I mentioned in an earlier rant that CNN is now figuring out where you are in the world, and expressed some concern that they would eventually use this to limit or control what news you view based on where you came from.

That day arrived. If you're outside the U.S. and now go to CNN.com you are now redirected to 'edition.cnn.com', which is titled 'CNN.com international'. You see something totally different from the default U.S. page - which if you're looking for it, can now be found at 'us.cnn.com'.

...Though one could legitimately question whether either site will have newsworthy content, regardless of where you're at. 

So it appears the gentleman in France who lost USD 7.3B had, as recently as 2006, been responsible for a third of the bank's annual profit..... to the tune of about USD 3B. The way he had found to accomplish this mad swing in fortune, both good and bad? 

His job was designated as a 'small profit' desk. He was to both buy and sell the same position, creating a small profit when the position actually moved in either direction. That was the job description. But initially, it appears his luck was good, and he began to take only one side of the position, immensely enhancing his profits. But as any trader will tell you, eventually your picks go south.....hence the huge losses. His excuse? His bosses "had to know" what he was doing and "said nothing to stop him" and so he continued.....

But I agree with Mike. You don't have losses until you sell. But that reminds me of a tax client of mine....he was the last person in 2001 to buy Worldcom. His daytrading consisted of buying 1 - 2 million dollars worth of stock, wait for the first 1/8 tick up, and sell. At that volume, the penny profit is large enough to make it worthwhile. He bought Worldcom at about $125/share, and waited for the uptick that never came. He rode that stock down to $2 a share, convinced the price would return to even greater heights. Wiped out the profit from 64 other profitable trades in one bad one.

Greed. That's the only word for it.

Or stupid. 

Well, this is just me saying hi...I have no idea how any of this works, and yes, you can call me a 'newbie', and I won't even be offended...I am shocked and appalled however, that you guys and gals are so incredibly smart that this thing does NOT have a spell checker!

LOL

Oh well, I'll just be ignorant and type words incorrectly, either way I'm sure you'll get the basic drift...I'm not here looking for anyone, but after seeing Mike's comment on one of my blogs I came to visit him on his, and found this! I thought it was a very cool place and so, with a great waving of arms, I attempted to join...I'm not certain if the weblog I 'attempted' to create is even visible (except to me of course) or if my profile is viewable by anyone...But, I'm here, delving into new territory, and trying very hard not to look like an ass...

I'm hoping someone will take pity on me and show me what I've done wrong, or if I've actually done something right, and am too stupid to see it!

Have a great day everyone, and be good to one another...

Peace and white light,

Nick

Strange that the recent decision to pull Australian troops out of Iraq received hardly a mention down under. Nor on the U.S. news sites. It's obviously not good news for the Bush coalition. But I fail to understand why they aren't talking about it here either. 'Let's just slip away quietly' seems to be the message.

Finally found a reference, on a website in India. 

Looks like I got sidetracked from my original mission to use this website as an xml playground to explore and develop new communications technologies, and instead wrote a social portal that hardly anybody cares about. That was a few years ago now. Well, I haven't given up. It just took a while to reach the state where I can get beyond the user-interface plumbing and get back to the machine interfaces which is where the fun is.  

Feeds have improved a lot. I'm using Atom paging now. Still holding off on atom-thread for comments since I can do it so much easier embedding into the articles - though I note that the latest Firefox parses atom-thread just fine. No use forcing it on the public until a few more feedreaders have jumped on board. The code has been working for a year or two, but I'm just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up before I turn it back on.

I've been playing with a weblog export tool that's basically an Atom feed, but replaces images and attachments with inline data: URL's. Have had a few glitches - including a PHP bug in the regular expression library that I need to report. But this in theory can let you take an entire weblog and move it elsewhere as one gigantic XML file. Everything. Images, attachments, comments, categories, the whole nine yards. 

I've also got Atom Publishing Protocol support in a very primitive state (but not yet ready for prime time). This is a big effort and I don't expect to be finished for a few months. I've got a suitable framework, but this site works a bit differently than the model used by the atom publishing spec. It will take a while to resolve all the differences so it plays nicely. This would for instance allow you to import your entire weblog from elsewhere in the world - especially one that used data: URLs to bring in images and attachments. Otherwise if I use the default model, I've got to package everything into a workspace for export, and this takes more than one file to represent all the structures completely. But that's the big picture - on a smaller scale, you should soon be able to publish weblog posts from your cell phone, or sync new articles with another weblog you may have. I 'm also not bothering with the xml-rpc remote mechanisms for publishing. They're primitive now, the api's too fragmented, and pretty much dead.

