Going into business
5k competition entries
Javascript links are bad
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. -----
Free tech books
Colour blindness
Ain't no sunshine
Haiku software licences
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 -----
Computational Frisbees
"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! -----
PriceWaterhouseCoopers name change
Power in your hands
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. -----
No more missing ISIHAC
No appreciation of football
"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. -----
Python XML-RPC wrapper
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. :) -----
Possible US war crimes
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. -----
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. -----
Transparent society
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." -----
More ideas to steal
Style, more style
WaSP season
Something begins
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.
-----Disney define reality by their own films
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. -----
Paradigm shift
A man page for the paradigm shift command in Unix. This is just hilarious. I wish this was packaged for Debian. :-) -----
The Octobus
Run from the ball
Blogdex
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.
-----Links steal no bandwidth
Stolen designs
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. -----
We're on our way
does the dance of joy -----
Stealing ideas
Neat background trick in Mozilla: Eric Meyer's css/edge
Google It! links: Scott Andrew
"Expand >>" links: aarondot
Expandable "other people" stories: my aqtree -----
CSS no good: film at 11
Pinging weblogs.com
People you link to link to
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. -----Auto-discovery RSS
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. -----Amazing tree generator
Code fixes
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 :-) -----