Pakistan Adopting a Tough Old Tactic to Flush Out Qaeda

"Several thousand tribal elders held a jirga, or council, and agreed to raise a force of their own to find the wanted men. In the last two weeks, the tribes have handed over 42 of them. Tribal members, meanwhile, have bulldozed and dynamited the homes of eight men who refused to surrender."

I'm glad we're hearing about this. Normally such inaccessible and 'minor' efforts would only be reported in local press, never reaching something like the NYT.

[During the anti-Soviet drive] the United States indirectly helped pay for hundreds of hard-line religious schools that produced anti-Soviet fighters. Today, the same schools appear to produce anti-American fighters.

Are we yet pouring more money into correct these mistakes? Or, going for the short term, painful, fix? My guess is the latter.

Nutty RSS/Tivo hack

"if you've already hacked up your Tivo to the point where you can telnet to it, it's not a whole lot of extra work to display RSS feed data right there on the screen."

I don't suppose it's better than reading it in a proper aggregator... But I like the convergence. I wonder if TiVo works in the UK?

Another busy old day. Going back to do another iteration of the Manila themes in CSS. Having troubles with my mouse overs. But after a good night's sleep, and some re-reading of printouts of some basic CSS from that I did way back in 1998, I'm looking forward to solving a few positioning riddles.
I see Tantek's doing some fun stuff with CSS too:

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]: He's doing a different design every day, based on Technorati's top 100 blogs. All in CSS. All without changing any of the content of his blog.

Cool. And finally a reason to visit a blog in a browser rather than in an RSS news aggregator (News aggregators don't usually display design of blogs).

Doesn't look as though he's picked a good example today. Odd.

Current Weather. 2C Mostly Cloudy [Cosford Royal Air Force Base, United Kingdom Weather]

I get the above updates every hour. Wouldn't it be cool, if I plugged it intot the Government's Intranet. So that as the weather changed, so did the theme. From suuny to partially cloudy. Rain to light rain...

Feature creep! I shut up, quickly!

John Robb: What is the scope of the offshoring problem?

What is $100 b of offshored services worth in terms of jobs? First, an offshored service costs ~50% of the service produced in the US (on average). Since this is basically a pure salary play (infrastructure is minimal), these estimates mean that 2 m ($100k) information workers will be offshored by 2008. Also, given these jobs usually produce upwards of ~4 additional jobs per position (community impact), this is a net loss of 10 m jobs by 2008.

I guess, offshoring is a bigger opportunity than I thought. Problems are, after all , opportunities.

Too busy working over the last few days. NEED SLEEP. Been pouring man hours into CSS for Manila. Not that Manila was the problem, but style sheets, and what I could do within my knowledge, which obviously I wanted to stretch (unfeasibly long).

Family's taking off to visit Nannie, so I'll have the house to myself. Intend to break the back of this project—switchable CSS for Manila themes. It'll be nice when it's finished.

ComputerWorld: Blogs bubble into business

Too busy to blog!

ImageReady to make CSS themes

Living with Britain's population timebomb. Society: 100 years ago, there were five workers for every retired person. Soon for every pensioner, there will be just one worker. Robin McKie asks what this means for the future.

15 Trends Taking Shape In Logo Design

Plenty of ideas to steal from :-) Giving clients the spin from these descriptions isn't recommended.

Current Weather. 1C Mist 

Slough beats New York's finest. BBC comedy The Office sees off Sex and the City and Will and Grace to pick up two Golden Globes.

Saddam's WMD hidden in Syria, says Iraq survey chief

"David Kay, the former head of the coalition's hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, yesterday claimed that part of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programme was hidden in Syria."

Debka.com has been saying the same for ages.

From my archives: Documents coming to light in Baghdad directly incriminate Syria as a full partner in the financing, development and concealment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs

Mind, they were also saying: The Iraqi ruler has massed around Baghdad--not only his crack fighting divisions and most loyal suicide units, but also his missiles and weapons of mass destruction, including possibly radiological devices.

Small firms to cash in on software bargain bonanza

But they need to negotiate them to the floor. For example, small firms should be aware of the fact that vendors often try to base maintenance contract prices on the 'list price' of software licenses (usually 20 per cent to 22 per cent) when dealing with SME buyers.

