Archive for November, 2006

SF Book club top 50 meme

Friday, November 24th, 2006

There is a meme going round the sci­ence fic­tion and fantasy blog­gers, and after real­ising how many of the books I have actu­ally read, I thought I would pick it up, even though I haven’t read that much in the past 15 years.

Via Jonathan, even though he has not done it yet. The list is the top 50 sci­ence fic­tion and fantasy books from 1953 to 2002 accord­ing to the SF Book Club. Bold the books you have read, strike through the books you hated, and as this is a blog, what would be a list without edit­or­ial comments.

Changes to copyright for this blog.

Monday, November 20th, 2006

If you ever read my old copy­right state­ment you found that I was very relaxed about the reuse of my con­tent and released it under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 License.

How­ever, after see­ing some of my con­tent has turned up on splogs and I think splogs are evil and the bane of blog­gers, I thought I should take the first step and change my copy­right to Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

If you can find a com­mer­cial use for my con­tent, let me know and I will give you per­mis­sion, unless you are intend to use it to just gen­er­ate advert­ising rev­enue or for search engine manipulation.

Joe Clark finds me patronising

Friday, November 10th, 2006

Joe Clark finds me patronising

Joe Clark is using micro­pat­ron­age to sup­port the fund­ing of a research pro­ject. Micro­pat­ron­age is get­ting lots of small dona­tions from many people. If you par­ti­cip­ate you will not be fund­ing the Open and Closed Pro­ject, but sup­port­ing Joe as he tries to raise the money some $7 mil­lion dol­lars cana­dian for the life of the pro­ject (or at least CA$400,000 for the first year).

I par­ti­cip­ated, not because I am friends with Joe. From what I know about Joe, if we phys­ic­ally meet, viol­ence (of a verbal nature) is the most likely out­come. But because I believe in what the Open and Closed Pro­ject is try­ing to do write stand­ards for cap­tion­ing, audio descrip­tion, sub­titling, and dub­bing. And know that Joe is pas­sion­ate about the cause and is the best per­son for the task.

Fitness or lack of it

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

After a week on excess­ive alco­hol, nicot­ine (I do not nor­mally smoke) and caf­feine at WD06, I have been slack about cyc­ling to work. It was not until Miles Burke at port:80 meet­ing men­tion that he was reg­u­larly going to the gym, I finally got back to cyc­ling to and from work. The res­ults were:

Flash, browsers, OSes & accessibility

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

aka things I learnt this week part 2

I am cur­rently read­ing Web Access­ib­il­ity: Web Stand­ards and Reg­u­lat­ory Com­pli­ance and I am learn­ing a few inter­est­ing things. I have been select­ively read­ing chapters, the chapter I have found most inter­est­ing so far is Access­ible Flash. Which says for flash to be access­ible to a screen reader, the user must have:

the button element and IE

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

aka things I learnt this week part 1

A fea­ture of IE I did not know exis­ted till read­ing the com­ments on Aaron Gust­afson’s Push My But­ton at Digital Web Magazine was that when a but­ton is sub­mit­ted in a form, all other browser sub­mit the value you assigned, except IE which sub­mits the inner­text.