Science vs faith

A friend of mine sent me this and said I no longer need to wade through the God Delusion.

Web standards checklist

Web standards checklist - useful for future score carding? Every point on the checklist is supported by a link to an external article such as how to create the perfect 404 error page. The list is rather old (august 04) but it's all still relevant by the look of it.

http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/checklist.htm

Atomic energy agency releases new warning symbol

The International Atomic Energy Agency released a new warning symbol to supplement the elegant and traditional but meaningless trefoil radiation warning symbol.



New:









Supplementing:











Source: boingboing

Local dignitaries visit Digital

Three of Anton's toys joined the Enterprise IG digital team yesterday.









RSS, Second Life and Windows Vista were the hot topics.

Quick Firefox Tip: Single-key search

Reader Grant wrote to tell us about Firefox's little-known Quick Find search tool, which you access by pressing the forward slash key (the one that shares space with the question mark).

When you press slash (or the apostrophe key), you'll see a little Quick Find field in the lower-left corner of the screen--not unlike what you get from pressing Ctrl-F (but without any of the Find controls). Start typing and you'll see instant results. Wait a moment and Quick Find disappears on its own.

Obviously this won't work if you've placed your cursor in a text field (you'll just get the slash or apostrophe), and I'm not sure there's any major value in using this search method instead over Ctrl-F. That said, it's one less keystroke, so it does seem a little faster. Just one more way to wring a little more value out of Firefox. — Rick Broida

Source: lifehacker

Gulp...

Video of skydiver with defunct parachute plummeting to earth (don't be put off by the annoyingly slow intro and the fact that it's on the Daily Mail site!)

Yahoo Pipes - apparently revolutionary

A new feed aggregator and manipulator from Yahoo.



O'Reilly Rader calls it:

"a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output."



Techcrunch noted:

"It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes” from Yahoo! is no exception."



This use of RSS as a data channel is what Adam Bosworth was talking about the MySQL User Conference in April. RSS provides an "an open, simple data model to easily server up information similar to the way a web server delivers content to the browser." Listen to his talk at IT Conversations.



So we're starting to get a confluence of a single, simple data model and simple interface to allow anyone to construct their own queries.





Better have a look then.

Graffiti Research Lab

Light Criticism: LED Throwies: Two projects from the Grafifiti Research Lab

Christians celebrate Darwinism

A refreshing glimpse of sanity in the world of religion

Christian faith in the other good book

Nice animation

Cheeseburgers, anyone?

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: Keynote text analysis

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/110473.asp I'm not a great fan of tag clouds, but sometimes that really do give a new way of looking at things. These weighted graphs applied to keynote speeches really make you think. The article tries to make a point about complexity, but I think it's more interesting that 'phone' is the key word i for jobs, but 'great' is so crucial for Gates. This really is the tactic of salesman that knows something can't sell itself. Gates on vista...

The Paradox of Choice

More is less.



"We can't have it all, and worse yet the desire to have it all and the illusion that we can is one of the principal sources of torture of modern affluent free and autonomous thinkers."



Clarity of thought on the subject of choice and happiness from Barry Schwartz.



Interesting tie-in at the end with our craving for human community in so much that it helps us limit these choices. Could this be one of the key drivers for the explosion in social networking online?



IT Conversations

Google video (different presentation)

Musicovery

Can't find a radio station that you like? Try this...

http://www.musicovery.com/

Chinese Animation

Animated films and shorts from Shanghai are being shown at the NFT from Sun 18^th to Tues 27^th Feb as part of the upcoming Chinese New Year celebrations.

Cambrient, Enterprise IG partner on digital marketing

http://www.biz-community.com/Article/196/16/13131.html "Cambrient, South Africa's foremost integrated digital marketing specialist, has partnered with leading brand consultancy Enterprise IG in a joint venture that will offer Enterprise IG's clients complete digital branding products and services." It would be interesting to know the range of their capability, and the functions of the brand management platform. Clearly online brand management is now a 'must have' for any global brand and it would interesting to see if their offer / product can stretch across the group.

Message in a Bottle Server

Welcome to the Message in a bottle server located at Brighton UK.

Enter a message here and it will be printed off, put in a bottle and thrown from Brighton Pier on the south coast of England.

I hadn't seen this before either:

Domain Suffixes

Useful list if you need to check which URL suffixes correlate to which countries.

Another approach to image editing

Similar functionality to the post before (Picnik) but very different interface.

Perhaps a good opportunity to do some user testing e.g. do people want to get the job done or does and pleasurable aesthetic experience make a difference?







Source: Conor

Edit photos online

There just aren't any domain names left hence Picnik.

Crop, rotate, adjust colours, sharpen etc.

Good interface.

Well worth a look.







Also the 'try it out option' is great. No pfaffing around with handing over details. Just straight in there.



Source: Rob

Oolong the Rabbit

"Album 1 contains 88 pictures of Oolong balancing objects on its head."







I take issue with that statement.

Surely the rabbit has a gender? And I would guess that someone else is doing the balancing. If not, a post to YouTube or similar is in order.

Liquid layout in Flash

Here is an example:

www.thefwa.com

and here is a tutorial:

http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/liquid-flash-layout

It seems to involve creating full screen Flash sites because you have to set the flash size to 100% in the html code. However it may be possible to stick this in a DIV within a CSS layout?

edit: yes this is possible!

http://www.enterpriseig.net/flash_layout_test/

Linux version of Mac / Vista eye candy?

Ubuntu + Beryl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0ZtcxHUSDQ

Windows Vista - some negative reactions

Windows Vista has launched to mixed reviews.

No surprises there.



Microsoft have a short tour on their site. Some might say that the player is almost the most interesting thing about it.







One commentator succinctly expressed the feelings of many within the IT community:

Yeah! get new vista!...with google desktop, yahoo widgets and osX animation - just the same but called something else so you have to pay.

Also, our windows media 9 is so good, we decided to play this presentation using macromedia flash….upgrade today, really, we know what’s best for you.

Hummer golf-kart

Sorry, I'm not telling you where this is from because I don't want anyone to drive one. Golf with military overtones. Ouch.

iConcertCal

Neat little plug in for iTunes that goes through your music library and and lists artists playing in your town. iConcertCal