katlalog archive january 2003

030131 16:34 Software : alternatives

I only used Powerpoint once in my life and only because it was required for an in-class-presentation at uni. Now NTK has discovered my favorite tool. Here's what they have to say:

So, you did something awful in a past life, and now you've got to do a proper, businesslike presentation in front of an audience of your peers. But how? You don't want to use PowerPoint because of those pledges your friends made to shoot you if you ever did. Your grungy five-year old clown laptop might spontaneously self-immolate as you sweep onto the stage - but you don't know what backup hardware they'll have running at the venue. You want your presentation to be in plaintext so you can hack final tweaks, but you also want to be able to stick in those funny pictures you snagged at the last minute from Google Images. You don't want to use Keynote because your image is of a raw, rough-and-ready soothsayer, not a turtlenecked Jobs clone. So what do you do? Can we suggest the rarely mentioned, but rather cool, presentation feature of the unbrowser, Opera? Pressing F11 in any version of Opera since v.5.0 will switch the app fullscreen, with a new media stylesheet enabled: simple HTML pages magically become individual slides, which you can flick through using PgUp and PgDown. Opera itself fits in under 4MB, so you can stick it on a USB key, or download it at your destination. Your presentation is in HTML, so you can download that too. Opera's non-free, but hell, it'll run on anything - and the ad-supported versions don't show their wares in presentation mode. Plus the more people use this feature, the (marginally) more likely it will that Mozilla and friends will adopt the same useful functionality.
http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/operashow/
-step-by-step guide
http://www.w3.org/Talks/2002/04/11-pemberton
- as used by the W3C

030131 14:34 Politics / Comix

Ok, it's all clear now. Here is what's *really* going on.

030131 14:31 Politics / Economics

I don't get it. The Iraq is still selling oil to the US? Must be some alternate reality.

According to local newspapers, a restaurant in southern Hunan province has started offering dishes cooked with human breast milk. [...]

The milk used so far is reported to have come from six peasant women who were still breast-feeding their children.

030129 13:09 Politics

Bush's State of the Nations Address transcript. Basically, the world is diseased and the US is the cure:

...we have the opportunity to save millions of lives abroad from a terrible disease. [...]

The American flag stands for more than our power and our interests.

"...for more than..." but still including "...our power and our interests."

For a nation that separates church and government, the speech is dripping with religious pathos. The US is the chosen one.

I urge you to pass both my faith-based initiative and the Citizen Service Act, to encourage acts of compassion that can transform America, one heart and one soul at a time. (Applause.) [...]

As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling as a blessed country is to make this world better.

And here comes the slap in the face for the scum at the bottom of this compassionate nation:

By caring for children who need mentors, and for addicted men and women who need treatment, we are building a more welcoming society -- a culture that values every life. And in this work we must not overlook the weakest among us. I ask you to protect infants at the very hour of their birth and end the practice of partial-birth abortion. (Applause.)

And of course he doesn't forget to cleverly remind Americans why they should be for war:

As we fight this war, we will remember where it began -- here, in our own country.

Lastly two examples of enormous hypocracy:

...this nation and all our friends are all that stand between a world at peace... [...]

Tonight I have a message for the men and women who will keep the peace, members of the American Armed Forces...

The rhethoric of the righteous, where war = cause or peace.

The American Dialect Society has chosen the Word of the Year 2002 and I am not going to utter it here. 'To google' made the 'most useful' category and 'blog' was voted 'most likely to succeed'. Wasn't that 'dotcom' in 1999 or so?

[Update 030123 12:45] UnBlinking has some comments on how these phrase memes get started. Suspicious!

030122 00:41 Politics

Ok, so even I pick one up from blogdex once in a while: Hilarious right-wing take on the peace rallies. This guy unwittingly hits the nail on the head:

The sickest, and most common, argument I heard today was that we shouldn't go to war with Iraq because we need to spend the money elsewhere. Perhaps if we had the cash to spare it would be ok. I guess this whole thing really is a struggle for control of resources.

030121 23:30 Email

Evolt.org: The case against HTML email:

Soon, more and more of your readers are going to wise up that you're tracking them without their consent. Those pictures you sneak in there to count how many people open your email is an incredible intrusion into your readers' privacy, how many of them would complain or unsubscribe if you headed each email with the message "By opening this email you consent to inform us of your doing so, and possibly force a connection to the Internet"?

