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katlalog
021024 22:42 History
Really interesting bit of history - until now completely ignored by the West: In 1421 the Chinese sent 4 huge ships exploring around the world. (via robotwisdom)
The Chinese set up settlements all along the west coast of North America, from Vancouver Island to New Mexico and inter-married happily with the local Indians.
021024 13:58 Intellectual property
Just goes to show how people and organizations try to make money these days: law suits. The Metropolitan Police was suing the BBC over the trademark to the Tardis. Luckily they lost.
In similarly stupid news: A San Diego company was granted a patent for using graphics and text to sell things on the web
.
021021 21:31 Accessibility
The judge in the case against an airline to make their website accessible has ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does not apply to the web.
On top of these bad news they also diss the efforts of the W3C:
She noted that the World Wide Web Consortium had drafted accessibility guidelines, but said the document was over three years old and there is no indication that the guidelines are "a generally accepted authority."
021021 12:18 Society
Typical! An article on the Farmers' Union website about the problems faced by farmers on the urban fringe starts with those popular catch words 'prostitution, illegal raves and drug-taking' and that's the only time they're mentioned in the whole article. (Similar situation on the BBC News article that brought me there.) I sympathize with farmers but if raves hadn't been pushed into the underground by British society and law, if they gave ravers their own regular venue, farmers would at least have one problem less. Their main problem, by the way, is fly-tipping of industrial and domestic waste.
021020 03:31 Web development
Wired is getting negative feedback over its new design. But...
...the negativity is drowned out by an overwhelming positive response from the blogging community and loyal users...
...and those you care about standards and accessibility.
021020 01:12 Games
Peace posters for your Sims. (via boingboing)
This handsome bumpersticker was made famous by the progressive website Common Dreams. Framed and ready to hang. Your radical Sims will gaze lovingly at this item as they prepare to engage in tiny acts of war resistance.
021020 00:36 Intellectual property
Transcript of the oral arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
021018 17:26 Browser
Mozilla 1.2 beta is out, yet again with another new feature: link prefetching. It's the first time that I'm no too thrilled with a new feature but, to be honest, that's probably just a personal thing.
Link prefetching means that your browser will download (pre-fetch) pages for you that are linked from the document you're currently reading so that they are quickly available from the cache. It does this in the browser's idle time, i.e. while it's not downloading anything else. It will only prefetch pages that are specified in the HTML code via the <link rel="prefetch"> tag or in a similar prefetch <meta> tag. Basically, this will only be available if the code includes the relevant instructions.
I wasn't too thrilled at first because it reminded me of off-line browsing software of the early dial-up days that would download whole websites for off-line usage. I never thought of this as very practical and I definitely found it a waste of bandwidth. The Internet is clogged up with unnecessary traffic anyway and nowadays, where web hosts charge for bandwidth, this could just put an unwelcome strain on someone's bandwidth allowance.
It's not too much of a problem, though, because a) it can be turned off by the user in the browser preferences and b) the web designer actually has to put these instructions in a page. Currently not too many designers use the <link> tag to its full capabilities anyway.
Still, I've never seen the point in downloading stuff that you only might visit and I really can't see the advantage now.
021017 20:20 Library
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Internet Archive are working together to add that digital edge to the new library, which aims to become the same center of learning that the legendary library from the antiques represented - to serve the knowledge of all peoples, as this german article puts it.
Alle 120 Alphabete, die es weltweit gibt, haben Steinmetze in den grauern Assuangranit eingemeißelt, als Hinweis, dass auch die neue Bibliothek dem Wissen aller Völker verpflichtet sei und wieder ein Zentrum des Lernens, wie es auch einst die antike Bibliothek war, entstehen soll.
021017 16:57 Spam
Princess Leia Organa jumps on the Nigerian money laundering scam/spam band wagon. (via camworld)
021017 16:52 Browser
Been using Phoenix for the last couple of days. It's a stripped-down version of Mozilla. Mozilla without the fluff. It's perfect if you just need a browser and none of the other stuff like mail and newsreader, if you need something that sucks a bit less on your resources. It's got most of the things I love about Mozilla, although some of the keyboard shortcuts and sidebar tabs you can add don't work. What i like best: it uses a more intelligent shortcut for cycling through tabs - ctrl + tab.
021015 23:59 Consumerism
Harper's Index September 2002:
Number of square feet of retail space per American : 27
021015 23:47 Culture
Google's Zeitgeist features quite a few international listings now.
021015 23:28 Society
It is estimated that 25,000 people a day die as a result of hunger and poverty.
021015 21:04 End of World
The design might look a bit retro but this is a really well-written, seemingly well-researched, and not to forget surprisingly funny, site about all the different end-of-the-world scenarios: Exit Mundi.
But even if we don't go one of these ways, eternity doesn't look like fun either:
Information is by definition stored in a finite amount of particles. Even in your cyborg brain, there will come a point where you would have to discard old information in order to store something new. And that IS a problem.
