A father describes how he wrote software to let his disabled daughter communicate. He used his own time, and free software, and now gives the software away to help other people.

Link: Using Perl to Enable the Disabled

I’m not at all sure about this on a technical level or a practical level, and I’m not keen on new standards being handed to US ‘national’ organisations either. Most of all, I’m not sure there’s any need for this at all. If people used today’s DNS, OIDs and URLs properly, would there be any need?

Link: draft-vandesompel-info-uri-00.txt

The recent lecture ‘The future of the World Wide Web’ by Professor Tim Berners-Lee is available online, in two sizes of RealMedia video. Worth seeing, or just listening to. The first part is on the history and basic concepts of the web, and the second part is on ‘The Semantic Web’ and RDF’s role.

I’m very optimistic about the Web now. A few years ago things looked bleak: Flash, Microsoft ‘standards’, visual style crushing useability. Boo.com syndrome. Things are moving back to the real point now - content, hyperlinks, semantic markup, and best of all, useability. Concepts like xHTML/CSS, Wiki webs and RESTful design are seen as the new ‘cool’ technologies, but are really a return to the Web’s first principles. Tim Berners-Lee isn’t just the creator of The Web, he’s one of the main reasons it survived the bad years, thanks to his work with the W3C.

Link: The future of the World Wide Web His slides are available too.

[Nick Hinder - if you are reading this, he pronounces GIF as “jiff”, so you’re in good company]

I’ve long been amused by both extremes of music categorisation. Shops that have “Rock” categories so vague they may as well just label it “music”, or categories so precise they have two CDs in them.

A lot of music shops in the USA, and music websites (the iTunes bundle included) lump a lot of music together under the “Electronica” category. In Europe, we often take the other extreme - beyond the charts with their awful compilations, there’s a strange world of frankly obsessive categorisation. House music pseuds endlessly building a strange taxonomy of music genres. Some people take it all way too seriously.

I lost my way years ago, which can cause difficulties, because both my favourite music and music that makes me feel physically ill are both buried within Electronica.

Ishkur.com has a great guide to the dance music genres, with sarcastic commentary, maps, and samples. It’s easy to explore the genres and work out what you like and dislike. It isn’t accurate, scientific or unbiased because that’s impossible. It’s useful, and even better, it’s fun, and that’s the whole point.

Link: Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic music (Direct link to avoid porn adverts, and you’ll need a fast connection for this.)

Info about the site, with dodgy adverts

JPop: Bad, but fun. This gives me the urge to jump around with a manga-size grin. It’s so insanely stupidly happy that the artless, disposable soulless side of it is forgivable. I love the tune on the Molly, Star-Racer trailer.

Gabber/Hardcore: The worst music ever, made worse by drunken aggressive morons in shell suits shouting over the top, and then being played in an antisocial way (personal stereo, boy racer car, a garden a mile away, always too loud). The infected zombies in ‘28 Days Later’ were probably listening to this on personal stereos.

Good, got that off my chest.

This popped up on Metafilter a while ago and makes an interesting read. The true story of Mary Mallon is quite different to the one I’d picked up from everyday references.

Link: Dinner With Typhoid Mary

A. and I are dedicated supporters of the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund, but we can’t run, and I definitely couldn’t run in a hot gorilla suit. When we received a leaflet advertising The Great Gorilla Run, I passed it on to my comrade-in-multimedia, John Moore. John, better known as an international croquet sportsman, is also someone who actually enjoys running, especially if brightly coloured clothes are involved.

John raised a fair quantity of money, travelled across the country, donned his gorilla suit, and despite only a couple of hours sleep he managed to come third out of six hundred-odd running gorilla people. Sadly The Great North Run was on the same weekend, and the Great Gorilla Run got very little media attention, but it looks like it went well. The mountain gorillas are very close to extinction, but they can be saved, with enough help.

Link: Lots of official race photos (John is wearing orange shorts.)

1. Connect old external SCSI harddisk to elderly Mac.
2. Press power button on front of harddisk case.
3. Watch dazzling blue flame/spark combination briefly shoot out of every gap in the harddisk case, including the power button you are still pressing.
4. Take finger off power button.

The actual disk and and my finger are OK, but the external PSU has lost its magic smoke. I swapped the actual harddisk into the Mac to test it.

Update: Although Mac OS 8.6 and BeOS 5 have installed OK, tThe disk is making beeping noises when the SCSI bus is scanned, and is too hot to touch. That’s not right. Yellow Dog froze when it was time to partition the disk. Bad disk, I think.

There’s now a brand new Jacob Dimbleby in the world. Possibly a Jakob, as I’m not sure about the spelling. Congratulations to Alison and Martin!

I’ve really got to get my proper uncle behaviour sorted out now - I’ve not been a particularly good uncle so far. Mysterious Uncle, yes.

I’m not posting the traditional weblog baby photos, MPEGs or Quicktime VR files, nor does Jacob yet have a FOAF file or PGP key. Just a Google entry by now. First one, too.

And now, a link for Alison: Buffalo-sized guinea pig revealed

That stuff about baby metadata is meant to be ironic/satirical, it really is. Honest.

The concept of justice and fairness might be hardwired as part of our social behaviour. Capuchin monkeys are very aware of fair and equal rewards, and more importantly, when underpaid they blame the payer, not the over-rewarded colleague. They can go on strike as a result. Well, withdraw their labour at least. They don’t ballot and stand by a burning barrel.

I’m very interested to see what happens when other animals are tested, and it would also be interesting to see how human children respond.

Link: Monkeys show sense of justice