I know this will go up when I get back from holiday in a weeks time, but I just wanted to note that stanstead now has wireless networking in the form of BT Openzone. Now I'm thinking I'm got power from underneath one of those rack of TV monitors in the public departure areas. So wireless would be a god sent right now. And you know what I'm willing to pay the 15 pounds plus vat for 24 hour access. I'm going to be around stanstead for at least another 6 hours. Oh yeah wireless is charged at 6 pounds plus vat for 1hour otherwise. I just wish i could get a stronger signal from where i am.
I think the best form of action at the moment is wait and see how things go, as i got more than enough to do without wifi at the moment. Maybe pay the 60mins of access when I go into the departure lounge where the wireless signal is coming from. Then again, i know my flight will be delayed, so maybe the 24hr one wouldnt be such a waste.
Author:
Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser.
Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io
Table design vs CSS – easy decision surely?
Caught this in my feeds today. Credit to accessify.com for the link. Its basicly a presentation about why table based design is stupid and why we should be using css. Yes nothing new, but well presentated none the less. Will be useful for my students and maybe management.
Oh I spied this in Zeldman's blog today too. And I'm just fumming with rage! Good on Zeldman with a leveled response, I wouldnt be so leveled with my response to it.
Seems a lot of people are really UPSET at this article….Well, I guess, if you been brainwashed for the last 2 years or so on the absolute superiority of CSS (e.g. sort of like the Nazis who thought they were the superior race) only to watch it crumbling down with one little web page article, I guess you would be upset as well. Not to mention that they spent all that time redesigning their website without tables only to figure out that in order to get any of that neat stuff like, catalogs, forums, search results, product lists, address books, etc. you got to have tabular data…i.e. TABLES……
Oh please no one was saying tables are completly banshed, but for design layout yes they are! Dont even get me started on the rest of the points!
GentooX 3 home edition
Been meaning to put Linux of somekind on my xbox for a while now, when GentooX 3 home edition comes out I'll install it. So this serves as a reminder to keep an eye open for it on my feeds and the GentooX site
Multi channel publishing
Oh my life, this is where i want to be. I cant believe some of the ideas coming out HP's research labs in Bristol. It really makes me want to return to bristol when I hear such forward thinking ideas. Why am I not part of this, I will never know.
So yes it all started with this feed. I started reading it and thought yeah tell us something we dont know. And I actually prefered Adobe's Network publishing
term as it was slicker and seemed alot more ubiquous than multi channel publishing. But then I got near the end and realised that not only have HP labs outlined the statergy but also created a opensource tool which works on the same ideaology. Formatting Objects Authoring Tool, or FOA for short
.
Written by researcher Fabio Giannetti, FOA is a Java-based authoring tool that allows you to create document templates and styling information without having to write them in the XSLT or XSL-FO programming languages. (XSLT, or eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, is used to convert XML to other formats, most commonly, to HTML for screen display. XSL-FO, or eXtensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects, is one component of the XSL language used to describe a format for XML documents.)
This comes at the same time as OpenOffice.org 1.1 final, Microsoft release Office 2003 and the W3C.org finalise XForms.
I'm going to give FOA the full run through while on holiday in germany on the tablet to see how good it is. One thing I did notice while browsing the FOA site is, FOA can only open XSL files created by WH2FO or by itself? Humm, doesnt sound good, but I shall see if that will be a problem or not. Oh I've added myself as a tester for good measure.
Blojsom Imap fetcher and more blojsom
Bill McCoy wrote a fetcher to drive blojsom from an IMAP server
Sounds like a great idea, but I still need to figure out abstract authentication for blojsom otherwise things like this mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. That also reminds me I need to check out blauth at some point, maybe I'll give it a going over while I'm waiting for my plane to berlin Friday – Saturday morning.
Custom t-shirts
Because I'm a geek at heart, I've always fancied making my own tshirts with dodgy things which only a few will understand on it. Now I know there are places like think geek and others which do tshirts for geeks already, but there crap in quality. Unfortually the Nike, Adidias and even diadoria tshirts I routinely wear actually have a quality beyond the typical cotton tshirts you get from think geek. If I could only print on top of my nike tshirts i would be very happy.
Anyhow, saying all that, I found this today too. Maybe I'll setup cubicgarden.com tshirts store one day – hehe
Time travel
I have always been interested in the time. But something kinda of shocked me yesterday at the party I had at my house. Miles didnt believe time travel was at all possible. Hummm i thought, thats odd… All the things I have read of the years of my life have pointed in me in a direction that were not far off. David seemed very interested in why I was a believer and Miles not. Not obvioulsy it was a party and not everyone wanted to hear a ramble about time travel at 1am, but I started thinking of ways to prove certain theorys right.
The one which came up alot was is there anything faster than light?
Now I would say no, based on all i know but black hole theroy is still along way from being solved. Anyway, I started thinking again about a quick way to sum up all what I had learned over the years. Then I remembered the documentary from channel4 which pretty much covers the major areas including quantium theory in a simple way. I need to make a handy version available for others one day soon. Maybe Mpeg4 and stick it online?
Interesting enough however, Miles thought I was romancing the idea of time travel than really believing in it.
Could it be true than back to the future, William sleator and others like it have spelled out theorys which convently fit into the frame? I believe not but hey what do i know? maybe little but theres no douht that people are taking Prof Ronald L. Mallett seriously. His paper on the ringed laser system that he has built in fantastic. I highly recommend listening to Prof Mallett here in real audio. Also found the old link about the reality of a time machine. Oh and I know this is old but worth listening to also.
Matrix Revolution reviews and spoilers
Dave has been sending me a few links, here are the best ones.
The mother of all spoilers – Read first few sections and seriously had to stop. I keep getting tempted into reading more.
Matrix revoultions reviewed at Aint it cool – Good review from the people who hated Reloaded, but adore Revoultions.
Needing to Know
Found this while looking around the guardian site tonight too, Talk Time: Dave Green. Co founder of NTK.
Talk time: Tim Berners-Lee
Not great but still a good read anyway. A very short interview with Tim Berners-Lee by the uk guardian. Oh I also wanted to say how great his book is…Weaving the web. Which is also featured in my new bookmarks blog