Today I’m travelling back to San Francisco. I had a great week with my family and friends back in London, but I’m looking forward to getting back.

2008 has been a remarkable year. Quite unsettling in the amount that has changed, really.

Matt Smith is the new actor playing Doctor Who as of next year.

In which I analyse Facebook Connect’s UI, bash it a bit, and then steal the best bit and apply it to OpenID and OAuth applications. Pictures are provided.

For me, with something like a microphotoblog, the value of it is spread over multiple photos. The interest in that content is seeing the photos as an entire stream, moving from place to place, not so much as individual artefacts. Whereas Flickr I expect each photo to be something standalone, of a certain quality.

The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa

I checked, double checked and - for the hell of it - triple checked all my inboxes, labels, spam folders and deleted items. There was no sign of twitter sending me any notification as to when or wherefore they had disabled my account.

Something which I would be most upset about looking back on the future history of the internet is if those who only see the visual presentation of web pages win. If the combined ignorance of many should cause the semantic beauty of the web to be lost, for the abbrs and blockquotess of the world to disappear into irrelevance. Then, the web will be a far less interesting place.

One potential issue is that developers may create applications for the Android operating system at a higher resolution and screen size than the Agora provides in its current form.

It’s amazing. In the world’s most innovative, forward-thinking nation one stupid book has regressed women by centuries. What they fail to realise - and this goes as much for Paltrow as The Rules’s authors - is that the sexual revolution changed men as well as women. The feminists who tried to create a balance within relationships should spit in disgust at US dating behaviour and British men and women should be cheered for admitting that dating is meant to end in sex. If you don’t fancy the outcome with your date, be honest enough not to let him buy you dinner.

The elimination of Thursdays forces a change to Thankgsiving.

Layers · Screen forensics

This pattern can be used to resolve some long standing issues with including machine-data in microformats; it’s imperative we test thoroughly before adding it to any pattern specification. Following are a number of example tests. Please try them out.

Florence is a twenty one year-old art college drop-out from Camberwell, South London, a long pretty pale girl who makes up songs and sings them. The Machine is whoever’s standing nearby playing an instrument at the time. It’s a bit harder to define, the machine part. It’s just not exactly a person. It’s a sort of a machine. She’s been singing since pretty much forever. She was in the school choir, a few dodgy bands, had vocal lessons and such. She has all the necessary paperwork if you want to see it.

If you see her sing live you’ll forget paperwork and forget your name and maybe forget to breathe for a little while. Florence has a voice hewn from the rock and stamped in the gravel and shot out of a cannon into the middle of your chest. It cuts right into you and thrums. She also has almost as much stage presence as Hitler. She’s like a funny sexy popstar Hitler without the despotism and with more beautiful songs and the utmost love and respect for Jews and gays and gypsies.

Review of my listening habits over 2008, complete with a grand many Last.FM links to artists you should definitely listen to.

Spare a thought for poor Owen Thomas, the beleaguered professional troll whose gossip rag Valleywag was shut down recently; his role downsized into writing a section of the same name for the larger and less disrespected Gawker blog. A shock to Valley investors everywhere, it transpires that in an advertising recession the first sites to go are in fact the ones which provide no value.

In the face of doubt, openness prevails

I didn’t realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace these days

I hate the whole “RT” thing. Just link to noteworthy tweets, don’t regurgitate them.

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Before televisions and radios existed, before podcasts and internet pornography had even been imagined, families would gather round the fire and they would tell folk the stories to pass the time and take wisdom from the elders.

My personal thoughts on the microformats community at the start of 2009, where we might go, where I’d like us to go, and the kinds of new developers I hope get offered to developers. I hope it inspires others to write up their own ambitions for the year.

If people want a “cheerful” typeface — and it’s clear they do —and all they got was comic sans, then somebody failed, really.

Fireworks CS4: Disabled the retarded tabbed interface, then went to open 10 images to drag into my site design… OH LOOK THEY ALL OPEN FULL FUCKING SCREEN. Nice work you bunch of cunts, when adding your utterly pointless and tedious tabbed bullshit you managed to ruin how it worked before. 

One of my long standing hate points of Microsoft Windows and reasons to love Mac OSX is that the latter has thorough, consistent and mostly logical keyboard shortcuts all over. It’s an extremely powerful system to become very proficient and powerful in using. Windows, by contrast, sucks, and Windows applications (be they from Microsoft or third parties) behave with aggravating inconsistency.

Regarding class. The comment that ‘Class attributes are meant to store machine information according to the W3C specs’ is completely incorrect, and is a suggestion that comes up over and over again. So:

The HTML4 spec says, in §7.5.2 on id and class attributes: “The class attribute, on the other hand, assigns one or more class names to an element; the element may be said to belong to these classes.”

Below, it says that class may be used for stylesheet selectors, and ‘For general purpose processing by user agents.’

