PUBLIC MARKS from fredbird with tags lang:en & type:log

why not add a series of "Sunset modules" that expand the commons not by expanding on 'fair use', but rather by expanding on 'limited times'. Let non-commercial and non-derivative license modules be assigned a reasonable sunset via modules with (say) 1, 3, 7, and 14 year sunsets. This would allow the artist to use conventional proprietary licensing fees while the NC/ND was in force, but then expire into the copyleft (or non-copyleft) free commons.

- Normalised data is for sissies - Keep multiple copies of data around - Makes searching faster - Have to ensure consistency in the application logic

star-rating source code bit using xhtml/css

Here’s a radical idea: don’t even think of making your own language until you’re sure that you can’t do the job using one of the Big Five: XHTML, DocBook, ODF, UBL, and Atom.

I was asked about how did I do the rough worn type for post headlines on Khmerang.com, so I thought I’d write a kind of a tutorial on worn type. It’s quite simple technique, derived from Gilder/Levin image replacement, but instead of replacing the whole text, I’m just placing a repeating pattern image on top of it.

Development frameworks are supposed to be our friends. Instead, they often just get in the way. Frameworks suck.

The more I study them, the more convinced I am that Google has a truly revolutionary business model, and are the most visible pioneers of the emerging 21st century Gift Economy. Microsoft, and the irresponsible brokers who keep flogging overpriced stocks based on unsustainable growth promises, and everyone else who owes their living to the Ponzi scheme that is the modern growth/market economy, should be very afraid.

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig.

Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing.

Google isn't worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft's search efforts...although the media's focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running the smartest operating system?

Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.

Attention, demi-troll ! Non, je n'ai pas désinstallé firefox, contrairement à Suzie. Et je n'ai pas l'intention de le faire, du moins dans l'immédiat. Et je continuerai vraisemblablement à l'utiliser quotidiennement.

So, you run a multilingual web site with PHP and you want to serve the reader's choice language if available. No problem, HTTP carries user's language settings within Accept Language instruction, you just have to parse it. Here is a sample function

Had some conversations about tag disambiguation with people at work and in the pub yesterday (that’s right folks - I’m lots of fun to go drinking with). Stu reminded me that in the del.icio.us tagging folksonomy world, people are able to choose meaning by social convention - i.e. they see which tags people are using for what sort of things, and then choose an appropriate one for their needs (maybe to get the biggest audience).

Recently I've been asked to code up a few sites that require the Web page footer to be positioned either at the bottom of the browser window or at the bottom of the Web page – whichever is visually lowest.

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb.

Just a little howto for those of you who would like to add a nice Add to blogmarks.net link to the articles published on their blog (or anything else).

So this is my best guess as to how an "operating system" based on the Web (which I will refer to as "WebOS") will work.

Here's an interesting fact upon which I'll base the rest of my argument: people are horribly inconsistent when assigning keywords to documents. If you give two people the same document and ask them to assign a set of keywords to describe it, then the sets of keywords that they assign will agree only about 20% of the time. This was one of the problems that lead to the development of full text indexing systems. If we couldn't choose a few keywords from a document, we would use every word in the document as a keyword!

I see a sore need for what I’ll call “usable content.” I thought I’d take a moment and let y’all know what I think usable content is, and what I think it isn’t. Of course, this is pretty general and content needs to be tailored to your goals and audience. Take this with a grain of salt.

Simms, the foundation's policy director, said the supply of uranium needed to fuel atomic plants was too limited and would be exhausted in 85 years based on current industry estimates of availability and the existing rate of use. "If you suddenly dramatically scaled up in a very short period of time, you'd also, a little bit like oil, you'd very quickly run into natural resource limits," he said. In addition, increased use of atomic power would present greater risks to the problem of weapons proliferation and greater exposure to possible attacks by terrorists, the report warned.