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katlalog

030227 23:04 Intellectual property

In the on-going patent madness saga, this probably triggered today's ufie strip.

030226 21:38 Politics

[de] Interessanter Gedanke: Das Manko der "Demokratie": Wählen geht, abwählen nicht.

Während einer Wahlperiode haben die Menschen dieser Gesellschaften selten die Möglichkeit, das Personal wieder auszutauschen. [...]

Bezüglich der Außenpolitik ist das in Deutschland aktuell sowieso nicht nötig, denn die Meinung des Volkes stimmt mit dem Kurs der Regierung überein.

030226 20:48 Censorship

This is stupid. Zeldman reports that he had to change the name of his stylesheet because it was blocked by some corporate firewalls for its accidental similarity to a naughty word.

030223 19:23 Censorship

IP address based censorship can cause problems for totally harmless sites:

More than 87% of active domain names are found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains, and more than two third of active domain names share their addresses with fifty or more additional domains. While this IP sharing is typically transparent to ordinary users, it causes complications for those who seek to filter the Internet, restrict users' ability to access certain controversial content on the basis of the IP address used to host that content. With so many sites sharing IP addresses, IP-based filtering efforts are bound to produce "overblocking" -- accidental and often unanticipated denial of access to web sites that abide by the stated filtering rules.

030223 17:30 Society

Homelessness rising in the Big Apple:

The city is suffering homelessness akin to the Great Depression era, with children and families forming the fastest-growing segment of the population...

030223 17:18 Web development : Standards

The Web Standards Project calls the W3C brave for shutting out IE with their perfectly standard-compliant code. Oh, the irony.

...it's very brave for the W3C to use a CSS property that fails in Win/IE - surely the browser that most of its visitors will use when visiting that page.

030222 02:05 Politics

Insane World Leaders - the Card Game:

Nationalist Fervor: Action card

Players who play Nationalist Fervor may immediately unstrike any one Popular Support card on their table. Use of this card forces Hand-Wringing Foreign Policy to be discarded, if it is in play.

030220 10:39 Comix

Such desperate days. Microsoft is sponsoring UserFriendly.

030218 19:45 Web development: Accessibility

I don't think I've mentioned that Joe Clark is serializing his excellent book 'Building Accessible Websites' online. If you couldn't get your boss to buy you the book, then make this a regular stopover.

030217 23:38 Anthropology

Nature or nurture. Was the development of human creativity and communication a gradual cultural one or was it cause by a biological change, a suddenly mutated gene?

An explosion of art, culture and individual expression that took place in Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago may have been triggered by biological changes in the human brain...

...recent breakthroughs in genetics, in particular the discovery of the first gene linked conclusively to language, suggest strongly that Homo sapiens’s cultural revolution began with one or more genetic mutations that transformed the ability to communicate.

030216 23:05 War

So, the occupation is over:

America is to punish Germany for leading international opposition to a war against Iraq. The US will withdraw all its troops and bases from there and end military and industrial co-operation between the two countries - moves that could cost the Germans billions of euros.

I'm proud of humankind at the moments. The world-wide turnout for peace at yesterday's rallies and demonstrations was showing clearly that the people don't agree with their governments at the moments. Except in Germany :)

030215 14:52 Browsers

Opera takes revenge on Microsoft for delivering a broken stylesheet to its browser by sending in the Swedish Chef from the Muppets Show.

030212 21:57 Software

For PowerPoint haters: Is PowerPoint the devil? There's a sinister plan. (via lucdesk)

The point of PowerPoint - making presentations simple to prepare [...] - is what makes it dangerous to our imaginations, Phelan warns. "In their (Microsoft's) attempts to make PowerPoint easier to use, they have all these templates. They totally limit your ability to express yourself. Everybody's using the same color palette. It's one more way to choke the life out of creativity."

030211 23:46 Spam

Time to post something amusing. NTK from last Friday:

It was last November when MPs become dimly aware that spam might be a problem. Dr. Brian Iddon, the Member for Bolton South East told Robin Cook that "many hon. Members have been receiving unsolicited and highly offensive pornography via the parliamentary network. The worst comes via a method called HTML". Our hopes for an emergency order banning all HTML mail in the British Isles came to nothing, though, and Parliament instead set upon installing a filter.

030211 23:36 War

Amazing! This is just like in Our Man in Havana, where Alec Guinness hands in technical drawings for vacuum cleaners to his Secret Service employers: A report about Iraq, passed off as a British Intelligence report, has been plagiarized from a grad students research paper about 1991 Iraq.

030211 15:37 Society : Women

Bush's war on women continues and this time women aren't organised enough to stop him.

