I would not say it was really either a ‘minor’ thing — those happen pretty much every week — but it’s not really mind-blowing either. I spent a couple of evenings changing my theme. While the current layout used as a starting point my old theme, DarnSlick, I feel the number of tweaks and changes, complete with icon redesign where applicable, warrants it that I call it my own. PUREtext is it’s name, aimed at simplicity and clarity to permit focus on content rather than anything else.

Let me know what you don’t like. I keep tweaking things anyway, but I’m more than curious to see what breaks in your browser and what breaks your focus when reading. I have tested in Safari proper, WebKit nightly, Firefox 3ß5 and Opera 9.50. One of the reasons I started changing things was to try and get a fluid theme, so it should scale on most resolutions (granted, it will generally look weird below 1024 x 768, but not broken from what I can tell). More importantly, however, I wanted to do something that will make content self-obvious.

The output supplies more decimal places than we need and uses labels that may not be helpful [...] But, as usual with software, we can ignore distractions and find the results we need.

The above is taken from my Statistics book. It was written as a comment to an illustration of the output of some statistical software. It is the embodiment of what is wrong with software nowadays, why a lot of people still don’t get it and don’t use it.

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I have recently attended a talk given by Michael Geist on the subject of “E-Publishing and the Law” through the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Here are some of the things that Dr. Geist spoke about, as well as some of my observations.

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Joel Spolsky (the famous Joel writing “on software”) had a lengthy comment today yesterday on the impending war between the supporters of IE 8’s standards mode versus the rest of the world (as he argues it, that means the majority of web developers out there) that will have their websites broken in IE 8. (Mark Pilgrim hosts a translation of the article which pretty much captures the essence of the thing.) While he makes a compelling argument as to why he believes IE 8 will eventually revert to the old way of rendering, I take issue with some of the finer points of the matter. Specifically, I believe, for once, that Microsoft is not the only one to blame for the current state of the web and they should not backtrack because it might be a cause of inconvenience to some people in the short term.

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Although I haven’t written before about why I never use TinyURL to store links but rather only to pass them along, let’s get into it a bit. In the context of RapidShare, though, which I guess sounds non-sensical. Both of these services, in their respective context, are what’s known as a SPOF¹.
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1. Single Point of Failure [↩]

I gave the OLPC interface¹ a quick run tonight, and I must say it is… intriguing. I understand, now, some of Robert Graham’s arguments as to why the OLPC may be detrimental to third-world countries instead of helping them get access to more technology. While *I* certainly may find the interface interesting, someone that has never been exposed to computers before will be conditioned by Sugar². Take said person and put them in front of even a GNOME Linux desktop and it will take a bit for them to adjust. Put them in front of something as clunky and bloated as a generic Windows interface and they may actually think you are trying to make fun of them³.
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1. The words have been carefully chosen, for I only really analysed the interface thus far [↩]
2. The OLPC’s interface [↩]
3. Though even in the case of GNOME, the shift may be quite strenuous, I am taking into account that the OLPC is a Linux distribution [↩]

I am a strong supporter of RSS. I try to publish all my sites with a full feed to ease access to information and try to find ways around restrictions, technological¹ or otherwise, that would prevent me from sharing as much as I can.

So, taking this a step forward, I think we should start considering moving large parts of the web completely into RSS - with a few changes.

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1. Such as the new versions of WordPress cutting text in the RSS feed at <more> tags [↩]

I am not perfect. After generally pushing people to publish their full feeds, I myself have occasionally went against my own belief and sliced up my own feed. In my defense, it would appear that WP 2.1 did it for me whereas the older version was throwing the full feed even if a [more] tag. But no matter, I have a new plug-in that should take care of that

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… are due to piracy!

No, that’s what they would probably want you to believe. While both Bluray and HD-DVD are technologically capable of delivering the content that they’re supposed to, their foreseeable death will be induced by… one another.

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I was listening to episode 187 ["on an undercover cop"] of BinRev today an got struck by an idea:

What if people started using RFID tags for something useful for a change and put them [at the very least] in high-traffic areas to aid those with disabilities [especially blind persons] by providing an identifier for street signs, crosswalks/traffic lights etc? From my Google research it seems that these could be used for additional applications to further justify the cost of implementing the system. The people in question would simply carry around an RFID reader that will scan and receive the ambient tags; it can then process it in a number of ways to generate speech regarding the surroundings [harder to do with street names but relatively trivial with signs, for example.]

Wal-Mart has already implemented a similar system for its stores. I believe there is a lot of possibility to extend this into the streets - start with those areas that have so much traffic volume that makes it hard to ‘navigate’ for guide dogs.