When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · October
· · · · 27 (3 entries)
Out With the Old · Check out Reinventing HTML by Tim Berners-Lee. There’s going to be a new HTML Working Group, with a new chair, new charter, new staff contact, new everything. There’s no point me reproducing Tim’s narrative about the charter, but it’s interesting; go read it. I have had a very poor relationship with the existing HTML WG, so I’m hardly unbiased; but given the that the W3C’s impact on HTML over the last few years has been essentially zero, I think that this has to be A Good Thing. [Update: There is related TAG discussion afoot.]
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Project Orange Box · The announcement compares it to our Project BlackBox: “Lower power, smaller form factor, less expensive, more thermally efficient, more environmentally friendly (fully biodegradable), organic, and simple architecture.” There’s a photo gallery; I particularly like the I/O Panel.
Samsung, Ringtones, Fair Use · My cellphone expired, so I was poking around here and there on the net looking for something unlocked in a GSM flavor; but one of my key criteria is big buttons that I can see without my reading-glasses, and the Web just doesn’t help you there. I ended up at a local grey-market emporium where a friendly Russian sold me a Samsung SGH-D600; it definitely meets the no-reading-glasses criterion and seems like a pretty nice phone. This cute little slidey black goober lets you use any old MP3 as a ringtone. Given that most of us have tons o’ music on our computers, and it’s pretty easy to slice out a sub-ten-second clip and Bluetooth it over to the phone, I guess the ring-tones business is dead. It seems obvious to me that using music I’ve already paid for in this way is Fair Use, but I bet there’s a lawyer somewhere who’d disagree for a fee. So I sat up late one evening cackling fiendishly over the audio software, and my ringtones are: Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme (the classic Ray Anthony version of course), the opening sequences of Burning Spear’s Slavery Days and Deep Purple’s Highway Star (off Made in Japan), and the closing seconds of Runaway Horses from Phil Glass’ wonderful Mishima soundtrack. Now, whenever the phone rings, I smile.
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