Me2 findoo.info

michel v — intraordinaire.com posted a photo:

One of ten thousands buddhas in the monastery of Fo Guang Shan in Dashu, south of Taiwan. August 2008.

Join Knowbility in urging the University of Texas to reconsider its decision to close the Accessibility Institute, founded and led with distinction by the late Dr. John Slatin. Keep John's work alive. Sign the petition. [tags]accessibility, johnslatin, accessibility institute[/tags]

It looks like there’s going to be another point-release of WordPress coming soon. WordPress version 2.6.2-beta1 was just branded in svn a short while ago. Looking over the logs, I don’t see anything major — a fix for the Textpattern importer, a bug fix that prevents an attempt to make a revision of a revision, a new ‘login_redirect’ filter, a new ‘wp_rand()’ function, and a handful of other minor bugfixes.

I’m kind of wondering if there’s something bigger that’s going to be added before release…

The University of Texas is closing its Accessibility Institute today. Non-profit Knowbility has started a petition to save it. Though you may not have heard of the Accessibility Institute, you have been influenced by its work. Its late founder, Dr. John Slatin, was the former co-chair of the Web Content Accessibility ...

Released Wednesday, August 27th, SiteAssist Professional creates entire CSS-based websites in minutes. Since that sounds ridiculous and impossible, I'll say it again: the product creates websites in minutes, with clean markup, and nicely optimized CSS. The software package includes 14 designs, each with 12 color schemes. You can customize everything and ...

Anton Mannering organised TechLudd Cork last night at the Cork International Airport Hotel. I demoed Tweet Tweet and answered questions about WordPress and some of the plugins I had running on my blog.

Apart from showing off Tweet Tweet I took a few photos too. Pictured below are only some of the people there including (in no particular order): Walter, Bernard Goldbach, Anton, Aileen, Gavin Harkness, James Galvin (who should tweet more about Tweetrush!), Walter Wynne, John Peavoy, Pat Phelan, Ashley Halsall, Robin Blandford and some crazy guy who calls himself Damien.

If you see yourself in one of the photos please leave a comment, and apologies for not getting your name on the night.

Yes, the lighting in the toilets in the Cork International Airport Hotel really do change colour.

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2008-08-29: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web. The SKOS data model provides a standard, low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a light weight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. It may be used on its own, or in combination with formal knowledge representation languages such as the Web Ontology language (OWL). Comments are welcome through 03 October. The group has also published an update of the companion SKOS Primer. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink)

2008-08-29: The Web Applications Working Group has published the Working Draft of Web IDL. This specification defines a syntactic subset of OMG IDL version 3.0 for use by specifications that define interfaces. Web IDL is an IDL variant with a number of features that allow the behavior of common script objects in the web platform to be specified more readily. A number of extensions are given to the IDL to support common functionality that previously must have been written in prose. In addition, precise language bindings for ECMAScript 3rd Edition and Java are given. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

2008-08-29: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Group Note of Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. This document describes best practice recipes for publishing vocabularies or ontologies on the Web (in RDF Schema or OWL). It is intended for the creators and maintainers of vocabularies in RDFS and OWL (vocabulary and ontology are used interchangeably in the context of this specification). It provides step-by-step instructions for publishing vocabularies on the Web, giving example configurations designed to cover the most common cases. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink)

It's a question many of us in accessibility have been waiting for years to be answered. Does the Americans with Disabilities Act apply to the web? Sadly, accessibility's ultimate cliffhanger once again reaches an awkward denouement, leaving us deflated, and looking at yet another boring sequel. The National Federation of the Blind ...

If there’s a site out there that blends in with my very first Internet memories, then that’s Moluv, which now sports a brand new fresh design. I can still remember surfing the Internet and picking out the select few sites I later on used to get inspired. Sites like K10k, Surfsation and Threeoh (now defunct).

It’s been seven weeks since my knee surgery. I can now officially put my full weight on my right leg. Unofficially, I’ve already been walking around without crutches for most of the past week. When I had my six-week checkup with the surgeon, I asked when I could drive a car on my own instead of having to get my family members to drive me to appointments. He said “whenever you feel like you can,” so I did.