That ‘general purpose’ statement is wildly and regularly misinterpreted as allowing class to contain arbitrary data, even though that use contradicts the ‘belong to these classes’ specification. A data value is not a classification. Further clarifying this, under the spec for the id attribute in the same section, ‘general purpose processing’ is defined more fully:

‘For general purpose processing by user agents (e.g. for identifying fields when extracting data from HTML pages into a database, translating HTML documents into other formats, etc.).’

Thus, class is for classifying elements and for identifying fields (which is exactly what microformats does with it). Those things taken together, I don’t see how the spec can be read as permitting data itself to be valid within the class attribute.

Even if you disagree with my assertion that the ‘machine form’ is content, class is still an invalid place to stick it.

Research by the UK’s Food Standards Agency in 2006 found that 18.5% of doner takeaways posed a “significant” threat to public health, and 0.8% posed an “imminent” threat.

I always assumed that our work and integrity would speak for itself.

But, while I abhor the death threats, that stupid kid in me cheered the guy who spat. Something in me loved the protest of it, the simplicity of the action and all that it said. It wasn’t violent, no one’s life put at risk, but it was honest and fast, and probably said everything the man wanted to say. It was passionate. And a bit of me excused him for that.

It’s recognisable as a melodic SFA record, but is very focused musically as a cohesive album. And no country rock as Daf has developed a pedal steel phobia. Which has confined the great Nashvillian instrument along with the Saxophone to the banned instrument directive of the SFA board. there’s only one slow number which isn’t slow at all.

The other day we ran a story from Valleywag with a rumor that Steve Jobs was undergoing surgery. After talking to someone I trust more than I trust Owen Thomas’s source (who I admit I don’t know very much about) my take is that he wasn’t “under the knife” on Monday as rumored, but was at Apple in meetings. I’m don’t find this very satisfying to write about, but I’m sharing this data to nullify the likely wrong data from the valleywag post that appeared on Gizmodo. That is all.

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific tweetTextFilter -string "^RT"

Perhaps the most significant conclusion we can make from these survey results is that there is no typical screen reader user. As developers, we sometimes view screen reader accessibility as JAWS or Window Eyes or VoiceOver (or whatever) compatibility. This survey emphasizes that screen reader accessibility is about real people - and people that have diverse abilities and preferences. As developers, we must do our best to accommodate the needs of this diverse group.

Ben Ward’s Eyes

phpQuery is a server-side, chainable, CSS3 selector driven Document Object Model (DOM) API based on the jQuery JavaScript Library.

I’m working on adding a wiki system to my personal site for non-chronological content. I hinted at doing this a while ago in Practical Publishing. It’s taken until now to actually get it together.

Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end.

Nobody talks about people down the pub laughing about Bale’s expletive-laden bullying as a “social drinking sensation

There is coffee all over the world. Increasingly, in a world in which computing is ubiquitous, the computists want to make coffee. Coffee brewing is an art, but the distributed intelligence of the web- connected world transcends art. Thus, there is a strong, dark, rich requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of coffee. Coffee is brewed using coffee pots. Networked coffee pots require a control protocol if they are to be controlled.

To pre-empt this nonsense the practical course of action is to add the IE8 Compatibility view to your pages now before your sites get added to a blacklist. Exactly what Microsoft announced a year ago. They’ve routed around the web standards community. Again.

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The key ingredient I see in successful apps, Mac or web — and, really, in creative commercial endeavors of any kind — is that the creators are building something they themselves love. That’s what you should copy.

Alarmist by Pacific UV

And please, let’s put the whole “display: table-cell will grant those abilities through CSS” to rest. Saying that is just saying “use tables for layout” with different words. Turning a bunch of divs or list items or whatever into table-role boxes is no better than just using table markup in the first place, and it’s arguably worse. Using element names other than table and td to create layout tables, and then claiming it’s not using tables for layout, borders on self-deception.

I’d like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We’ve never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn’t consent to it. Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I’m concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up.

You can sense his frustration amid a scandal that was essentially cooked up by Consumerist on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend without even calling Facebook to check if their assumptions on the Terms of Use changes were right.

For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

All this talk of CSS layout modules.

The Conservatives were happy to misinform the world in order to back up their boss’s quip - to damage a charity that gives knowledge free to billions, for trivial political gain.

It’s the act of someone who’d forge a disabled parking badge, a tiny unit of pure, sociopathic evil. Even politicians should be ashamed that they’re harbouring anyone like that.

<div x-mojo-element="ToggleButton" id="my-toggle"></div>

The World Wide Web is a beautiful piece of social software.

Cappuccino is not designed for building web sites, or making existing sites more “dynamic”. We think these goals are too far removed from those of application development to be served well by a single framework. […] With Cappuccino, you don’t need to know HTML. You’ll never write a line of CSS. You don’t ever have interact with DOM.

