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April 2004’s Posts.

  1. Mozilla and GNOME

    UserFriendly tries to poke fun at the Mozilla browser. (The Mozilla Foundation recently met with the GNOME Foundation … I wonder what about?)

  2. A public Google

    Google’s mantra is to not to be evil, but might that also mean not going public? A cleverly illustrated New York Times piece speculates the company’s co-founders want to keep Google eccentric, and by necessity, private, for as long as possible. That article, and two related pieces, provides a timely reminder both of why the dot-com bust and why the market might not always know best.

  3. Toronto 1, f--k

    One of the knocks against Toronto 1 is that it is trying to be Citytv; and now its seems to be copying City’s delicate sensibilities. We all remember the blooper reel from Gord Martineau and crew, and now Toronto 1 has one of its very own

  4. Bleeding, but not leading

    Did you know about the massize train disaster that occured in Norh Korea this morning? Given the treatment of the story online, it wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t

  5. It bleeds, but doesn’t lead

    A North Korean disaster gets buried by online news sites.

  6. Off-shoring may benefit Canada

    Unlike the U.S., off-shoring hasn’t notuceably affected the Canadian economy. A recent PriceWaterHouseCoopers study suggests there will be about 75,000 Canadian IT jobs sent to places like India during the next six years.The net gain in jobs, though, may be double that figure. Ironically, the effects will be tempered by American companies “near-shoring” jobs in Canada

  7. The Webbys struggle on

    The collective yawn heard across the Web was the announcement of the latest Webby nominations (why do they force you to re-register every year?). Admittedly, given how far this medium has come over the past decade (need proof: look at the state of the medium circa December 1994), this blasé attitude is kind of bizarre.

  8. Mozilla offering page-specific CSS hooks

    Asa points to a great soon-to-be feature for Gecko based browsers: a means to apply custom CSS based on the URL of the page loaded in the browser (vote for it). This has been bandied about on the www-style list, and there have been a number of suggested workarounds, including CSS signatures. Until this gets implemented, try Chris Neale’s extension, URIid

  9. TCP flaw

    The myth goes that the Internet could survive a nuclear attack. Though it was never true, the network has proven surprisingly robust. But the British government has disclosed flaw affecting the transmission control protocol that was discovered late last year by terrorist.net owner, Paul “Tony” Watson. The result is someone could trick, within seconds, computers and routers into severing connections by restarting. The hack will revealed in detail by Watson on Thursday at the cansecwest conference

  10. Netscape back? Or is it the Net ninjas?

    In other news, AOL is trying to resurrect Netscape and a UofT prof is training “net ninjas” to get around government censorship on the Web

  11. A reading list

    A quasi-annotated list of some of the articles that caught my eye over the past few days:

  12. Define Web standards

    Signal vs. Noise is challenging people to define Web standards in 10 words or less. (Speaking of which, WebStandards.TO has its first anniversary get together tonight at Fresh on Queen at Crawford.)

  13. Quoting and adjusting font sizes

    The latest version of Firefox now supports nested quoting via q, meaning this renders correctly: There was a pause. This won’t work in IE, he said. That being said, I do have a script for rendering quotes in Internet Explorer — it’s not really production quality yet, though.

  14. The good and bad of Craig and CHUM

    Eric Reguly has some very strong words about both the CRTC and Craig Media in terms of the Toronto 1 deal

  15. Mr. Walrus

    MediaBistro profiles Mr. Walrus, Ken Alexander. Not a lot of new news for Canadian magazine junkies, but it is interesting to read an American publication parsing the idea of a Canadian magazine

  16. IE7 update

    Dean Edwards has a released a major update to the still alpha IE7, including a way to make it, theoretically, future compatible. Dean’s also released the heart of the IE7, its CSS query engine, as a separate JavaScript file.

  17. Developing with Web standards

    Roger Johansson has produced a nicely-presented document on Web standards aimed at both clients and anyone learning Web design (via Webgraphics)

  18. Searching with Amazon

    Hmm…searching with Amazon’s A9; interesting dHTML interface (possibly built in part by Scott Andew), too. The John Battelle’s Searchblog broke the news, and there you can find more details. There is also a complete analysis underway at Signal vs. Noise and a Firefox plugin from Steven Garrity

  19. Bought by CHUM

    Get one redesign done, and dive into work on another. Difference is this time, I like the design. More details to in the coming months (and, no, it still is not this site)…

  20. EPpys and eyes

    The finalists for Editor & Publisher’s annual EPpy Awards have been announced. There’s nothing too surprising in the list of all-American nominees (except maybe Google’s nod).

  21. Rwanda, ten years on

    We need look no further than our own backyard to see why it’s so important to remember what happened in Rwanda ten years ago.

  22. Getting them to register and pay

    With so many sites considering registrations and subscriptions (Reuters business news is the latest), it’s worth heeding some tips for getting users to pay and remember why they would even want to. I wished CBS MarketWatch followed some that advice as I was forced to register in an error-inducing process just to read a piece on MSNBC

  23. Rating the news

    Newsknife claims to rate news sites, but the interesting thing is how it does just that: it partly relies on Google’s relevance ranking

  24. Final Disclosure

    Ironically, The Eleventh Hour has been renewed, but one of its real-life inspirations, Disclosure, has been cancelled. What’s more, there’s speculation a hockey strike could affect the CBC’s other news programs. Antonia Zerbisias has a bit more on this and the Toronto Sun’s surprising redesign

  25. Telcos revolution

    The telecommunications industry, especially in

  26. Standards: to follow or not

    Microsoft really likes what the Mozllia Foundation is doing. First it releases XAML to compete with XUL, now it looks like it’s taking on XPInstall with its open-source (!) WiX. Combined with its support of InfoPath over XForms, it seems Microsoft is trying, again, to create a new de facto standard at the expense of those already in existence.

  27. “Real” bad design

    Wired News explains how bad Web design can potentially destroy a dominant product.

  28. Digital librarians

    Online journalists as we once imagined them may never appear, but Robin Good imagines an alternative: the digital librarian

  29. Microsoft pays-off competitor

    In the “It Worked for Apple” Department, Microsoft pays Sun US$1.95 billion in damages over antitrust and patent related issues. In return, Sun begins a “new phase of legal and technical cooperation with longtime foe Microsoft.”

  30. Online-news evolution

    Although I know it’s true, I still find it hard to believe I’ve playing with this medium for ten years. Steve Yelvington, though, has been working in it for that same period (for me, it’s only eight). His look back is also a call to arms, challenging online journalism to live up to the potential we once saw in this “new media.”

  31. CTV’s big intranet

    The Globe and Mail profiles (in a convergence-friendly story) another way the Internet has changed the way news has gathered. CTV, Canada’s big private network, relies on, essentially, an intranet to shunt videos between bureaus. By not relying on the technology revolution of the sixties — satellites — the network is saving phenomenal amounts of money and time

  32. View all (it might be a looong page, though)