The important thing about the six-week checkup last week was that it marked the point that my meniscus repairs are healed enough for me to start bending my knee past 90 degrees. At my physical therapy appointment a few days later, we measured my angle at 118 degrees, and I was able to pedal an exercise bike. Between the bike, the squats and the leg-lift exercises (4 different exercises with 4 pound ankle weights x 100 reps each = 1600 pounds!)

We’re also getting back to a proper eating plan at home, so between that and the exercise I get from therapy, I’m hoping to shed some pounds now. I’ve got to say, though, I don’t recommend the knee surgery weight loss plan. It’s a pretty darned expensive gym membership.

WordPress.org user, “definitelynot” discovered a bug in the WordPress plugin, WP Super Cache that could expose blogs to duplicate content penalties. Unfortunately this affects every blog that uses the plugin in “ON” or full “Super Cache” mode, and has URLs that end with the “/” (forward slash) character. If the plugin is on “half on” mode, you’ll be fine.

The problem is that an anonymous user might visit a legitimate URL, ending with a slash, the plugin then creates a static file out of that page, which is then used when people visit the same URL. Unfortunately if someone links to that URL without the ending slash, a visiting browser or search engine bot won’t be redirected to the proper URL, they’ll be served the static html file.

For example:

1. John visits the URL /2007/05/23/why-the-nurses-cant-go-on-strike/ on my site. WP Super Cache creates a html file of that page.
2. In his enthusiasm for that post, John publishes a post about those zany doctors, but he forgets the ending “/”.
3. Googlebot, seeing fresh content on John’s site, crawls it and sees the link, visits my site eventually and wonders why it’s seeing the exact same page at two different URLs.

To be fair, Google is pretty good at figuring out where duplicate content is supposed to go but it’s better to avoid the issue completely. It also only matters if there are links to your site without the ending slash. The most common will probably be to your homepage as it’s likely internal URLs will be copy/pasted.

How to Fix
You should update to version 0.7 of the plugin which checks if your blog is affected by this problem. It also has instructions for updating the mod_rewrite rules in your .htaccess. It’s fairly easy to fix. Thank you “andylav” for the mod rewrite magic!

1. Edit the .htaccess in the root of your WordPress install.
2. You’ll see two groups of rules that look like this:
   

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} .*gzip.*
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz [L]
   
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html [L]
   

3. You need to add the following 2 rules above each block of “RewriteCond” lines:
   

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
   

4. The rules should eventually look like this:
   

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} .*gzip.*
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz [L]
   
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html [L]
   

5. Or you could just delete those rules and let the plugin regenerate them for you again.

PS. Thanks also to Lloyd for noticing the “enable the plugin” link was pointing at the wrong URL, and to Ryan who spotted a minor problem with the admin page and was kind enough to send me a Tweet about it.

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Two incidents mark my morning walk to work. i. On Second Avenue, a long-legged woman in a short black skirt dashes past, late to an unknown appointment, her movements fluid and beautiful. With every step, her skirt bounces, flashing legs at the avenue. Her left hand hangs at her hip, trying to ...

A few weeks ago Twitter annoyed a lot of European users when they stopped sending sms notifications to their users. I never really used that facility so I didn’t miss it but many Tweeters did. Outrage and blue murder were spoken of in the same sentence. People marched in the streets, there were riots.

OK, maybe not, but it annoyed a few prolific Tweeters and I wondered aloud if I could make Tweet Tweet send me sms notifications when I got replies or direct messages. After quite a bit of testing and playing around with Meteor’s website I’m glad to say I cracked it. I added hooks to my plugin for other plugins to latch on to, and wrote a small bit of code that logs in to Meteor.ie and uses their free web text to notify me of replies or direct messages.

Following on from that success, Jason Roe added code so Irish Vodafone customers could get sms notifications too!

So, if you really miss the sms notifications from Twitter, and you’re an Irish Meteor or Vodafone customer, download Tweet Tweet, install it in your WordPress blog and enjoy getting those sms notifications from Twitter again!

Developers - if your phone company isn’t covered just yet, please take a look at the existing Meteor and Vodafone plugins. The framework is there. Using curl to login and send texts can be a little daunting but it’s not impossible. Get in touch by leaving a comment here, or using the contact form on the about page.

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In Issue No. 266 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: CSS Sprites2 – It's JavaScript Time by DAVE SHEA In 2004, Dave Shea took the CSS rollover where it had never gone before. Now he takes it further still—with a little help from jQuery. Say hello to hover animations that ...

