False Positives , Ian Irving's Adventures in Tech, Toronto (and HK), Sci and SciFi

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Is an Internet war looming?

"Rogers raises stakes in broadband battle


Rogers Cable, Canada's largest cable company, is offering its Internet subscribers in Ontario and New Brunswick a new premium service running at 5 megabits per second in addition to its regular 3 Mbps service.

QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks

QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks It comes recommended. It contains more than 150 pages with CSS and JavaScript tips and tricks, and is one of the best sources on the WWW for studying and defeating browser incompatibilities.

I'm not Just the Hypocrisy, I'm a Member.

The Advertising Slogan Generator

Corporate Identity : 15 Trends Taking Shape In Logo Design"

http://www.gdusa.com/feature/4_03/trends.php

So if your going to charge me real money, you had better NOT retrend this stuff.

Fifteen trends of contemporary logo design, according to the Graphic Design USA web site, include (among others):


  • Droplets - two or more droplets caught in the act of merging

  • Pop - as in the culture of the 60s
  • Natural spirals - chaotic rather than precise
  • Canted - geometric figures wrapped on a sphere
  • Alpha-face - turning a word into a face or person
  • Punctuation
  • Wire  



Via boingboing via Smartpatrol

I remeber see this earlier but it making the rounds again.

Friday, January 23, 2004

January 25 is Robbie Burns Day

Robert Burns was born on January 25th, 1759.
Everything you need to know here and here

This truth fand honest Tam o' Shanter,
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter:
(Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses,
For honest men and bonie lasses).

Now in Atom!

A Atom RSS new feed is now available to this blog. See the Site Feed link to the left side.

BLOGGER - Knowledge Base�-�What is Atom?: "What is Atom?"


2 quick comments : 1) Why Atom, why not one of the more mature and widely supported formats? 2) How is RSS going to effect BStats (a web traffic-tracking service for blogger). I would like to know how people found me, what they are looking for, and how big is the audieance. Yes It is partial ego, but it is almost the only feed back I get.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

the Testing Bug

A Dozen Ways to Get the Testing Bug in the New Year

and

ONJava.com: Effective Unit Testing with DbUnit [Jan. 21, 2004]

Saint Babbage

via Saint Babbage

After a long, virtuous life in which he never used a 2-digit field to represent the year, a programmer died and was met at the Pearly Gates by none other than Saint Babbage himself.

As they walked down the hall in Programmer Heaven, they came to a door, and he looked inside to see lots of programmers busily working, and the walls were covered with user manuals, every one different.

"Oh, that's Linux heaven," said Saint Babbage. "We gave them all the manuals they could possibly dream of, well formatted and professionally prepared, answering any possible question they might have."

The programmer looked in the door to the next room, and it, too, was full of happy looking programmers typing and merrily computing away. The shelves on the walls were absolutely crammed full of boxes of commercial software. He looked Saint Babbage, and Saint Babbage said "That's OS/2 heaven. They finally get decent app support."

"But we have to be quiet going past the next door, OK?" The programmer nodded, and the two tip-toed past another door. Yet another room filled with happy programmers.

Once they were well away from the door, the programmer said, "What was that all about?"

Saint Babbage nodded knowingly, and replied, "That's Macintosh Heaven. They think they're the only ones up here."

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

never let an ad agency near your website

Web design: never let an ad agency near your website: January 19, 2004 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern

Gung Hei Fat Choi!

On the eve of the Year of the Monkey, Year 4702, I'd like to wish us all a Healthy, Wealthy, and Happy Year.

Case Dropped Against Student Who Created Satire Site

via Techdirt:Case Dropped Against Student Who Created Satire Site follows up on this story. He is STILL a ass, and an abusive one at that.

Quick Links (YMTIML)

The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work: That's were I always go wrong ! It's either the simplest thing that still doesn't work or the most complex thing possible (which sounds like a general description of java).

MySQL develops new graphical admin tool MySQL Administrator provides all the capabilities of the old command-line tools and adds new features, Urlocker said. Some of the tasks that database administrators can perform with the new console are: server configuration, user administration, database monitoring, backup and restore, and log management...also..- An alliance with JBoss Group LLC to integrate the JBoss application server with MySQL's database servers, to improve the way the products work together. All in all a very good thing.

From Raible Designs :Coldtags these is a cold fusion devived jsp tag set. Raible mentions the Country tag and the State tag. Looks useful. I'll have to a let examine the tags they have defined to see if it would save time/effort. The HtmlCalendar bean looks promising.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

The Way of Nigella

This is for Elicia :The Morning News - The Way of Nigella

URL Rewrite Filter

Russell Beattie discovers URL Rewrite Filter at Paul Tuckey's URL Rewrite Filter. Looks useful. Something to tuck away for a later time. Something like this seems like it should be a part of Struts (or whatever your framework of choice/joy/damage/pain is).