It is important for SMB buyers to leverage the interest in their market and negotiate maintenance agreements based on 'as sold' prices, or contract deliverables in return for their business.

Orphaned or balck archive pages? Use this.
A few days ago I posted some advice re deleting posts, saying that one may end up with blank pages in your archives. Not that anything would point to them if you used my repair script.

I've found an old script that deletes those pesky files off your hard disk.

More than likely there'll be nothing there, but you may want to run it in check mode, to see if there are. If there are and there are lots uncomment the delete line and it'll really delete them.

Here's a screen shot to help you understand the script. You can just look in particular archives.

As my posts to the Radio discussion board is syndicated into my Radio aggregator it's much easier to snip it out of my aggregator than to copy, open new editing window, paste... (I think :-)

The Many Faces of Mount Everest

"Not an easy peak to locate while zipping over the mountains at 7 kilometers per second" [Via kuro5hin]

Once upon a time: India 'floated' up to Asia, and bashed the Himalayas up, and up, and up.

Mobile Phones Enter 2-Mpixel Era

Auto-focus (AF) mechanisms and electronic flashes are likely to become more common in mobile phone cameras once the 2-megapixel mark is reached.

I guess this will make me move from my current still digiCam ==> puter ==> thumbnailed to blog. Would prefer direct to blog, but will also require editing on the phone (crop, colour correcting). Though imageMagick does this... {Via Roland Tanglao]

Good Mars photos in German

ESA has new evidence of water on
Mars like we have oil on Earth.Site is in German (well, it is the European Space Agency's Mars Express) but you can download 17Mb tifs which give fairly good detal...
From metaFiler: At this point it seems fairly certain that a lot of the water is now underground (ESA artist's impression), and occasionally makes its way to the surface, sometimes carrying salt along the way (forming some of the more interesting surface structures on Mars, evaporites). But this can only be verified by the radar onboard of MEX, which will start operating in a couple of months.

The AtomEnabled Directory

"More AtomEnabled tools and services are being added every day. Check back soon for even more sites and software using Atom."

I don't hear of anything happening in the Radio or Manila world. I just had a quick look at Mark Pilgrim's feed made by MovableType. Doesn't look that tricky to do, knowing the system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile script (though I'm probably missing something, as I've ignored the developement process). If I had some time I'd make that system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeAtomFile and make one for my Manila hosting server too.

It would be good for business to be listed as the only Manila hosting service and quite probably the only service that both writes and reads Atom.

Manila themes and CSS

I'm creating some new themes for the Government's intranet. 20 of them. Valentines. St David's day. Christmas. Eid Al-Addha. You know, all the most important holidays.

I'm starting from scratch. Trying to have very little HTML and do most of it with XHTML and style sheets.

Once I have a layout that I'm happy with, I can very quickly alter the stylesheet, or the arrangement of the columns and produce 20 different designs with basically the same structure. Kinda like the CSS Zen Garden, only without the switcher. The intranet has 30 odd micros sites (Manila sites) and the IT geezer wants to 'one click' swap themes for the entire installation. People will still be able to use the Editors' only: Prefs: Appearance, to change background and link colours — I'm still using the body macro.

Each site will be fully loaded, with all the usual macros plus:

• searchThisSite
• alteredUserland.siteMenu: a Windows Explorer view of the hierarchy
  
• lastUpdate
• alteredUserland.newsDeptLinks: links with XML buttons to news departments
  
• recentNewsItems
• displayLastUpdatedHomePagesCSS
• printFriendlyLink
• mailStory
  
• xmlCoffeeMug
• rssLink
• viewRssBoxCSS
• alteredUserland.mailToLink: a mail to: member's name with envelope icon

I may add some CSS tool tips as well. Maybe a monthly archive macro too, and I have been thinking about doing a print CSS but if it takes as long to do a screen CSS then I think I'll stick with the print friendly template.

Currently, I'm ripping out the discussion group theme. Still has to be an HTML table but much simpler, whilst giving more power to the CSS.

I'll remove the non UserLand macros and add in modules instead of the includeMessage and release them to the community when they're finished.

