Archives for Apr 2004
css zen garden's 99th
I was so excited about the 100th CSS Zen Garden design, that I missed the 99th, a CSS Zen Garden comic book!
splintered rss
When people say more formats, or varying practices don’t cost, they are either naive or acting in their own interest, not ours. —Dave
Personally, I don’t see RSS and Atom as the same formats. Sure, their uses may overlap. But, there’s one fundamental difference I see. RSS is a simplified format to get titles/descriptions/permalinks. Atom is a rich format for full web content.
RSS is something you’d use to syndicate blog excerpts, bit torrent links, cvs changelogs, and event log feeds. I love RSS for its simplicity. Trying to read richly encoded content can be a pain due to spec incompatibilities, encoding errors from buggy software, etc.
AtomEnabled finally makes it possible for developers to have a consistent, tightly-specified, well documented XML format for both syndication and authoring of content.
Atom is not a 1.0 release yet, so this promise hasn’t been delivered yet. But, it has a detailed spec and validator, extensive conformance tests, and some interesting apps.
RSS is something I’d use to provide the latest news tidbits, and Atom is something I’d use to export my rich weblog data for importing into another system.
squarepusher
I had the pleasure of catching Squarepusher live last Wednesday in Austin. Awesome. Cassetteboy was… interesting. (I didn’t find any online reviews, but there is a Cassetteboy / Squarepusher review from London, with pictures).
I also saw the Punisher movie. Awesome.
batman begins intimidation game
Looks like I’m not the only one excited about the new Batman flick. Allan got his hands on the rumored Batman Begins script and says it looks pretty good.
(I’m using this entry to test Bloglines’ new References feature. It reminds me of SharpReader’s threading feature.)
CSS Diagrams
tool-man has come up with a CSS based organizational chart solution for those that don’t want to mess with monolithic, bloated, binary formats or dynamic html scripts.
On a side note, it looks like the wizards behind Xopus (the friendly standards-compliant browser-based xml editor) have an org chart demo.
reblogging
Looks like Scoble caved in to a few requests and shut down his experimental aggregator blog.
Content providers should have control how their content is produced. But, having an easily accessible syndication file is putting it out there; especially when people will be reading that info in NewsGator, BlogLines, Tivo, custom xbox dashboards, etc.
It seems that when lawyers get involved, the free-spirited nature of the internet is lost.
XP SP2 Firewall problems
I loaded the Public Beta of XP SP2 and had a few problems. First, the Security Center kept complaining that I have no AV(Antivirus) software. So, I disabled the Security Center service.
Secondly, the Windows Firewall kept working, but would not let me configure it. I would get this error message:
Due to an unidentified problem, Windows cannot display Windows Firewall settings.
I found a message on the Microsoft Newsgroups that solved my problem. Just run these commands:
regsvr32 windir\system32\atl.dll regsvr32 windir\system32\hnetcfg.dll
So far, I’ve enjoyed the new firewall. There has even been an instance where a program should not have been trying to access the internet, but it was.
Update: My bit torrent performance is up, now that I can configure the firewall properly. Cool.
it's happening!
So, I spent all this time setting up a shithot (and slightly outdated) blog engine and I ignore my own site…
But I had to mention this: evidence that Google is evil!
my video card is bigger than yours
Nvidia announced the GeForce 6800. Look at how it demolishes the Radeon 9800 in Halo and Far Cry. And, look at how big the thing is! Not only does it take up an AGP and a PCI slot (commonplace in high-end video cards), but it has two power connectors on it.
Any chance of an ultra-lite GeForce Go version for laptops?
css zen garden's 100th
Congrats to Dave Shea and the skilled web designers that contributed to the CSS Zen Garden. Dave put up its 100th design, a collaboration between Dave and Eric Meyer
eternal sunshine of the spor... uh... hey, something shiny!
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a wonderful movie. Twisted. Disorienting. Human. Of course, the idea of erasing your significant other from your memory is absurd (though, I’ll probably eat these words from the Wayback Machine in 200 years when my head is floating in a jar with my bright, peaceful memories of 2004).
strongly typed objects instead of datasets
Plip has some tips on using strongly typed objects and collections instead of datasets. It’s very similar to a technique that I’ve been using for awhile now. Nice to know that I’m on the right track.
He does go further into filtering a sorting than I ever did, however.
Windows Shell Extensions
Edamno has released a .net library for creating Shell Extensions.
gmail accessibility
Mark: “In short, the only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail.”
blogging in comics
look at what blogging did for Microsoft: it put a human face on the evil empire.
I hear word about a new Marvel imprint, but there’s no mention of it on their site. I find news of new Marvel developments printed on paper before seeing them on the website. Isn’t that a little backwards?
marvel icons
Marvel Comics announces the launch of ICON, a new publishing imprint that will produce projects utilizing properties outside of the Marvel Universe. ICON will launch with two titles fans are already familiar with: Brian Bendis’ “Powers” and David Mack’s “Kabuki.”
I was wondering why Powers #1 hasn’t come out yet…
Bendis: “Actually we were ready last Thursday, but we realized the date and figured no one would believe us. “
x-men unload
This month starts my boycott of the X-Men titles. This is the fourth time (and I’ll probably go back when a good writer starts, and feel a need to catch up on back issues I missed). But, there is hope in the form of Liefeld’s X-Force Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.
Titles I am enjoying this month are Supreme Power, Superman: Birthright, and Y: The Last Man.
free associated blogging
Be careful about posts that jump up in pagerank too quickly. Users should care about mime types. Looking for a “clearly-unsafe, unsigned, obviously naughty” Active X Control? ‘The ActiveX control is called ‘WebBrowser’ and it comes with IE so should already be on your system.’. Google is powerful. Maybe too powerful. Who watches the watchers? But, don’t listen to the naysayers (at least until gmail is public). Ever need help visualizing the hierarchical structure of a web page?
FairPlay plays fair
It’s done. PlayFair strips the DRM from your legally purchased iTunes songs.
I think I’ll start using iTunes again!
frag your hard drive
Brutal File Manager provides a 3D FPS interface to your filesystem.
I seem to recall an old DooM mod that provided a similar interface to your local computer’s processes. Kill a zombie to ‘kill -9’ the process the zombie was associated with. Hmm.
