Category: it could be called work

[IP] a piece very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

_The other means by which long terms of peace – or, more accurately, non-war – have been achieved is the unequivocal domination by a single ruthless power. The best example of this is, of course, the Pax Romana, a “world” peace which lasted from about 27 BCE until 180 AD. I grant that the Romans were not the most benign of rulers. They crucified dissidents for decoration, fed lesser humans to their pets, and generally scared the bejesus out of everyone, including Jesus Himself. But war, of the sort that racked the Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, and indeed, just about everyone prior to Julius Caesar, did not occur. The Romans had decided it was bad for business. They were in a military position to make that opinion stick._

Interesting people get interesting mail: browsing the archives will have to suffice for me. Read this all the way through. It *will* be on the exam.

Filters and Rogue Librarians: Weblogs in the Library World

Filters and Rogue Librarians:
Weblogs in the Library World

Abstract

Defines and discusses the history of weblogs, or “blogs.” Examines the creation of weblogs among libraries and librarians. Provides a framework for planning for a library-created weblog using a standard planning process, including needs assessment, budgeting and evaluation. Analyzes the possible uses of weblogs in a small special library.

via sean

Clean up your Web pages with HTML TIDY

When editing HTML it’s easy to make mistakes. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way to fix these mistakes automatically and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely layed out markup? Well now there is! Dave Raggett’s HTML TIDY is a free utility for doing just that. It also works great on the atrociously hard to read markup generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools, and can help you identify where you need to pay further attention on making your pages more accessible to people with disabilities.

So as part of my manifold duties, I have inherited a website that is in the midst of a makeover. I have some templates that look fine in IE for Windows, some skeletal style pages that don’t, and a lot of old content that needs to be migrated AND made 508 compliant.

What’s a lazy but resourceful geek to do? HTMLTidy to the rescue, of course. It’s taken me a few hours of monkeying around and reading, but I found a configfile incantation that seems to do what I want.


uppercase-tags: no # XHTML is case-sensitive
uppercase-attributes: no
indent: auto # made the output readable, ie “pretty-print” it
indent-spaces: 3
write-back: yes # write output to the same file used as input: risky but expedient
wrap: 0 # don’t wrap lines, since that confuses validators
output-xhtml: yes # write output as XHTML
doctype: auto # set the doctype to match the output


And just like that, my validation errors went from 50+ (with no content, mind you) to 0 and a clean bill of health.

Now to get some real work done.

sales dude: “so you want the Windows versions of those?”

me: “yes, unfortunately”

sales dude: “you want the ones that run circles around the others, then.”

me: “I don’t go in circles. I go forward.”

Dave Raggett’s Bio

I am very interested in speech and the Web. Nicholas Negroponte head of MIT’s Media Lab made the case for this very well a few years ago when he pointed out that as computers shrink they become to small for keyboards or screens. Speech recognition and synthesis become the only practical means to interact with them. I am now involved with work on ways to exploit robust speech recognition and high quality speech synthesis that is actually bearable to listen to. I expect W3C to play an important role in helping to make the Web accessible from a broad range of devices: cellular phones, car based systems, handheld and palmtop computers, Web TVs and regular unmodified phones.

I agree.

Why Nerds are Unpopular

Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids all locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.

Thanks to Josh for this one. A long read but worth it. Not sure it mirrors my experience but food for thought.

I decided to make a new category of entries, “two wheels good.” some will recognize it as a play on “two legs bad” from Animal Farm, while others may recognize it as the bowdlerized title of Prefab Sprout’s “Steve McQueen.”

Anyway, this is where I will collect my entries about cycling and training for the Seattle to Portland Classic.

White House Scales Back Cyberspace Plan

“The plan is all about consensus,” said Bruce Schneier, the chief technology officer of Counterpane, a security company. “Consensus is the lowest common denominator. Security is not achieved by consensus.”

From: Tyranny of the Moment by Thomas Hylland Eriksen

In information society, the scarcest resource for people on the supply side of the economy is neither iron ore nor sacks of grain, but the attention of others. Everyone who works in the information field ? from weather forecasters to professors ? compete over the same seconds, minutes and hours of other people?s lives. Unlike what happens to physical objects, the amount of information does not diminish when one gives it away or sells it.

Stolen from here.

This has come up before.

“Godwin is getting old”

Geography, as they say, is Destiny. and here in Europe we have a lot of geography. There isn’t a town that doesn’t show, in some way, the effects of war. From the bomb-cratered walls that every British MP walks past on the way to Westminster, to the vast swathes of Berlin so obviously built post 1945, there isn’t a single day when people living in the European capitals aren’t reminded of war. It’s not the heroics suggested by the Washington monument, but the crushed, burnt bodies and screaming destruction of massive bombing. If you want to know why the French, the Germans, and the Russians don’t want to fight just yet, walk down their streets.

Can’t add a thing, other than to insist you read the whole posting (I’ve excerpted a lot of it but didn’t want to steal all Ben’s thunder).

My father can remember the war, watching dogfights over the West of England, seeing the POWs working in the fields, playing with evacuated schoolkids, and watching the air armada on D-Day.

One’s enthusiasm for a fight depends on how badly you might get hurt in it: sometimes this all reminds me of the 80s when the superpowers seemed prepared to fight WWIII in Europe and no one who lived there seemed all that excited at the prospect (Greenham Common, anyone?).