030121 21:58 Intellectual property

Ha ha! More legal madness. Someone's got a patent on navigation. This website is being sued. (via boingboing)

030121 21:03 Politics

Here's a bit of interesting world politics news:

Libya has been elected chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, despite opposition from the United States.

...and the evenly interesting following discussion at BBC News.

030121 19:42 Games

Tycho from Penny Arcade expresses the feelings I've always had about the Sims series of games:

Where is the Goddamn multiplayer?

They always say that they are working on a multiplayer version but it never happens. SimCity 3000 was suppossed to be networkable but they gave up. Simville died a similar death, bits of it were incorporated into The Sims and now they gave us an online game that doesn't seem to be all that good (check reviews). When I heard SimCity 4 was coming out, i said: 'Would be so cool if...'. I wish I hadn't said that.

030121 19:19 Society

Roe v Wade at 30:

It's been 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court established a woman's right to an abortion. The ruling in no way put the issue at rest and women's legal advocates are sketching scenarios of what may lie ahead. First of a four-part Roe v. Wade series.

030117 16:20 Backbone

Microsoft catches up. For the first time a Windows 2000 / IIS site makes it into the Top 50 sites which have been up without reboot.

030117 15:38 Environment

[de] Es scheint, dass die Nachricht doch durchzudringen scheint. Die Amis machen sich Gedanken um's Energiesparen.

030117 15:06 Society

The 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which made abortion legal in the States and finally gave women the right to make their own decisions over their own bodies, is coming up and Bush takes the piss. To please the conservative part of society that can't keep their patronising fingers out of other people's lives, he declares January 19th 'Sanctity of Human Life Day'.

In the proclamation, Bush cited his administration's efforts to create "compassionate alternatives to abortion."

What? Like getting rid of poverty and social injustice? And by developing some effective contraception for men?

I should also point out that 'Sanctity of Human Life' is a bit strong coming from someone who is currently so keen on starting a war.

030117 14:25 Privacy

Something else you might want to opt out of if you're a Yahoo Groups user.

Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners. This aggregate information may include demographic and usage information.

Problem is, you can't opt out your account. You have to opt out each computer you use.

030117 12:20 War

Gulf War veteran plans to lead a group of Westerners to Iraq to be human shields:

Not one of the volunteers has said that they want to go to Iraq to support Saddam Hussein. The theme I'm getting is that this is a criminal war, that it's going to victimise an already victimised population. Many also regard the US as the greatest threat to world security.

030116 00:13 Browsers

What Mozilla users miss when they have to use IE:

I'm always middle-clicking on links. In Mozilla this opens the link in a new tab. In IE, this opens the Logitech Scroll Wheel. Or I start typing, attempting to use typeaheadfind, which of course does nothing in IE. Being a web developer, View Source is the other big one. I'm constantly hitting CTRL-U or highlighting some text and looking for "View Selection Source" in the IE context menu.

030115 22:57 Web standards

Uh uh. There's something bad going on in the land of web standards. Web developers are not happy with where the W3C is going with XHTML 2. Mark Pilgrim is furious:

I bought into every argument the W3C made that keeping up with their standards, validating with their tools, and using their semantic markup would somehow "future-proof" my site and provide some mystical "forward compatibility". How about some fucking payoff now? How about some fucking compatibility?

I'll second that. They tell us to use the acronym tag and then they take it away again.

Zeldman suggests they should rename XHTML 2 into AML (Advanced Markup Language) or anything else to...

...relieve developer anxieties and make clear that the language now called XHTML 2 is not intended as a replacement but as an alternative to the markup with which all of us are familiar.

Actually, seems like I didn't have any good news at all today.

030115 22:44 War

Well, what do you think? Which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003?

030115 22:11 Intellectual property

Disney wins. The public loses.

boingboing is wearing black.

030113 21:29 Games

With Sim City 4 and Sims Online on the horizon (and absolutely no time to get addicted to either) I've been woefully reminiscing about the few game addictions of my past. I was playing SimCity 2000 with my sister. I was in England, she was in Berlin. I started the game on the left, she on the right. Once in a while, taking turns with the game, we would send eachother the saved game file - via snail mail - on a floppy. Pidgeon-carrier protocol. It was a long time ago.

030113 12:50 Comics

Today's Boondocks has the solution for America's upcoming war.

030112 23:15 Geek humor

I was laughing so much I had tears in my eyes. This is from a pre-xmas NTK (yeah, i'm still catching up): Jawa Programmer Wanted.

