My first article for Wikinews was published quickly. Cool! (oh, yeah, and there is bird flu on PEI)
Framing Terror
The media is a buzz today with the news of the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. I have no doubt that he was a bad dude. However, it’s worth taking a look at how this is being presented and covered.
See this screenshot of the CNN.com US home page. Note that they went to the trouble of framing and matting photo. I can only assume that some framing shop in Washington D.C. got a call from a Whitehouse aide with the weirdest rush-job they’ve ever had.
For bonus points, you can click the photos of the dead man to watch video of the actual bombing that killed him.
We’re getting pretty used to this kind of media presentation by the US government. It’s worth stepping back and taking a look at how absurd things have become. They framed it. Are they going to hang it up in a dining room?
Selecting Columns and Rows in HTML Tables with Firefox
| Col 1 | Col 2 | Col 3 | Col 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Row A | 1A | 2A | 3A | 4A |
| Row B | 1B | 2B | 3B | 4B |
| Row C | 1C | 2C | 3C | 4C |
| Row D | 1D | 2D | 3D | 4D |
A random tip, because I find it so handy on rare occasions:
You can select columns, rows, or blocks of cells in HTML tables in Firefox (or any Gecko-powered browser) by holding down “Control” and
selecting with the mouse. Handy for copy+pasting data from tables in websites.
Try it out in the table to the right.
Our local Canadian member of parliament on the descision to stay in Afganistan to two more years.
TV Series Pitch: George “W”, M.D.
I’ve got what is clearly a brilliant idea.
A sit-com/drama (a dramady?) about a doctor who, when push comes to shove, is the decider. It’s ER meets Scrubs meets The West Wing meets Commander in Chief meets Grays Anatomy meets Scarborough Country.
I call it, George “W”, M.D.
I wonder if I can get Ian Williams to write the pilot…
I wonder if ‘Eagle Fever’ is anything like the bird flu.
How to tell if your web-mail system is any good
| Commercial Web Mail providers | |
|---|---|
| HotMail | No |
| Yahoo Mail | No |
| Gmail | Yes |
| Open Source Web Mail packages | |
| IMP/Horde | No |
| RoundCube | Yes |
| SquirrelMail | Yes |
| Hula | Yes |
Here’s a quick test to see if you web-mail system is any good:
When you first log in, does it show you your mail (your Inbox), or something else? If it shows you something other than your mail, what do they think you were logging in for?
The table to the right shows how the leading commercial and open-source web-mail systems stack up.
Condoleezza Calrissian?
Is it just me?
I always thought she looked eerily familiar and vaguely galactic.
Thunderbird Extension Request: Colordiff for Thunderbird
I have a quick Thunderbird extension request for the throngs of aimless developers waiting to build software at my whim. When reviewing changes to a source code repository, such as Subversion or CVS, most tools offer nice syntax highlighting for the “diff” view.
Even on the command line, output of SVN and CVS commands can be “piped” into the command-line utility, colordiff, for a similar beautification.
Several projects I work on (or hang around pretending to work) have mailing lists of changes to CVS and SVN repositories. I’d love to see a Thunderbird extension that provided syntax highlighting for the diff format automatically in these emails.
Fun review of presentation about Firefox to elementary-school kids