We are all free to have fanciful ideas. Professor Greenfield’s stated aim, however, is to improve the public’s understanding of science: and yet repeatedly she appears in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims, without evidence, all the while telling us repeatedly that she is a scientist. By doing this, the head of the RI grossly misrepresents what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a claim. It makes me quite sad, when the public’s understanding of science is in such a terrible state, that this is one of our most prominent and well funded champions.

1. Ben: Give Seth a cuddle
2. Kevin Ryan: He is in SVN…
3. Ben: He's _in_ SVN? Like, trapped there? Like in Tron?
4. Kevin Ryan: … And trying to help me figure out what is up with my sever access, apparently my password keeps randomly changing
5. Ben: Hmm, Tron 2 is already in production, but Tron 3 as ‘An accident in version control’ would be AMAZING
6. Ben: The final showdown would have Seth and Jeff Bridges team up with previous revisions of themselves to defeat whoever it is that's changing your password…

Song of the Day: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Dull Life

You can paint it any color you want, but the broadest concept fueling the web is the exchange of knowledge and data over the network, and to argue that web apps are somehow ‘exempt’ from the need to ensure accessibility because they are somehow different does the real disservice here – they are simply more complex abstract layers between the data and the user.

Radio 1 also apologised on-air immediately after Bono used an expletive to describe Coldplay’s lead singer Chris Martin. The BBC said it had received no complaints about it.

Calpol is a common cause of accidental child poisoning, due to its pleasant taste.

The Hawaiian-born, half-Kenyan leader of the “free world” is a direct, 13th-generation descendant of one of the Plymouth colony’s earliest settlers, Thomas Blossom. […] His family moved from Great Shelford to Stapleford two years after Thomas was born.

Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

printernot (pryn·ter·knot) n. Any example of a newspaper’s feeble attempt to appeal to a younger demographic by likening some aspect of itself to the internet, such as re-christening its letters page the “Messageboard”.

Marco posted about some of the quirkier unicode glyphs, and notes:

Forever’s Not So Long

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

1. Ben: Hey Ben, did you do the laundry like I asked?
2. Ben: Oh, hey Ben, you look nice. No, I just emptied all the dirty laundry into the middle of the bedroom floor; juggled it around a bit; played football with the socks. Figured you'd sort it out.
3. Ben: No, you shit, I've spent all evening doing our taxes, and resurrecting our Green Card application so we don't almost get deported again. Remember that?
4. Ben: I remember your mum.
5. Ben: Well, yes, good work sending those flowers. But even so, what the fuck? We have no socks and the bath towel smells kinda flunky again.
6. Ben: You had better put the washing on then.
7. Ben: Do we have any quarters?
8. Ben: Nope. Hey, is that rain out? At least Ariel made you buy an umbrella, right?
9. Ben: I hate you. I miss David. He bought better records than you, too.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

These issues exist because the ultimate nature of human taste is irrational and depends on factors impossible to capture with computer systems.   Interpersonal relationships, social pressures, locales, context in which music is encountered, meaning that individuals assign to a music encounter (has a girl you liked ever introduced you to music you just happened to also like?)

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1. Chris: stupid liquids + electronics
2. Chris: why can't they just get along?

The most notable thing I remember from art classes in school was building a model clay house when I was 15. Most people built nice houses, with smiles and flowers, and fences and a shrubbery. However, due to a mid-teens Tarantino infatuation, all the people in my house were gangsters, and half of them were dangling from windows, somewhat dismembered or missing… internal organs. They all had hats.

A few months ago I started an experiment to publish photos from my iPhone into a separate photostream, Ben Ward’s Eyes. The intent was simple: I wanting to visually document more of my day-to-day life, but without polluting my Flickr account with poor-quality, fuzzy phone-camera pictures.

I’ll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations

Every day I’m upset. Every day I lose three hours to a bus. Every day I’m staring out the window thinking about what I’ve lost. Thinking about that amazing dream job that for six months was just that.

For everything that happened in the past three months, my situation is remarkably positive. It’s a tale of survival, against odds and expectations. It’s underpinned by luck, hard work, and the effort of dozens of kind people who tried to catch me when the rug was pulled from under me. Some of them known to me, some of them total strangers acting out of instinct and respect. I’m someone that people want to support.

My two previous posts had to be separate. It’s the best way to express the bi-polar conflict that is my state of mind right now.

And from that, we come to the headline. Food is not fuel. Not to be misconstrued as an anti-biofuels slogan, this is about valuing everything you eat. Savouring the taste of every mouthful. If you’re just filling up, what’s the point? Food is not about nutrition, or fat, or calories or traffic light diets. Food is about pleasure.

This wasn’t meant to be posh, it ended up that way because there was only posh bread and cheese in the kitchen.

♥

The golden age of the album cover is pretty much over.

There has been a revival in vinyl sales the last few years driven largely by nostalgia. But, in overall terms, the era of vinyl - the era of the album cover - has gone

The b element represents a span of text to be stylistically offset from the normal prose without conveying any extra importance, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, or other spans of text whose typical typographic presentation is boldened. The following example shows a use of the b element to highlight key words without marking them up as important

In the following example, objects in a text adventure are highlighted as being special by use of the b element.