Oh yeah, and we've got trackbacks now - for any weblog that allows non-member comments. This is a flavor of xml-rpc. It isn't a big deal, but a few folks have requested it. You can find the trackback URL in the 'more actions' menu of articles - that is for any member weblogs that allow them. Mine does.  

Oh, and photo albums can now be exported as zip files. That has nothing to do with XML...

China has moved to ban ultra-thin plastic bags as a packaging material, citing environmental concerns.

This move on the surface sounds laudable. However I note that here in Australia, the skinniest plastic bags are sought out by consumers as opposed to the more durable bags and wraps manufactured overseas.

I was informed it was because those manufactured here, especially the micro-thickness bags - are in fact bio-degradable. Perhaps they're cellulose instead of poly-eth or poly-prop. I haven't researched it enough to know. But perhaps there might be potential for a booming export market in bio-degradable containment materials.

The last pll before voting shows Obama with 39% and Clinton with 30%. The actual results show Obama 36%, Clinton 39%. "Why the difference?" is the question on every news channel this morning. I'll tell you why:

Obama did well in Iowa because it was a public vote. Few people want to be politically incorrect and so, since everyone could see who they were voting for, they had to vote their talk. In New Hampshire, the talk was that Obama was the better candidate, but when it came time to punch out a chad, NH proved it's more racist than sexist, more willing to vote for a woman than a black man. NH showed us what white America will do in November 2008......if Obama wins the nomination.....and that is secretly vote according to race. 

America, you suck. 

Boy, the Men's Wearhouse really likes us. Day after we bought my wedding dress, we went in to see what they had and ended up walking out having spent over a grand. My platinum card was crying very loudly that weekend.

My better half is now the proud possessor of a full tuxedo - from bow tie to shoes and everything in between. Including the shirt studs, braces and cufflinks. Plus we found a very nice sport coat, two pair of slacks, two shirts w/ties and an additional set of braces.

The nice thing is, for every $500 you spend, they send you a $50 gift certificate (gotta join their little club but its free). So, when the gift certificates arrived, we went back on New Year's Day and found a nice 3/4 length coat for Fred that ended up costing us $11 out of pocket.

Now all I have to do is mail off the invitation, now that everyone is on the list. Got the chapel contract signed and faxed off and reserved the private room at the restaurant for the dinner after the ceremony. Plus the deposit for the private room. Can't forget all those pesky deposits.

Have to talk to my daughter - she's the maid of honor - about what she's going to wear. She's been a maid of honor of brides maid so many times, I'm hoping she has something already that she'd be willing to wear again. The dress she wore at her foster-sister's wedding would be fabulous, if it still fits.

A friend from grade school, who lives in Vegas, can't wait for me to arrive. We haven't seen each other since grade school and only found each other a couple of years ago on Classmates.com and have been e-mailing ever since. It's nice to have someone in the know down there. Especially since we have a lot of similar likes - motorcycles, guns, chocolate and working for a transit district. I don't work for a transit district but my better half does and so does my friend and her husband.

Less than 3 months until the wedding day. Got to make that man of mine an honest man.

I've been working with some dynamic text/font resizing tools recently. Some visitors over the last few days may have seen some of these efforts in progress, but I've just turned them off again until I get it all sorted.

In order to change the text size on a page after it's loaded, and without re-loading, one has to walk the DOM tree and re-calculate every font size on the page. There are actually a few open-source packages which will do the dirty work, but there are still a lot of issues. Almost all of these center around MSIE (why am I not surprised?). Additionally, it takes some work to get them to play nicely with sifr - the modern day equivalent of webfonts; which was abandoned around the turn of the millennium as being too infected with DRM controls to ever mass deploy.

Anyway, if you're interested in doing dynamic font scaling, I'd like to point you to JS magnifier, which is a pretty cool little app for walking the DOM and changing all the sizes. I had a bit of trouble with it on web forms, because it listens for key events, and if you type -,+,<,or > anywhere it changes the page size - even if you were typing these into a text field. Rather than modify the event listener to determine if it was a form and check the current focus, I just commented out the event listener and used JS links to activate the functions. 

