bangersandmash

Google Chrome is getting lot of press. I find it amusing that Chrome, like Firefox before it is getting a lot of pixels (formerly: ink) by touting features pioneered by Opera. Opera seems to be the gold standard for new features: tabbed browsing, speed dial, autocomplete, security user stylesheets, privacy features, etc. However, the complaint remains that Opera is relatively closed to community development (said the guy who blogs using Safari). I wonder what would happen if Opera merged their cutting edge user-experience with Firefoxe’s community of plug-in developers?

I used Opera for years but eventually switched back to Safari to take advantage of a couple of mission-critical bookmarklets. However, I continue to regard Opera as the gold-standard of browsers. IE has its hoard-of-lemmings and Firefox has its community of holier-than-thoughs, but Opera is the true innovator. I realise that this is holy-war-class-material for some people but if you exclude the plug-in architecture, closed-source Opera has innovated while others have followed. Now I invite Opera to open up to an established plug-in standard (Firefox/greasemonkey) and truly take over.

Bloomsbury is going to release Creative Commons licensed works concurrently with their print-based work. Fittingly, the work advertised on their website is by Lawrence Lessig. Ironically, a CC-licensed work is not available because:

[t]he Creative Commons (CC) version of the book will be available in May 2009. This is due to pre-existing print and electronic publication rights granted to the originating publisher, Penguin Press, in the USA. Until the CC version is available, all profits from the e-book will be donated to Creative Commons.

Good ol’ copyright gets one last kick at Bloomsbury.

All joking aside, this is a fantastic turn of events. According to their FAQ

[Bloomsbury] will impose the same standards expected of any world-class academic publisher. Manuscripts that pass the editorial selection process will be peer-reviewed, copyedited and formatted. Authors will have their works marketed and sold globally. In addition, Bloomsbury Academic will be at the forefront of promoting the text online.

On other words, Bloomsbury does not believe that making an e-print available will undermine the central tenants of academic publishing. They will continue to deliver a quality product that lives up to the expectations of their community while also attempting to lead the humanities deeper into the digital age.

My only suggestion is that Bloomsbury add a “donate” link. I believe in Creative Commons. I also believe that by making something available to the masses the author and publisher should still have the right to make money directly from the product. Communities are very powerful. Whether they realise it or not, Bloomsbury has just made their works available to a much wider community. The community should have the opportunity to pay them back.

Click image to view larger original version.

Having made many-a-flow chart in my day I just had to share this.

Talented people have trouble writing comedy this good:

Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming “Hot Housewives in action!” on the front of the third-quarter edition. source: independant.co.uk

Don’t blame me if this disappears from your local library.

Storage space is cheap these days. Some are even giving it away for free. For me, however, file size is an important consideration. I use a Macbook as my primary workhorse and I want as much information as possible to be at my fingertips at all times. This means that I don’t want to be working with external drives, CD backups and ‘cloud storage’ (except for purposes of backup, of course) I’ve got an 80 gig drive so I should have lots of room for my materials but once you install a few programs, take a few hundred pictures and put a few gigs worth of MP3s onto the disc you’re left with a lot less room to play with. This is why I’ve gotten fussy about what I save from my research.

Web pages are particularly nasty wasters of space. I recently saved a single article from the New York Times website that took up over 1100k! That’s more than a megabyte for a single article. After I’d taken 20 seconds to cut out the adds, javascript and other useless, irrelevant material that was saved in the web archive I was left with a file of 7k. The New York Times stuck me with 1093k of unnecessary material. Now multiply this across thousands of files and realize just how much drive space could have been wasted.

That’s why I’m thankful for Aardvark and make.text.

Aardvark is a bookmarklet (or plugin if you use firefox) that allows you to highlight the part of the page you’re actually interested in an automatically (or sometimes manually) get rid of unwanted content. This is usually more than enough to get rid of much of the crap that comes along with most web pages. However, make.txt takes this a step further by converting the remaining text on the page into markdown. This step is pure nerdery but it does an excellent job of preserving

• the link to the original source,
• all of the remaining links on the page
• the semantic structure of the original document.

What I’m left with is a small, easily searchable file of unformatted text that can easily be imported into other applications for editing and quoting. And no ads.

From the telegraph:

The study looked at 212 patients, all of whom snored or had related conditions including sleep apnoea, a dangerous disorder in which sufferers make snoring noises and stop breathing momentarily during sleep as their airways close over. Those who suffered from the most serious snoring problems expended around 2,000 calories while resting every day. Those who tended to snore only lightly and less often burned an average of 1,626 calories a day resting, the findings show. source: telegraph.co.uk

Sadly, the news gets more depressing as you read. In the meantime I’m hoping that my insurance company will look favourably upon my new-found leisure activity.

And now it is time to recognize that my first post of my new work-related blog is distinctly not work related. So much for good intentions.

bangersandmash is taking on a more work-related focus. All previous content has been burned.

Over the years bangersandmash has been many things to very few people. I’ve never been good at updating it. I’ve tried writing about what I’m interested in and I’ve tried writing about what I thought others might be interested in. Neither approach worked. So now I’m going to write about what I’m working on. Yes, fellow travellers, this just became a work-related blog. Feel free to tune out.