030211 15:22 War-time entertainment

Hollywood gets more boring by the day. I'm not surprised that a pompous musical gets 13 Oscar nominations - especially now.

Just think back 50 years to a time when musicals were similarly popular, a time when there was war, when people needed light entertainment that took them away from nasty reality, give them 90 minutes where they could look at glamour and listen to uplifting straight-beat (sometimes marching) music. Stupid cheerful pure entertainment and hardly any story or godforbid a moral. Musicals are war-time entertainment.

030211 10:48 War

Don't mention Afghanistan! While Bush is preparing for the next war, he hasn't even achieved what he wanted to with the last one.

"Soldiers still confront an invisible enemy," is the title of Marc Kaufman's first-class investigation, a headline almost identical to one which appeared over a Fisk story a year or so after Russia's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-80. The soldiers in my dispatch, of course, were Russian. Indeed, just as I recall the Soviet officer who told us all at Bagram air base that the "mujahedin terrorism remnants" were all that was left of the West's conspiracy against peace-loving (and Communist) Afghans, so I observed the American spokesmen – yes, at the very same Bagram air base – who today cheerfully assert that al-Qa'ida "remnants" are all that are left of Bin Laden's legions.

030211 01:47 War

The Iraq has agreed to UN surveillance flights. Look George, is it still not obvious that they don't want a war? But of course, the US doesn't care.

But the US defence secretary said the crisis would not delay possible military action against Iraq.

How can "would not delay" and "possible" be in the same sentence together? This war doesn't sound "possible" to me anymore. No, it sounds like this war is going to happen.

[Update 030211] It seems that all they want for now is that the US and UK stop bombing them:

...since the US and UK imposed a no-fly zone (not a UN-enforced one), Iraq has been bombed anything from almost daily to every three days. That does not seemed to have stopped, as nearly two years on from the above, John Pilger reports (April 2002) that the "[British Royal Air Force] RAF and American aircraft have been bombing Iraq, week after week, for more than two years..."

Useful site for people who are in denial: U.S. Bombing Watch: When was the last time the U.S. Bombed Iraq?

030208 21:14 War / Libraries

Librarians against the war:

Instead of preparing for war, let us arm the human spirit with "Weapons of Mass Instruction."

030208 18:57 Internet at work

Two reports mentioned on Slashdot yesterday: One explains how it can actually be less beneficial for companies if they monitor their employees' internet usage and the other states that even though people tend to spend some time with private surfing at work they spend even more hours doing work at home.

I work entirely from home at the moment but when I was still in a situation where I had a faster connection at work than at home I did quite a lot of my private business from work. Personally I have never been monitored (I think) or restricted at work. I appreciate the trust and I've never abused it. In fact, I've always done more work than I'm getting paid for. Lack of trust would have definately made me less loyal to my employers and less productive.

030207 16:27 Browsers / Evil empire

MSN is giving Opera users trouble, again, this time it's really sneaky, though, making it look like Opera is broken. All done by delivering a bad stylesheet.

030207 14:13 Politics / Comix

Convincing evidence.

030206 12:54 War / Civil liberties

Anti-war group sues NYC for refusing to allow protest march.

030205 18:45 Culture / Business

Business is beginning to acknowledge that the consumer behavior of cannabis users will change the whole market. At the moment they prefer to stay at home and boost the profit of home entertainment companies and snack manufacturers.

'They don't like shiny, noisy environments with lots of choices such as McDonald's. On the whole, they prefer somewhere with low-key lighting and a straightforward menu. [...] And they don't like venues solely devoted to heavy drinking.

'I hate Saturday, it's full of idiots, it's expensive. That's when I love to stay at home and smoke [...]'

030204 11:49 MS

[via /.] Microsoft's House of the Future has no bathroom. Or as my boyfriend puts it: eating, drinking and shitting have been deprecated.

030201 18:34 Web design

Evolt is redesigning the Microsoft site (with valid standard-compliant code) to make it work in all browsers.

030201 01:10 Geek burn-out

Mark is headed for burnout. It's sad but the honeymoon is over. But what fun it was! Discovering computers. Discovering the net. Discovering that you can do it all, that you can control your life. Sharing, being part of and designing the information infrastructure. Working from home. But in reality, while we were doing this, we steadily lost control of our lives. The problem is, it never stopped. Leisure became work and suddenly there was no more leisure. And slowly the fun went out of it. And now we'd rather do something else. I'm looking for an outdoors job.

Now there is no after work, there is no before work, there is no work day, no office, no clock. There is only one long continuous 24-hour day that is always work, always office, and I never punch in and I never punch out.

It's 1 am on a Friday night and I'm up and at home because it's the end of the month, stats day, and I'm writing the website report for the steering group of the project I work for. I love what I do but it's become too much.

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