Our friends at Teehan+Lax have released a great set of assets for iPhone UI prototyping. Download it now!

WP Super Cache is a plugin for WordPress that creates cached copies of your blog posts and pages, making your site much faster to serve. It’s also ideal for coping with sudden surges of traffic.

I released a new version of the plugin this morning. This is a bugfix release:

• Mike Beggs contributed a number of changes:
  1. Better support for Win32 NTFS
  2. Better use of the “Vary” header so proxy servers won’t cache the wrong page. If you see leakage of comment details on posts this will fix that problem.
  3. WP-Cron handles cleanup of expired cache files in the background now.
  4. Disable mod_deflate if it’s running as it sometimes tries to compress gzipped files. Remove wp-content/cache/.htaccess for that file to be updated.
• Lazy and Otto both recommended using get_comment() instead of the depreciated get_commentdata()
• A basic “uninstall” function has been added to remove some of the files the plugin creates. It’s called when you deactivate the plugin.
• PHP running as a CGI doesn’t support apache_request_headers() so that’s been added too.
• And I almost forgot, the admin page received a slight makeover.

Get the plugin from the download page!

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2008-08-20: W3C announced today its new Licenses for W3C Test Suites. Two licenses promote two goals:

Take a dip in the Flickr photo pool from An Event Apart San Francisco 2008. Day Two is about to begin. [tags]aeasf08, aneventapart, webdesign, conference, sanfrancisco[/tags]

Begin by considering the desired outcome of every interaction and then removing everything that distracts the user from accomplishing that outcome. A great read.

2008-08-18: The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published five Working Drafts. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata.

2008-08-18: The Voice Browser Working Group has published the Proposed Recommendation of Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) Version 1.0. PLS provides the basis for describing pronunciation information for use in speech recognition and speech synthesis, for use in tuning applications, e.g., for proper names that have irregular pronunciations. Changes from the previous Working Draft can be found in Appendix D of the specification. Comments are welcome through 18 September. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity. (Permalink)

The happy and sad story of Goofy, a dog rescued from Greece, who took over Belinda Harley’s life.

If you enjoyed story of Goofy’s rescue, look for the book, “Marley and Me”. It’s a lovely story, and you’d need to have a hard heart not to shed a tear by the end of it.

The only time that Mark Birley, that quintessentially reserved Englishman and ruler of the nightclub Annabel’s, sent me a love letter, it began: “Darling Belinda, I know I only saw you last night, and will see you again in a few days, but there is something I wanted to put in writing. I want to tell you how much I love and admire you” (here, I caught my breath) “for rescuing that divine dog.”

The rest of the letter was not about me at all. It was all about Goofy, the mixture of spaniel and scamp with the wonderful, intelligent eyes that I had brought home, after nightmarish battles with official-dom, from the Greek island of Paxos.

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Darden Studio has relaunched its website and released Jubilat, a fabulous slab serif. We've been beta-testing Jubilat all year; it's my principal typeface for An Event Apart in 2008. (Last year's principal An Event Apart typeface was Darden Studio's Freight Sans.) New to Joshua Darden's work? Try Birra Stout, a ...

Early tomorrow, I leave for San Francisco. Headed into my laptop bag, along with my MacBook, are... An iPod Classic containing 8624 "songs" (I like music) and 46 "movies." Sample titles: A Mighty Wind, A Night at the Opera, Helvetica, Kiki's Delivery Service, Lost in Translation, North by Northwest, Rushmore, Spirited ...

2008-08-15: Web-based video is exploding, for advertising, enterprise collaboration, entertainment, product reviews, and other applications. As prices drop for consumer electronics, amateur and professionals alike are creating increasingly high quality videos. Social networks are sprouting up around Web-delivered media. W3C today launched a new Video in the Web Activity to make video a "first-class citizen" of the Web. The initial scope of work, determined as a result of a successful W3C Workshop on Video will be conducted by three groups:

2.6.1 is out.  Thanks for testing.  The beta releases had very good download numbers, and the helpful responses in the comments and on the bug tracker were great.

