Just another nerd.
Mark Pilgrim has a long explanatio about making cruft-free URLs in which he goes through a lot of steps to remove the .html file extension in URLS, so a URL that looked like http://…/xp.html would be shortened to http://…/xp
Yuck. I agree with this comment that file extensions are generally useful information,
As an end user, I sometimes derive assurance in knowing what kind of file I am clicking on and going to view. The removal of the “.html” extension removes that.
When I was younger I was a real lazy ass. Now that I’ve reached my mid-30s I’ve become someting a workaholic. In fact I’ve accumulated so much vacation time that I’m dangerously close to the maximum allowed (after that, they simply don’t give you vacation time until you are once again below the maximum).
The payoff for all that work is that 18 months ago I took over a group that was losing upwards of $250,000 a year. Now, however, we’re well on our way to turning a profit of upwards of $250,000 a year.
And what am I going to do on my vacation? I’m going to hole up at the WiFi-equipped library and work on my weblogs, of course.
I’d been rolling along using Mozilla 1.4 for the past few months until Seth Dillingham posted about how a new Conversant feature was supported in IE, Mozilla 1.4 and Mozilla Firebird. I’d never heard of Firebird (formerly Phoenix) until Seth posted it, but figured I’d download it and give it a whirl.
As Neo might say, “Whoa!” Firebird hasn’t yet reached a 1.0 release and not only does it have all the goodness that is baked into Mozilla, but this is by far the most stable browser I have ever used. My mean time between crashing with Mozilla and IE was probably about 4 hours. I ran Firebird for two weeks before experiencing my first browser crash.
The only defect I can find is that, like Mozilla, it has a nasty habit of crashing when printing certain pages. Mozilla used to crash on me several times a week while printing. With Firebird that’s been reduced to about once every other week, but it’s still an incredibly annoying bug.
Still, it’s got tabs, its got the incredible keyword system for bookmarks and sets of tabs . . . why people would still run IE is beyond me.
The candidacy of Arnold Schwarzengger for Governor of California is demonstrating the absurdity of equal time provisions. These would really only apply to broadcast stations, especially those in California, but a number of cable outlets have decided to pull Schwarzenegger’s films until the end of the election as well (thankfully TNT seems to be showing nothing but Schwarzenegger films lately — they’ve shown Predator two or three times in the last week).
Like I said, I think equal time provisions are pointless and a violation of the First Amendment, but if they’re going to be there anyway, the requirement out to be that if a candidate wants equal time the broadcaster only has to provide it if the candidate can provide content comparable to what the broadcaster originally aired.
For example, suppose a local California station shows “Predator” and Gary Coleman wants equal time. Fine, but Coleman has to submit an 80 minute movie showing him kicking alien ass.
If Bill Simon has a fit because a network broadcast “True Lies,” that’s his right, but if he wants to respond he has to deliver his campaign message in the context of saving the country from nondescript terrorists trying to detontate a nuclear bomb while simultaneously making us believe he’d even have a shot with Jamie Lee Curtis.
Or suppose Gray Davis wants to get in on the act after an airing of “Total Recall.” So Davis would have to submit a drama full of plot holes featuring him constantly shifting identities (or, in this case, the judges would likely rule that tapes of Simon’s campaign speeches about the size of the California deficit from the last election would also meet this criteria).
Apparently The Economist (which, btw, sucks because it doesn’t have bylines) also missed the weblogs memo and gets taken to task for it by Dave Winer.
Always On looks like a blog and acts like a blog but Winer is here to inform us otherwise,
The person who interviewed me didn’t get that there is a difference between a discussion group and a weblog. Tony Perkins runs a DG. Nice, but it’s not a weblog.
Winer served with blogs, he knows blogs, some blogs are friends of his, and sir, that is no blog.
Well, somebody has to single out the apostates.