June, 2004

With much pomp and fanfare, pillowmint has been launched. Stop by for completely conflicting opinions on inconsequential topics. Suggestions for new topics are always welcome.

I don’t even have to say what the fuck. It is implied. Read this press release at Gotham Comics and you’ll understand what has got me to this point of pure anger. Apparently Peter Parker is now Pavitr Prabhakar.

When I first saw it I thought it was a spoof or something. But this is the Gotham Comics website. It’s a goddamn press release. There’s some fairly high quality artwork of Spider-man in a fucking dhoti.

Honestly, who the hell are they trying to appeal to? Even the farmers in India have better fashion sense. Look at the shoes!

Someone has completely lost their minds. They call it transcreation. I call it crap.

Finally, the LZW compression patent runs out and Unisys doesn’t get it’s grubby paws on money for every single application that uses GIF compression. The Unisys Website has some more details about the whole thing. But really, at least open source software can build in the damned thing to distribution binaries instead of making me rebuild it with some obscure switch turned on.

This one’s for you: Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Ad Graveyard. Thought you’d get a kick out of it.

I’m new to the blogosphere. I knew it existed, frequented a few blogs here and there and never thought about setting up my own. Which is rather weird, now that I think about it, since I’m all for trying out new stuff. Anyway, the reason I finally got involved was because I read a blog with a beautiful design, actually it was this very template.

As a web developer by profession I was naturally attracted to the simplicity of a page that lost none of it’s beauty because it didn’t have aqua buttons or flash or javascript trickery. I had no idea what I was getting into when I right clicked to view source. It was nothing short of a revelation.

Nestled comfortably in this elegantly coded html file was nothing whatsoever. That is to say there wasn’t the stuff I expected to see. Instead of the nested tables and IE/Netscape hacks with indentation from hell I saw no content formatting code at all. The content was there in simple <div>s and <p>s but that was all.

They had managed the holy grail of web design: Separation of content from formatting. CSS is finally living up to it’s promise.

Now I’m not an idiot. I know what CSS can do, hell I use CSS on every site I make. I just didn’t know how far people had managed to get it to go. There were always compatibility issues, unsupported properties and a plethora of other problems that had no solution.

Things have moved on since the last time I looked. I’ve been gobbling up information on the new way of doing things. A list apart, CSS Zen Garden and Douglas Bowman’s Stopdesign (he’s the guy that made the template I’m using and redesigned Blogger) have all been incredibly useful resources. Needless to say I’m moving ActivElement‘s site to this kind of separation and all new projects will use this method alone. To hell with Netscape 4.

Job #1 is to redo my home page with pure CSS. It should then be relatively simple to get this blog to match.

This is one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” sites. BugMeNot.com offers logins for all those sources of information that require registration now. Brilliant idea. Add to favorites for sure.

There are those that have so little faith in the American judicial system that they think SCO actually has a case. I beg to differ. This is a company that have been duped by their lawyers into believing they can win this thing.

Groklaw has a write up on Judge Kimball kicking the case out and giving SCO 30 days to make good. The odds of SCO making good are slim at best.

It is almost comical to see SCO play the bad guy trying to get money from people giving software away. Linux is obviously the good guy, grassroots movement, everything for free, tree-hugging hippie of the software world. As with any good hollywood movie, the bad guy gets what’s coming to him and the good guy gets the girl… which in this case is probably more market share.

This entire fiasco can only make Linux stronger. It’s like a huge PR exercise to prove to people that the Linux code is not only utterly free (because the copyright holders have chosen to release it under the GPL), but that it is so good that SCO, the makers of UNIX, think it has to be a rip-off of their operating system. I can think of no higher praise.

SCO are done for. To all you SCO stock holders, a word of advice: Eat the loss and sell now. It will only get worse.

Holy moly! I have got to get me one of these!

As usual, Robert Cringely manages to blow away everyone by seeing something where others don’t. The man is remarkably perceptive and, perhaps more importantly, is capable of delivering his message to enough people thanks to PBS and his geeky fame. Engines of Change is just another great piece of thinking. Everyone knows the technology exists, he just plugs enough of it together to make something completely different happen.

What I want to see (and haven’t seen yet) is a cheap IP phone that uses WiFi. It only needs 802.11b but needs to be in the approximate price range of the Nokia 3310. Now that would make me a rich man.

Been busy redesigning my website. Here’s a sneak peek at the graphics I plan on using there:

Hopefully this one will get completed. The old one was under construction for an obscene amount of time.