As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in his recent blog post – XHTML is dead, kinda.

W3C announced a few days ago that the XHTML2 working group will likely be closed down by the end of the year, and focus will be shifted to the development and polishing of the HTML5 standard (which also offers an XML flavour).

To me, this is a quite welcome change – it never made much sense to me to have two competing standards for documents, especially when all the original XHTML standard did was to enforce strict syntax rules (which are rather arbitrary given what is actually allowed under XML itself). This tightening up could easily have been dealt with in HTML4.1, say – and with less problems with Internet Explorer (which is still having problems dealing with properly served XML/XHTML documents even after 9 years).

Now, with the HTML5 development, it all comes back together into a single standard again. Sure, there a few differences between HTML5 and XHTML5 – but less than between HTML4 and XHTML1.1. These differences, however, a easily overcome by applying some of the restricted behaviour allowed in XML documents to HTML (things like not using document.write() and so on).

Anyway – hopefully, this dropping of XHTML2 will result in a better developed combined standard, and this will help browsers to move towards adopting that new standard as soon as possible.

Found by JediLlama at RandalFlagg

Here’s a totally random way to make your new random band’s new random album cover. Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random” and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

(original article at BuzzFeed)

Namekagon Lake

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.

Original Image: DSC_9961 by cislbasilicata

I admit – I cheated with the image – but it was the first one I found with CC licencing that allowed derivative work.

Not entirely sure what kind of tunes would be on there – probably somewhere between Faithless and Air.

30 years ago, the Iranian Shah was deposed, and was replaced with the theocratic Islamic Republic.

Last week, the Iranian public went to the polls to determine their new president. Since the polls closed, and Ahmadinajed declared the winner, many Iranians have taken to the streets, but there has been an almost complete media blackout.

But the regime has struggled to close all channels, and one of the most prolific has been Twitter. Just looking at the hash list for #iranelection nets an evergrowing number of tweets from people in Iran and participating in the protests that are continuing (and, unfortunately, a lot of hashed spam, too).

I’ve only been following one Twitter account – but what has been posted there is eye-opening and, at some points, rather harrowing. @Change_for_Iran appears to be one or more university students in Tehran, and is apparently reporting events that are happening in and around the part of the city he is in. (I say ‘appears’ and ‘apparently’ because there really isn’t anyway to confirm that a Twitter account is authentic – but in this case, that is a good thing as it makes it harder for Iranian security forces to track the origin of the tweets).

It now appears that the university and neighbourhood have been overrun by the Iranian Republican Guard and there have been shootings and deaths.

Living here in South Australia, it is almost impossible to imagine such a situation – and the same would be so for most of the readers of this blog. We are in established democracies. I don’t know about Australia itself – but that last major riots and protests in the UK were in the early to mid-80s, and they were nothing on the scale of what seems to be happening over there in Iran.

I wish that there were more that I could do other than read these postings, and other images and stories which are filtering through the communications barrier setup in Iran.

I really hope that these democratic reform revolutionaries are successful in achieving what they are working towards – and I really hope that they have outside help (the west was happy to invade Iraq and seek regime change – so why not help establish another democracy right next door?)

I’ve just read that the Guardian Council, the true power in Iran, will recount the votes in the election – but without independent witnesses, any recount is a nonsense.

Last month I heard about a festival celebrated in Moonta, a town about 175 km north of Adelaide where the majority of the population is descended from Cornish mining families who settled in the middle of the 19th Century.

While the mines are now all closed, and the local population turned to agriculture, they are still proud of their heritage. The Kernewek Lowender, though, is relatively new. It started in the 1970s as a tourist attraction, and is still a popular biennial event.

The festival is actually celebrated all around the region known as the Copper Coast, although the main event – the Fer Kernewek – is held in the town of Moonta.

I drove up with my camera to get some pictures of the parade.

I also took some pictures around one of the abandoned enginehouses which provided steam power for lifts and water-pumps out of the mines.

