Technorati claim…
Reply
Category Archives: Weblog
Take back the web!
The standards body we thought would help us get the Internet better in shape is actually dying at the hands of elitist members.
The Internet started with open standards and code that formed the IP stack with the BSD Unix software. Later Tim Berners Lee and other people ensured we were able to work with HTML and all these specifications were open and people actively worked to get innovation and fixes in.
Now, since a number of years the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has become the domain where the ones who can pay the membership fees ($50.000 seems normal) get a voice and individuals without such backing are left in the cold.
For some examples, read:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qa-dev/2006Jul/0011
http://www.zeldman.com/2006/07/17/an-angry-fix/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2/
http://www.dzr-web.com/people/darren/blog/2006/07/12/is-the-w3c-failing-us/
Haiku on VMWare 5.5.1
From http://www.schmidp.com/index.php?option=com_files&path=/haiku/images/
download a VMWare file.
Within VMWare create a new machine based on ‘Other’, name the virtual disk haiku.vmdk. After creating the machine replace the generated haiku.vmdk with the contents from the downloaded tarball from the schmidp website. Next you might need to select VM > Upgrade Virtual Machine.
When you start the virtual machine you will see the Haiku boot screen. After a few seconds you will be greeted with a graphical user interface which has a Terminal 1 window open with the text: Welcome to the Haiku shell.
Welcome to Haiku.
Addition: for those of you with VMWare Player, use VMXWizard (http://rhysgoodwin.orcon.net.nz/vmxwizard/) to create a .vmx file to use with the downloaded .vmdk.
Thinking…
Following a discussion about MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicators) I redid the What kind of thinker are you quiz.
Instead of the old score of musical thinker I now wound up with:
Linguistic thinkers:
- Tend to think in words, and like to use language to express complex ideas.
- Are sensitive to the sounds and rhythms of words as well as their meanings.
Other Linguistic Thinkers include
William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Anne FrankCareers which suit Linguistic thinkers include
Journalist, Librarian, Salesperson, Proof-reader, Translator, Poet, Lyricistand
Existential thinkers:
- Like to spend time thinking about philosophical issues such as “What is the meaning of life?”
- Try to see beyond the ‘here and now’, and understand deeper meanings
- consider moral and ethical implications of problems as well as practical solutions
Other Existential Thinkers include
The Buddha, Gandhi, Plato, Socrates, Martin Luther KingCareers which suit Existential Thinkers include
Philosopher, Religious leader, Head of state, Artist, Writer
Almost here
I’ve been quite busy with the paperwork for buying this newly built apartment. If all goes well it should be finished by August 2006. So that will mean looking at certain household gear for the new place to live in.
Always a nice pastime.
Internet Explorer
I am getting so tired of the Internet Explorer shows it perfectly, but it fails with browser X or Y rhetoric.
Once and for all people: the Internet has standards. That Microsoft choses not to play nice with this is not the fault of the people developing sites that do play nice with standards.
Instead, bother Microsoft to fix their browser’s dumb behaviour.
Open format?
So, Microsoft intends to submit its Office 12 file formats to ECMA as a proposed standard.
I took a look at the files and they’re in binary format. I thought that for most office applications, especially word processing, we were leaving behind the world of binary encoded formats and moving to XML?
Given the fact how the world is massing behind the Open Document initiative this move of Microsoft’s seems to be nothing but PR and marketing. Especially given how the OASIS Open consortium and the Open Document community have now pushed this forward to become an ISO standard.
Finally…
Finally have a working PHP again after the PHP folks totally screwed over PHP 4.4.1′s apache2handler. Thankfully the FreeBSD port reverted this piece of code.
And I will migrate my PHP stuff to Django and such frameworks in the future. PHP’s braindead decisions by its developers has annoyed me a bit too much by now.
Threading issues, need needle
Repeat after me: if X (X.org or XFree86) has XTHREADS defined in Xlib it does NOT automatically mean you have to add -lpthread to your LIBS line.
I still wonder which smart person got that generalistic idea.
In this case it is glitz from the Cairo Graphics project to run dead on DragonFly. *sigh*
Hitting the high notes – harmony with the choir
Very interesting article by Eric Sink about comparing teams of programmers to choirs (extension of Joel Spolsky’s earlier essay).