great news for the free internet: smokescreen is taking flash and outputting html5 and javascript. these hackers are up for more than just vid conversion. it seems they are looking to render anything flash can throw at them, at least in civilised browsers. great stuff :-) very much in alpha at the moment

democracy—to me, and to its inventors—is not when people vote for people: it’s when people vote for laws. that is why i think this looks a bit lame. lots of vague talk about how the best submitted ideas will inform government policy. that is not democracy. you have a democracy when a randomly selected group (something like a jury) agrees a question that is then put to the people, whose answer immediately becomes the law of the land. in england we don’t have democracy; we only have the choice to be obedient. the late initiative from the government is welcome, but nowhere near enough

try walking onto a stage and doing this from cold. absolutely incredible. what is almost as unbelievable is that footage of this televised (!) concert from 1968 appears to be unavailable except as a bootleg. the *sony corporation approved* compact disc is dubbed, contains no video footage (obviously enough) and is generally sucky. don’t get it

breathtaking and very spooky pictures (html5) from the early stages of atomic explosions. these detonations were carried out in the united states, many in the nevada desert. heaven knows what the exposure time was, or how many microseconds after fission the pictures were taken :-O the rope trick effect—where heat conducting down the stabilising cables travels faster than the blast wave—is waaay weird. photography wizard harold edgerton did well here

are you still using internet explorer

2010 pwn2own contested nine days after apple plugged over a dozen holes in safari. it didn’t help them much; they still got savaged, as did microsoft. the last two contests were bloody too, except for linux users. this year ubuntu was not attacked, an unwelcome step as far as i’m concerned

redditor yegg hacked up a search engine. it’s nice. and yes, it has a silly name. didn’t we think that about google when we first heard of them too? anyway, ssl encryption and no ip-address logging make this an attractive option. i’m using it

bitstream vera fonts. yay for free font licences! jim lyles, thank you very much. update: there are dozens and dozens of fonts licenced under the SIL open font licence (or similar) now. check out the open font library for a list of over a hundred of them

osama khalid, you da man :-) youtube video conversion and streaming with free open-source software only. yaay! tinyogg needs a lot more storage space, bandwidth, etc., though; vids are rather jumpy, which is hardly any suprise given demands being made on the server(s). if the pain is too much, you can just click straight through to the youtube source ;-) so, who will fund this enterprise?

oh yes please google! adobe flash is a nasty piece of work, and it’s good to see some big players (most notably the apple corporation) are moving against it. meantime if you don’t run flash, stop that rubbish drop-down bar appearing in firefox:and that should set the value to “true”. you’ll never get that damn bar again!

be careful in the netherlands

check out physicist richard feynman’s superb lectures from 1979 at the university of auckland

while engineers here in europe were laying the sewers of paris and carving out an underground train network in london, something remarkable was happening in chicago

polytonic greek characters in unicode. provision for the display of a greek character modified by an unusual diacritic symbol amounts to entering the letter entity and a “modifier symbol” entity. it is cumbersome, and is often the case that it doesn’t look right in the browser. hopefully the excellent people at unicode can fix up entities for polytonic greek characters with all diacritics. i reckon anything greek is privileged, and just ought to be right ;-)

speaking of getting stuff right, here is the w3c html validator. did you ever try to validate the validator page itself? the link to an RFC page is rather sweet! the css validator is here. and yes, the css file validated for even that web-page gets the usual warnings

voting labour in 2010? the bullingdon club