<p>You enter a small room. Your <b>sword</b> glows
brighter. A <b>rat</b> scurries past the corner wall.</p>

Another case where the b element is appropriate is in marking up the lede (or lead) sentence or paragraph. The following example shows how a BBC article about kittens adopting a rabbit as their own could be marked up using HTML5 elements:

<article>
    <h2>Kittens 'adopted' by pet rabbit</h2>
    <p><b>Six abandoned kittens have found an unexpected 
    new mother figure — a pet rabbit.</b></p>
    <p>Veterinary nurse Melanie Humble took the three-week-old
    kittens to her Aberdeen home.</p>
    [...]

This is more like your uncle’s band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there’s no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book’s name is the same as the album on which “Hallelujah” originally appears.

Pixar vs. Dreamworks

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It is early days and we are still getting used to the milk and the new dairy but the flavours coming through are already promising.

I can use a syringe to remove the filling from a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and replace it with Branston Pickle, but it wouldn’t be a good idea… at least I don’t think so… hold that thought.

The cool thing about this is that you can use the Xbox LIVE Amazon Xbox LIVE store to purchase Arcade games and Microsoft points to send as gifts.

At some point in the future, when tinyurl and bit.ly are lost to the annals, you can check the annals (this site) and find out where a shortened URL used to point, and go there. Or archive.org if the original site doesn’t exist anymore.

Pretty spiffy, Tom! FaceBook ain’t got shit on what you guys have now. I definitely prefer MySpace over FaceBook (which annoys the @#$@!# out of me on a daily basis) now.

Pretty wins! At least it does for me. Especially combined with the spammy nature of FaceBook and the fact that FaceBook’s management are a bunch of pricks.

If Dave Shea built the CSS Zen Garden, this was going to be the CSS Weed Patch; a block of code so semantically twisted that it would turn Joe Clark straight.

It was upon thinking of this analogy, however, that I really started to get psyched about this project. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to make perfect code dance. But it would be a real accomplishment to make a pig do the pachanga.

I’ve finally figured out the worst thing about living alone. It’s not the lack of company (I’m pretty great, thus living with me is likewise) but there are certain practical implications to a flat with one occupant. The most critical of which is this:

So does that mean we have to expunge his existence from musical history, [Gary] Glitter-style? Or is murder, you know, not as bad?

Script Summary: Changes the label for Twitter’s Remember Me Checkbox to be more accurate. Installing this script changes the label to be “Remember Me. Maybe. Your guess is as good as ours.” Yes, I’m being cheeky.

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1. Muttley: A friend of mine has an HR policy that says you can't hold eye contact with another person in the office for more than 20 seconds
2. Timoni: But what if you're trying to signal that you want to sleep with them?

Like everyone, I carry a certain amount of uncertainty at all times. Life, love, breakfast: All these things up in the air, apparently constantly. My attempts to ground any of them are either futile, or go unpredictably awry. This morning, for example, I discovered all the yoghurts in my fridge had expired. That’s a breakfast-related uncertainty, by the way, in case you were expecting metaphors. The opus “Ben in love: A multipack of low-fat yoghurt and fresh fruit garnish” remains a brilliantly titled, yet entirely fictitious autobiography. My favourite is strawberry. I like to think.

I went to see late screening of Objectified in San Francisco last night. Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica was a hugely enjoyable documentary for me, both in style and content, and Objectified felt like a true sequel.

Obviously I wont pay, alternative to last.fm?

1. Strimble: I want to see all of this paperwork. Also, why is it "paperwork"? Why isn't it an online form?
2. BenWard: It's a Word document.
3. BenWard: The worst of both worlds.

Companies committed to a culture of antidesign (also consultants like Jakob Nielsen) may occasionally succeed in the marketplace, but they do so in spite of their antidesign, not because of it. Of course we can’t prove that; we can’t run a controlled experiment, let alone 41 of them with distinct shades of blue. It is merely one of those things a visually literate person knows. The fact that you don’t know it, or you deny it’s important, or deny it even can be known goes to show you really are better suited to programming a computer all day than dealing with actual human beings.

1. Aide: “Mr President, _EVERYONE ON EARTH HAS THE VIRUS…_ *EVEN YOU!*”
2. Mr President: “Oh shit… is this it? Is this humanity's end? Have I failed?”
3. Aide: “No, sir. Just take these vitamin supplements, a little rest and watch some Adam Sandler movies from bed. You'll be fine again in four days. I can cook you some bacon if you like? For irony?”

catch some plague - pictures for sad children

I’m laying in bed, flat on my back without pillows because I’m trying not to put any weird strain on my neck, having spent the day in some pain.

