Dylan Schiemann

Sodipodi is an open source svg editor in early alpha development that feels like a powerful SVG editor written by someone by people who really understand the capabilities of SVG. Lately I’ve been wondering whether or not SVG is a commercially viable specification. Adobe has stopped development efforts on its viewer, mozilla has not made it a top priority (though there are a few capable volunteers working on it), and Microsoft has not made significant browser updates in years. Not being able to do real drawing on the client-side is one of the most significant limitations for web site and web application developers.

In an article about Sammy Sosa and his corked bat, Hal Bodley compares Sammy Sosa using a corked bat to Bill Gates stealing a hundred bucks. Of course, when I read that quote, I think, isn’t that what Microsoft does to you when you want to buy a new computer with Linux instead of Windows. 🙂

Incredible.

The Wall Street Journal had an article recently about words that change their meaning, such as the many meanings of the phrase shut-up. And then, a couple of my friends announced that they are eloping. But it seems that the word elope no longer only means running away and secretly getting married. Now, it also means a small wedding gathering in another city for 20-30 of your closest friends and family. You can even elope in Santa Monica with packages at some of the nicer beachfront resorts.

In an effort to be as surprised by the 2nd movie as I was by the first, I have managed to not see or hear anything about the Matrix sequels. Between avoiding the Matrix Anime shorts to covering my eyes and ears when green text starts scrolling down the tv or theatre screen, I have succeeded so far. A few Matrix links that are interesting, but in no way spoil the sequels, are the Matrix in Legoland and an article that attempts to explain Why the Matrix has such a strong following despite its limited box office success (could it be that it is rated R, which excludes a large percentage of the population with nothing better to do than watch Harry Potter 10 times at the theatre?).

Daniel Glazman compliments this site. Now if only I had time to finish the content, make the printer-friendly version work properly, add the RSS feed and archiving for the blog, do a better job with my semantic markup, … then maybe it would really be worthy of Daniel’s praise. The thing I do like about this site so far is that it is functionally different than most other sites, and it uses JavaScript and CSS to make the site more usable (though not necessarily more accessible).

The Mozilla Firebird browser currently has much better themes than mozilla (Phoenity and Qute. I’m looking forward to using firebird on a regular basis once thunderbird is also ready. For now, I’m settling with Pinball.

I’m looking for an 802.11g or 802.11b PCMCIA card that is easy to install and configure with Linux. So far I am reading through Wireless Networking Guides, learning about chipset manufacturers for wireless cards. Any suggestions?

Update: From what I’ve read so far, there are presently no available linux drivers for 802.11g. I’ve settled on the Linksys WPC11… it is based on the Intersil Prism II chipset which is widely supported with the wlan-ng driver project, there is a reasonably good Linksys WPC11 tutorial, as well as unsuppored drivers from Linksys themselves. I’ve been warned by an e-mail from Nayib Kiuhan that Linksys has a new version of the WPC11, version 2.7, that uses the Broadcom chipset, which is known to not work with Linux. I was fortunate to not have this problem.

Migrating to xhtml2.0, another xml.com article. The article summarizes current problem with using xhtml, such as the problems with using the application/xhtml+xml mime type with current generation browsers.

mozilla has released the much improved version 1.3. Key features of this release include the completion of the bayesian spam filtering implementation (which was great in 1.3 alpha and beta) and midas (the analog of isContentEditable).