Fish with faces on

About a year ago, I gave Esme some slid out of a tin... Little three inch long whole fish in a tomato sauce. She'll eat just about anything, and normally likes tinned fish. I say it's good for her brains. "What's brains?"

She looked down at them, and said she didn't like them. "Well, try them first!"

Still months later, nearly a year, Bradley won't eat fish. Any fish. He says. "I don't like fish with faces on."

Engineering Google Results to Make a Point

All search engines, to varying degrees, analyze links in calculating the relevancy of a page for a particular query. Seed the Web with enough links pointing to the same site using the same anchor text, and you alter the search results. The effect is magnified with less popular search phrases, since there are far fewer competing links.

Some Google bombs may have been accomplished with as few as 20 links. What is important is not the number of links, but rather the popularity of the sites doing the linking and the relative obscurity of the search term.

I wonder if us UK bloggers should do that for Blair, something on the lines of 'big liar.'

The World and the US internet balance of power

For the first time in Internet history there are more DNS rootservers outside the United States than within, following this week's launch in Frankfurt of an anycast "instance" of RIPE NCC-managed K root server.

The US still has the master A root server in Dullas, under the control of the US Dept. of Commerce.

10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time

I think all of his arguments have been rebutted now.

Easy subscription is one I'd like to add to. I can subscribe to feed by hitting the coffee cup icon on a lot of sites, or, more usually pulling down a bookmark which looks in their headers for a feed. Sure lots haven't got this yet, but it's there and has been for two years.

I think there's still a ways to go, but for sure it's ready for prime time. This is why many large orgs like the BBC are publishing through it.

Text messaging reaches new high

.Last year was yet another record-breaking year for text messaging, and this year is set to be bigger. A massive 20.5 billion SMS messages were sent over the four main mobile networks, said the Mobile Data Association, with 1.9 billion sent in December alone.

I wonder how much mobile firms make out of picture messaging?

Found Typography

From Metafilter I also found, some that are more appealing to me as a designer. Fuller of meaning and poignantcy. Here's a cheesy cheese example:

Found Typography (right) and if you liked that, please also try Hundreds of Thousands.

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.

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.

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?

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,

Fat, bloated files! Squish them with this

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.

Webcam Windows Media GPRS SmartPhone=?

What if we combine Webcam, Windows Media Technology, GPRS and a SmartPhone together? Here is the result:

I broadcasted the scene of my cubicle and use a smart phone to view it, in video, at real time. I can pull my mobile phone and see what is going on, no matter where I am, on bus, in Metro, at airport, in Beijing or in Hainan...

Interesting stuff. But using IIS is a bit overboard, surely? Aren't there web cam apps that would do this? Or, at least create MPEGs that could be streamed with QuickTime Streaming Server? What about QuickTime Broadcaster? I'll dig into this a little more in a few days. I have a client that will definitely be interested in it.

Wired News: Here's the Price of Fame: $218.32

"Filmmakers can afford to work now. No more excuses, or filmmakers' block, or procrastination. Either they start shooting, or they are waiting for the vanity crew, or they aren't filmmakers."

Whooo-Hooo! There's my call to action. I've got hours and hours of the kids... Hundreds of stills. No time though. Damn.

Scoble reading 1200 RSS feeds

I can't keep it up. Over the next few days I'm gonna work at getting rid of about half of the feeds I'm reading. I learned I can handle 700 feeds, but not 1200.

Feeds.scripting.com still says that I am only reading 703, though.

I have enough problems with 61. Most don't update, luckily, some have hundreds of news items a day, some repeat. But most of all, I know I'm being extremely efficient in my news junky mode. Takes me an hour a day to skim. Plus an hour to read/post. Pretty soon, I'll have to skip some of this this out, as I'm getting too busy.

But, I'm watching less and less TV news... So, I guess it's a better way to get my junky fix, I'm getting the news that matters most to me and at least I don't have to sit though sports news on TV anymore. Fantastic!

Thousands of Iraqis Demand Death for Hussein

The 5,000-strong crowd was believed to be the first public demonstration in Iraq demanding death for Saddam since he was captured by U.S. forces Dec. 13.

Iraq is turning into a blood thirsty country. I guess it always has been.