After 50 years, soldier reunited with his family in South Korea

This story After 50 years, soldier reunited with his family in South Korea brought tears to my eyes.

Mr. Jun was lost to his unit just days before the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting, and South Korean military records listed him as killed in action. But he was not dead, just taken prisoner.

Somehow, Mr. Jun managed to survive -- not only 50 years in a country ravaged by a bankrupt economy, a hard-line Communist regime and terrible famine, but also a remarkable escape from North Korea that came close to disaster at many turns.
...
When he was captured, Mr. Jun had parents, two sisters and a brother. They all assumed he was dead, and he had no idea what had happened to them.
...
Mr. Jun was finally reunited with his brother and sisters just after Christmas. Tears of joy and sadness flowed.

"My little sister, come here! I will hug and carry you on my back as I used to," Mr. Jun cried to 57-year-old Jun Boon-yi, as he saw her for the first time since she was a toddler.

"I am sorry that I was away so long and did not do my duty as a brother."

The woman, her face now creased and weathered and streaming with tears, buried her face in his chest.
...
Mr. Jun, the 34th escapee since 1994, then headed to his old hometown, where sister Yong-mok promised "to feed him well."

"This is a miracle he could come back home alive after all that hardship in North Korea," she said.


What horror the man must have gone though. The hardship of being separated from this family multiplied by the hell on earth that is North Korea. Every happiness to Mr Jun and this family.

I should note that the story was covered earlier (on Dec 24th (which is why I missed it?)) by The Marmot's (Final) Hole: Welcome Home and Seeing Eye blog : 53 YEARS LATER has a very emotional picture.

Monday, January 19, 2004

Disable Flash in Mozilla, kill ads dead.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog: Disable Flash in Mozilla/Thunderbird. I wanted Flash Click To View and now I found it (via Jeremy Zawodny). This will block Flash animations in Mozilla/Firebird. It's still possible to view them (if you click on them).

Another Firebird/mozilla trick: type about:config in the url box and you'll see all the configuration parameters.

The zombie that will not die.

As part of the runup to yet another LotusSphere at mickey's dolphin world :The Long Goodbye for Lotus Notes

Politically, Notes apps reside on the borders between business units. Notes HR apps are the J. Edgar Hoovers of the enterprise, capturing the sensitive details of where the corporate bodies are buried. Notes' seminal delivery of secure replication allowed sales force automation to establish interconnected mapping of complex relationships that could survive individual personnel changes and the loss of rainmakers to competitors....

But don't count Notes out. Being dead has been good for the architecture that inspired the Web. As long as IBM keeps the porting path open;from those original Notes apps to Domino to Lotus Workplace portlets to a DB2 alternate store in Domino 7 to an Eclipse assembly tool in 2006;it keeps Global Services busy and profitable.


Also Microsoft is trying to, skin the cat, at least give it a new home:

Microsoft Zeros In on Lotus
Over the next six to eight months, the Redmond, Wash., company plans to roll out a series of initiatives, including a tool kit, due this summer, that allows Domino developers to create Notes- and Domino-based Web services using Microsoft development tools such as Visual Studio .Net and Visual Basic....The as-yet-unnamed tool kit... creates the .Net Web services, they will be consumed by Microsoft applications such as the Office suite, SharePoint and Exchange.

All this in the bigger picture of what IBM/Lotus is planning : IBM Beefs Up Lotus Workplace Platform

A point release of Notes and Domino, 6.5.1, is planned for the first quarter of next year. Then in the second quarter, IBM plans to release Workplace 2.0 featuring a rich client built on the Eclipse framework, collaborative document management and Workplace Builder, an application development toolkit for Workplace.

At the same time, support for team workspaces and document management will be added to Notes and Domino.

By the fourth quarter, Workplace will get a disconnected client and mobile development support in its 2.5 version, while the 7.0 version of Notes and Domino gets integration with Workplace, enhanced portlets for WebSphere and support for DB2 as the data store.

The 8.0 version of Notes and Domino, likely for some time in 2005, will allow Notes users to access non-IBM applications, such as a Siebel Systems Inc. call center application for example, from within Notes.


By far the biggest problem is expecting IT managers and theibossesss to digest all this and plan out the next 2 or 3 years.

More YATFITU

Via Raible Designs : kuro5hin.org || Tweaking MySQL (4.x) Primer



and Jakarta Struts Tutorials

More Googling by the Numbers

Google also does unit conversations : 23 miles = 37.014912 kilometers or 71 degrees Fahrenheit = 21.6666667 degrees Celsius or half (1 US cup) = 24 US teaspoons and you can do math 234 * 34 = 7 956


see more at Google Web Search Features