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katlalog
051228 19:08 Web development
Task for 2006: switching all my sites to XHTML Strict. Not sure why i'm still using Transitional. Sure, this was the reason in the beginning...
A Transitional DOCTYPE may be used when you have a lot of legacy markup that cannot easily be converted to comply with a Strict DOCTYPE.
...but that was donkeys' years ago. On the newer sites i could probably just switch the doctype and be ok. The really old sites might still have the odd align="right" in an image tag somewhere.
051228 18:05 Culture, technology
Economist article about the Japanese and their robots explains why they find robots less intimidating then humans, giving some interesting insights into japanese culture.
Hiroshi Ishiguro, a robotocist at Osaka University, cites the example of asking directions. In Japan, says Mr Ishiguro, people are even more reluctant than in other places to approach a stranger. Building robotic traffic police and guides will make it easier for people to overcome their diffidence.
Karl MacDorman, another researcher at Osaka, sees similar social forces at work. Interacting with other people can be difficult for the Japanese, he says, “because they always have to think about what the other person is feeling, and how what they say will affect the other person.” But it is impossible to embarrass a robot, or be embarrassed, by saying the wrong thing.
051225 19:32 Politics
No more secrets. Any of us. I think that's good.
051222 00:05 The world outside (and in*)
house mates:
051222 00:01 Culture
Amusing article on productive procrastination:
...procrastination can be highly productive, provided one has plenty of things to do while working toward the most dreaded task.
This is great. I don't have to feel so bad anymore. He's absolutely right: the things you can achieve while not doing what you're supposed to be doing! I usually use the excuse that i don't like prioritizing. Everything is important!
...life is what we do when we are avoiding something else.
051208 23:10 Fun
Photoshopping contest of Archaeological Anomalies. This one is my favorite, mainly because of how it's done.
051205 19:42 Business
The power of companies is outrageous. This is blackmail.
Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.
051203 14:19 Browsers
All hail Mozilla. PC World chooses Firefox to top the list of The 100 Best Products of 2005.
051202 19:24 SciFi
Uncle Orson wrote the Serenity review i would have written:
Some of you have no idea what all the hooplah is about.
Some of you didn't even know there was any hooplah.
And it's true that there hasn't been some massive hype campaign. Instead, the producers and the studio did something different.
They held special screenings of Serenity starting much earlier in the year, letting diehard fans of Firefly see the feature film and then talk about it.
And talk they have. I've been hearing buzz about how great the movie is for months.
But here's how much the fans love this movie and want it to succeed. Some massively important things happen in this movie, things that are emotionally devastating, things that it would be almost unbearable to know about without telling.
Yet as far as I know, nobody has told. I walked into this movie reasonably aware of the advance word-of-mouth (though not obsessively so) and only as the film actually began this afternoon, the day of its premier, did it occur to me that I had not heard a whisper of a breath of the actual plot of the movie. All I heard was, "It's great, you'll love it."
Well, guess what.
It's great.
He explains why:
Because for me, a great film -- sci-fi or otherwise -- comes down to relationships and moral decisions. How people are with each other, how they build communities, what they sacrifice for the sake of others, what they mean when they think of a decision as right vs. wrong. [...]
The key to this kind of movie is that you create a community that the audience wishes they belonged to, with a leader that even audience members who don't follow anybody would willingly follow. [...]
Well, not only is Serenity about something, it's also extremely well written. Joss Whedon has invented a kind of weird future slang that is still perfectly intelligible but is different, with snatches of foreign languages and obsolete English words that make it clear that it's not ordinary English they're speaking.
051202 19:15 Environment
Thus in 2002, humanity's Ecological Footprint exceeded global biocapacity by 0.4 global hectares per person, or 23 percent. This finding indicates that the human economy is in ecological overshoot: the planet's ecological stocks are being depleted faster than nature can regenerate them. This means that we are eroding the future supply of ecological resources and operating at the risk of environmental collapse.
051201 19:47 Business
Bad boys being taught a lesson: No Xmas for Sony
quote of the month
For the last 10 years, everything I've done that was worth doing has been done when I should have been doing something else.
Thomas H. Benton on Productive Procrastination