Anthology of Ideas

If you haven’t already seen this: the original Star Wars ASCII animation can also be accessed from telnet by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl. Use the following in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

BrowserCam has long been the best tool for testing websites in a multitude of situations; however, it isn’t free, so its usefulness is limited for people who just want to test a new design quickly: enter BrowserShots. This free website has most of the features developers will need to test their sites; however, unlike BrowserCam, there seem to be waits of up to 20 minutes for some OS/Browser combinations, so it is better for casual testing to ensure compatibility rather than live tweaking—it does have a detail page to show how long your wait will be.

You have no doubt heard about the pro-democracy protests in Myanmar over the past week or so and the resulting government crackdown on the protests. The flood of information out of the country was staggering in the beginning, and the government was faced with enormous amounts of information flowing out of the country. They tried to stop it by releasing their own propaganda and attempting to slow the spread of information from the country, but protesters weren’t so easily dissuaded and information continued to leak out.

Yah, not much you can say about that.

Haven’t heard of it? National Punctuation Day honors and celebrates “…the lowly comma,correctly used quotes and other proper uses of periods, semicolons and the ever-mysterious [and ignored] ellipsis.” Want to know more? There exists a wealth of information on the web about punctuation in general—and of course you are just dying to learn about it; if you just want to know about the day itself, it has its own website with lots of information and history: here.

I knew I wasn’t going to have time on Monday to upgrade to the official version of WordPress, so I did the next best thing and upgraded to the latest release candidate. Yes, it is risky, but I see the word BETA and think “mostly stable” instead of “partially unstable and likely to cause lots of headaches in the next few days.” If you find any bugs on the site, please let me know by emailing me.