It looks like Salon is in the process of getting rid of Radio Userland as their blogging tool. Providing what is essentially a hosted service with a fat desktop client puts you outside the mainstream. It wouldn’t surprise me if Salon had a Wordpress-based offering before too long, although I still think that Movable Type is the better product.
Now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections, they’re trying to rehabilitate their image in the western media. American-educated Mousa Abu Marzook has a piece in the Washington Post entitled, What Hamas is Seeking. Khalid Mish’al, another Hamas political operative, has a piece in The Guardian explaining that Palestinians knew good and well what electing Hamas meant for their relations with the United States and Europe, and did it anyway. The Washington Post piece is a lot more conciliatory than one in The Guardian. ...
For the past 15 months or so, I’ve been a renter, after being a homeowner for about four years. When my wife and I owned a home, we spent many thousands of dollars on repairs and upgrades, used about half of the available space, and often felt angst about the housing market and stress about what sorts of things we needed to do next to keep our home in good working order. We then sold the house and cleared just enough money to pay the realtor’s commission. We rented a place much more to our liking, in a much more desirable location, pay less rent than we paid in mortgage, and lowered our home maintenance costs to a rounding error. (Contrast that to my home maintenance bills, which in the first year of home ownership added up to more than we paid in rent the previous year.) ...
If you ever wondered whether Google keeps track of everything you ever searched for, the answer is yes. In other news, Google has launched a bookmarking feature. You can save pages from your Search History as bookmarks and apply tags to them.
Today you can read an article in the New York Times about how a group of conservative attorneys decided they wanted to take over the Supreme Court, formulated a plan, and have seen that plan come to fruition this year with the nominations of John Roberts and Sam Alito to the Supreme Court. For an example on the liberal side of the ledger, think back to the civil rights movement. Civil rights leaders had a goal, came up with a plan to achieve that goal, and succeeded through hard work and great sacrifice. ...
Here’s the story behind the Firefly season 2 Web site I mentioned the other day. Never mind.
Google has been catching lots of flack this week for creating a version of their search engine for the Chinese market (at google.cn), and capitulating to the censorship demands of the Chinese government. They’ve explained their reasons for doing so at the Official Google Blog. I’ve been giving this matter a lot of thought this week, and the reason I haven’t had anything to say is that I am still not entirely sure what I think about this complex issue. ...
Like just about all software developers these days, I’ve done my fair share of XML wrangling. What I hadn’t done until this week is create DTDs or schemas to describe the XML I was generating. Then I ventured into the realm of XML schemas, and I have to say that I come away impressed. The schemas themselves are easier than you might thing to write, and there are a number of cool schema tools out there. My favorite is Microsoft’s XSD Inference Demo, which creates a valid schema for an XML document for you. Unless your format is very rigid, you’ll have to edit the schema that it produces, but it provides a great starting point. Once you’ve created schemas, you can run all of the documents you produce through them and make sure they’re free of defects. I found a bug in my code the first time I added schema validation to my unit test. ...
Google sampled over one billion documents on the Web to see how HTML is really used, and came up with a number of interesting statistics, including the most popular classes assigned to elements (“footer” is number one) and the average number of different elements used on a Web page (19). The report is also interesting in that all of the figures are served as SVG files. The SVG stuff looks neat but the figures render incredibly slowly in Firefox 1.5 on my Powerbook. ...
The one way conduit of links from here to Freedom to Tinker continues as I point you at an article pondering the economics of DRM.