July 2009
18 posts
“A city where pizza is only consumed as a booze sponge.”
– Caroline McCarthy
Question to all: What is it with San Francisco’s reputation concerning pizza?
Is it because I only ever eat from Little Star and Delfina that I’m ignorant to some twisted, dark underbelly of San Francisco, where terrible cheese-lathered bread-product unworthy of the...
“Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets...”
– Tangentially, John Gruber posted a nice explanation of how his blog, Daring Fireball is not free to read, as it is ad supported. In this paragraph, he clearly summarises the relationship between all interested parties in the publishing of his content.
This is hugely important, because the same...
June 2009
55 posts
“What’s more troubling however, is the whole approach to performance optimisation...”
– Google have published PHP performance guidelines, in addition to their HTML/CSS/JavaScript page speed guidelines. Similarly though, they are full of errors, contradictions and unsubstantiated claims, resulting in the PHP development team itself responding to them.
PHP optimisation is certainly not...
“Apple and other big phone makers have struck a deal with the European Commission...”
– I find it especially interesting that a mere two years after shipping, “Apple” is the big-name manufacturer and everyone else is just “others”.
The news itself is excellent, too: mobile phones standardising on micro-USB for charging means we can kiss proprietary chargers farewell next year.
CNET...
“Hotelling’s law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is...”
– Hotelling’s law, in follow-up to the previous article. via David Thompson.
“The upgrade option was not available, Microsoft said, because it was trying to...”
– BBC NEWS Windows 7 pricing gets unveiled
The Windows 7/Internet Explorer unbundling malarky is an utterly confusing tangle.
What seems to be happening here is that Microsoft, having been ordered not to ship IE with Windows in Europe, are denying customers a smooth upgrade path (which would,...
Michael Bay's Rejected "The Dark Knight" Script -... →
I saw Transformers 2 yesterday, so now I’m trawling the internet looking for ways to avenge my poor, mangled brain from Michael Bay’s assault.
This is from last year. The plot for “Michael Bay’s ‘The Dark Knight’” is both more substantial and makes much more sense than Transformers 2. It also accurate represents his depiction of women in the new film.
“We’re pleased to announce a formal partnership with Yahoo! to support the...”
– I tend not to post much employer related stuff here, but reading that Yahoo! have popped some funds into the excellent NVDA accessibility tool is really warming news. Nice to see us assist with Good Things™
Providing feedback via synthetic speech and Braille, NVDA allows blind and vision...
“Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found...”
– Microsoft are full of shit
So, look. This whole Fix Outlook campaign. It’s not something I feel super-strongly about. I disable HTML email in my client, I only send plain-text email… this isn’t really my fight.
But, Microsoft’s response to the campaign is just crazy-nuts...
“Outlook is to be shunned (ideally scrapped), not “improved.” Its default...”
– Joe Clark
Joe chips in on this whole the Fix Outlook ‘campaign’. He’s not keen.
“I can almost hear the Oxfam advert: “This is Andrea. Every week, she has...”
– David Mitchell summarises a tabloid campaign against wheelie bins as councils start to enforce recycling, at a time that the people of Iran are dying for their democracy. Good work, England. Could we at least rebel against how ridiculous our newspaper’s desperate cycles of moral outrage makes...
“We are asking all citizens (that’s you!) government agencies, local...”
– Making a deliberate effort to support local independent businesses to stimulate the economy. You’ll get better produce, too.
Lowcountry Local First - Lowcountry Local First, via. TreeHugger.
“What we’ve talked about is getting to a concept that we call livable...”
– Ray LaHood, US Secretary of Transportation.
One thing that has struck me very starkly about life in the US is just how completely ingrained the car-dependency is. Generations of car ownership has completely affected the way massive suburban conurbations are built, such that you can’t just...
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iTunes Stats Meme
Fun stats time!
