addedentry, posts by tag: computing - LiveJournal

By now, you must have seen 'Google circa 1960'. In the same outdated vein, thingsmag pointed to last year's The Victorian Internet - what remains up is relatively worksafe, by the standards of B3TA. And from the elite pairing of ravenblack and several_bees came Privates Eye, a euphemism genitator. I mean generator.

Catching up: Simon and Garfunkel, again; a party chez nou which let me put usernames to faces and hear the always gratifying 'So you're Owen Massey!'; and a visit to Swindon. Come back!

There's something uniquely nostalgic about British geeks - their fetishes for the computers of their youth ... seem to overwhelm their future-thinking impulses time and time again. [Tom Coates on NotCon]

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I live with a web designer who comes home every day after sweating blood on some minor detail to make her employer's website look perfect in every browser, on every system, to everyone. She takes special care to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act, even taking advice from the Royal National Institute of the Blind.

I wonder why she bothers. daweaver notes that the All Music Guide, once as useful as the IMDB, has just paid someone lots of money to redesign their site precisely so that Mac users can't use it. One enterprising chap is working on a CSS rewrite of the new version. How better to persuade companies that accessibility is the simpler route than to sit down and do it, for free?

In the UK, Matthew Somerville has become well-known for this, creating accessible front-ends to National Rail Enquiries and the laughable Odeon cinema website. Instead of taking the point, Odeon sent him odious letters. Now the RNIB are on the case.

Did Boo.com die in vain? Will we see the return of animated workmen on under construction icons? The email address of the Odeon's marketing manager appears in the threatening letters. Why not send him a ROT-13ed, uuencoded email?

As the UK Web Archiving Consortium toddles in the footsteps of the Internet Archive, here's a timely article on the traces you'll leave on the Web when you die.

I went to NTK's NotCon yesterday, with huskyteer and fivemack. I'm not a fannish sort, so this was my first con of any description; and to paraphrase Douglas Adams, I still think digital cameras are a pretty neat idea, so an emerging technologies con was particularly inappropriate. I had a great time.

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Alice and I left before our heads exploded, so I missed the talks by simon_cozens and Cory Doctorow, and the launch of http://www.theyworkforyou.com/. But as Tom pointed out, unlike the revolution, they will certainly be blogged.

I get no spam. At all. My mail provider must have struck a deal with Brightmail the Devil.

But today, one very short, text-only, non-sexual spam snuck through. It was from Egregiously D. Merchandises.

The final question would certianly [sic] be: .cat? Meow!! Yes ;-) But then .net means "clean" in Catalan, and .nu, "naked". And this can be expanded to exhaustion. Some names are nicer in different parts of the world. That's a fact, not a bug.

From the application for a Catalan top-level domain. See also Get Out Of My Namespace.

Growing up in a house full of Labour Party activists ensured that I never succumbed to lazy cynicism about politicians. On the other hand, I couldn't have made the mistake of imagining any glamour in politics as I tramped round suburbia to deliver leaflets in the rain, or grudgingly provided unpaid tech support across Bristol North West.

Talk of 'the new localism' and 'neighbourhood forums' overlooks the fact that grassroots democracy is very, very boring. Yet its effects can also be directly visible: so I was delighted to discover that one of my ward's Labour councillors has a weblog. Cllr Andrew Brown (Blackheath) started writing only last month, but has already astonished me with the news that Lewisham won last year's 'London In Bloom'. (You can imagine the competition.) Promoting Lewisham is worthwhile, though I'd be perfectly happy to read a record of committees and casework. Narrowcasting at its best.

Only an estate agent would locate our flat in well-to-do Blackheath. A capricious boundary is all that removes us from Lewisham Central, whose new Lib Dem councillor Andrew Milton uses his weblog to celebrate his recent by-election victory. His gallery of local eyesores is effective evidence of his focus on pavement politics (literally).

Both councillors provide a little personal background. Cllr Brown's favourite record is Sonic Youth's 'Daydream Nation', which secures my vote. Cllr Milton prefers the Horst Wessel Song.

My brother also sits on Lewisham council and I shall encourage him to start a website. Better to follow the examples above than that of the parish councillor in York who runs her own porn site.

Robots are the new black, according to The Guardian's fashion writers. uitlander's memories of 'I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek' prompted me to check if any nice person had made Marvin the Paranoid Android's two singles available on the Interweb. Inevitably: here are 'Marvin' and 'Reasons To Be Miserable' (do you see what they did there?)

Looking for information about today's Chinese New Year celebrations on the London Assembly website, I wondered, why isn't it london.guv.uk?