Archive 4/2006

Well, nothing really special, but since we put some hours of work into this I thought it would be worth to share this little paper Michael Ofner, Martin Santner and I are currently attending a course by Giorgio Brajnik about web accessibility. And one of the tasks it was analysing problems on websites we noticed during normal web activities (so no active reviewing). The result is a paper of about 10 pages (A4) were we describe problems on following websites in relation with Grice's Maxims and Wilson's & Sperber's Relevance Principle:

Just a short comparision of the two systems based on what I've read on the web and what I like and dislike about each of them. Note: I haven't really worked with any of them yet, but I definitely want to use a distributed versioning system for some stuff. This is just a really out of the hand listing of things I noticed while playing around with those systems, so it's ... informal would definitely be an understatement.

This is also work-related so I think I will post this one here as well as on gamerslog.com:

As I've written before on gamerslog.com Sony quietly released version 2.70 of their PSP firmware and to be honest: I have a feeling why there was no big announcement. At work we are currently experimenting with Flash on handheld devices so I ... first things first: Installing was a pain thanks to the slow Sony servers. It took about 10 minutes to download 19MB (on a normally very fast line ). Then came the installation itself and naturally my PSP was only half-way charged. So I had to wait until it was fully charged to get to the actual setup.

... or basically a downtime of my 1st-tier ISP (bottom-up since I don't know how many tiers my traffic goes through). Did you ever want to export to your Top10 of all times from your iTunes library to show off on your homepage (for example) or are you just bored like me?

Today I heard thanks to Bill Beebe about a software update for the Nokia770. Since was curious about this gadget since its announcement and know it a little bit from the office I wanted to find out, what has been changed in this release.

I'm currently writing on a small paper for a course about web accessibility by Giorgio Brajnik of the University of Udine and the requirements for the paper are XHTML. Since every paper in my opinion has to have a table of contents, this also counts for the XHTML paper But updating the TOC everytime you make a change manually?! Nah. It's one of these times when I happy that I can code

I love remixes, esp. if they are based on HipHop or Rock. Don't ask me why, but somehow I simply love the combination of different music styles and I love even more if one of them is Rock or Electronica A few years ago Linkin Park released their album Reanimation which still is IMO the greatest LP album of all

Since English is not my native language i18n is one of the hot topics for me on and off the web. Let's see, how is it done by most open source applications? Right, GNU gettext. There's also a library for Ruby called Ruby-Gettext. Since I love rubygems the first thing I checked when I learnd about Ruby-Gettext was if there was a gem available for it. Yes there is, in fact there are multiple versions:

$ sudo gem install gettext
   Password:
   Attempting local installation of 'gettext'
   Local gem file not found: gettext*.gem
   Attempting remote installation of 'gettext'
   Select which gem to install for your platform (powerpc-darwin8.5.0)
    1. gettext 1.4.0 (ruby)
    2. gettext 1.4.0 (mswin32)
    3. gettext 1.3.0 (ruby)
    4. gettext 1.3.0 (mswin32)
    5. gettext 1.2.0 (ruby)
    6. gettext 1.2.0 (mswin32)
    7. gettext 1.1.1 (mswin32)
    8. gettext 1.1.1 (ruby)
    9. gettext 1.1.0 (mswin32)
    10. gettext 1.1.0 (ruby)
    11. gettext 1.0.0 (ruby)
    12. gettext 1.0.0 (mswin32)
    13. Cancel installation
   >

Another entry into the "Giving (.*?) a try" series This time's topic is the StructuredBlogging plugin for WordPress.

StructuredBlogging is an initiative bringing to you means to blog in a more semantic way giving automated aggregators some new ways to categorize your content. For example if you want to review something, you write a review that can now also be recognized as such by automated aggregators.

This book was the first Enterprise book for me and also the first by Dave Stern and .... well, I think I should simply stop to pretend as if I could write decent book reviews and simply say: I was really enjoying this book. I was actually enjoying that much that I ordered the 2nd part when I was only half way through this one.