Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl

There’ve been some people bitching about the free_culture presentation being in Flash. As if simply by it’s format it’s somehow ickier or inferior. Now I’ve bitched about the difficulties of putting the thing together because of the technical weaknesses that Flash still has, both in its tools and design, however what gets me is these people that are dogmatic about it.

“You should use SVG. Sure you couldn’t actually do it since the tools and players aren’t there, but you should have done it anyways because it’s better.”

Or even better yet, you should spend your time contributing to that project instead of actually doing what you need to get done. (Obviously you should do this because the person posting this is much too busy and has more important things to attend to… like bitching on other message forums no doubt.

Now, it’d be nice if there were some alternatives to Flash, if only for competition’s sake, but while SVG has some neat potential, it’s nowhere near prime time. From a purely format/technical perspective SVG is better than SWF in almost ever single perspective (see: Comparing .SWF (Shockwave Flash) and .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format specifications), but from the viewpoint of actually getting anything done (not to mention seen)? Forget about it

And what about SMIL? I don’t know, you tell me? What about SMIL?

In any case, the source files are online. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

Posted on by lhl

A friend sent me a link to thispast week’s WSJ Personal Technology column, which talks about the T-Mobile Sidekick, a surprisingly reasonably priced piece of technology. It’s like a Accompli, but priced at $199 instead of $599, and with unlimited (always on w/ GPRS) data usage (web, email, and aim) and 200 anytime / 1000 weekend minutes for $39.99 a month.

That’s pretty damn impressive and has me almost convinced on changing service right now. If the web browser is decent (allowing me to program usable web services) or even if there’s a decent programmable API (it has 4MB of Flash and 16MB of RAM…) and if it had Bluetooth (and a bluetooth headset accessory), I’d switch in a heartbeat. As it is though, I’m just going to lust for a while until I find out more information on its programmability. Hmm, I wonder if work will pay for one of these…

Random thought: imagine one of these puppies with built-in wi-fi and netstumbler. >;)

Posted on by lhl

Hmm, this is interesting… Originally, I thought that Mozilla’s CSS error parsing was at fault, but discussing it with JesseR, extending the test case, and looking at how CSS2 blocks are defined, it appears that because blocks can be nested, Mozilla’s parsing is correct and the W3C CSS Validator is wrong.

If declaration blocks can be nested, then this:


a { foo:bar; }

b { baz:qux;

c { quux:quuux; }

d { quuuux:quuuux; }

should evaluate to:


/* Mozilla's result */

a { foo:bar; }

b { baz:qux; }

and NOT:


/* W3C css validator */

a { foo:bar; }

b { baz:qux; }

d { quuuux:quuuux; }
Posted on by lhl

We don’t need no steenkin’ title. Go free_culture go!

One nice thing about all these links rolling in is getting to see all the referers. Some pretty interesting sites/blogs/discussion going on. The only negative is that there are actually quite a few “members only” boards that I can’t look at. For some reason this really annoys me. Anyway, here’s a partial list of somet interesting sites so far:

Organica has it’s own list of crawled blog links.