Sometimes blogs make you think

Like this entry. A picture is worth a thousand words indeed.

Posted at 2004-01-31 15:34:09 by Richard • Link to Sometimes blogs ma…
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Writing my own blog...

Not content to use things like MoveableType, which have these things freely-available, I roll my own.

OK, so I started from a base of PHPosxom, but I've hacked it to pieces — e.g. it serving XHTML. Now, the ultimate: a ‘current track’ block on the side there, filled directly from iTunes through the magic of Recent Tunes by Freshly Squeezed Software.

Now I just have to start listening to more ‘respectable’ music!

(one flaw: Recent Tunes won't send any text if there are Unicode characters in the title, artist, or other fields. So that's why it's occasionally blank. They also don't correctly send ampersands.)

Posted at 2004-01-31 15:00:29 by Richard • Link to Writing my own blo…
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The use of dashes

A List Apart has a marvellous reference on the use of em and en dashes, quotes, spaces, etc. in XHTML. Important reading!

Posted at 2004-01-31 10:12:48 by Richard • Link to The use of dashes
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Knuth on email

Donald Knuth is a very clever man. This is what he thinks about "email":

Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write non-zero and soft-ware instead of nonzero and software; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling e-mail. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form email has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, email has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England — but for an entirely different reason.)

He also justifies why he hasn't had an email address since 1990: I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Posted at 2004-01-31 10:05:30 by Richard • Link to Knuth on email
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Processing Processing

From this marvellous article comes this joyful little quote. For those not in the know, SHOE and RDF are languages used for marking-up data.

It took me about 15 minutes to fully understand SHOE, which was embedded inside of HTML. It's taken me two years to understand RDF. I lack anything like genius, but I do score better on standardized tests than a box of hammers, and two years is too long.

Posted at 2004-01-31 06:03:23 by Richard • Link to Processing Process…
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419

I just got 3 419s in one go, and they got past my spam filter. Time for a bemused smile.

Lose the smile: our paper got rejected for the WWW2004 conference. I'm not in the least bit surprised: it was done in a single-digit number of days, with no findings, and they only accepted 74 of 506 submissions. It's a miracle anyone liked it at all!

Still, submit somewhere else!

Amusingly, one referee said I see the difference between facts and opinions, but resources remain unclear to me. The next referee said the exact opposite. Methinks they didn't ‘get it’.
I think I just ran out of pages to satisfy all their concerns: indicative of a bad title. But hey!

Posted at 2004-01-31 00:33:59 by Richard • Link to 419
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