Other hoo-ha

• Lots of good stuff recently @ Many-to-Many
• Designweenie has a quite nice design
• Meyer: Containing Floats

Lots of discussion recently on structural HTML:

• jko: Standards don’t necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct
• Bowman: On Standards and Semantics
• mezzoblue: Semantics and Bad Code
• Pseudo Design: Semantic Markup
• SimpleBits: This Validates!
• Simon: HTML: More structural than semantic
• SimpleBits: SimpleQuiz > Part I: Headings

Hmm… Popdex Citations seems to be missing most of these; Google has clustering for news, but not blogs (yet, I’m assuming).

Next time @ In-N-Out: yeah, I’d like to order a 20×20.

apparently redirects to goatse.cx now

Anonymous Spammer says:

As a professional sender of UCE, I just want to tell you slashdotters to keep on playing with your spam filters. As long as you use spam filters on your e-mail, I can continue to reach my real intended targets, those non-slashdotters who do not know better and will buy my products or click through to my client’s websites. Your filters really help cut down on the complaints to the Internet service providers I do business with, and as long as not too many complaints come in their marketing people assure me we can do business. Of course, I still waste your bandwidth and mailbox capacity, but you no longer complain to uce@ftc.gov, my access providers, or anyone else who might cause me problems. My yahoo and hotmail and other accounts for replies are lasting much longer before getting shut down because someone complained to these service providers. And my clients are even reporting that they can start mailing out 800 numbers like 1-800-901-3719 again and they will not have you damn geeks set up your modems to keep autodialing them, since you spend your own time and effort to filter the e-mail and only clueless users who might actually call will see the numbers.

The Mendacity Index: Which president told the biggest whoppers? – The last 4 presidents get rated on their biggest lies. Guess who wins out?

Related: an excerpt [8KiB TXT] from Al Franken’s new book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.”

Interesting, jz and Doug Bowman will be doing some consulting on Apple’s website.

Although promised otherwise, USC still seems to still be offering NS 4.76 for download (as well as NS 6.0.2, a release so horrendously buggy that it doesn’t exist in Netscape’s product archive).

A recent /. post prod me to do some research on CD-Rs for archival purposes. It looks like the MAM-A (and MAM-E in Europe) lines of CD-Rs, with the combination of Phtalocyanine dye and superior uniformity/quality make it ideal for archiving (and it looks like there aren’t many other players in the market anymore). Their top of the line Gold/Gold (650MiB) goes for $0.94/pop in quantities of 100 ($1.48/GiB), while the Silver/Gold (700MiB) can is $0.66 in quantities of 100 ($0.97/GiB).

Of course, doing large backups makes one wonder, why not DVD-Rs? And why not? A 50/pack of MAM-A DVD-Rs is $169.99 for 50, which comes out to $3.40/disc, or $0.78/GiB.

BTW, doing searching for the cost/GiB conversions has firmly convinced me that separate binary unit notation really is needed, otherwise evil marketing causes confusion.

• How Much Data Is On a CD/R? – nice table of sizes, CA-DA and CD-ROM data numbers
• DVD FAQ: DVD-R – interestingly enough, while CD-Rs are sold labeled in MiBs, DVD-Rs aren’t.
• MAM-A Technology: Technical Papers – some actually useful information here
• Mitsui Chemicals sells CD-R/DVD-R production – trivia bits; MAM stands for Mitsui Advanced Media
• cynikal’s Powerbook Superdrive Firmware Update – uncripples PB G4 Superdrives; 2X DVD-R, 16X CD-R, DVD-RW support
• Region free DVD hacks – UJ-815 has no region free firmware yet. see also: xvi’s page

Microsoft’s big role on campus:

Bearing gifts of cash, software and computers worth $25 million, Microsoft Corp. came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, saying it wanted to jointly develop educational technologies. Some scholars expressed more suspicion than gratitude.

Was on Sony.com today; the front page design isn’t horrible, but notice anything going on with the text? That’s right, the tabs are JPEGs, not GIF/PNG. Quite icky. Of course, I probably shouldn’t be one to talk…

I signed away the rights of my first film in class today. One can’t take the class without doing so.