Bertrand Meyer is Recipient of Software System Award for Impact on Software Quality
Team Eiffel — Oh! Very Good! Very Deserved!
'Nail' house flattened after three-year row
The most famous “nail” sticking out in China has finally been hammered down. After a three-year standoff with developers, the home of Yang Wu and Wu Ping was demolished last night, ending a property rights protest that was the talk of the nation.
Guardian Unlimited — Ah well.
Fodor vs. Dennett - Evolutionary Psychology
There’s an interesting debate happening at I believe, Cognitive Science, this year. Jerry Fodor has come out with a full force denial of evolutionary psychology and in the process has managed to piss off Daniel Dennett who has responded with a very nasty paper of his own.
via Omni Brain — Looks like fun. Fodor is, I think, a great writer with great ideas.
Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours
The better way to do javascript is to do it unobtrusively. PPK and Simon Willison have been recommending this approach for ages. And it’s definitely the way to go. The only problem is that it’s a bit of a pain in the ass.
That’s why I came up with Behaviour - my solution to unobtrusive javascript behaviours.
Behaviour lets you use CSS selectors to specify elements to add javascript events to.
Ben Nolan — This is a really useful javascript library. We’ve been using it since Ben wrote the original description almost two years ago. If you don’t know about this library, do yourself a favour and check it out.
Our Behaviors library was originally inspired by Ben Nolan’s Behaviours library. Basically, the idea is to use CSS selectors to “decorate” DOM elements with Javascript handlers and the like.
We took the idea a step farther and pulled them out into a separate file, called an extended stylesheet (ESS). This is a superset of CSS that includes a number of additional attributes to support DOM decoration.
See the previous item for my opinion of Ben Nolan’s work. This library could be a nice enhancement. I’ll be looking at it.
One new timing technique relies on the notorious <blink> tag, the other is all about the whitespace.
Ajaxian — I’m hoping this is an April Fools joke, but it is a good one.
Kepler: The Lua Web Development PlatformThe Lua programming language keeps coming up. I’ve yet to do anything serious with it. Soon?
Interactivity considered harmful
The most memorable section subtitle being interactivity considered harmlful. This is a real treasure trove of wonderful design ideas for interfaces for information-rich applications.
Lambda the Ultimate — This is a very interesting paper, all 70+ pages. I don’t know how accessibility fits into this, but it has to.
ActiveForm - a form generator dsl
ActiveForm provides a DSL for defining complete XHTML forms with validation. You can compose your own widgets and (nested) form sections from basic elements.
I remain dubious about XHTML forms, but…
Announcing Skim: Stop printing - Start Skimming.
Announcing Skim. Skim is a PDF reading and note-taking app for Mac OS X that is designed to make reading research papers and manuals better. Just like in Preview, you can search, scan, and zoom through PDFs, but you also get some custom features for your workflow:
michael-mccracken.net — I will be checking this one out real soon now.
UniverscaleNikon — Interesting Flash thing that explores relative sizes of stuff.
Ten Horrible Deep See CreaturesOddWeek — Have a look, lots of pics!
Apes to Name Neighboring Trumpeter Swans
The eight bonobos at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa howled Tuesday as they watched two trumpeter swans dip into a lake for the first time. Who can blame them? Not only will the apes get new neighbors, they’ll get a chance to name the rare birds.
Newsvine
As of yesterday, Indonesia has suffered more confirmed human deaths (72) from the avian flu than any other country. (Here are World Health Organization statistics.) In February, Indonesia stopped sending samples of the flu to the WHO. They wanted to prevent drug companies from developing and patenting vaccines that they (and other poor countries) could not afford.
Crooked Timber — Well… can you really blame them?
There were some situations during my stay at this year’s International Lisp Conference where I wished I had a blog. And, incidentally, a chance for non-bloggers like me to blog was offered for the conference. So, I’m now (April 3, 2007) sitting at the airport waiting to be boarded and I’ll use the time to write down some of my impressions.
Edi Weitz — One of these years I’m going to make it to that conference.
