as days pass by

Lots of stuff to mention, so a Mark-esque catchup post is in order. Phil Ringnalda notes a change required to your blog this page MT bookmarklet for Mozilla. I hope Ben’s seen this and rolled it into the new version. Vampire Ecology in Sunnydale (via Lots O’People): how many vampires are there in Sunnydale, and is this a stable population? Amazingly (and I can’t believe, despite Joss’ legendary attention to detail, that he set up the populations such that there were the appropriate numbers of humans and vampires), it all works out: a town the size of Sunnydale can support a number of vapires which seems reasonable, given what we’ve seen on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am well impressed with this. Mark’s got a TiVo. I’ve acquired a couple of video capture cards, so I’ve toyed with the idea of essentially building my own TiVo; at the very least, I could lay down my current video collection onto VideoCD. I have no intention of recording to DVD, because DVD recorders are thumpingly expensive, and blank DVDs are equally expensive, presumably at least partly because the movie people don’t want punters to be able to lay down video of their own, especially in a world with filesharing in it. But VideoCD would do me nicely, especially given that it’s not hard to find a DVD player that will play the format. I could also record stuff from the telly direct to the hard drive and then either watch it later or write it to VideoCD if I wanted to keep it. How good does a machine have to be in order to do these things? Clearly to convert a video to VideoCD you have to be able to grab the video input and convert it to a digital format in realtime — I’ve got no problem with laying it down to the internal hard drive as an uncompressed format and writing a compressed CD later, but how performant does a machine have to be to do this? Simon notes the existence of YAML, a non-XML-based data transfer language much like XML-RPC’s data serialisation format. This is much like Aquarion’s ESF in concept. I wonder if we’ve all be using CSV or something if someone had pushed it in earlier years? A game design tutorial which is actually a log of an IRC session. Am I the only person who finds IRC logs really hard to read? The black page background doesn’t help either; that’s so 1996, man. Understanding web typography, an introduction (via Dorothea): notable for some historical information on fonts, which is a very good grounding for novices to typography (which is, er, damned near everyone, I reckon — there is a lot more skill in this than I thought, although I suspect that Dean Allen could have told me that if I’d asked), and its up-to-date-ness; I’ve seen too many “typography” guides which ignore stylesheets, for example. Jonathon Delacour talks about Myers-Briggs personality typing. I’m an INTP. I shall be interested in his conclusions, although the self-selecting nature of the sample might tend to select for some personality types over others. Moreover, Jonathon doesn’t actually reveal his own classification, although we know that he’s INxx. Those people who understand these things could potentially guess based on his style and see if they’re right; a fun new game for all the family! Should there be a Myers-Briggs category in FOAF, I wonder? If there were, it would reasonably quickly because a very large potential sample population, with writings (since they’re all webloggers) against which you could gauge their personality type. Ronaldo over at reflectivesurface sums up the XHTML/RSS debate with some thoughts of his own. A couple of minor misconceptions; RSS discovery isn’t hard with Mark’s RSS autodiscovery LINK element, and I’ll bet money (although I have no proof of this) that the majority of Movable Type users are not using MySQL. But these are minor points; he stresses that “the burden of implementation is on the developer”, and gives me some food for thought on the nature of representation as opposed to direct meaning in XHTML. Even if this conversation dies away (which it may have done, although Tantek hints at private discussions which may lead to more), it’s got a lot of people to think about the nature of XHTML and the potential that the semantic use of markup promises. ——-