030112 21:50 Science fiction

No humanoid aliens, please.

030112 19:04 Web design

People used to moan about the W3C website, sometimes about its ancient code but mostly about the look. The W3C recently switched to a standard compliant XHTML + CSS, with tableless CSS layout. Now people can only complain about the look. And, of course, they still do. If you care so much about it, you can now submit your own design for the W3C homepage to the Wthremix contest.

...the W3C's powerful technologies and guidelines are trapped in a sprawling site that is less attractive and less usable than it might be. We wondered if the W3C's website could be transformed into one that is better looking, better organized, better branded, and much easier to use and understand. Hence this contest.

030111 20:03 Intellectual property / Science fiction

Cory Doctorow's novel is out and it's published online under the Creative Commons licence. Wired has the details. (via boingboing. What else.)

An award-winning science fiction writer and digital rights activist has persuaded the publisher of his first novel to make the book available free online for anyone to read, print or even republish on paper.

Yes. The counterculture lives!

And there is a lesson for the music industry:

Science fiction and fantasy publisher Jim Baen, whose Baen Books has offered a free library of selected works since 1998, says free downloads have boosted book sales.

[de] Hier das ganze auf deutsch.

030111 19:54 Politics : Protests

Here is FAIR's take on the news mentioned below. In America allegedly it isn't.

FAIR has been unable to find a single mention of this development in any major U.S. newspapers or magazines, national television news shows or wire service stories.

030108 14:34 Politics : Protests

Police admit making up evidence against protesters during the Genoa G8 summit in 2001 where many people were beaten up and one killed.

A senior officer, Pietro Troiani, reportedly admitted under questioning that two petrol bombs allegedly found at the school were planted by police to justify the raid.

[...]

Demonstrators said riot police beat them with clubs, smashed windows and wrecked computers in the raid.

The BBC's Bill Hayton was among those who stood outside the Diaz school, hearing the screams coming from within, then watching bodies brought out on stretchers.

When the police left he went in and saw blood on the walls, floors and radiators of an upstairs room.

030108 00:27 Browsers / Web design

Today - on some mailing list - I was talking about how, if user agents just conformed to standards, there would only ever have to be one solution to each problem, we would not have to make adjustments for each and every single browser. And then I came across this: a review of the new Mac browser 'Safari' at dive into mark. It just proves my point. It doesn't even support the title attribute?!

030107 23:56 Intellectual property

Great news:

"Jon Johansen, the author of DeCSS, has been acquitted on all charges by the Norwegian Supreme Court. Johansen and his defense attorney Halvor Manshaus won on all counts, with the Oslo court ruling that Johansen did nothing wrong when he helped cracked the code on a DVD that was his own personal property.'"

030107 14:32 Books

If you are trying hard - like I am at the moment - to turn away from the computer screen more often, to return to the whole different world of books, to read more again, rather than consume information (admit it: on the net you don't read, you scan and skim), then this website might help: Allconsuming.net aggregates information (mainly from Amazon and Google) on books recently mentioned in weblogs.

Over the last six months, as I've been trying to return to print media, discussions about books on the web have led me to some amazing additions to my library. What better place to get book recommendations from than the affinity groups you hang out in on the web.

Can't wait for the new William Gibson.

030107 11:25 Internet / Politics

First Monday has published the introduction and the first two chapters of a new book, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule by Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, online:

...authoritarian governments, far from fearing the information age, have chosen to direct Internet development in ways that bolster the state.

[...]

The Internet, however, is only a set of connections between computers (or a set of protocols allowing computers to exchange information); it can have no impact apart from its use by human beings. The conventional wisdom also tends to be based on a series of "black-box" assertions that obscure the ways in which the use of technology might truly produce a political outcome. Proponents see the Internet as leading to the downfall of authoritarian regimes, but the mechanisms through which this might occur are rarely specified. Instead, popular assumptions often rest on anecdotal evidence, drawing primarily on isolated examples of Internet-facilitated political protest. Subsequent assertions about the technology's political effects are usually made without consideration of the full national context in which the Internet operates in any given country. Hence, they fail to weigh politically challenging uses of the Internet against others that might reinforce authoritarian rule.

generation text - those of the age who have thrown off the angst and rebellion of previous generations, and instead spend their time texting each other and comparing ringtones.

the real Middle Earth - the country formerly known as New Zealand.

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quote of the month

Every episode was like the characters had taken LSD.

Slashdot reader reminisces about Farscape

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