May 2004
May 10, 2004
False Economy. “The current state of IT in corporations large and small is pretty bad and getting worse.”
Bright Creative (via) Dave Shea’s consulting business gets a great looking redesign.
May 11, 2004
Google Blog (via) Currently lacking a human voice (no name on some posts). Let’s hope they fix that.
Google approved PageRank stripping
Blogger are now using the redirect-without-PageRank technique to protect their hosted blogs against comment spam (also used by Moveable Type). At the risk of sounding incredibly pleased with myself (which I am), that was my idea! Sweet.
[... 213 words]W3C Internationalisation Guidelines
Via Phil Ringnalda, the W3C have published three useful articles on HTML internationalisation techniques. In classic W3C style, the boilerplate and verbiage at the start of the documents threatens to overwhelm the actual content. Here’s a tip: jump straight to chapter 2, which is normally where the interesting stuff starts. Here are the ammended links:
May 12, 2004
Simple mini-languages with PHP
I linked to PDML the other day in my blogmarks, but beyond a cursory glance I hadn’t really dug in to what makes it tick. Dumky over at Curiosity is bliss points out that it makes use of an ingenious output buffering trick. To create a PDML document, you add a single line to the top of a page that includes and executes the PDML library (written in PHP). The rest of the document is written in the custom PDML markup language. The script uses output buffering to capture the rest of the page, then executes a callback function that actually processes the page content (see ob_start() for details).
[... 195 words]May 13, 2004
Supplemental Results
Does anyone know what Google means when it says that something is a “Supplemental Result”?
W3C proposes an Atom working group. Can you smell the flames yet?
Google Image Ads. Hopefully these are only for AdSense and won’t show up in Google’s search results.
Google Groups (Beta) (via) Now has Yahoo! Groups style “create a group” functionality, mailing lists, Atom feeds and more.
Why the W3C wants Atom. Matt May explains all.
May 14, 2004
LugRadio Episode 7 (via) I wish they had permalinks for each episode.
Freedom 0. Mark Pilgrim switches to WordPress.
May 15, 2004
A French blogger arrested by the Police because of his blogging. They had to let him go.
May 16, 2004
Bitkeeper after the storm (via) How the commercial BitKeeper has helped increase Linux Kernel productivity.
Implementing Bayesian Inference Using PHP. PHP for statistical anlysis.
May 17, 2004
Testing Page Load Speed. Dave Hyatt on browser benchmarks and how browsers handle page layouts.
Kisstory in action (via) Indiana has a law on the books that makes it illegal for a man with a moustache to “habitually kiss human beings.”
May 18, 2004
Eurovision Contestants. RealPlayer videos of every song!
Joho the Blog: “We are legal”. Dave Weinberger reports from Massachusetts.
RTFM: A Guide to Online Research. An oldie but goldie from Steve Champeon. Watch out for the intrusive ads though (and bemoan the demise of WebMonkey).
indieWIRE BLOGS: Morgan Spurlock. The director of Super Size Me has a blog, updated daily.
The Fishbowl: Type Inference and Java. Why Java’s implementation of static typing is stupid.
Why Windows is a Security Nightmare. The pain of Windows Update over a 56K modem.
Childless couple told to try sex. But of course, abstinence only sex education is the way to go.
Mac OS X URI Handler Arbitrary Code Execution (via) Very nasty: affects all web browsers, allows compromise by malicious web sites.
Defending against the OS X help: vulnerability
There’s a nasty OS X vulnerability under discussion at the moment which lets a web page execute code on your machine by taking advantage of a flaw in the “help:” protocol. There’s a non-malicious demonstration of the exploit on this page, and Jay Allen is hosting a discussion on the exploit and ways to avoid it.
[... 253 words]Random access to Web audio. Standard MP3s can be randomly accessed using HTTP’s range header—without any extra server software.
Atom discussion minutes
The minutes from the Atom/W3C discussion in New York have been posted online. Unfortunately the default formatting is pretty difficult to follow. I found it a lot easier to figure out who was saying what after applying the following CSS (using the test styles bookmarklet):
[... 81 words]May 19, 2004
Top 10 Elements of Good Software Design. Always a worthy topic.