Talking about how comparing OAuth et al to Facebook Connect is an entirely broken analogy and that the ball sits in the court of product makers like Yahoo! and Google to stand up to Facebook, not the OAuth and OpenID communities that just build the foundations of an open web.

It’s tempting to recognize the symbol as a “P for paragraph,” though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for “chapter.

As both its function and form suggest, the ampersand is a written contraction of “et,” the Latin word for “and.

<script type="text/javascript"> document.write('Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe\'s Flash Player. <a href=\"http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer/\" onmousedown=\"urchinTracker(\'/Events/VideoWatch/GetFlash\');\">Get the latest Flash player</a>.'); </script>

As you know, we are committed to delivering quality game experiences on Xbox LIVE and Games for Windows – LIVE. After receiving reports of errors with the Fallout 3 Game Add-on Broken Steel on Games for Windows – LIVE, our technical team removed the file from Games for Windows – LIVE Marketplace and worked to quickly resolve the issue.

It’s like, you’re both into the same music, and you have loads in common, but you’re not quite gelling.

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And don’t get me started on the whole “you don’t need to know html/css/js” malarky – it’s akin to calling yourself a graphic designer using PowerPoint and clipart.

Introduction to Wolfram Alpha by Stephen Wolfram

It’s basically infinity dollars.

We definitely want to have music recommendation,” Mr Ek said. “I’d love to work with someone like Last.fm and I think in a couple of days you’ll see some sort of announcement. Something will happen.

European pressing: Near the inner groove of the Outside is etched in script: “This is the way” and the Inside has “Step”. Both lines are taken from the song “Atrocity Exhibition”, which was released on the follow up Closer album, a year later.

It also features a bit of a novel subscription feature, where you can pay £35 and get everything that’s released for the rest of the year (including the album, several 7“s and an EP) and a load of extras.

DingoAccess » Refreshable Braille and the Web

The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, admitted today that the company has been losing out to Twitter in the race to meet web user’s demand for real-time information.

The great thing about it is when you start seeing it in places like China and Afghanistan. It’s democracy. We’ve kinda given democracy back to the world.

The story posted by the Web site was based on an unnamed tipster. No inquiry was made to CBS or Last.fm about the veracity of the anonymous source. Those who consult such blogs should be aware of the standard by which such postings are sourced and published.

Fonts available for @font-face embedding - Webfonts.info

• Wave is an open network: anyone should be able to become a wave provider and interoperate with the public network • Wave is a distributed network model: traffic is routed peer-to-peer, not through a central server

FUCK YOU SHAUN SMITH, I HAVE PLAYED AT BIRMINGHAM CARLING ACADEMY ALREADY, WELL THE ACADEMY TWO, BUT WE PARKED IN THE SAME PLACE THAT YOU WOULD, SO FUCK YOU.

1. Ben: And as you get within sight of San Francisco, you see this swirling mass of cloud and fog just over the city
2. Ben: It's quite a sight
3. Nathan: A prime photographic subject?
4. Ben: Potentially. Not sure what set up you'd want for it, and I've no idea where you'd take the picture from — I've only ever seen it from the highway
5. Nathan: A blimp
6. Ben: Oh, hmm, that's actually a real option here…

I wish you were a little less emotional about it but your arguments are interesting.

I’m a fierce defender of science because there are two great castles that we as a species have built - one is science and one is art. You can say anything about art, but science is cumulative and people say, “I can’t understand what’s at the top of that, so I’m just going to scrabble around in the mud outside the castle and build my own shitty version of it out of reassuring platitudes and borrowed terms.

The technology has been described as e-mail for the 21st Century, a rival to Twitter and to Microsoft’s collaboration software, Sharepoint.

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Video For Everybody is very simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> element which offers native playback in Firefox 3.5 and Safari 3 & 4: This is native OGG video playback in Firefox 3.5 (you get MPEG4 / H.264 playback in Safari). No plugins to install.

In other browsers that do not support <video>, it falls back to Adobe Flash.

A new monthly event for Bay Area designers to share ideas, learn, and get things done.   Chromatic combines the spirit and goals of developer-oriented events like hackathons and hackerspaces with the practical structure needed for designers and students of design to truly learn, receive feedback, and improve their design skills by talking with their peers.

Promote your message via YouTube if you want to. But it is no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.

One election official was quoted as predicting up to 80% of the country’s 46 million voters could cast ballots.

it may well be that we will tolerate these worse outcomes, because we decide it is somehow more important that we publicly declare ourselves, as a culture, to be disapproving of drug use, and enshrine that principle in law. It’s okay to do that. You can have policies that go against your stated outcomes, for moral or political reasons: but that doesn’t mean you can hide the evidence, it simply means you must be clear that you don’t care about it.

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• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each — a total of $1.9 million — for 24 songs.

A group of users want to mark up their iguana collections so that they can write a script that collates all their collections and presents them in a uniform fashion.

