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050131 21:54 Comix

...incompatible with the Internet.

050131 19:01 SciFi

Asteroid Named After Douglas Adams

...the asteroid carried the provisional designation 2001 DA42, thus commemorating the year of his untimely death, containing his initials, and incorporating the famous answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

050131 02:28 Web development

This evolt article explains why it is important to separate content and structure from its visual presentation, namely for the sake of computers that have to process and work with the information. It adds an interesting thought to the pro-standards arguments. A brief history of bad web design leads to the author's warning that...

All sorts of bad things happen when you do this, most of them related to the usefulness limits of non-intended use of technology:

• lessened impact on search engines, as related information may be technically unavailable for the search spiders despite being visible to most of your visitors
• access difficulty for people with another browser than the one(s) you used as your reference target, such as people with a handicap
• bandwidth waste, as the ratio between content and markup in your HTML code plunges to abysmal levels
• terrible difficulties in maintaining the content, changing the layout, and dealing with new access technologies (mobile phones, PDAs, RSS feed readers).

[...] So the case behind standards-compliant, structurally correct HTML markup is the following: because it makes use of the features of HTML as they were designed, it is efficient in what it does (describing the nature of various pieces of content that compose a document), and it is future-proof (if need be, good but deprecated markup can be easily converted to a newer version).

[...] there is simply no reasonable business case to be made for non-standards-compliant web building, as it is very costly in the long term, while not being necessarily expensive in the short term.

050131 02:26 Browsers

Mezzoblue's 2004 site stats show an enormous drop in IE and an impressive rise in Mozilla usage. Smirk :)

050131 02:12 Entertainment

The 25th Annual Golden Raspberry (RAZZIE) Award Nominations for worst motion pictures:

...the Worst Actor field also features [...] President George W. Bush as himself in FAHRENHEIT 9/11, for which performance he is also nominating as Worst Screen Couple paired with either Condoleeza Rice and/or His Pet Goat.

In the meantime, Al Otro Lado Del Rio by Jorge Drexler, the beautiful end credits song from The Motorcycle Diaries receives an Oscar nomination.

050128 12:20 Currently reading

Dennis Danvers, The Fourth World:

Globalismo is what they call it when the grand haciendas are too far away to burn, when the land beneath your feet is bought and sold by people you never see, who never see you, who never even see the land. Globalismo is what they call it when the world belongs to those who never till the soil, who never soil themselves with life.

010527 15:53 Web development

Hilarious retro design of the CSS Zen Garden template by Bruce Lawson: Geocities 1996. It's got everything from painful colors to dancing gifs (For maximum authenticity, I've used only public domain gifs from surviving "webmaster resource" sites of that era.). It's even got a "under construction" sign and a visitor counter. On his website Bruce laments:

The CSS Zen Garden has been highly useful to me in demonstrating the value of standards when attempting to convince my reluctant colleagues to abandon tables. Thanks Mr. Shea!

However, it's also been a major pain in the arse, as Nongyaw, friends and family now expect every site I make for them to look as good as the zen garden submissions. As an design-challenged individual, I've found myself almost nostalgic for the multi-coloured, multi-typefaced gif-ridden designs I used to see in 1996

[Update 050313] Page has moved.

050127 15:16 Politics

Little Gamers comments on Bush's inauguration speech. The headline in a german newspaper had me rolling on the floor: "Bush propagates worldwide freedom - [...] Protests even in Europe".

050117 23:42 Games

When games infiltrate Real Life. Yeah, how many times have i wished for an undo-button in Real Life. Cory Doctorow introduced the concept of saving your life at certain stages with the possibility of returning to a stage before things started going badly.

050117 21:15 Entertainment

Continuing an age-old tradition the first Star Wars fan has started his camp-out in front of a movie theatre awaiting the opening of Episode III - Revenge of the Sith.

050117 20:15 Games / Language

Learning a Foreign Language with The Sims. ...and they mean a real language.

050117 19:23 War / Culture

Apalling disrespect, ignorance, greed are words that come to mind: American troups are destroying Babylon (Guardian).

The egyptian Al-Ahram goes into the motives for the looting of museums and archaeological sites:

The economic motive for the looting is still present, she says, with items looted from Iraq fetching high prices once smuggled abroad and being highly sought after by American, European and Japanese collectors.

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