Ross Gittins wants you to stop showering »
Ross Gittins, an otherwise seemingly sane economist opinion writer, wants you to go easy on your showering, in the name of energy savings. We’ve all been brainwashed by Dove ads, apparently, and can easily go a few days without a shower.
Ross Gittins hasn’t sat behind the guy on the bus that I did tonight, obviously.
MetaCarta GeoSearch News »
MetaCarta’s GeoSearch News is a newly launched service that indexes news articles from a bunch of sources (the wires and masthead news sites primarily), mines the content for location data, and then plots those on a searchable Google map.
Nifty!
Paul Keating on Woolley’s Opera House plan »
Paul Keating has a fun piece in the SMH about Ken Woolley’s plan for a new, unsympathetic opera theatre on Sydney’s Opera House forecourt:
Joern Utzon gave Sydney not only the greatest building of the 20th century but one unique in all history. Its plastic yet classic forms confounded his competitors, who entered designs based on their idolatry of the steel beam and the box-like structures which grew, Meccano-like, from their drawing boards.
A giant box dropped into this space, I believe, has absolutely no merit. And to provide a theatre on the scale proposed by Woolley would need to be much larger, far larger than that illustrated in the Herald. A major auditorium will look like a major auditorium.
Ken Woolley says:
“Some critics will feel it compromises Utzon’s original vision, while others will say it just will not work … It does demand courage. Only the brave would dare build something near the sacred monument.”
Wow, such clever and subtle mind-trickery there from Ken. We’re not cowards just because we don’t like your plan.
Photos: Great Ocean Road, Victoria
Surfers at Torquay
Looking towards Jan Juc and Bells Beath
The Twelve Apostles
Here are some photos that I took on a road trip down to Melbourne and along the Great Ocean Road, in August 2007.
The Great Ocean Road is absolutely beautiful — stunning scenery, and miles of twisty and hilly roads that is great fun to drive.
NSW photographer’s rights »
Andrew Nemeth:
An analysis of legal issues which apply to street photography in NSW Australia, written from a photographer’s perspective, with a focus on what rights shooters have (and don’t have) when it comes to candid photographs of people.
Even though “unauthorised” photography hasn’t been prohibited, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s open slather. Far from it! NSW Defamation and Offensive-behaviour laws still apply, as do common-law doctrines of Nuisance, Trespass, or statutory prohibitions arising out of the Commonwealth Trade Practices Act.
Pragmatism vs. Idealism: IE8 »
Joel Spolsky on web standards, and the Internet Explorer 8 team’s decision to default into backwards compatibility (or not):
As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that.
Secretly? Here’s what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they’ll say, “look guys, we’re really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can’t ship a browser that doesn’t work,” and they’ll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won’t, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won’t decrease Dean Hachamovitch’s big year-end bonus by one cent.
This is a great, entertaining article from Joel that explores the legacy of browser (non) standards and backwards compatibility, and Microsoft’s tough choice between idealism and pragmatism.
See also Jeffrey Zeldman: Microsoft reverses version targeting default
Photos: Darling Harbour, Sydney
A series of photos of Darling Harbour from Balmain East, Sydney, that I took just after a quite violent twilight rainstorm. (Click on any thumbnail to zoom in.)
Convert Microsoft Word to plain text
This is a repost of an entry from 2004. This Word-cleaning functionality is showing up in more and more web editors, but people might still find this useful.
Most of the time when I’m writing content for the web (for this blog, or a forum comment, or whatever), I’ll write in Microsoft Word for the spell check and other features that aren’t in a standard textarea widget, and then I’ll cut and paste into the form on the site.
The problem is that this carries all of the high characters (“smart-quotes” and the like) that MS Word makes straight through to the site — and most sites aren’t set up to handle them. They expect plain (“Latin”) text.
A solution: this script converts text copied from MS word into plain text. Paste your input into the top box, press clean, and the input will be scrubbed and sent to the lower box.
(If you want to clean up Word HTML, rather than just create plain text, I suggest that you use HTML Tidy with the “clean” and “Word 2000” boxes checked.)
Web Developers: feel free to use this code on your own forms to clean your user’s input (although you’d probably be better off doing it server-side). Just change the onClick() method to convert the text inplace.
Obviously after this phase, you’ll want to cast those now clean but dumb quotes into smart HTML quotes: for that you’ll want to use SmartyPants.
Unless, of course, you think that smart quotes are pretentious. In that case, you’re all set!
Mike van Niekerk interview: Future of journalism series »
The Editor’s Weblog is running a series of articles on the future of journalism. First off is Mike van Niekerk, editor-in-chief of online for Fairfax Media (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age).
Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?
… We must be careful not to allow our better instincts drowned out by what one thinks the audience wants. For example, stories about Britney Spears are regularly highly rated on our websites. Those kinds of stories can be a temptation, but we must be careful about upholding our brand values.
Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?
I have to be very cautious with this answer. The economics of new media make it very difficult to fund investigative journalism in the same way it once was. If you’re talking about the kind of journalism that keeps governments and corporations at check, I am concerned about its sustainability in the future.
Related: the ABC is launching a whole bunch of hyperlocal regional sites, populated by repurposed existing ABC news content, and user generated content, and is setting up a continuous news desk in Ultimo.
Hello, world!
After an awfully long hiatus — almost four years — I’m firing up the old word processor and starting to blog again.
This, then, is the first post of my new blog. I’ll be posting about things that I find interesting, and that I hope you do too. Links and articles about technology, software development, management, internet culture, and business. And photos. And whatever else happens to come along.
So, let’s get started :)
That’s like what, 12 internet years? Is there an official conversion rate?