alfa.org.uk

This is a really informed and informative article about why Microsoft slammed the brakes on Internet Explorer development.

./~ Oh happy day! ./~

Dear MR PARTRIDGE,

Congratulations.

You have booked to attend KEANE at Carling Academy Brixton, London on WEDNESDAY 17/11/2004 at 19.30

You have booked 2 STANDING at £16.50

Sorry, that was a cheap usage of the word ’shenannigans’ - although it is a fantastic word.

Er, right, what was I going to write about. Oh yes, HTML.

Apple is proposing extending HTML. The latest betas of their Safari browser contain four (count ‘em) changes to HTML, including a new <canvas> tag, which basically allows DOM-scriptable access to a 2D drawing layer in the browser.

Yes, you read that right. Apple wants to allow developers to script (most likely in Javascript) drawing on an “HTML” canvas. *Sigh*. Basically you define your <canvas> tag, then you can call getContext() on it to access it through the DOM. Then they give you a whole load of 2D drawing APIs, so you’ve got your own lovely Microsoft Paint-alike. In your browser. And you draw through Javascript.

Have these people not heard of SVG? This is exactly the kind of thing SVG was designed for! God, why not do it properly?? Extend XHTML to allow XSLT to generate embedded SVG!

Oh, and did I mention they’ve forked their own standards body, so all this stuff is being developed outside the W3C?

This really pains me, when people have spent years trying to standardise the Web and prevent forking…

A very good annotated version of the letter sent by the RIAA to all 100 senators, enouraging them to support the all-new INDUCE Act (the one that tries to “outlaw” P2P).

I’m a closet Justin Timberlake fan (damn, just outed myself again). His best song is clearly “Senorita”, with it’s funky piano riff. He obviously borrowed a lot from people like Chick Corea and Prince, but even so, kudos to him for having good taste.

Here’s the riff, for other people that like it…

From a Linux 2.6.7 ./configure :

“WARNING: RAID-6 is currently highly experimental. If you use it, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it won’t destroy your data, eat your disk drives, insult your mother, or re-appoint George W. Bush.”

I found a fascinating article about the work of Richard Feynman. While I was at university I did a brief research project into the simulation of genetic algorithms using cellular automata, but I had no idea that Richard had tackled the same kind of problem in 1983 whilst working at Connection Machines.

He outclassed me though. I guess that’s why he has a Nobel prize, and I don’t ;)

My simulation ran as a 500 virtual-node cluster connected as a simple two-dimensional grid. Richard’s ran on a 1,000,000 node cluster connected as a 20-dimension hypercube.

He simulated turbulent flow in fluids. I simulated the growth of rabbit populations ;)

You know what bugs me with some software? When it pops up a dialogue saying “would you like to save your changes?”, and the three options are “Save”, “Don’t Save”, and “Cancel”.

No no no!

If it’s a yes/no question, the options should be “Yes”, “No”, and “Cancel”. Why make it more complicated than it has to be??