I don’t know anything about iguanas, but let’s pretend it’s about cats, which should be basically the same thing from a markup perspective. Let’s say someone in the group has the following text on http://example.org/:

It’s been a while since it was recreated, and despite assertions that the article could be improved “Web 3.0” remains an amorphous protologism without a single coherent meaning, and should be deleted again.

Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.

Just like on its desktop counterpart, the Mail app in the iPhone 3.0 update can now reply with only a quote from the original e-mail. To achieve that, you […] select the portion of text you want to quote. Then just hit the reply button and the selected fragment will be appended at the end of the email.

All these grown werewolf men falling in love with 4 year olds was a bizarre sentiment to write about, seemingly made justifiable because they wouldn’t touch them until they were of age, just act like their over friendly uncle for ten years…  That’s not really better.

A translation of Jon Dowdell’s “Adobe on HTML 5” piece. With apologies to John Gruber.

An overview of this whole Flash vs. HTML5 brew-ha-ha, and how really the developments concerned are just pragmatic evolution of technology butting up against a couple of short-lived, but lucrative, media opportunities. HTML 4 supported pictures. HTML 5 supports moving pictures. It’s progress.

♥

Some time ago I picked up some new personal domains, benward.me and bnwrd.me. I’d somewhat dismissed the .me TLD, but as time goes on and the opportunity to claim benward.com seems distant, I’ve decided to switch over.

Fun stats time!

What we’ve talked about is getting to a concept that we call livable communities, where people don’t have to get in a car every day. You can use light rail, you can use buses, you can use walking paths, you can use your bike.

We are asking all citizens (that’s you!) government agencies, local businesses and non-profits to do an assessment of their expenditures and see if they can shift an additional 10% of their annual budget to local independents. 

I can almost hear the Oxfam advert: “This is Andrea. Every week, she has to walk three bins all the way down the street, round the corner and into the backyard. It’s either that or people will see her bins. It’s crazy, but you can help.

Outlook is to be shunned (ideally scrapped), not “improved.” Its default settings – use HTML mail; top-post – single-handedly destroyed electronic mail. Someone who mails you via Outlook is presumptively a top-posting asshole who doesn’t know how E-mail works.

Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world. We have always made information available about what HTML we support in Outlook. For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers.

We’re pleased to announce a formal partnership with  Yahoo! to support the NVDA project. Their first funding contribution will enable us to implement enhanced table navigation and reporting in virtual buffers, ARIA land marks, ARIA drag and drop and other ARIA improvements in NVDA over the next couple of months

Michael Bay’s Rejected “The Dark Knight” Script - The Spill.com Movie Community

The upgrade option was not available, Microsoft said, because it was trying to comply with European competition regulations. This means that IE is not onboard Windows 7 in Europe.

Hotelling’s law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible.

Apple and other big phone makers have struck a deal with the European Commission to start selling phones with universal cell phone chargers starting next year.

What’s more troubling however, is the whole approach to performance optimisation as a matter of “knowing the secret handshake”. Optimisation is far more complex than that, and spending time on these “optimisation tricks” are rarely worthwhile and might often lead to unmaintainable code, if applied too early.

Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it.

A city where pizza is only consumed as a booze sponge.

While we recognize the value of the XHTML 2 Working Group’s contributions over the years, after discussion with the participants, W3C management has decided to allow the Working Group’s charter to expire at the end of 2009 and not to renew it.

Graded Browser Support Update: Q3 2009

This year’s contest was broadcast live on sports channel ESPN, and featured much of the fanfare usually reserved for professional sporting events.

These are the tags
That live in the house
The house of confusion
That Jeffrey built.

Morgan Freeman getting his “In Rainbows” box-set

Had a great conversation with Rebecca this evening about mobile UI design, off the back of Sony Ericsson’s rubbish new Android front-end that people are apparently and inexplicably fawning over. All style, no substance. It’s unquestionably going to be utterly irritating in actual day-to-day usage.

Song of the Day: ‘Run To Your Grave’ by Slow Club

What you may ask, is the dilemma, since it is clear that any decent human being would simply refuse to have anything to do with something so lurid?

For my money, Techcrunch is doing the best it can to be open and it’s laudable they’ve decided to only publish the “newsworthy stories.” They’re not being slimy, but they’re certainly being treated as if they are. People really like to hate Techcrunch.

Some months ago, Twitter fixed, or broke, their @replies feature. They made it so that all the ‘@username’ messages you sent to your Twitter stream were only visible to people who also followed ‘http://twitter.com/username’.

*[Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version

vanityfair.com](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/palin-speech-edit-200907?currentPage=1)*

But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

The correct answer to the classic trick question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”. Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer “yes” is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but “no” is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually “mu”, a Japanese word alleged to mean “Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions

Spotify iPhone App Kills Pandora, Last.FM, Slacker and iTunes in One Shot

Will my site be archived? - Yahoo! GeoCities Help

In our testing, we found the inclusion [of Flash] actually hurts operation of the phone more than it helps. When browsing to a site heavy on Flash (there are many), the browser loading times were abysmal. Furthermore, trying to view videos in-window produced choppy, nearly unwatchable results.