I shall play your meme game, because this is a really interesting game of stats. It is certainly flawed, since ratings and playcounts don’t penetrate my entire iTunes library right now (I did a library reset a few years ago), but, all the same:
Tumblr users will need to view this on the full page, because for some reason, the Tumblr dashboard renders definition lists...
.me
Some time ago I picked up some new personal domains, benward.me and bnwrd.me. I’d somewhat dismissed the .me TLD, but as time goes on and the opportunity to claim benward.com seems distant, I’ve decided to switch over.
I spend a certain amount of time thinking about what makes a good URL, and the old ben-ward.co.uk set-up has a number of problems.
Country affiliation, even though...
♥ →
Tumblr now allows you to make your ‘Liked’ items public. First go to your settings to enable sharing your liked items, and then http://tumblr.com/liked/by/yourusername.
Some dissection of Jon Dowdell's bullshit...
A translation of Jon Dowdell’s “Adobe on HTML 5” piece. With apologies to John Gruber.
The current WhatWG proposals called “HTML 5” have been stirring up a lot of polarizing speech lately… articles with Flash-killer headlines lead to street-level fracases.
I’m here to dismiss this scary new “HTML 5” thing by framing it as a proposal from an unofficial group of...
“All these grown werewolf men falling in love with 4 year olds was...”
– Twilight is a book I don’t even need to think about reading “just so I know what’s going on” because internet ridicule is ensuring I understand just plenty about it.
Unlike the Harry Potter novels, which I probably should still read at some point.
This summary is provided by Ellen of...
“Just like on its desktop counterpart, the Mail app in the iPhone 3.0 update can...”
– Yes! Proper reply quoting in iPhone Mail (one of my favourite subtle features of Mail.app on OSX).
Which is to say, it’s now morally acceptable to slap top-posting email users in the face again. (Download the ‘Wet Fish’ application for this.)
iPhone 3.0 Update: 10 Hidden Features - PC...
“Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in...”
– Bullshit: Tabulated
Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts
is a marketing exercise from Microsoft that’s so very, very full of shit it cannot pass unridiculed.
Lies, mistruths and opinion stated as fact throughout, the most hilarious case is the above, where it writhes around IEs...
“It’s been a while since it was recreated, and despite assertions that the...”
– Wikipedia: Articles for deletion · Web 3.0 (2nd nomination).
“Web 3.0”. Just say no to bullshit.
“A group of users want to mark up their iguana collections so that they can write...”
– I very enjoy the way Ian Hickson writes for HTML 5 (this is just from an email, not the spec itself, mind you). This particular excerpt concerns the new structured data mechanisms in HTML5.
[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for
“A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally...”
– At $80,000 a pop, those had better be the best pieces of music ever recorded…
Woman fined $1.9 million for illegal downloads – The CNN Wire - CNN.com Blogs (via Jina Bolton, via Josh Williams)
POUR
Perceivable
Operable
Understandable
Robust
The basis of publishing accessible web content, as taught to me by Mike Davies some while ago.
WatchVlad The Impaler
Lead video for the new Kasabian album ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’. Really impressed; it’s got some great tunes on it.
“it may well be that we will tolerate these worse outcomes, because we decide it...”
– This is my column. This is my column on drugs. Any questions? - Bad Science
“One election official was quoted as predicting up to 80% of the country’s...”
– Iran: Better at democracy than us, apparently.
Iranians flood to polls for pivotal election - The Guardian.
“Promote your message via YouTube if you want to. But it is no substitute for...”
– Hazel Blears, Labour MP
Blears not only made a fool of herself and destabilised her party by resigning days before the election, but also demonstrates here that she’s completely out of touch with modern communications.
I’m not saying that getting out on the streets isn’t still...
WatchSongs of the Day: Fanfarlo - Reservoir
Fanfarlo have put their entire first album ‘Reservoir’ up for download for $1, plus some bonus tracks. Have a listen in this handy embedded player.
The album is fabulous, and I totally recommend it to all.
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