Archives de l’auteur : Seek

Blogosphere

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There are a bunch of systems around the web to see who’s linking to who, what weblogs you might like to read, who’s reading what, who’s the most prolific linker, etc. Some rely on spiders, some rely on trackback pings or search engines or a combo of those methods.

Today I had the pleasure to see that a distinguished visitor had commented on a post by Brightblue. My first reaction was just like if I was getting unexpected company: « ohmygod, this place is a mess I should clean up really fast and make a good dinner and and… ». Except then I didn’t have any warning… Oh well!

This is an experiment above all and I’ll have a v 1.0 up soon enough.
I also noticed some of my post were noticed elsewhere. It’s quite unexpected really. The intended audience for this site was less than a dozen people! I just wanted to dip a toe into the water, but it seems I enjoy being splashed.

I like the linking, the foaming caused by juicy tidbits, the ease of circulation of information. I really appreciate that people will often link to the exact source of an item, instead of just doing it Ananova style « BBC reported that » or whatnot. And by following the trackbacks, you can actually learn more about an issue. I also like the opinion pieces.

I like that my humble place got visited by someone I have a lot of admiration for. I’ll never wash my logfiles again.

Oh yeah. And I’m putting Christopher Locke on my reading list. I had already read parts of the Cluetrain manifesto (and it’s credited somewhere in my thesis) and I fully expect Gonzo Marketing and The Bombast transcripts to be a worthy read. It will be quite a change from my recent readings on the Qing dynasty.
(yes yes, I want to see AllConsuming pick those up, I admit).

Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land

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Mark is angry. How angry?

I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end.
[…]
Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

I’m migrating to HTML 4.

Refreshingly sincere isn’t it? I can understand him: it seems the XHTML he lovingly crafted will be made obsolete. (or will it? I don’t know, I have issues with the basics of CSS that need to be resolved… Look at this site… so I’m not going to get into discussions on XHTML)

Standards evolve and conflict. Generally, I can understand the need to do tabula rasa once in a while. I cringe when it happens with laws though, because a well known evil is often easier to deal with than that weird new thing, no matter how much good will went into drafting it.Yet, for things as mark-up languages, maybe standardization bodies should be allowed to fumble and change their mind.

I’m saying that because it seems like a relatively new field and an absolutely rapidly evolving one too and I imagine it is harder to envision all the consequences of a single decision. I’d be curious to learn about the rationale of the changes Mark talks about though.

So Mark followed the book to the letter, pure code, and got burned. At least he proved it could be done. That’s an impressive feat in itself.

Will Mark be as passionate about HTML 4 as he was with the much richer (philosophically speaking) XHTML? And more importantly, what’s with the need to use the latest, highest numbered, standard? Early adoption is great, but his code is still valid as it is isn’t it? Is it about lost bragging rights? Frustration of misdirected efforts?

MS settles for 1.1 billion

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MS settles for 1.1 billion in a California class action. This is not the federal anti trust case but a private class action. The settlement amounts to 30% of all the sales revenues of Microsoft in that state between 1995 and 2001. Similar lawsuits are pending in 16 states.

Trial was set for Feb. 24. Maybe getting not another judge to utter the word monopoly was worth 1.1 billion? In all fairness, that amount only exists as long as all involved customers and business take advantage of the rebate vouchers and the actual cost of the settlement, if accepted by the judge, will be lower.

And while we talking of settlements, don’t forget the RIAA one. (Oh, /. already posted his earlier today… too bad, I wrote it, I’M posting it).

Who are you and what are you doing writing this?

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I’ve been surfing the web for a couple minutes now, I absolutely forgot what it is I was looking for in the first place. The non-chronological history of Chimera makes it hard to retrace my steps. All I know is that I just ended up reading a couple sites about Kobe beef and Wagyu cows. I think I need sleep

Besides the History panel, another thing I miss in Chimera are subscriptions to web sites that alert you when the page changes. I prefer RSS feeds, but when worse comes to worse, they can be useful, especially for job posting sites. One last rant on Chimera: the Cookie alert dialog does not give me any details on the content and expiration date of the cookielike Mozilla does. If you drop down a sheet, why not put something useful on it?