I have been getting annoyed by think pieces in newspapers who criticised the service [Twitter] but don’t really know how it works—they use their laptops predominantly as a light.

What shows up in Twitter, in blogs and in the other ways we are connecting the loosely coupled web into flows is that by each reading whom we choose to and passing on some of it to others, we are each others media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. Although we each only touch a local part of it, ideas can travel a long way.

Nick Douglas has reached the point of realisation that Tumblr is a better feed reader UI than others. Where, at this point in history, ‘others’ is pretty much Google Reader. He wants the ability to read other feeds in Tumblr.

Betsy McCaughey Interview on The Daily Show

One question asked: “Do you think the government should stay out of Medicare?” Keep in mind that this is a logical impossibility, as Medicare is a government program, which was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, to provide guaranteed health care to the elderly.

[…]

Among Republicans, 62% say the government should stay out of Medicare.

Drawn from the best local sources, Chicharrones contain natural pork, sea salt, cane sugar, and the finest chiles. The exquisite balance of flavors is just one of the reasons Chicharrones are the official snack food of the Cochon 555 national competition tour.

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We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever.

“We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice.

Being left-handed, I never use Cmd/Ctrl-C X V. I would have to take my hand off the mouse to do that. I use CTRL-Insert (copy) and SHIFT-Insert (paste).

This works in almost every Windows app, except for those by Adobe for some reason.

When it was released we found a few show stopping bugs that neither us nor Apple found which kept new users from playing the game. Whoops. We pushed 1.1 a few weeks later only to find that there were problems for other new users. Again none of this was caught by us or Apple. As they say, shit happens. We quickly put together a release and submitted it to Apple about 6 weeks ago.

Wayne Hayes, an Oasis fan since 1994, said: “I’ll miss the fact that Noel Gallagher and his employees are not called Oasis anymore.

“Hopefully changing their name doesn’t mean they will be changing their music, because I really like the Stone Roses.

A swarm of 10 trillion small mirrors launched into space one million at a time every minute for the next 30 years.

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The HTML5 specification as a single document will not be the document that serves front-end developers directly. It won’t be the go-to reference in the way that HTML4.01 is. Once HTML5 is stable (perhaps when it reaches Last Call in October) separate, companion documents will be produced. “HTML5 for Content Authors”, you might call it. It will cover the content of HTML5 at the correct depth and breadth for developers.

The trouble is, once you’ve gasped or chuckled over the YouTube clips of his most demented excesses, he’s actually incredibly boring: a fat clown with one protracted trick. His show consists of an hour of screechy, hectoring bullshit: a pudgy middle-aged right-winger sobbing into his shirt about how powerless he feels. It’s an incredible performance, but it belongs in some kind of zoo, not on a news channel. But that’s the Murdoch way.

Guitar Hero: The Beatles

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

I have now decided that making iTunes visually inconsistent with everything must be some sort of strategy. Here we are with yet another new window colour – instead of using the system grey gradient, it’s very slightly lighter (even though it was right in the last version). They’ve also lightened the already custom scroll bars, presumably so they don’t match the custom scroll bars in all the other iLife apps.

On top of that, it seemed like it might be an unsatisfying way of ingesting chocolate syrup. Like licking caramel off a badger, it ran the risk of being an experience that would you feeling vaguely unsatisfied and still quite hungry

Unfortunately I let that emotion get the best of me and I reacted by speaking out during the President’s speech. I should not have disrespected the President by responding in that manner. But I am not sorry for fighting back against the dangerous policies of liberal Democrats. America’s working families deserve to have their views represented in Washington, and I will do so with civility. But I will not back down.

My Saved Items from Fever (RSS Feed)

Billionaires for Wealthcare is a grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, industry lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system.

We are not a political, religious or even particularly well-organized group. We’re simple folk, thrilled profiteers pouring out of our corner offices to dance on the grave of “Change.

9.12 DC Tea Party - Interviews

If there was any question on where America stands right now I think these images from DC should help answer them. Look at the number of people. Y’know the estimates on the crowd size range wildly. Read a story last night from the ‘Daily Mail’ over in London they were saying it was around 2 million, I’ve also read stories that it was, y’know, the obligatory ‘tens of thousands of people’. Yes, there are tens of thousands; that’s low-ball, I think.

Whatever the actual number is, it really doesn’t matter.

“Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life” - Salon.com

• Spontaneous
• Obsessive
• Passionate
• Tangential

The previous post is a first step in trying to identify myself. I’ve stared at my unstyled blog pages for a long time now and not really being an artist, I got nothin’. If I were to approach someone to design my blog for me, or even just some art for the header, I haven’t the faintest clue what I’d ask for, not even a direction, style or starting point.

I linked to my exciting new Fever ‘Saved Items’ feed before, but the thought occurs that I could link to my various other feeds of affection as well, so here they are.

