February 2009
51 posts
WatchThe Big Pink - Velvet
via David Emery, who describes it as the most exciting new song I’ve heard in so very long. He linked this a few days back and I finally caught up. Outstanding.
You can watch it big and on repeat (recommended) at their website: The Big Pink.
“You can paint it any color you want, but the broadest concept fueling the web is...”
– John Foliot commenting on ‘The Cost of Accessibility’ at Drew’s blog. I think he absolutely nails it: Content is king, no matter what context you present it in.
My contribution to the web applications frameworks discussion is not especially refined at this point, tends to be ranty and as...
Song of the Day: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Dull Life →
via. The Hype Machine
Tr3n
Ben: Give Seth a cuddle
Kevin Ryan: He is in SVN…
Ben: He's _in_ SVN? Like, trapped there? Like in Tron?
Kevin Ryan: … And trying to help me figure out what is up with my sever access, apparently my password keeps randomly changing
Ben: Hmm, Tron 2 is already in production, but Tron 3 as ‘An accident in version control’ would be AMAZING
Ben: The final showdown would have Seth and Jeff Bridges team up with previous revisions of themselves to defeat whoever it is that's changing your password…
“We are all free to have fanciful ideas. Professor Greenfield’s stated aim,...”
– Ben Goldacre in Bad Science: “Facebook causes cancer”
The whole article is a good read and powerful anti-bullshit device but this paragraph is outstanding.
“Cappuccino is not designed for building web sites, or making existing sites more...”
– Everything that’s wrong about Cappuccino, quoted from their own about page.
I actually get angry about this. When I hear a friend talking about learning Cappucino I react as if they’ve been tricked out of their money by a con-artist on a street corner. I think they’ve been conned...
“The World Wide Web is a beautiful piece of social software.”
– Jeremy Keith
Small world, loosely joined.
“<div x-mojo-element="ToggleButton" id="my-toggle"></div>”
– A code example for using Palm’s Mojo framework in their otherwise awesome-looking new WebOS (from: Palm webOS from O’Reilly Media (page. 7)).
I ranted a bit about this on Twitter just now (1, 2, 3), because whilst the HTML5, CSS and JavaScript base of the WebOS platform is awesome, the...
“The Conservatives were happy to misinform the world in order to back up their...”
– David Mitchell: Twitter ye not - I adore Wikipedia in the Observer, talking Twitter, Wikipedia, and the above quote referring to the UK Conservatives party editing Wikipedia after their leader David Cameron made an inaccurate quip in the House of Commons.
Layout 2005
All this talk of CSS layout modules.
I’m currently digging through archive directories on my hard disc as I migrate between machines. So much stuff I’d forgotten about. Some of it deeply personally and sort-of upsetting to discover I hadn’t deleted, other things are like this.; my lead-by-code-sample proposition for something that I can only assume was called ‘Cascading Style...
“For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula...”
– US Stimlus Bill implementation instructions
Demonstration of the new, tech-savvy government summarises the Atom vs. RSS relationship in a single perfect sentence fragment.
(via. Aaron Swartz via. John Gruber)
“You can sense his frustration amid a scandal that was essentially cooked up by...”
– Sarah Lacy, writing for TechCrunch (Facebook: You Own All Your Data. Period. (But See You at the Next Privacy Uproar.) ).
Yes, it must have be very frustrating for Facebook to have a blog cook something up like that. Without calling, even! Nothing at all like cooking up a scandal about Last.FM,...
“I’d like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We’ve never...”
– Russ in Last.fm giving data to the RIAA? forum thread. In response to TechCrunch posting shit.
Nice to see that ‘amateur hour’ is still in full swing at TechCrunch. Valleywag is dead, here’s hoping TechCrunch is next on Karma’s hit list.
“And please, let’s put the whole “display: table-cell will grant those abilities...”
– Eric Meyer
Eric quite reasonably points out that CSS needs a proper, robust layout mechanism, but off the back of the ‘just use tables’ crap last week, I disagree with this paragraph.
So, CSS has ‘table layout’ built in. display: table-cell;, and so forth. It was designed for and exists to...
Alarmist by Pacific UV →
Song on the Day. Recommended played in the dark, or ideally whilst walking through deserted streets in San Francisco at around 2am. Tingly.
“The key ingredient I see in successful apps, Mac or web — and, really, in...”
– Daring Fireball: Copying the Wrong Thing
5 tags
4 tags
WatchNew single from Doves, ‘Kingdom of Rust’. It’s been a long time. (via Pitchfork TV)
“To pre-empt this nonsense the practical course of action is to add the IE8...”
– Mike Davies
Oh. Joy. IE8 breaks the internet after all.
So, if a site gets blacklisted into IE7 mode now, how do they get removed from the blacklist when they do a redesign? How does IE know?
“There is coffee all over the world. Increasingly, in a world in which computing...”
– RFC 2324
WatchFireball - The John Gruber Story (on Vimeo)
In terms of ‘things I desperately want to be real’, this wins Wednesday. See the Fireball site for details and supplemental in-jokes. Hints that something is going down during South by Southwest.
“Nobody talks about people down the pub laughing about Bale’s...”
– Bobbie Johnson
Also from Why I’m finished with ‘social media’, this absolute gem.
No-one talks about ‘social drinking sensations’? Well, they should.
“Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end.”
– Bobbie Johnson is finished with ‘social media’ .
Pondering URLs
I’m working on adding a wiki system to my personal site for non-chronological content. I hinted at doing this a while ago in Practical Publishing. It’s taken until now to actually get it together.
I’ve ended up going with MediaWiki since it’s what I know, shares the same PHP language as my blog (running on Wordpress) and does everything I want. I also feel pretty good...
“phpQuery is a server-side, chainable, CSS3 selector driven Document Object Model...”
– Was looking for ways to process CSS selectors on the server side and found PHPQuery on Google Code. With a view to quick and dirty microformats processing, this sounds like an astonishingly useful tool.
WatchEric Bauman was a notorious thief of content from around the net, slapping a watermark on mirrored content, doing nothing to credit authors, and not sharing revenue as he got rich off the ads displayed alongside. He didn’t seek permission, and would ignore the requests of authors to remove their content.
He sold his site for millions, but now the karma police have caught up; he and his...