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Steve Hooker's Radio: kids, war, blogs, gadgets: A Welsh man in the wrong country, going home
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22 January 2004   

 

Blunkett calls for spread of gated communities

Gated communities should be adopted by councils to improve community safety, the home secretary, David Blunkett, said today.
WTF? This doesn't sound very egalitarian! What the hell is happening to this so called socialist government?

This on top of the higher money for good or best higher education? I'm beginning to pray that Labour lose their vote next week, a day before the Hutton report, and this will be the exit for Blair.

 Source: Guardian Unlimited; 22/01/2004; 15:45:15.
1593 Also posted to: warBlog . At: 4:24:03 PM  . .
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Panorama prompts probe calls

The government faces renewed calls for a full judicial inquiry into its decision to go to war with Iraq.

I don't see why this programme is more of a call to action than anything else that has been said by anybody else. Nothing too exciting in it.

However, I certainly want Blair's head on a block for the passion he added to his calls for an attack on Iraq in Parliament 18th March 2003. I certainly was for it then. To stop any chance of WMD being used or passed to mad Muslims — for no other reason. For sure, he was a ruthless dictator — but that was for Iraqis to solve.

"We are now seriously asked to accept that in the last few years, contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence, he decided unilaterally to destroy the weapons. Such a claim is palpably absurd."

That's what he did Tony. Your intel was wrong. You went to war for the wrong reasons.
I used to respect and trust you. Now, I don't.
I want you out. Otherwise Labour will lose. And I don't want that, not at all.
Why did we go to war? I now believe it was for other reasons. Perhaps as a distraction for the bin Laden brigade, perhaps for the US dollar hegemony, perhaps for more power in an oil rich region. I still don't know. But, I do believe that WMD was a camouflage — a way of getting around the anti-war public.

 Source: BBC News | Politics | UK Edition; 22/01/2004; 13:45:08.
1592 Also posted to: warBlog . At: 2:34:11 PM  . .
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Pure css tooltips

Do you know what is a tooltip? This is a tooltip an aiding text that appears just when you roll on with the mouse. The basic idea comes from Eric Meyer's pure css popupsa very clever way to get dynamic effects on an html page without using javascript.

Nice... I use javascript for the tool tips on the navigation, this is much cleaner, and I'd much, much prefer to use CSS to do this. And I don't have to have 'stuff' in my hrefs. I could write an addition to my standard hrefs, just to add the class declaration, won't matter if there's no span element inside... And I could style the tool tips differently for different parts of the site... Yip, I'll change over as soon as I get some time.

As an aside, I wonder if it'll come through my RSS feed into my aggregator.

[Update:] No, the CSS curly braces have been neutered in the RSS feed somewhere. I'll have to dig in and see if I can control this with a callback. It may be that Radio thinks they're macros and is neutering them. [update 2:] Actually, it's not the production of the RSS feed that's the problem, it's the aggregator, when it sucks up the feed. Again there are callbacks for this, but I wonder how many other aggregators actually allow complete stylesheets?


1591 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 12:46:38 PM  . .
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Nokia prefers Python to Perl for smartphone scripting

Limited trial for pros, first.
Interesting, I'm just starting with Python, which is a lot like Usertalk,

 Source: The Register; 21/01/2004; 21:45:09.
1590  At: 12:32:41 PM  . .
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Fat, bloated files! Squish them with this

I posted about this last Summer. Some one asked me if it were safe. You'll need the script itself and there's a dependency bug in my squish script, you'll need to get the extensions.frontierMath.fttb, which is handy anyway.

This script runs on four Frontier servers automatically, without error or incidence and has done for three or four years. I run it because it makes Frontier serve pages much quicker. It's based on a legitimate Userland script, and I've just made it report better and run faster.

I like to squish out bloated aggregator, radio and weblogData most. Saving up to 50% off disk space. But that's not the important aspect, it's the speed!!!!! I'm sure upstreaming is faster, because the bloat in user.radio.settings.files can be considerable. I have over 13,000 items in that table, believe me, I NEED to squish that regularly!

The script initially switches off all your threads and agents, does a save as of each open root, then swaps the old one for the new one. It can't swap the Radio root, because that's where it's working from. So you'll need to quit Radio and swap them manually.

After swapping the Radiox.root (freshly squished) for the Radio.root (old and bloated) in your Radio Userland application folder, by deleting the old one and renaming the new one as Radio.root, you'll also need to add this line to your radioStartupCommands.txt which is also in the same folder:
user.scheduler.prefs.runThreads = true;
Then, restart your Radio application. You'll find things are back to normal, your roots a freshly squished, things will be quicker and likely you'll have no root corruption.

Squished report window
Click for bigger
If you get this report and then there's an error in the last part of the script which is trying to send you mail regarding this report, read this message for how to edit the script either to switch off the emailing, which isn't necessary, or how to edit your email server, email address etc. Or, you can just carry on ignoring the error. The squish worked perfectly (if you get this report window up).
 

 Source: Radio UserLand Messages; 22/01/2004; 11:45:29.
1589 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 12:15:06 PM  . .
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Snippets from RSS WinterFest IRC day one

RSS removes SPAM completely and make it truly "My Internet"
RSS Aggregators and formats are good enough to start replacing email newsletters
RSS information routers are disruptive because of their ability to create your 'own newspaper', will lead to explosion
RSS is a great way to collaborate and manage attention
2rss.com is a directory of RSS feeds.
RSS flowing in and and out enables a superior colloborative process
RSS may be the perfect vehicle for delivering news to small devices
Showing people business applications of News Aggregator is key. Show them how to subscribe to a Google or Feedster search.

Roland Tanglao was on IRC for the first day and blogged quite a few snippets. I just had to rob, what I considered the best bits, and stick them here.


1588 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 11:40:25 AM  . .
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