Pssst. New Happy Cog Studios design. Books-A-Million Online Bookstore. It looks even better when you start using it. Details soon at happycog.com. Update: A Books-A-Million case study is now available for your reading pleasure at Happy Cog dot com. [tags]books-a-million, happycog, design, webdesign[/tags]

I’m a big fan of Twitter. It serves as a useful tool connecting people who might never meet, and also as a vital means of communication for those who work at home or in solitary conditions.

The one huge and uncomfortable problem I see with Twitter is, “What happens to the conversation if Twitter fails?” What will you do if Twitter goes out of business tomorrow? Where will all your conversations, all the links you posted, and received from your friends be? That’s why I wrote Tweet Tweet.

Tweet Tweet is a plugin for WordPress that will archive your tweets, and the tweets of everyone you follow, plus replies you receive from strangers, and direct messages too. All these tweets will be stored safely in your database.

There is a simple “review pane” where you can see the latest tweets and go back in history but it’s very basic. The primary aim of this plugin is to ensure that your conversations are safe.

The plugin has been tested by a number of users, but it uses jQuery and AJAX techniques for the review pane so I’d love to hear if it works for you.

Please, do not hack the plugin to poll Twitter more than once every 90 seconds. Unless you follow thousands of others, 90 seconds will be fine. I have mine set to 180 seconds and it picks up every single tweet.

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Speculation on fan blogs about an upgrade to play DVDs on the Wii Console has been persistent for as long as I’ve been reading them, but it seems doubtful Nintendo will ever add this ability.

What are we to do? If you can’t get official support for something that the hardware can probably do, why not code it yourself? The Wii is a closed platform, but that hasn’t stopped enterprising developers taking a peek under the covers. That’s exactly what Erant did with his libdl and DVDX installer!

He created a dvd access library for the Wii Console, added the Mplayer media player and hey presto! DVD playback on the Wii. Mplayer also plays practically any video format under the sun so it’s even better than a DVD player.

Our DVD player is stuck in a cupboard under the television where the baby can’t get it (and requires untying of handles for an adult to get to) while the Wii is on a shelf in easy reach. I think this may be the project that gets me to try out Wii Homebrew using the new Twilight hack.

Once you’ve done that, you can enjoy the splendor of mplayer. That what started out as a simple proof of concept has rapidly turned into a full-featured media player, under the nourishing hands of dhewg. The main aim of the mplayer project was to get DVDVideo going, but it also supports reading video files off the SD card. (Experimental).

Nintendo Wii fanboy has a simple guide to getting everything running, from installing the Homebrew channel to running Mplayer. Nice.

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2008-08-14: The XML Processing Model Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language. This specification describes the syntax and semantics of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language, a language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents. A pipeline consists of steps. Like pipelines, steps take zero or more XML documents as their inputs and produce zero or more XML documents as their outputs. Comments are welcome through 26 September. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. (Permalink)

Everybody knows that you shouldn’t keep beverages too close to the computer, right? The reason is because eventually, your toddler is going to run up to give you a big hug before she leaves for daycare, and is going to bump your leg. Your leg, in turn, is going to bump the TV tray where you set your coffee cup. The cup is going to tip over and spill several ounces of coffee directly onto the keyboard of your Macbook. And as a consequence, the Macbook is going to cease to function.

Yes, that’s what happened here at Castle Campbell last Friday morning. I tried to disconnect power and battery as quickly as possible, tried using a blowdryer on it, sat it out in direct sunlight for about an hour, and continued to let it air out for quite a while after that. But it still would not power up. I scheduled repair with Apple Care, figuring I’d end up eating just about the full cost of a refurb laptop.

Fortunately, I tried booting once more today, with the power supply connected, and it did boot. It still won’t boot under battery power, but at least I know now that it didn’t fry the entire motherboard. And I can get one last Time Machine backup before I send it off. Hopefully it will be back to normal after Apple cleans up the innards (keyboard, CD drive, etc).

Without the Macbook to work on, I had to fire up my old Sony VAIO laptop. It’s really not a bad machine, despite its age. It’s got a 2.4GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM (the maximum that this model can have, unfortunately). Its biggest problem, hardware-wise, is that the battery won’t hold much of a charge anymore, so I have to stay tethered to the wall. But I do that when I work anyways.