Leonardo’s surname was not Da Vinci. He was from Vinci, or of Vinci. As many critics have pointed out, calling it The Da Vinci Code is like saying Mr Of Arabia or asking What Would Of Nazareth Do?

Pipes: Ben Ward’s Lovestream

We figured FOX would rather show So You Think You Can Dance than broadcast an honest discussion about health insurance reform. FOX is an ideological outlet where the President has been interviewed before and will likely be interviewed again…

Not that whining particularly strengthens their case for participation anytime soon.

You live in their house, Wallace. Don’t expect everyone to come to your parties.

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The Ultimate Productivity Blog

Of course, patriots know that the 50-star flag truly represents one nation under God and our Founders’ republic, but modernists simply don’t get it. So what do you say we make a statement by flying a different flag and educate our neighbors when they ask us, “Why are you flying that flag instead of the contemporary Stars and Stripes?” (If you insist on posting a modern USA flag, too, then get one that is tea-stained to show your solidarity with our Founders.)

Lord Mandelson denied this, saying that what he’d really said was “bunch of chumps”.

Typedia: Blog: Machine Tags for Type

$ defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1

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As a citizen of the world who believes that No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation, I’m glad that the Obama White House’s jingoist rhetoric and attempt to pay back Chicago cronies at the expense of undermining our relationships with our allies failed.

Among the toughest questions posed to the Chicago bid team this week in Copenhagen was one that raised the issue of what kind of welcome foreigners would get from airport officials when they arrived in this country to attend the Games. Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, in the question-and-answer session following Chicago’s official presentation, pointed out that entering the United States can be “a rather harrowing experience.

Will California become America’s first failed state? - The Observer

Millions spent by lobbyists fighting Obama health reforms - guardian.co.uk

If you attended Cupcake Camp today in San Francisco (and let’s face it, you should have done; it was delicious) you may have wondered between mouthfuls of cake and icing “Just what are these splendid and eclectic tunes accompanying my noshing?”—or a thought transcript to that effect.

Like Debating a Pyromaniac in a Straw Man Factory

The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain - President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.

It’s astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming

It’s not even really a web site,” Steele said. “It’s a new platform for us.

Microformateers on Twitter

Flickr: The GOP Faces Pool

All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true in itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

*[Support Details

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Only 36% of people view the GOP favorably, with an outright majority of 54% viewing them unfavorably.

The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

The first worm to infect the Apple iPhone has been discovered spreading “in the wild” in Australia.

I saw the mayor of New York said today, ‘We’re tough. We can do it.’ Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it’s your daughter that’s kidnapped at school by a terrorist?

Update, Jan 20th, 2010: Jon Collins from Dropcards very graciously got in touch about this post, and so I’ve added a few points of clarification at the end. I want to stress that I’m criticising here not just about the particular implementation, but an overall experience strongly influenced by actions of record labels, and the capabilities of underlying software platforms. It is a complete user-experience criticism.

As for the larger issue, supporters of action on global warming might be well-advised, for the sake of argument, to concede more than they should. OK, they might say to the deniers, we’ll treat all of CRU’s data as irrevocably compromised, and never refer to it again. From now on, we’ll rely only on information from NASA, NOAA, and the Japan Meteorological Agency, as well as the affirmation of the UN’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. The consensus that warming is happening would be unaffected.

For instance, when posting a Flickr photo from a user directly, “via” should really be “by”. Using “via” only makes sense when you’re giving someone credit for introducing you to content and to link back to them as thanks. Even in those cases, however, it’s inappropriate to remove the creator credit on the item.

Ben Ward on Skitch

For Mac users who want to use their favorite text editor everywhere. QuickCursor allows you to edit text from any application in your favorite text editor

Activision’s main response to No Doubt’s claim is that that the band requested their likenesses be limited to perform the band’s own songs in-game – however, it made this request “only after the Band Hero programming was finalized.” Activision seeks an unspecified amount of damages and interest from the band, as well as court and attorney fees, and a return of all payments dispersed to the band for their initial involvement.

Gitmo is “the best place to have [trials], it’s the best place to house them. It’s the safest place,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told reporters. “More importantly, it’s the place that keeps activist federal judges from making activist decisions that could end up turning [terror suspects] loose on the streets of America.

LOVE YOUR SCROLLBAR

How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room

The construct of your gags this week is:

Inspired by Wordpress’ seriously clever use of Loren Brichter’s new Tweetie options, we’re launching our own Tweetie and Twitterrific compatible API. This Twitter-like API should make it easy for a lot of existing Twitter clients to start supporting Tumblr. The really cool thing - because our following models follow a lot of the same principles, we’ve been able to take advantage of a ton of native features:

• Retweeting = Reblogging
• Replying = Reblogging w/ commentary
• Favoriting = Liking
• “@david” = ”http://david.tumblr.com/”
• Conversations = Reblogs