But then on IE, everything was screwed up. First of all, even with a setting of '0' (no change), the page always goes through a resize cycle after you load it, and a lot of inherited sizes got messed up and set to something obscenely small. You can fix these by declaring them '!important', but you'll likely end up with over half your size tags set to !important in order to render your original page anywhere close to what it was designed to look like. 

The real trouble began however doing the DOM walk. IE does some real funny stuff to their DOM (this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody either). If you've got an embedded video, and there are any troubles loading the video, the entire DOM tree from that point forward seems to get rebuilt (resulting in the font size reverting for part of the page). The same thing happens if you've got AJAX-updated content on the page - every time there's an update, everything from that div to the end of the page reverts.

Looks like I'm back to square one. Think I'll go back to my original plan which I never quite finished implementing, but basically use proportional (em) fonts everywhere [this I do already], and then dynamically change the main body font declaration on the fly as the CSS page goes down the wire. This is hardly dynamic - it results in the need for a page reload to render everything correctly. At least it's portable and doesn't require javascript or depend on anybody's screwy DOM implementation. Oh well, live and learn I guess.  

Scientists believe a patch of ground disturbed by the vehicle shows evidence of a past environment that would have been perfect for microbial life.

The deposits were probably produced when hot spring water or steam came into contact with volcanic rocks.

On Earth, these are locations that tend to teem with bacteria, said rover chief scientist Steve Squyres.

link to entire article, on BBC News. 

Someone left their post-it to-do list at the restaurnt last night. I'm not making this up. Here were some of their bullet points (they had drawn a tiny circle in front of each item):

• workout after work
• work at 5 pm
• call Heath
• text Terry
• drink water
• journal
• blog
• bike riding
• look for an apartment
  

A bit of monsoon rains off an on for the last few days (no I'm not complaining - it's actually reasonably warm outside). This morning we got a little over an inch in about 20 minutes - or about 1cm/hour. The morning drive was a nightmare. With the wipers on full speed they couldn't brush the rain away fast enough to actually see anything over a couple of meters away. Everybody was crawling along at 20km/hr on Highway 1. It was a bit flooded near the Princes Highway - about a foot deep in places. (The Princes Highway is very much like El Camino Real back in California - it's the old highway; lined with business establishments, whereas the coast highway [highway 1 or the F6] is the newer freeway.)

I'm not exactly thinking about Thanksgiving. It isn't celebrated here. Even less than Halloween. A non-event. But everybody has been pushing Christmas here since about six weeks ago. However, it's hard to think about Christmas in the middle of summer. It just doesn't seem natural to be looking at Christmas decorations and beach towels at the same time. The university is preparing for graduation next week, about the time y'all are gonna' be carving turkeys. Today we went to the Frensham Iris Festival. Frensham is a private girl's school and this is their spring/summer event. Hotter than blazes. 

I think Kenneth Donnell (Glasgow, Scotland) takes the cake for being scalped for concert tickets.

He paid almost $200,000 for the privilege of seeing Led Zeppelin re-unite for an evening in London. Yup, the return of the satanic coke-heads that can't remember what song they're playing from one bar to the next.

Dude, they're old. Brains long since fried. Have any of them made any memorable music in the last 30 years? There you go. Do you remember the Cream re-union? It was freaking horrible - and Clapton still plays guitar for a living.  A year from now the DVD of the event will be in the discount bins at K-Mart for $4.95. Why not spend the money on a new Ferrari or something? 

A friend (now at Google) responds:

"Mike, obviously I cannot talk about Google internals, but what did we do about content violations at AOL?"

Uhm, nothing.

"Right."

OK, this isn't entirely true. There was that big flap with the EU over their different definition of the age at which a child is subject to parental controls. And then we spent weeks coming up with a solution to the problem of what should happen to group content if a group founder/moderator leaves the online service.

But mostly, content issues weren't our problem as software designers/engineers. The recently passed (at the time) DMCA had a "Safe Harbour" provision - which basically states that a service cannot be liable for infringement by its members if notified of content offenses and takes the offending content down/offline in a reasonable amount of time. Ultimately, this was our solution to any legal issues that might arise. We left it to the legal team to sort out what was or wasn't illegal content, and provided tools to operations staff to actually remove the infringing material.  

Just noticed a search hit landing on my website for 'crossroads BBS'. Wow. I'm impressed. That was about 25 years ago. Somebody obviously remembered and came looking and passed by all the links for a Crossroads BBS from Melbourne in the '90s so they must've known what they were looking for.

Howdy. 