'All organisms would ever do is relive the past, having the same thoughts over and over again,' cosmologists Lawrence M. Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman estimate. `Eternity would become a prison, rather than an endlessly receding horizon of creativity and exploration. It might be nirvana, but would it be living?'
Nope. Probably not. There you go, Mr. Cyborg: constantly asleep, and when awake only rethinking old thoughts.
Perhaps it's best our world is swallowed by one of those big, mean Black Holes after all.
021015 19:06 Intellectual property
The Eldred v. Ashcroft (aka Lawrence Lessig v Mickey Mouse) court hearing in Lessig's own words.
021015 16:08 Domains
ISOC, the Internet Society, will take over the running of the .org domains with Afilias, who already runs .info, as its infrastructure provider. I guess this is good news.
021013 02:54 World Wide Web
First Monday has published an article on hypertext that examines its semantic nature and rhetorical purpose.
...hypertext can be defined as a web of relationships. Authors establish the relationship potential of linking by choosing to expand on an existing item of information by adding a connection to another item of information. Users, on the other hand, establish the relationship actuality of linking by choosing to follow the link and examine the relationship created between the items of information. This relationship has meaning, i.e., semantic value.
Most interesting are its observations about idiosyncratic linking styles and hypertext structures driven by communities and their ideologies.
...when people were given the same texts and asked to choose links among them based on the same guidelines, the results were highly variable.
021012 22:15 Web development
Wired have completely redesigned their site. And I don't mean the looks, I mean what lies underneath. They talk about standard compliance, have shifted to XHTML, use several alternate stylesheets (nicely accessible from Mozilla's View - Use Style option) and they've said bye-bye to tables and to Netscape 4.x. Not the first ones to do it but - as they point out - it may well be the first major, heavily trafficked site that dared to.
Eric A. Meyer's in-depth interview with Wired's Douglas Bowman is an interesting read:
I ran into a steep learning curve, not with the Web standards themselves, but with the quirky rendering behaviors and inconsistencies in various browsers. Our writers and editors must get used to some new rules when generating the day's stories. Our management also has to accept the fact that some older or smaller browsers may be getting an un-styled version of our content. We know that some users may prefer getting an un-styled version, because they'll finally be able to read our content in the browser they use. But some users may write in, frustrated and complaining about the horrible design decisions we've made. Those feedback loops will have to be managed appropriately.
For Wired News, we analyzed the traffic reports to get a picture of our user base. From looking at our data, we predict there could be as much as 14% of our users who will get the un-styled version of our content. That's a significant percentage when we're used to our pages looking the same in every browser.
021007 21:55 Society
The ignorance of the privileged :
Whites and men tend not to see these privileges because they are taken to be normal, unremarkable entitlements. This is how things appear to members of a dominant group. What's missing is an awareness that life is different for others. Not having to think about the experiences of people in subordinate groups is another form of privilege.
In contrast, women and people of color usually see that those above them in the social hierarchy receive unearned benefits. At the least, they must, for their own protection, pay attention to what members of more powerful groups think and do. This is why women often know more about men than men know about themselves, and why blacks know more about whites than whites know about themselves.
021007 14:02 Linux vs Microsoft
The fun never stops on Slashdot : Tux Vs Clippy - New XBox Game
Choose alliance with either Tux or Clippy, and finish the mother of all disputes right here and right now. This game is free (as in beer), and will run on any xbox that has been modified for use with the GNU/Linux operating system.
Here's a screenshot.
021007 12:33 Accessibility
An airline, whose website can't be accessed with a screenreader, and a disability right group are fighting it out in court. It would cost the airline less money to just make their website accessible.
The parties are arguing over what Congress intended when it passed the landmark disability legislation in 1990. The plaintiffs claim that Congress wrote the ADA so broadly that the Internet is covered, while the defendants take the position that Congress never meant to include the Internet.
021007 01:29 Language / Internet
The origin and history of the word 'cyber' and its compounds. Leaves out Cybrarian, though. (via lucdesk)
021006 23:49 Economy
Seems the U.S. doesn't just have troubles externally.
There is a piece of US legislation, known as the Taft-Hartley Act, which entitles the US government to order employees back to work for an 80-day period if it believes that the stoppage "imperils national health or safety.'
021005 01:00 Civil liberties
The U.S. military wants to drug rioters with Valium where "lethal weapons are inappropriate" (my emphasis).
Officials in the military's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate began discussing whether it would be possible to develop drugs for use as "calmatives," or chemical peacemakers.
Huh, huh, Butthead, he said 'joint'.
021004 13:18 Internet
Good point made by a slashdot poster about the UUNET/WorldCom backbone troubles:
It will take a while for the 3 network techs that havent' been fired yet to fix this. [edited]
021004 15:40 Science (or not)
The annual 'How scientist wasted their time this year' celebration, also known as the Ig Nobel Awards, took place at Harvard last night. Definately not as funny as the Darwin Awards, except for this:
In economics, the executives and auditors at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen and a host of other companies were commended by the Ig Nobel committee "for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world."