Tabs dump 3

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The blogosphere is cooling down, so is this weblog. I'm on holidays and very slowly recovering from sickness, a tabs dump seems an appropriate diet for now.

  • Attack of the Flying Weasels by Maciej Ceglowski. "That the French authorities complied so completely with the American request demonstrates the considerable amount of goodwill remaining in France towards the United States, even after the acrimony over Iraq. [...] People in [the USA] sometimes forget (or are not often reminded) that France is second only to Israel in its extensive experience fighting against islamist terrorism. [...] Given this context, it has been particularly galling to watch the United States go out of its way to alienate France in punishment for its opposition to the Iraq war."
  • Jeffrey Zeldman completes his third redesign in a year. "There’s something New Coke about toying so wantonly with an old brand, but this site is not only our podium, it’s also our workshop — a place to test new methods while no meter is running and mistakes are penalty-free."
  • The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft. "In light of the won't do and can't do, Microsoft sits there, and watches its market share begin to erode. That's happening slowly at first, but the snowball is rolling. A few people are starting to look up the hill and notice this big thing barreling down at them, and some are bright enough to step out of the way." [Source: Slashdot]
  • The Silent Penguin at Eurosource announces a new EU site on Free/Open Source.
  • How users can help open standards evolve. As Seb notes, "you don't have to be a self-sacrificing zealot to pick the light side, as the open alternatives are cheaper and work better."

  • This Car Can Talk. What It Says May Cause Concern. At one point in time, not so far from now, one may grow tired of being traced down everywhere, anytime. [source: ATAC]
  • Resources from MT Plugin Directory. For the hardcore Movable Type users.
  • Speaking of hardcore, Mark Pilgrim has decided that RSS is deprecated by Atom. Here is how his feed greets me now: "Note: The "dive into mark" feed you are currently subscribed to is deprecated. If your aggregator supports it, you should upgrade to my Atom feed, which includes both summaries and full content." I'll add my voice to Steve Kirks' remarks: "This is the first experience I've seen of what I'll call "feed discrimination". This is similar to the browser wars of the late 90s. During that time, you could frequently see phrases at the bottom of a webpage "insulting" your choice of browser. Cute phrases like "Site best viewed using Internet Explorer" or worse would let you know that it's time to "upgrade"." AFAIK, mainstream RSS readers such as NNW do not support Atom, so much for diving into deprecation.
  • Installing MovableType on Panther. [Source: Karl Dubost who seems to prefer Bloxsom]
  • Still on MT, They called it ecto. Adriaan, creator of Kung-Log rebrands it and joins Joi Ito's swat team of Super Bloggers.
  • Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS. Marc Fleury and Julien Viet explain why using the PHP solution PostNuke for driving JBoss' web site wasn't such a good idea and why they rewrote it in Java. They even replicated the ugly URLs!
  • Limitations to Keyword Targeted Advertising: "One embarrassing example was the placement of ads by luggage stores on a Web page for a news article about a murderer who carried away his victims in a suitcase."
  • Online crime up in 2003 in the U.S. "The [Internet Fraud Complaint Center] reports receiving over 120,000 online fraud complaints through its website this year -- an increase of 60% over the 75,000 complaints counted in 2002. I wonder how things went in France, notably after they've put in jail a pair of Santa's brothers from pere-noel.fr.
  • Scientists Measure Pollution in Humans, and it's scary. As says the Slahsdotter: "They've found things such as flame retardants, chemicals derived from DDTs, mercury, uranium, cotinine, and many more. The concern is a lot of this stuff is ending up in mother's milk. But hey, at least in the event of spontaneous combustion, I'll be partially protected."