Live from the Formosa #3 is neither live nor from the Formosa, but I’m in it
Nat and Miguel from Novell respond (scroll down a bit) to the 1985 Bill Gates photos from Teen Beat
Consistency in Save Confirmation Dialogs in Gnome
For slice of readership to whom this type of thing is relevant, I have compiled an overview of of the inconsistencies in file-save confirmation dialogs in Gnome. There is also a page with screenshots of the dialogs in question. I’ve posted the overview to the Gnome desktop development mailing list for discussion.
If you don’t know or care about (or any combination therein) what I’m talking about, I thank you for your patience.
I’m stuck at my friend Dan’s house for the storm – there are photos
Ben Goodger, lead developer on Firefox has announced he is now working for Google (still working on Firefox though). Congrats Ben!
This Is Wonderland
I have a rule for evaluating new TV shows: All tv shows are bad unless proven otherwise.
This “guilty-until-proven-innovent” policy has served me well. Occasionally I miss out on a good show until years later, but it’s a worthwhile sacrifice.
This past year, I became aware of the un-badness (with apologies to George Orwell) of two shows, both from the CBC. First, Davinci’s Inquest, which has been running on the CBC for years, has become one of my favourite shows. A top-secret source tells me that it was considered for syndication on A&E, but was passed over for being too specific to a particular region (it is set in Vancouver). The show follows the coroner of Vancouver and my people on the ground on the West coast tell me it is remarkably true to life in the city. The season finale (2hrs) runs Sunday night on CBC.
Another CBC drama that has defied my expectations (which were admittedly quite low) is the new series This Is Wonderland. The show follows the dizzying work-life of Alice, a rookie defence layer, and Toronto’s Old City Hall serves as her wonderland rabbit hole.
The premise isn’t really that important. They key is that the show is well written, well directed, and well acted, all of which contribute to a compelling set of characters. It is somewhere between drama and comedy, being too funny to be a drama, and too heart-wrenching to be a comedy.
The second season starts Tuesday night on CBC. Recommended.
Mitchell Baker from the Mozilla Foundation gives a rundown of the day Firefox 1.0 was launched
2005 silverorange Summit Keynote Address
Earlier this month, those of us at silverorange retreated to a beautiful cottage on the north shore of Prince Edward Island to take stock of the year past and plan for the year to come.
Dan James, the CEO of silverorange, has posted his keynote address from our summit. Don’t be fooled, though, by our appropriation of large corporate terminology (summit, keynote, CEO). There was no convention center, no podiums, and no power-point projections (though we did use a projector to play Mario Kart). Our technology infrastructure for the weekend consisted of a mass of ThinkPad power adapters, wifi hubs, and game consoles.
We were really just 10 people sitting around a fireplace talking about how to make next year better than the last.
Thoughts on Weblog Comment Spam Prevention
As has been publish on a zillion weblogs today, a group of the most significant search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search) and weblog tool publishers (Sixapart, Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, etc.) have agreed to implement a new tool to prevent weblog comment spam.
The idea is simple. Weblog tools will tag links left in comments with a rel=”nofollow” attribute. When search engines see this, they will not follow the link and as a result, comment spammers will not get a bump in the search engines by leaving rogue links.
I can understand that comment spam is a serious problem. It has been quite a problem for me here on this weblog. However, I would like to add my small voice to those who are concerned about the ramifications of this new tag.
Tagging all links in comments left by weblog readers means that none of these links will contribute to the great hive mind that is Google PageRank. There are loads of great and valuable links in weblog comments.
Some systems will likely turn off this feature for comments from “trusted” people, such as logged-in Blogger users, TypeKey users, or LiveJournal-friends. However, this limits the wild-westiness™ of weblogs and the ability to benefit from the mass of communication by improving search results.
I applaud those involved for working to curb weblog comment spam. However, I fear this may hurt the web in the long run.
Good post by Asa from the Mozilla Foundation about how to make HTML form text input boxes suck less in Firefox