We did have a fun little online community back then, although it was just ASCII text at 300/1200 baud. Joe remembers...

Hey computer! Who called today?

Read my mail, from Joe, since yesterday.  

Oh, and make me some coffee, wouldja' please?

Sometimes I wonder if we've moved forward at all... 

Seems I got locked out of the forum that was accusing me of all manner of illegal behavior for the way my websites (used to) use newsfeeds. I merely asked what I was doing that they felt was wrong, and how I might rectify it. 

If you've arrived here trying to find out what all the fuss is about, sorry, but I'm no longer able to respond directly to the accusations made.

But there's more. I'm going to use your esteemed Google Reader as an example, since this was used as a shining example of how to publish/republish newsfeeds in a non-infringing manner. 

It was claimed that many sites can get away with publishing newsfeeds because they only contain snippets, and not a complete copy of the original copyrighted work. Further that they do not republish this information to third parties.

It just ain't so. I went to Google Reader and plugged in a feed URL for one of my web properties. Up came my newsfeed. Now lets take a look... hmmm. I don't see snippets of my articles. I see the complete articles. The whole tomato. 

But wait, there's more. The argument is that Google just creates this list on the fly, so isn't storing and republishing protected work.  

Then how come I see a full copy of every article I've ever written since Google Reader came into existence? Everything. Tell me, I'd like to know. I'll tell you. It's because somebody else subscribed to my feed, and Google made a copy of every article that has ever been read on my site, and is republishing it to anybody who accesses that feed URL. My feed only contains 20 recent items. But everything is there, even articles which have been deleted from my website. 

The only way this could happen is if they make a (complete) copy of every article, and republish it on their website. No different than anything which I did, and in fact they publish a whole lot more than I ever did for a given feed. I only provided a snapshot of the current feed, and the ability to import one or two articles a day from a few select feeds.

So Google Reader has the ability, and is actively creating copies of every weblog for which it is provided a feed - providing an alternate to ever visiting the source website, and without regard to copyright issues; and republishing this to the world. Exactly what I was accused of doing.  

Google as you may or may not know is pretty much exempt from copyright restrictions under the fair use clause. They have argued successfully that they can copy pretty much anything that has ever been written. But I can't - because I'm not Google, and fair use apparently only applies to large U.S. corporations with lots of lawyers.

But since I've been locked out of the dialog, the idiots who have accused me of wrong doing will probably never see this.

As I told folks on that forum before I was locked out, if you really want to protect your writings, don't publish them, and certainly don't syndicate them. And if you don't want your entire site to be cloned, certainly don't syndicate full articles.

It's too late to bring back news on this site. I'm done with it. Heck, I'll just use Google Reader and save some disk space, not have to worry about foul language and XSS injections and all the other mess that comes with importing content from the wild.

It's a bit of an inconvenience to those who had a desire to use this software as it was envisioned, to create personalized websites of personalized content compiled from their favorite sources around the globe. But nobody was really using any of that functionality anyway.  They were just letting me subscribe to interesting feeds and using it to see glimpses of the blogosphere that they wouldn't have seen otherwise. 

Oh well. I've got better things to do.  

Tomorrow is Daylight Savings. Remember 'Spring forward, fall back'? That's right - tomorrow we move it forward, no matter how odd that may seem. It's October, but it's spring.

At least the Australian government hasn't been mucking with and tweaking DST as it did before the 2000 Olympics. The software engineers need time to code in the changes - I think that a lot of the world now has Sydney time right.

Well that would be anybody using the Olsen timezone databases. I know personally about thirty web services which just give you a choice of 'GMT+10' - and these are all going to be wrong tomorrow. On the bright side, I really don't care if they get it wrong. I'm not using any of them for anything globally time sensitive. It always makes my head hurt trying to figure out how many hours I'm going to be away from GMT with all the conversions and tweaks in effect. I suppose it'll probably be GMT+11. One hour forward. But wait, we'll then be one hour closer to Greenwhich, England as the earth spins. Not further from it. So maybe it's GMT+9. Silicon Valley will be... Uh, I give up. It's in negative GMT and the time is going back. So is it forward or backward? I'll have to figure it out on paper to work out the difference between LA (where this server is) and Sydney (close enough to where I am).  

But this will also give a good test of my own daylight savings and timezone functions (which use Olsen tables). The U.S. is going one hour back and we're going one hour forward. I might be poring over the code tomorrow if something gets askew.