Unexpected galaxy string in the early universe

How could such a long string of galaxies form so early in the universe?
Several new measurements of galaxies and clusters in the early universe are reporting structures involving galaxies and clusters that are larger than expected with the new standard "dark-energy" cosmology.
The controversy centers on the inability of a dark-energy dominated universe to create such large structures.
Fans of the old standard cosmology -- without weird but pervasive dark energy -- are hoping that these new measurements rule out the newly popular strange universe.
Previously, however, data taken from several independent sources over the past few years has only appeared to bolster the bold new universe paradigm.
A compromise is still possible if the new data is not typical or if the comparison computer simulations are not properly biased.
Pictured above is a computer-generated illustration of a universe that shows a string of galaxies of the size measured.
The size of the superimposed box is about 300 million light years on a side.

I can't begin to wrap my mind around the argument between the dark energy universe and the old way of looking at it. I guess I'm still in awe of the great distances still. 300,000,000 light years. One light year is 6,000,000,000,000 miles. If in doubt download this 8Mb video.

Strings are made of clusters of galaxies. This string, then, is too early for some theorists.

Current Weather. 9C Rain
Ah! Good. I need to post some invoices. I can wear my new hat. This makes me even happier — it's a big invoice I'm posting :-) And the Government, who're gonna get it, always pay quickly.

Camera Phones Help Buyers Beware

"With a camera phone that is also a bar-code scanner, you can go into a store like Barnes & Noble, take a photo of the ISBN number on a book and instantly receive a coupon offering the book for 30 percent less at Amazon.com."

Although it'll be difficult, for sure, camera phones will be banned from use in most shops. The above example is just perfect: the bricks and mortar carry the expense of stocking the 'look-at-product' while the online company makes the profit by selling it.

Look in the shops, check out competitive prices on the 'net. Barcode phones increase the efficiency, dramatically.

I know I did this when I need to buy my digi cam. However, Tescos actually carried it as cheaply as anywhere on the net, especially when delivery came into the equation. I ended going back to Tescos :-)

Microsoft threaten and bully student

For his phonetic sound-a-like domain name of MikeRoweSoft.com.

"It may confuse customers."

Basic Manila training in an hour

Maybe I'm getting quicker. Last week it was an hour and ¾. Today, it was down to an hour.

To be fair, the two classes I had today were far brighter, and much quicker off the mark. One woman was always two steps ahead of me. I was particularly impressed by one instance if this, as she had to log into her site under a made up email adress then add herself using the Editor's only: Admin, then log out, and log back in as her real self.

While others were figuring what fields to fill in, and what level of editorial roles to select, she had done the lot. Smart.

So I'd have finished an hour early. But, I wanted to teach them the world according to my version of Manila's RSS aggregator and this, news items, and express blogging via bookmarklets and/or the aggregator took up the other hour.

Cars in shopping centres these days

A walk to the local park

Dark side of the moon

The large impact basin pictured is Crater 308. It spans about 30 kilometers (19 miles) and was photographed by the crew of Apollo 11 as they circled the Moon in 1969."

Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt standing next to boulder at Taurus-Littrow during third EVA. I've been troubled lately. I knew that our moon was, visually, exactly the same size as our sun. But a few days ago I learnt that we never seen the dark side of the moon, not because it is dark, but because our moon spins every 28 days, and as it also revolves around us every 28 days it, 'just so happens' that it's always facing one way, from our view point. Two, rather odd coincidences.

I began to wonder why. If there was little green men, or a god, on the other side, and they caused it to be so.

Well, I was just wondering. I'll go see if anybody else has been troubled about this in Google. [Update:] Not much there... Just one little snip thast makes things seem a litle worse... "The far side of the Moon was first seen on September 15, 1959 when the unmanned Soviet probe Luna 2 was launched into an orbit over it." So, we haven't done much looking there, have we?

I know, it's daft, but these daft things keep me awake some nights. Just don't like coincidences — especially when they're in twos, more so when they're this magnitude. (Back to work, kids and the real world.)

3 Columns From 1

"This demo illustrates how to achieve a layout with 3 columns of equal height using only one column. The trick is to use a central column (this one) and add borders to it. Then position your other 2 columns so they overlay the borders."

Clever! I've been puzzeling problem for a