Month: <span>June 2001</span>

Salon: Three strikes and she’s out?. “Jenna Bush may be facing not only her father’s wrath, but a jail sentence under a zero-tolerance law he signed.” Aah, the irony.
10:45:07 PM  

Frontier News: “Frontier 7.0fc1 for Mac Classic has been posted now too. Windows coming soon.”
10:44:06 PM  

Frontier News: “Frontier for OS X fc1 has been posted. This is a final candidate — which means we’re looking for deal-stoppers.”
8:04:17 PM  

CNN: California mulls legalizing ferret ownership.
8:03:34 PM  

Sjoerd: “Yes, everyone knows how a menu bar works, but not what it’s effect is in a webpage. Read Drop-Down Menus: Use Sparingly by Jakob Nielsen. A menu bar is used for issuing commands, not for navigation. Even if the user understand that this menu is used as a navigation tool (most people have discovered that by now), it is a clumsy tool… For webpages it’s often better to give the user a limited amout of choices, and clearly describe each one of them.”

Aah, but Sjoerd assumes that I wanted to use DHTMLenus for navigation. 😉 I do, however, agree that drop-down menus make for a crappy navigation interface.

On the proof-of-concept site I started last year, the menu commands are indeed navigation elements to parts of the site’s editorial interface. This was by no means ideal. What I was working towards was having a DHTML menu-bar, which actually issues commands to the server, while the browser remains on the same page. The site itself can then become an application, and the menu is (part of) its editing interface. I see this as conceptually different from using drop-down menus for navigation.
5:50:21 PM  

BBC: Nasa hypersonic jet fails. “Nasa aborts the test flight of a hypersonic jet designed break the aircraft speed record after a booster rocket veers out of control.”
5:35:03 PM  

Wired: Getting to Core of Power Crunch. “Part of California’s power problem is that it can only move so much of the stuff from one place to another. A project that will replace the steel cores of wiring lines with fiber optics would increase the flow without adding new lines.”
5:34:37 PM  

The Register: Ballmer: “Linux is a cancer”. “If by ‘educate’ [Balmer] means punish with higher costs those who fail to appreciate the wisdom of volume software leases, and inconvenience Win-XP users who like to re-format on a regular basis with a limit of two clean installs, then perhaps he might have chosen different wording.”
5:34:13 PM  

AP: Iraq to Stop Crude Oil Exports Monday..
5:32:11 PM  

Plastic: Self-Described “Christian Guerillas” Inflitrate Gay Days at Disney World
5:31:42 PM  

Rich Salz asked a very creative question on the xml-dist-app mailing list tonight, illustrating yet another ambiguity of the SOAP serialization spec, resulting from its dependence on XSD: “Which of the following are legal serializations for the integer 12?”… All of them? Also, what about 42?
3:34:41 AM  

Science News Online: Molecular Chemistry Takes a New Twist. “Pophristic spent 5 years crunching calculations with a supercomputer to figure out what underlies the stability of ethane’s staggered conformation. First, she mathematically modeled ethane and removed the parts of the calculations that relate to the steric effect. To her surprise, the ethane molecule remained staggered. Something else must keep it in the staggered conformation. ” I don’t quite know why, but I’ve always loved reading this kind of stuff…
3:34:21 AM  

Hack the Planet: “Dan Gillmor says a Microsoft rep says Ballmer intended to limit his comments to the GPL instead of all open source licenses, although IMO the slip seems too convenient to be unintentional.”
3:31:42 AM  

Jake's Brainpan

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Scripting News: “Perhaps it’s ironic that The Standard has a clearer view of the big picture in XML. I thought Edd [Dumbill] would not go down this path when he took the editor job at XML.Com, since he’s an XML-RPC developer. How did he forget this in his survey of what’s happening in XML? Because it’s not embroiled in W3C politics, it’s not important?” [links added]
11:33:30 PM  

Salon: The unlikely populist. “All this doesn’t quite explain how California lost power over its destiny to Texas. In fact, it was the work of Californians, Republican and Democratic politicians alike, along with state energy executives looking for bigger profits and an asleep-at-the-switch media. And while Governor Davis may well have to go to war with Texas energy profiteers to ease the crisis, to date the evidence shows he’d rather wage a rhetorical war against Washington and Texas than a real one.”
11:29:26 PM  

Sjoerd: “My javascript is often so simple and minimal, that it really surprises me that it doesn’t work on the Mac.”
4:00:21 PM  

Dan Sheridan: “The registration process is fundamentally flawed, at this point. It is the ultimate example of poor process engineering and customer service. For all of the partnerships, new economy leadership Network Solutions possesses, it is still a government agency at its core.”
3:57:46 PM  

This is just plain weird: Poodle eats womans lip as she slept.
3:56:02 PM  

BBC: Hypersonic speed attempt. Final checks are being carried out for the first test flight of a jet designed to travel at seven times the speed of sound.
12:42:33 PM  

Cosmiverse.com: Spectacular Image of the Atlantic Oceans Gulf Stream.
12:42:13 PM  

Associated Press: Hackers Target College Computers.
1:43:45 AM  

Jake's Brainpan

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