Unfortunately, the weather was pretty grotty for most of the day, and while I did manage to get some photos, it wasn’t the best day for a camera and I didn’t hang around too long after the parade.

Photos of the Kernewek Lowender parade in Moonta

Photos from an abandoned enginehouse near Moonta

Microsoft Live Search is dead – long live Bing!

Microsoft, despite some not terribly heroic attempts to gain ground, hasn’t been too big in search. Google takes about 90% of the market share globally, with Yahoo grabbing another 5%, and all the rest (including Microsoft) fighting to get a look-in. This is a major shift from where search was at in 2005.

Recently, Microsoft has sought to break away from the search peloton, and become a significant third (or even second) choice of search engine by killing the Live Search brand and replacing it with Bing.

First Impressions

The first thing you notice is that they have dropped the plain white of Live Search, and that which has served Google so well for over a decade. The background is now occupied by a nice photographic vista which seems to update on an irregular basis.

The next thing that hit me was that the default location seems to be the UK (at least for me coming in from Australia). Thankfully, http://www.bing.com.au/ gives me access to the option to only search for sites in Australia. Not sure why Bing can’t auto-detect my location like Google does, but the option is cookied for now.

The results page is quite a tidy design – looks a little bit more fresh than Google, but that might just be because I’m used to Google.

One nice thing is what happens when you hover the mouse over a result – a floating panel opens with more content from the page so you get a neat little preview.

Instant Answers

From the press release:

Bing provides Instant Answers that immediately return highly relevant direct answers in response to a specific search. For example, entering a flight number will return the most recent flight information and display it prominently in the results, saving the hassle of going to a separate page. Other Instant Answers on Bing include stock prices, local weather, sports scores and more.

That’s kinda cool – the flight from Adelaide to Singapore is SQ268, and the last flight arrived 35 minutes early. Google apparently does this too, so I’m not so impressed. And both search engines get their data from the same source – Flight Stats.

More Search: Images and Relevance

Image search only turned up 7 images associated with “horuskol” – while Google returned 214. This may be a result of Bing’s attempt to return ‘more relevant’ content, although one of the seven images is rather tangential to my alias.

Image search does have some nice filtering – size, type (illustration or photograph), people (faces/portrait), colour and shape – these finer controls over results here are most welcome.

A vanity search works nicely, though. This blog hits the top 2 spots for “horuskol” on Bing, while Google nets me my Twitter and Wikipedia profiles ahead of my own site. Fair enough, but I’d rather have this site on top, thanks – the problems of placing PageRank over relevance (considering my WikiPedia profile page has been untouched by myself for about a year, I’d rather it drop off the face of the internet – but WikiPedia has a very high PR).

Layout and Features

I quite like the results layout of Bing – it enhances what is already a well-developed formula for results pages. Sponsored sites, followed by image/video results, followed by results. Placing related searches on the left hand side is nice, and there is a quicklink to search ‘filters’ (maps, news, images, etc) to indicate that a good number of results in those sections.

Bing is missing one trick, though – I mispelt “lord of the erings” when I was testing, but Bing didn’t offer the alternative spelling. Google very handily places the alternative text right up the top of the page.

Overall

Bing saw a leap in usage right at the start, and outdid Yahoo for a couple of days. This could of course be due to a reported ‘glitch’ in some version of internet explorer (which Microsoft had previously said wouldn’t happen), but I think there was a fair bit of media interest which people followed.

The blip is down again now, and Bing usage is about the same as where Live Search was before the change.

Then again, I’ve become tempted to make the switch myself – at least for a little while.

Last year, a self-proclaimed ‘Google-killer’ was launched – Cuil. They came out with huge bang, which quickly fizzled into a farce, and they have pretty much dropped off the radar. Apart from making riduculous claims, they also made a large number of technical mistakes which caused a lot of angst amongst web-masters around the world. All in all, Cuil has pretty much dropped out of the media, and doesn’t really factor in any discussion on search.

