March 2004
March 8, 2004
Essential utility: “screen”. Multiple terminals in a single session.
We’ve found the weapons of mass destruction
At work while poking around the official website for Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority we stumbled across some interesting meta tags:
[... 85 words]Joel on Software—Back to Basics. And oldie but still worth re-reading.
Rounded Corners in CSS (via) Using :before and :after, so no show in IE.
Lockergnome reverts
I decided to hold off commenting on the news that Lockergnome were dropping their CSS layout in favour of a table based alternative until I had seen the new design for myself. I figured that they were probably just going to move to a transitional tables/CSS combination design with tables used to bypass some of the more taxing cross-browser issues. I think the following code snippet from their new front page speaks for itself:
[... 182 words]March 9, 2004
SXSW on a shoe-string
So, in customary last-minute style I’ve decided to go to SXSW Interactive this year. I can get a student ticket on the door so all I need to sort out is transport and accomodation. The cheapest air fare I can find at this point is $700+ (Expedia quoted me $415, then at the last minute laughed in my face and told me I couldn’t book the ticket). The Greyhound is $220 and although it’s a 20 hour journey each way the timetable is actually pretty decent, getting me to the conference for Friday evening and back by early Wednesday morning. It looks like I’m going to experience America close-up!
[... 124 words]Feedster at One Year. “With a little help from our friends”
CouchSurfing. Stay on random people’s couches. Inspired.
March 10, 2004
Semantic data extractor (via) Structured markup advocacy tool.
Photo Matt : Code is Food. Why the Locker Gnome thing is upsetting.
Column Two: The quality of yours indexers matters. Metadata remains ridiculously hard to gather.
March 11, 2004
Naming Classes—Do It Once And Do It Right (via) Some great tips.
Boing Boing: We’re a Movable Type blog now! Archive pages suck less.
March 12, 2004
Overreaction. Absolutely storming rant from Russell about America’s culture of fear.
Greetings From the John Kerry for President HQ. Cam lands on his feet after the Clark campaign.
“Unknown Soldier” Speaks Out To Bring Troops Home :: Intervention Magazine :: War, Politics, Culture (via) Fascinating
Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (via) Excellent overview of Mono from ONLamp.com.
March 18, 2004
Chess in 5K (via) Insane! It plays a pretty mean game as well.
E-mail technical support warning. “...in accordance with our zero-tolerance policy for Internet troublemakers we have had him shot...”
SXSW 2004
SXSW 2004 was a blast: by far the geekiest weekend of my life. I was planning on writing a few updates from the conference but quickly discovered that laptops and socialising just don’t mix—there were just too many interesting people to talk to!
[... 270 words]March 19, 2004
PHP 5 Release Candidate 1
I haven’t blogged much about PHP in a while because I’ve been up to my nose in mod_python and loving every minute of it. This news is just too important to miss: PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 has been released, bringing the first production-ready release tantilisingly close. While I doubt PHP 5 will tempt me back it’s definitely an exciting upgrade—my biggest complaint with PHP 4 is the brain-dead object model which defaults to copying whole objects rather than passing references, and this is one of the many things addressed by PHP 5. The new libxml2 powered XML features sound really powerful, and SQLite as an on-board database should be ideal for knocking out small stand-alone applications without needing to set up a mySQL database for them.
[... 173 words]March 20, 2004
CSS Diagrams (via) Pushing CSS towards SVG.
XML Namespaces Support in Python Tools (via) Expert analysis from Uche Ogbuji.
Internet culture
In what could be the most significant internet cultural event of the decade, Strong Bad has answered his 100th email. Attempts to guess the URL ahead of time were futile.
[... 69 words]March 21, 2004
Avoiding protracted debates
I love Charles Miller’s Fishbowl. His latest entry introduces his rules for argument. Read them, follow them and save a truck-load of time avoiding protracted debates in the future. Heck, if everyone stuck to them the overall productivity of the internet would probably increase by a factor of ten.
Bill Gates goes dumpster diving. “The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
Democratised Namespaces
The New York Times: Get out of my Namespace (via Diego Doval)—a well-researched look at the huge problems (and frivolous lawsuits) being generated by the global quest for ownership of unique names.
[... 267 words]ICANN: Ten New Sponsored TLD Applications Received. Finally a TLD for filtering all of those cat picture sites.