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by Stuart Langridge.
Original Post: The tyranny of tabbed browsing
Feed Title: as days pass by
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kryogenix
Feed Description: scratched tallies on the prison wall
Tabbed browsing is great in all respects except one: it encouorages you to store away an interesting link in a tab somewhere to come back to later. So, oh, that looks interesting, must make a note of that, (middle-button click on link), I'll look at that tab later. Repeat for a couple of weeks and you not only have a process that's been running for ages, but you can't upgrade to Firebird 0.7 because you have all these links to note on your weblog before you can shut down your running Firebird 0.6.1. So, in a pitiful effort to clear out some of these tabs, herewith a collection of all the random stuff I've stored as interesting for the last fortnight or so:
mod_accessibility for Apache, "a fully automatic aid to making websites more accessible". It's no panacea, but it does do some neat stuff, like bung all your crappy old HTML through some kind of HTML Tidy equivalent thing, or create a "text only" view.
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), a Joel "I'm in a fight with Ned Batchelder" Spolsky guide to Unicode and what you have to know. Useful-ish, in that you'll understand more of the theory, but I bet you still won't get how to actually use the smegger in your work. Still, no knowledge is bad knowledge, and next time someone asks you about codepoints in the pub (happens to me all the time) you'll have a glib answer ready.
Suing Your Customers: A Winning Business Strategy?, or, How Henry Ford Righteously Screwed His Competitors The Last Time Big Corporates Tried To Kill Innovation, or, Read 'Em And Weep, RIAA. Or, ahahaha, hope it works that way this time too.
Introducing mod_python, which is something I really must prat about with when I get a chance, which will obviously be never.
Bob Cringely, someone who I forget about for six months at a time and then rediscover, to marvel at his articles. Wish he had an RSS feed.
Mahogany Mail, which seems to work seamlessly with Mutt and may therefore become my desktop mail client of choice. Except that it talks lots about its built-in Python interpreter and then says in the README that "Note that this is currently not very useful and may even be broken due to lack of interest in this functionality". Sigh. And it should be "owing to lack of interest".
The Digital Imprimatur, John Walker's rather dystopian view of how Big Media, the courts, and the assorted governments might just kill the internet and all its promise. I mean, yeah, imminent death of the net predicted, film at 11. But Walker has a habit of being pretty perspicacious about technology trends...
How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time, an article on worms, the threat that being able to remotely r00t lots of boxes noninteractively poses, and how to make a better worm. I wrote a thing about making a better worm once, and this is much the same sort of thing except proper and serious and with good research and all :) A bit concerning, although a bit maths-heavy too.
The "Trusted Computing" FAQ, or What DRM Means To You. I go and re-read this every few months, lest I forget.
Lie Detector, a brief sumary of how much the Bush administration is lying in its pro-war propaganda programme.
Ned notes the Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference using Jython, Xalan, and XSLT. Nice. Actually, the idea of being able to distribute Python code with jython.jar and knowing it'll run everywhere with a JVM is quite compelling; easier than distributing the CPython runtime, perhaps.
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