Last week saw a very different launch of a rather different search engine – WolframAlpha. Despite the media attempting to label it as another ‘Google-killer’, the developers and team behind it were very careful to show how their search engine would be different from Google and not in direct competition.

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Last Thursday, I went to the cinema to watch the new Star Trek movie, and I was completely blown away.

As a franchise, Star Trek had been getting a bit stale. It was continuously running on TV for eighteen years, with two series concurrently for half of that time (not counting syndicated repeats). And then there were six movies in there, too.

There were at least two things working for the new film – it came out 4 years after the last new Star Trek production was released (the series finale of Enterprise), and the writers and producers decided to reboot back to the original crew (although, with different actors).

Actually – they go a bit further back than the original series, introducing Kirk and Spock when they are growing up and joining StarFleet.

Another decision by the writers was to not go the future-retro-future (not sure how to describe it, really) look of Enterprise (where they tried to make the tech look older than the Original Series, but with a production quality matched to the 21st century), and worked to get a visual style which was more in keeping with the original series – but with enhancements. In other words, it looked great.

The actors chosen to play Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), and McCoy (Karl Urban), were selected for their similarity in features to the original trio. The remaining cast relied more on mimicking behaviour and mannerisms rather than facial likeness – but from what I saw, all casting choices were good ones for this movie.

The director, J J Abrams, was one of the brains behind Lost, and also wrote MI:III and Armageddon. I think he did a pretty decent job on this movie (I hear he is now working on an adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series – so I’m looking forward to that).

The film does appear to deviate from ‘accepted’ Star Trek lore – but then it explains it, and in such a way that even the most die-hard fan can really object. And because it doesn’t retread, it stays nice and fresh – and is accessible for newcomers.

By the end of the movie, after watching some great acting and scripting, I was left hungry for more again (as opposed to the last couple of Next Generation movies which just seemed more like extended TV episodes). I haven’t seen any rumours yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get at least one more movie out of the cast for this latest film.

So – verdict: this film is brilliant – well written, well directed, and well acted. Even if you don’t like Star Trek, the movie is setup so that you don’t have to have watched any of it before. It is a reboot, and it works.

Go watch and enjoy.

Don’t you just love bureaucracy.

All Australian citizens MUST be registered to vote if they are 17 or over and they MUST vote ($20 fine). Although only those 18 or over can vote, and while people in the Northern Territories must vote in federal elections their votes apparently don’t count.

So I received a letter asking me to either register or at least sign a statement that I am not eligible (being a resident is not enough to get voting rights). Not a problem – simply write my name and address and cross a box to sign and send it back in the prepaid return envelope.

On the return envelope there is a warning to check that the return address was visible in the envelope address window – and that’s where things got difficult.

Previously: http://horuskol.net/second-hand-pc-games-20090425

I got a response today from the Manager of Preowned Operations at EB Games confirming the reason to be the use of registration keys:

The main reason we do not trade PC games is because of registration keys. … Once this has been registered to a specific PC, they cannot be reinstalled onto another computer and therefore, cannot be re-sold as Preowned.

While I disagree about it not being possible to reinstall on another PC – I have installed registered games on various PCs when I have replaced the computers with newer models. But I do agree that it is not easy, and this added difficulty lowers the resale value of PC games in particular.

It still irks me that PC games in particular are singled out for such scrutiny and ‘protection’ when piracy is not restricted to PC games (Google News: Console Game Piracy) – but that’s not the fault of the retailers.

I’m also not advocating stricter protections for console games – it has been proven time and again that any protection method used for computer users is next to useless against determined pirates and also victimises honest users at the exact same time. In fact, the protection used on PC games is being softened again after certain well-publicised PR disasters last year.

But, I fear, the registration key is here to stay – although with on-line purchasing through things like Steam, reselling might be easy enough even if there is an administrative cost.