Also see the list of articles, none to be taken seriously.
Matthew Thomas: Netscape is dead, long live Mozilla.
Netscape’s control over Mozilla was the single biggest factor in making Mozilla’s usability suck, from the project’s inception until two days ago. That’s a pretty tall order — to make an interface design crappier even faster than hundreds of volunteer geeks are — but somehow, Netscape managed it. That was the main reason I used to get so angry, so often.
29,000 rubber ducks, tossed overboard between China and Seattle more than a decade ago, will wash up on New England shores shortly.
After a mammoth journey, they are expected to start washing up on the New England coast. And while they will be bleached and battered from their journey, they are providing invaluable information on the ocean’s currents. They were flung into the Pacific on the International Date Line, level with Oregon, USA.
[via Boing Boing Blog]
News.Com: “An increasingly popular technique for preventing e-mail abuse is frustrating some visually impaired Net users, setting the stage for a conflict between spam busters and advocates for the disabled.” [via Scripting News]
Via Car Talk (so you know it will be funny), problem reports from pilots to maintenance crews.
Problem: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
Solution: Almost replaced left inside main tire.
[More]
Here one week, gone the next.
The Register: RFID Chips are Here.
CNET News: Wal-Mart cancels ‘smart-shelf’ trial. The retail giant cancels testing for an experimental wireless inventory control system, ending one of the most closely watched efforts to bring RFID technology to store shelves.
NY Times: A Safer System for Home PC's Feels Like Jail to Some Critics. But by entwining PC software and data in an impenetrable layer of encryption, critics argue, the companies may be destroying the very openness that has been at the heart of computing in the three decades since the PC was introduced. [via Tomalak's Realm]
Jon Udell on cross-browser JavaScript programming:
Mozilla has emerged from its long nuclear winter to become a pillar of the Linux desktop. Alpha geeks everywhere (including Sun and Microsoft) are running Safari on their PowerBooks. But here’s the reality check you knew was coming: cross-browser and cross-OS compatibility remains nearly as elusive as ever. I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say that testing CSS and JavaScript effects on the three major OS platforms, in six different browsers, isn’t a good use of anybody’s time. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
I posted a blow-by-blow account my trip the Bermuda 1-2 sailboat race back from Bermuda, with pictures and a couple of movies.
I’m leaving for the next couple of weeks on the Bermuda 1-2 race. The second leg (Bermuda to Newport) starts this Friday.
Here’s hoping for a smoother start than the first leg’s.
Email access will be poor. (And yes, there is a dearth of Wi-Fi hotspots in the Atlantic.)
The race organizers put up a Java race tracker applet. If you’re curious how I’m doing after June 20th, check class 4, Nimros.
Joe Gregorio has a RESTy comment API based on RSS 2.0. His article compares it with the soup of other protocols available: TrackBack, PingBack, and Post-It. One problem: it links to the author’s home page rather than a specific post, so it’s not good as a link-notification mechanism, as TrackBack is. And John Gruber points out that TrackBack isn’t really that good for comments in practice, because the dominant implementation just resends the article summary.
His Referrers list, however, continues to show a lot of junk along with the real links, including one user’s local Radio Userland aggregator on port 5335.