random($foo)

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).

Other hoo-ha

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

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

Turning off auto-email checks would probably make me a lot more productive. Juha Haataja writes:

Jeremy Zawodny
writes: “E-mail is not real-time. It never has been. Why do you assume
that your messages and received and read within 20 seconds? Some people
actually work.” — This is a good point. You don’t need to be
available immediately! There is a recent report
(in PDF) about the cost of e-mail interruption: “The time it takes the
average employee to recover from an email interrupt and to return to
their work at the same work rate at which they left it, is on average
64 seconds.” Thus, if you receive 50 e-mails in a day, you might lose
almost on hour of productive time. Thus, setting in your mail program
the interval between e-mail checks to one hour is a good tactic, as is
disabling all notifications of received e-mail.

Joyce Park: Towards Semi-Permeable Blogging (w/ mod_pubsub) – very good summary of the problem-space (-1 for use of term ‘Blogistan’)

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

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…

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.

So, I’m not quite running around with my head cut off, but I haven’t really had a chance to post anything recently. Last week was spent trying to tie up loose ends, filling out lots of paperwork (class registration, financial crap, etc.) and this weekend was topped off by coming down with a nice little bug. My first class starts tomorrow, so we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’ve realized that I’ve acquired almost 40 open browser windows (it’d be too scary to count the number of tabs).

• MT-Medic – less messy than writing Data::Dumper debug code, semi-related: can’t wait for Perl6 Method Introspection
• Recent Cogent talk:
  • What about Cogent Communications?
  • Impressed with Rackshack and Interland’s new offers
• Fixe Orbit Network Search – shows peering data, etc.
• The Netlantis Project – visual network graphing
• Programming with Twisted:
  • Network programming with the Twisted framework, Part 1
  • Network programming with the Twisted framework, Part 2
  • Network programming with the Twisted framework, Part 3
• 0.9 = 1
  • Conceptual Proof – since there’s no number however small that is >0.9 and <1, they must be equal
  • Algebraic Proof
• iSpeakIt – takes a webpage and converts it w/ Text-to-speech into sound-file — hmm, not to impugn the authors here, but selling this for $10? This is pretty trivial to do w/ standard system calls (probably can be done in Applescript even).
• MyIE2, Avant Browser – two IE shells
• Remove Content from Google’s Index, Automatic URL Removal interface
• MIT Media Lab Viral Communications Program
• Berkeley DB XML development weblog
• Macromedia – new site, now in XHTML/CSS.
• Deep Navigation examples, comparing some IT sites:
  • IBM
  • UW Computing and Networking
  • NYU Law Library
  • NYU ITS

  My thoughts: listings are fine, but for large sites, it probably makes sense to organize by role (more specifically function) – need to come back to this later

• Justin on Machine Friendship and Portraiture