• Wordpress produces XHTML
• Therefore, this site has a lot of XHTML in it that I can’t control (my php skills are not up to editing anything server-side)
• del.icio.us automatically posts my link entries as HTML (minus the eX)
• Therefore, this site also has a lot of HTML in it that I can’t control
• Some of the XHTML won’t validate as HTML and some of the HTML won;t validate as XHTML
• Therefore, my site doesn’t validate.

So, I guess my problem is

• How much does it matter?
• How much do I care?
• Can I do anything about it either way?

To all those people who wonder if the constant stream of other-people’s-consciousness is distracting, the answer is – not really, until it goes away.

I’ve become used to the notifier in the bottom corner of my screen popping up from time to time, but increasingly TwitterIM is down and I find I have to go and manually check if everyone is still around.

Anyone else find this?

I used this Batch Operations Tutorial from Slightly Remarkable. It’s incredibly easy.

Open one of the pictures in Photoshop, and begin recording an Action (it’s basically the Adobe term for “macro”). You should be able to hit the “Actions” tab in your History/Actions/Tool Presets window to see the default Actions that come with Photoshop. All you have to do from there is hit the circle (record), [record the actions you want repeated], and then hit the square (stop) in the Actions window. Now that you’ve recorded the action, you can tell Photoshop to open a large number of images, run the specified Action, save the images (or copy them as changed to a new directory), and close them, all automatically.

And it means cropping 120 images takes 5 minutes instead of 5 hours.

“More than 10% of net users are going online with the Firefox browser, show figures from analysis firm One Stat.

The global average of 11.5% is the highest percentage of users that the open source browser has ever reached.

The research also reveals that Americans are the biggest fans of Firefox with 14.1% using it. In the UK 4.9% use it to get around online.

It is thought that continuing news stories about security problems in Internet Explorer are helping to fuel the move away from Microsoft’s program.

In recent months, browsers, toolbars and the technology around them have become the new front line in the war between the web’s biggest companies – Microsoft, Google and Yahoo – to grab and keep hold of users.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | Firefox fanbase reaches new high

Anyway…

This article on the unfathomability of various web-terms, by the british public(via Simon) got me thinking back to a conversation I had with a colleague about six months ago. He asked “What’s the difference between a chatroom and a blog?”. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m fairly sure I gave a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer.

Let’s try the question another way.. In terms that you would use to a taxi driver, landlord or hairdresser…

A chatroom is a to a blog, what a [---] is to a [---]

debate is to a lecture?

conference call is to a letter?

free-for-all is to a committee?

This email puts me in mind of one of those puzzleboxes where you have to shuffle all the pieces around in order to see what the picture is. I’m not entirely sure what’s happened – even changing the browser & font sizes didn’t fix this… not that I was particularly interested in what they had to say.

Scientists have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.

Pittsburgh’s Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject’s veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.

And there I was assuming that most people were perfectly happy with sci-fi staying fictional…

Boffins create zombie dogs | The Other Side | Breaking News 24/7 – NEWS.com.au (27-06-2005)

Computer scientists in the US are developing a system which would allow people to “teleport” a solid 3D recreation of themselves over the internet.

Their original plan was for the application to work in face-to-face interaction.

“I’m in Pittsburgh, and you’re in London. How do we make that happen?” Dr Mowry said.

“We can’t teleport somebody, nobody’s going to travel anywhere, but if we’re in our own rooms a system of cameras will capture exactly what’s in each room.”

“That information is turned into some representation – a three-dimensional version of an mpeg [computer video file] – like a DVD,” Dr Mowry added.

“You capture it digitally, ship it over across the network, and then reproduce a physical object that looks just like the original object, and moves just like it.”

And he stressed this would be useful for much more than simple video conferencing.

“It’s very artificial to talk to somebody through a glass wall, which is effectively what you have when you have a screen,” he added.

“You want to forget the fact that you’re in different rooms.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | ‘Teleporting’ over the internet