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Asa Dotzler, one of the Mozilla team, links to a (Flash) game at newgrounds.com in his blog. But the link leads to a page saying "Error - Someone is stealing our bandwidth! Click here to view this properly", with a link to the newgrounds.com homepage. A link is not stealing bandwidth. Why do they think this? It would appear, although I have no idea whether it's true or not, that newgrounds.com aren't comfortable with the idea of people linking to pages internal to their site. Now, if someone was displaying the Flash directly on their own site, I'd understand the point of view; sure, check referer details on the HTTP request that actually fetches the swf file. But linking to the newgrounds.com page that hosts it is surely fine? Why is this in any way stealing bandwidth? Unless people following the link (and therefore upping newgrounds.com's bandwidth requirement) is bad, in which case: don't have a web site. Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

Pirated sites (via Zeldman):
Criminal ripoffs. I trust that when I steal people's work I'm not this obvious about it. Not that I ever steal other site designs. No. Naturally not. But web design is, I think, 10% inspiration and 90% plagiarism. It shouldn't be as obvious as these examples, though. -----

England 1 - 0 Argentina
does the dance of joy -----

Robbed lots of ideas from various other people and added them to Kryogenix over the last week or so -- this is a hat tip section. RSS link element: diveintomark
Neat background trick in Mozilla: Eric Meyer's css/edge
Google It! links: Scott Andrew
"Expand >>" links: aarondot
Expandable "other people" stories: my aqtree -----

Cascading Style Sheets, Promise vs. Reality, and a Look to the Future (via From The Orient): Is CSS still only a burgeoning technology? Digital Web Magazine questions its current utility. I'd like to go further into this, but everyone everywhere who would care has already seen rants in favour of CSS styling. As Sarabian points out in his comments on Orient, most of Mark Newhouse's complaints seem to revolve around Netscape 4 support, which is hardly looking to the future. Hopefully in a year or so everyone will ave moved on from that dead or dying browser. I'm even inclined to suggest that we, as web developers, explicitly make the decision to not support it; that way more users might be encouraged to upgrade. I can't imagine that it's in use places other than large corporate installations who haven't yet rolled out an upgrade programme. Perhaps the release of Netscape 7 might trigger a change. -----

Weblogs.com has an XML-RPC interface so you can "ping" it when your blog updates; it shows a list of recently updated blogs. Remind me to do this. At some point I must actually release xlog, as well; it seems to work reasonably nicely now, and stably too. (Well, I've not noted any problems with kryogenix lately, so that's OK). Naturally, I need to go through the code and parameterise everything, bah. But MovableType seems to be becoming the standard tool for blogs; Sarabian seems to be using it without problems, sor example. I just don't like third-party tools for this kind of thing, because I always find them more difficult to use, and hacking them to do what I want defeats the pont of using a third-party tool (because then I have to go through the merge-my-diffs nightmare every time there's a new release). Besides, it's in Perl and I'm no good at Perl. Vive la Python, I say. -----

diveintomark: blogrollfinder

Automatically find the "blogroll" of a site.

A "blogroll" is a list of sites; usually used on a blog site as the "what I read" section. Dump your blogroll into it and see who the people you read read, if you catch my drift. -----

diveintomark: RSS auto-discovery

Use the LINK tag to indicate where your RSS is.

This is a neat, neat sort of a thing. Mozilla, great little browser that it is, even pops up the link toolbar and has the link to RSS in its More|Other Versions bit. Kudos all round. All this stuff just, like, works automatically if you follow the specs. People are now beginning to discover power behind all this stuff that the W3C have been going on about, I think; using bookmarklets to automatically do things, XML-RPC across the internet to make web services happen, all this sort of thing. It makes me gasp sometimes, the sheer power that there is out there. It's all cool. -----

I've decided that I need to actually publish some of my DOM/CSS/JS experiments. The most recent is aqTree . I quite like aqTree, actually. Making expand/collapse trees should not be hard: well, now it isn't. I intend to publish more of my DOM fiddlings about, especially since every web designer worth his salt seems to have an "experiments" page, these days. Keep an eye on mine for more. -----

That's fixed the blog, at least. Thank goodness. I've just spent nearly two hours reading about and reviewing blogging software, wondering which I should use instead of getting this working. Cursing because there aren't any in Python.

And then I spent about fifteen minutes fixing this and it works again. Ha. There is a lesson here.

Right, now I can get back to posting about all the stuff I'm doing :-) -----

Someone's faked up a contenteditable attribute for Mozilla in XBL! Woo! Although, slightly less woo when you try and use it, owing to the lack of editing caret. Their documentation says that pressing F7 turns on "caret browsing", whatever TF that is, but it doesn't work for me. Additionally, the ctrl-b and ctrl-i shortcuts to bold and italic don't work for me either (but they do perform their normal functions of "show bookmarks" and "show page info"). Still, the fact that it's in XBL would make it pretty easy to knock up a toolbar that did all this sort of thing, like the IE inline wysiwyg editors have. I may add that to my list of projects. If only the caret worked...