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040131 16:19 Language

Learning other languages helps understand other cultures because values and ways of thinking are expressed in grammar and structure of a language. Read the interview with Alexandra Aikhenvald, Professor of Linguistics. (via die puny humans)

Why is it important to preserve these languages?

First, to learn about how people communicate and how the human mind works. What are the categories that are important enough for people to express them in their languages?

If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world.

040130 22:54 Web dev / Browsers

I love my browser. Just added another tool to it. No, two actually.

040130 22:45 Marburger Feuerzangenbowle

Just returned from Marburg's Kultevent, the public showing of Die Feuerzangenbowle on the marketplace, which has been taking place every end of January for the last 7 years. On the last schoolday of January the grades are handed out and in celebration of this event they show this film, which is an homage to school, but school might not realize it.

This has turned into a big social event. The old historical marketplace was packed - in the middle of winter, I might add. The town hall was completely covered by a huge screen on which this old black and white movie was playing. The sound was terrible but that didn't matter. We all know the film by heart anyway. It's a classic. The atmosphere was great, helped of course by the hot Feuerzangenbowle sold at every corner.

040130 20:38 Media

I Believe In The BBC.

040130 20:19 Web development

Gerry McGovern: Words come before looks in web design. (via lucdesk)

However, the primary activity on the Web is reading. It's very fast scan reading by impatient people who find web reading harder than print reading. Therefore, a foundation of web design success is to ensure that all your pages are as readable as possible. It's not that the look is not important. Just that, on the Web, words come before looks.

040129 22:50 Evil empire

Microsoft - they make me laugh. Now they advice users of IE that it's best to type in URLs by hand rather than click on potentially malicious hyperlinks.

040128 22:11

Grotesque story of the day: Whale explodes.

040128 21:47 Comics

The life of geeks.

And while we're on the subject of comics, there's a great storyline developing over at ubersoft about the boss getting knighted.

040128 20:46 SciFi

i know i'm a bit behind on this. i just watched enterprise 308 twilight. i've been watching the season 3 episodes, getting increasingly bored. which is why i haven't been in a hurry to watch them.

but this one surprised me. they actually managed to pull one of those timeshift stories off and even came up with a new idea for the solution. besides that, it had fast action and big explosion and it had phlox! every single episode where phlox plays a major part has been good. let me rephrase that: the only good enterprise episodes are the ones with phlox in them.

pretty sad, really. it's gonna get pulled. why didn't it work? was having to compete with farscape and firefly too much? is it just simply the end of the wooden star trek universe? i'm just sorry for scott bakula. maybe i should start a 'save quantum leap' campaign :)

040127 22:53 Web development : accessibility

One of the SXSW Web Awards Finalists, the excellent Accessibility Internet Rally, links to me in its resources section. I feel so honored :) The link is to the CSS layout resources page of my accessibility guide.

I should really get the redesign of this site up.

040126 20:26 Economy

Lawrence Lessig in Wired December 2003 on natural monopolies, particularly advanced fiber networks.

AFNs are natural monopolies. That doesn't mean that there can be only one, but rather that if there is one, then it is far cheaper to simply add customers to the one than to build another. The electricity grid in a local neighborhood is a good example of a natural monopoly. Sure, we could run four wires to every home, but do we really need four electricity companies serving every home?

040126 20:15 Web development / Intellectual property

What kind of stupid idea is this? (via LucDesk)

You can patent usability innovations to keep the competition from stealing them. Most Web projects are managed by marketing departments that have no experience with the patent system. Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new. Talk to people in your legal department. They might know of a patent attorney who doesn't bite.

040126 18:03 Web development : standards

Craig Saila interviews Dave Shea:

I did near everything I could to boost accessibility and promote validation, only to be thwarted by a really bad content management system and coders who continuously couldn't make heads or tails of the simple markup I'd give them. Tables and font tags would mysteriously sprout up everywhere after I'd handed off my code, because understanding it involved changing methods that, like it or not, continued to work.

I know exactly how he feels. If you eventually have to hand over control over sites you designed to others you have to make a decision from the start whether to use the tools they will be using and tone down accessibility and standards to the tool's capabilities, all the while doing the best you can under those limiting circumstances, or whether to write clean, accessible and standard-compliant code and hope that it won't get messed up. This is the reason I tend to not attach my name to sites I won't have control over in the future.

040126 15:05 Advertising

Advertising everywhere. Now even on dollar bills. (via boingboing)

"People talk about the Internet or word-of-mouth. But given the way it circulates, money is the most viral medium there is," says Woolmington. "We estimated that each bill will touch 25 to 40 hands."

040122 22:40 War

There's a Tomb Raider Platoon in Iraq. These war types don't give a damn about nomen est omen, do they?

Grimes, 26, the only female soldier attached to the unit, maintains a steely grit around the guys but cries on the phone to her father when she talks about what she has witnessed in Iraq.

Argh! There had to be some tears in the description of the only female.

040118 01:29 Web development : standards

I'm getting motivated again. I had a CSS layout design for this site (exact replica of the current table layout) lined up for about half a year now, but then 'life' happened, as it does in the most inconvenient moments, and I still haven't gotten around to converting the whole site. I have one problem that I haven't sorted out yet: Konqueror on Linux seems to use the print stylesheet to display the pages, which means no navigation. I'll get around to it soon...

[Update 040122 22:48] Got around to it. Konqueror doesn't like alternate stylesheets, displays them instead of the preferred stylesheet. Had to take them all out until i figure out a better solution. I like being able to offer alternate stylesheets without the use of javascript. A lot of modern browsers can offer them via the View menu now. But some, rather than ignoring them, mess up.

040118 01:20 Web development : standards

How could I have missed this excellent site this far? (via Einfach für alle)

Painstakingly updated every weekday, The Daily Standards is dedicated to recognizing sites that have been lovingly crafted with web standards and the future in mind. As more and more sites begin adopting CSS and standards for its many benefits (smaller page size, cleanliness of code, accessibility, ease of maintenance, etc.) I thought there needed to be some way to document the best sites, best practices, and best practitioners.

040117 22:15 Environment

Pretty gruesome photos of the scars we leave on this earth. I had to look up the word tailings. (via boingboing)

040116 23:20 Geeks

Another funny poll from the geeks over at slashdot: Your Biggest Failure as a Nerd?

040116 22:51 Browsers

Mozilla 1.6 is out.

The View Source window now has reload functionality.

040110 23:01 Geeks

Slashdotters bragging about their low User IDs.

I remember when registration was first implemented and I was still freaking out about giving out *my name* on the web. I waited for nearly(?) two years before I got mine. I could have been an early adopter...

040110 22:16 Space

Return of the Space Age? I knew this would happen. Bush just got the geek vote with his new space plans. Let's hope they are smarter than this.

...the only way we'll get from here to Firefly is up, not inward.

040109 00:38 Web development

2003 web design fashion trends in review and Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003

Unfortunately, some sites don't realize that ALT text is a user interface element, not a statement of political correctness. ALT text should help blind users (and others who can't see images) navigate and operate the site. The text should describe the image's meaning for the interaction and what users need to know about the image to use the site most effectively. There is no need to describe irrelevant visual details.

040109 00:00 Web development : accessibility

acronym vs. abbr. Dave Shea on the eternal debate.

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