I booted it up, let it install a bazillion updates for Ubuntu 8.04, and restarted. And it ran as slow as molasses. What the? After doing some diagnostics, I discovered that I was running a bunch of services that I didn’t really need. Samba? Netatalk? Winbind? Turn those off, I’m not using them on a regular basis. MT-DAAP, Tomcat, avahi-daemon, tor, and even apache and mysql — not needed right now. Turning all of those off helped a lot.

But the performance still seemed sluggish, especially once I had Thunderbird and Firefox running. My final tweak was to switch from the default GNOME/metacity setup to xfce4. Once I got that configured, the system became much more useable. Even now, with Thunderbird, Firefox, Pidgin, Tomboy, a terminal, and several xfce panel plugins running, almost half of my RAM is still free.

Still, I’ll be glad to have the Mac back. It’s got more screen resolution, a slightly bigger hard drive, and several newer CDs of ours in iTunes that I don’t have ripped on the VAIO. And I’m getting antsy about the fact that I can’t sync my iPhone at the moment. Not that I have anything terribly important that needs to be synced, but it’s the principle of the thing.

So, anyways, let my mistake serve as a lesson to you all. Really keep your beverages faaar away from your equipment. It’s not just the repair cost you have to worry about. For me, the time I’ve wasted in getting another machine set up as my working environment was at least as valuable as what I’ll be paying for repairs. I don’t know about you, but time is something that I can’t spare much of.

2008-08-13: The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Element Traversal Specification. This specification defines the ElementTraversal interface, intended to provide a more convenient alternative to existing Document Object Model (DOM) navigation interfaces, with a low implementation footprint. It does so by allowing script navigation of the elements of a DOM tree, excluding all other nodes in the DOM, such as text nodes. It also provides an attribute to expose the number of child elements of an element. See the disposition of Last Call Comments and learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

You may have heard that the official site of the British Prime Minister’s Office at number10.gov.uk launched earlier today. The great news is that it’s running WordPress, but what really excited me is the fact that the site is also using WP Super Cache.

The site was initially very slow, but once the cached static files were in place, it just zipped along! Three cheers for caching and everyone who has contributed to WP Cache and WP Super Cache!

I wonder if Gordon Brown will be looking at his Dashboard? *Wave*

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In Issue No. 265 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: The web is a conversation, but not always a productive one. In "Putting Our Hot Heads Together," Carolyn Wood shares ways to transform discussion forums and comment sections from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration. Plus: ...

Thanks to those who tested Beta 1.  Beta 2 addresses the bugs you found.  Reference the change log and the full diff to see what has changed since Beta 1.  We’re now at almost 60 tickets fixed for 2.6.1.

Get 2.6.1 Beta 2.

A long sought after feature in WordPress MU is domain mapping. That’s where a blog on a WordPress MU site can be “mapped” to a new domain. WordPress.com has an advanced domain mapping feature that has proved to be very popular with users even though it’s a paid-for upgrade.

This domain mapping plugin isn’t quite as powerful and still requires plenty of testing. So, while domains and “sub domains” or hostnames can be mapped to individual blogs, there are a number of caveats:

1. Remote login does not work. It’s possible to be logged in on the main site, logged in on the domain mapped blog as a different user or not logged in at all there!
2. It only works if your WordPress MU site is using sub domains.
3. It’s the 0.1 0.2 release. It’s basic.

Here’s the plugin page, and the download page. I’d like to hear how well it works for you.

I’m submitting this plugin to the WordPress MU plugin competition. There are only 2 other entries so the odds on my winning are pretty good!

I should have a Sitewide Tags update later this week, with thanks to Thomas Schneider who came on board last week to help and has done some super work!

Ron and Andrea found a bug in pre release testing that I forgot to fix in 0.1, so grab 0.2 if you were (un)lucky enough to grab the first release! Thanks Trent for testing too. Follow me on Twitter to get the inside scoop on my WordPress plugins, including a sort of super secret Twitter plugin..

WordPress MU is the multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com and many other sites.

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Some truly spectacular photographs on Boston.com from the jaw dropping Olympic opening ceremony. (Via Cameron Moll )

2008-08-08: The Voice Browser Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Requirements. VoiceXML 2.0 is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations. VoiceXML 3.0 is the next major release of VoiceXML. Its purpose is to provide even more powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced speech applications and to provide these capabilities in a form that can be easily and cleanly integrated with other W3C languages. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity. (Permalink)

The SXSW panel picker launched today. SXSW Interactive is probably the world's biggest web shebang, and the panel picker is how the festival begins winnowing out which panels, out of the many submitted, will actually be presented to the public. A few potential panels feature Happy Cog personnel: From Freelance to Agency: ...

