I was alerted to this Inaccessible Website Demonstration through mezzoblue. Which gets the message of accessability over very quickly. Its not just about the technology its about the way you design the sites. The blury example is one which touch me, as I've always been told my sizes are too small on cubicgarden.com
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
Opie (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment)
The question of what I do with my old compaq 3630 ipaq still bothers me. I cant just sell it as I wont get much for it and I would rather make sure it makes a difference to someones life than sell it. As such…
Anyway I found something to do with it. Thanks Infosync. Install Opie Linux on it.
So I did.
Its alot of hassle to put opie on the ipaq, but if you follow the instructions to the T it works fine. The scarey part was when you first boot up the ipaq from cold and it sits there booting up opie without much feedback. Anyway it all looks good now.
When you start up opie the screen is a little low res and it flickers a bit, but my old ipaq screen wasnt the best anyway. Looked at the updated packages and downloaded a few bits and bobs like web server, samba server, etc. To note it doesnt support 3com wireless cards, but it liked the oroncio and compaq cards. Never had a chance to read the opie user manual till now.
At last a update to exist
I was wondering if the open source xml database exist was dead? Well it seems no, there was a 0.92 update a few days ago on the 11th August 2003. Seems the biggest feature is XUpdate
xmldb's xupdate information page. Yeah just as though, xupdate will allow you to modify xml data on the fly though a query, just how you do with sql. I also believe you will be able to change xml structures using xupdate too? Yep the xml schema is gonna be more inportant than ever before if that is the case.
The future plans of exist look interesting too.
XML schemas
An existing XML schema could be used to control the indexing process. Currently, it is only possible to exclude or include selected nodes from the fulltext index.
Stored procedures/Constraints
I would like to enhance the pre- and postprocessing features of eXist, probably by using concepts similar to Cocoon. Each collection could have a collection configuration document, which defines how to process documents.
How to use newsgroups and p2p
Right I found it again, if anyone asks me about newsgroups or p2p tools.
Go to Slyck's guide, I only wish he'd sort out his rss feed because it keeps crashing my aggerator.
Oh I dont forget zeropaid too, there rss feed also does the same thing!
Presentation Judo
Useful link if your ever planning a conference presentation by Mark Jason Dominus – Conference Presentation Judo
And Tufte?s presentation tips never go a miss here either. Edward R. Tufte?s Presentation Tips.
Chris moneymaker wins poker world series
Dave, alerted me to the fact that this years poker world series was won by a guy who regularly played poker on the internet. He had hardly played in real life and entered the world series only because he won a internet tournment which had cost him 40 dollars. So yeah from 40 to 2,500,000 dollars aint bad for the american bank accountant.
Some links dave sent me,
gamble.co.uk, google search for chris moneymaker and this months wired's magazine A piece of the action
The greater question I guess is how much is poker reading and how much is reading players? Most poker players upto now subscribe to reading players and cards second. What does Moneymaker's success say about this? Maybe poker is all about rounders after all.
Some interesting links I picked up about stratergy using computer ai.
The New Card Shark and
The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group and there Java Poker Client for Windows and for Linux/OSX
Phrack is back
Man I feel so lame sometimes, there is so much to read online and I dont ever have the time to sit and read it. I thought having a personal aggerator would be a good way of filtering the noise. And it is but I'm finding so much I cant run through it because there not rss feeds.
Now my solution to this problem is using cocoon's aggerator generator, I can grab a html page, tidy it into xhtml and extract the bits needed for a valid rss feed. And I can see it working, but its alot of hardwork for a simple job.
_life is ment to be hard_ says me.
Anyway the sites I would start off with, phrack and ntk.
If you dont know phrack, then your've never heard of 2600 or anything like that, its time to learn. It describes its self as 'a Hacker magazine by the community, for the community'
and yep they've been there since the mid 80's believe it or not. I still remember getting there txt files from bbs's and ftps on my old st. Anyway they always have the fresh news of exploits and hacks, all rounded up in a humourous not too serious container. Its spot on, trust me.
Anyway, they have put all there archives and all new issues online in grabble txt files within logical folders. Even though everything is in txt i should beable to do simple aggeration like pulling all the txt files together into one large one. Perfect for reading on my ipaq.
NTK is a odd one, I like it but I dont. There content is great and so fresh, but there style and presentation is enough to put me off from reading it regularly. Anyway Dave usually tells me all I _need to know_ from NTK. Hehe.
But anyway, yes I like your content and I want to represent it in something less html and more xml based so the presentation is very seperate from the content.
Now one of the things I could do is grab there main pages and tidy it then turn it into rss. But have you seen the mess which is there pages? Yuk, span elements everywhere. Oh well at least its not like there menus which are full of dont tags.
Anyway, if I get time I may write the xsl to do the transformations, sure others would be interested.
Open source really pays
So where did it all start?
Well we needed a blogger app for staff and students to blog from anywhere in the college. And our college has the additional problems of using mac as well as pcs and laptops not only desktops.
So how would we do this? Well I evaluated many blogger apps but they were either too complex or not cross platform. But yes there was one which was simple and cross platform. Chronicle lite
Anyway theres major problems with the graphics display on mac osx, so much of a problem I sent Paul a screenshot of the problem.
Paul replied that he had no mac to test on and that he wouldnt support the mac because of that. Oh, were a little stuck then?
Not if we send him a mac complete with osx! Yes thats right, we are going to send Paul a mac so he can fix the problem and maybe do some of the things we want to include into clite. Obviously because clite is opensource, everything we suggest for development will be open to everyone. Its a odd sitution because everyone wins. Paul gets a new mac, we get unlimited licences of software which does what we want and everyone else can use the same software with or without modifications. Yep the only people loosing out are those who charge for software. It really does pay to go opensource…
And in the spirit of opensource, I will now be plugging clite and its development when ever i can. lol.
Oh and here's Pauls wishlist if anyone else feels the need to help him out.
Is Apple Going to iApp Itself Into Irrelevancy?
The london underground old map
Nice link from London underground, charting the orginal 1933 london underground map and how the underground really looks when placed on top of a real street map.