Cleaning my bookmarks

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Ok, as I’m pretty settled into Chimera as my browser of choice, I’m weeding through many sedimentary layers of bookmarks, creating a couple multi-tab bookmark groups in the process. This is a great time saver to read my comics in the morning in particular, but also to get the weather on a couple sites at a time, get my favorites news sites all loaded at once. While I’m at it ‘ll take the occasion to share a few URLs.

Radio-Canada’s new page with a clean layout. Made to be accessible to disabled people. I love it.

Surrealist compliment generator in français. That’s what it is…

RedFlagDeals. I thought it was one of my China related links but no, it’s a site about internet deals for people living in that other North-American country.

The Axis Applet shows you common connections between countries. It’s quite ironic that the Afghanistan/Iraq/North Korea axis gives « These countries have not yet registered their Axis » (ok, but with Iran instead of Afghanistan it gives « axis of oil-producing border-disputers »). There is a whole bunch of little artsy code demos on that site. Wait.. did I just sneak « art » and « code » in the same sentence again?

Heavens above has all kind of information about. well.. heavens above, that you can customize for your location. Can’t see much of the sky here but I might have better luck in Morin-Heights.

Ever had a coworker who was stuck with a file he could not open? MacLink and GraphicConverter usually made my computer more versatile than most Windows-based machines in that respect, but if you don’t have those tools at least look up the file extension to know what kind of file it could be.

montreal city is a weblog without a RSS feed. But it’s a nice resource to keep up on local news. In that respect, YUL Blog is also a nice directory. I’ll get listed there once I get a real host.

alright, that’s enough for one post. Good w-e everyone. Apparently, despite what the website says, a couple more trail were groomed this week. Or maybe we’ll try something a bit more challenging.

Make a « page Seek » bookmark

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Some of you guys know I have a pager. I pay for basic numeric service but I have always been able to use the internet paging service that’s supposed to be only for alphanumeric pager. Of course, it won’t work with letter, just numbers and dashes.

So by crafting a URL like this
http://207.245.224.97/PAGESCRIPT?pin=MYPagerNumber&message=YourNumericMessage
You can bypass the web form. But more importantly, you can bypass the connection issues MSN Messenger has been giving me lately and even reach me for the few minutes in a day when I’m not in front of a computer.

I also use this occasionally in a script triggered by a mail rule to be warned of a message by a special someone.

wOuch!

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Another cold inspired story: a Russian man had to be rescued after his penis stuck to a frozen bus shelter while he was urinating.

Classic… well at least he could cry for help, unlike when your tongue gets stuck somewhere.

wHao!

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A Chinese man has broken his own record by standing naked in sub-zero Siberian winter conditions for 4 hours in temps that reached -29°C.

Awesome!! Did he actually stay standing still and upright? Impressive. I hope it wasn’t windy. Were there bets on how many digits he’d loose in the adventure? Or maybe he had none left to loose, since he apparently held the previous record of 3h46, set in 2000…

Mobile phone booth

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I remember that at the back of old 2600 magazines, they used to have pictures of phone booths from across the world. Maybe they still do I, I haven’t seen one of those in a while.

Well this idea definitely is worth noting: using humans with cell phones as phone boxes with legs. Imaginative solution for a common problem.

[Via Smart mobs]

update: My favorite LDC connectivity specialist informs me that Bangladesh saw people adopting a similar situation where individuals would start a business reselling cell phone time. The idea snowballed.

Morning news ramblings

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Sometimes around 6 or 7 AM a mail rule my computer makes a special sound. It’s the Cla morning (well, noon) news updates. Somewhere (ok, I know exactly where) someone had a small thought for an old sleeping friend. It does help me start my day better than Corn Flakes. Thanks Cla!

So today we have old news (which incidentally I had missed back then so it’s ok): Kazaa gets the green light

And we have new news: first a NYT article on DRM . good read. scary read. sad read. I never considered DRM bad per se, but like anything, abusing something is never good.

Then an article on Intellectual property: an interview with the EFF’s Fred Von Lohmann. He’s the EFF’s attorney and this is another valuable read, revolving around the idea that « It makes you wonder whether the fight is actually about piracy, or if it’s instead about asserting control over new technologies. « 

He also states the tragically obvious: « If the precedents being made today were on the books 20 years ago, we would never have seen the photocopier, the VCR, or the CD recorder . »

Oh, and I’ll try reading in Safari today. I used to read long texts in OmniWeb but Safari seems to have fairly good anti aliasing too.