With 2.6.1, we’re continuing our trend of releasing a dot one release about a month after dot zero.  We want to get fixes for the inevitable dot zero bugs into your hands without a long wait.  If you’re happy with 2.6, you can ignore 2.6.1.

If you are an IIS or i18n user, we’ve fixed a few annoying bugs that might be bothering you depending on your hosting setup.  If you are an IE user who uses Press This, we fixed some image insertion problems for you.  Check out the full list of almost 50 fixes and see if 2.6.1 has something to offer you.

If 2.6.1 looks interesting or if you just want to help us test and make sure we didn’t break anything else, go grab the 2.6.1 beta 1 package.  If all goes well, expect the final 2.6.1 release before WordCamp San Francisco rolls around.

Ava, who is nearly four, is not so bothered about Daddy's crippling monster toe, but great-grandma's passing still troubles her. She has calculated, correctly, that if great-grandma can die, anyone she loves is fair game. Sometimes Ava defies the inescapable logic. She'll tell a stranger, "My great-grandma died, but my grandma is ...

2008-08-07: The XML Query Working Group has published the Candidate Recommendation of XQuery Update Facility 1.0. This document defines an update facility that extends the XML Query language, XQuery. The XQuery Update Facility provides expressions that can be used to make persistent changes to instances of the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model. This document incorporates changes made against the Candidate Recommendation of 14 March 2008. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. (Permalink)

John Gruber is right: his four-year-old Daring Fireball essay, Ronco Spray-on Usability, still holds up nicely indeed. Alas, the notion that usability is the easy part—something you just add on after doing the hard part of writing the code—is hardly limited to the open source community. There are still many companies that ...

Andy has the very exciting news that Gravatar icons will be printed on attendee’s WordCamp San Francisco badges this year!

On supporting websites, Gravatars have become a de-facto identity for comment threads and discussions so to carry through the identity to the conference floor is just a logical conclusion.

There is one caveat. Gravatars can now be up to 512×512 pixels. The bigger they are, the better they’ll print. If your Gravatar is a measly 32×32 pixels it’s going to look like a dirty smudge next to the shiny badges of the big boys. Andy has created a handy form for checking if your image is the right size. If not, please upload a new Gravatar before August 14th!

I won’t be at WordCamp this year but after seeing the line up of speakers I’m looking forward to seeing the blog coverage afterwards.

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2008-08-06: The Protocols and Formats Working Group published an updated Working Draft of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). WAI-ARIA defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. WAI-ARIA is introduced in the WAI-ARIA Overview and the WAI-ARIA FAQ. Read the updated WAI-ARIA Specification announcement that requests feedback on host language embedding, and about the Web Accessibility Initiative. (Permalink)

I’m trying out the iPhone 2.0.1 firmware along with WP App 1.1. Both were released today. 2.0.1 seems to fix the keyboard lag that was coaxing expletives out of me. WP 1.1 is solid so far. We’ve been working on extending the WP XML-RPC API to allow the iPhone App (and other XML-RPC clients) to do some cool new stuff.

If you’re still looking for an organized resource of inspiration, then Pattern Tap is what you’ve been missing. After browsing around their categorized gallery of sites, you’ll probably feel as overwhelmed as I did. Great resource, permanent bookmark!

michel v — intraordinaire.com posted a photo:

Lines, texture, helvetica.
Ávila, Spain, april 2006.

(Super Takumar 135mm f2.5 @ f8)

2008-08-01: The CSS Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation for CSS Mobile Profile 2.0., which defines a common baseline of CSS support that even constrained mobile devices can provide. This effort is part of W3C's ongoing efforts to make the Web easier to use from a mobile devices (see related news). For the CSS Mobile Profile 2.0, W3C has worked closely together with OMA to remove the differences between W3C's and OMA's previous CSS-mobile profiles. An "alpha" quality test suite is available for the mobile profile. The Working Group will track implementations during the Candidate Recommendation phase. Implementers are invited to send feedback before February 2009. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)

2008-08-01: The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group published six documents yesterday: