codedread

It may seem that Scalable Vector Graphics for the masses is stalling on the web, but I did find this interesting site which has some recent promising news about SVG’s rising popularity on the mobile phone front. Mobile vendors Panasonic and Sony have announced models that support SVG.

I’ve ranted before about XML, but despite my ill feelings, it’s obvious that XML is at the root of some very promising technologies. SVG is one of those and it’s really a shame that it hasn’t yet taken off. This older article from Slashdot hints that March 2005 we’ll start to see Mozilla include native support of SVG (the masses will see this in Firefox 1.1, I think)…that will be VERY exciting indeed! Maybe we’ll start to see something interesting happening on the web for SVG very soon. As far as I know this will be the first major web browser to have native SVG support.

If you’re interested in learning more about SVG, check out http://www.svgbasics.com for an overview of some of its capabilities. If you haven’t installed Adobe’s SVG Plug-In, don’t worry you can turn off “SVG” examples on this site and just see what they would like if you had the plugin. Or you could follow the intructions at svgbasics.com and install the Plug-In.

I just noticed today on the cover of EETimes that the Embedded Systems Conference is giving away free passes to the “Expo”-type activity. The Embedded Conferance takes place in San Francisco, at the Moscone Convention Center, March 8-10. Ironically, Rob and I will be in SF March 9-12 for the GDC and, since it looks like we’re missing some of the goodies at GDC (like the Awards ceremony and the Booth Crawl), it seems that we might be able to check it out, at least go look at some of the booths.

The only other thing that could make this more interesting is if the Scotch Tasting Festival that is supposed to take place in SF on March 5th gets delayed by one week

We had our first family photo today. The following is a post-mortem on that experience. Click To Read More...

An update to some of the facets going on in my life…also apparently an exercise to see how many related links I could stuff into an article… Click To Read More...

Looking a little on the internet I found out what a “Trackback” is exactly and I also found the WP file that allows the trackback mechanism to show up as a posted comment. This means that with “Trackbacks” turned on in WordPress, cretins can leave spam comments to their heart’s content by formatting a special HTTP POST request to wp-trackback.php (thus by-passing my captcha).

I have disabled pingbacks and trackbacks on my blog for now, let’s see if I get any more spam in the next month or two…

The newest version of WordPress is out, Version 1.5. They seem to have improved the commenting and moderation system, so I’m tempted to upgrade, because despite implementing my own captcha, I got bombed without about 30 spam comments last night. Thank god for “Mass Edit” mode…

I might try playing around with my captcha a little more, but I’m having a hard time believing someone actually figured out a way around my little captcha just to post comment spam on my little blog with an audience of about 2. Thus, I think they’re exploiting a vulnerability within WordPress there and I may investigate that a little.

What bottom-feeders…:(

I caught the last half hour of a great interview with Roger Ebert on the Howard Stern Show this morning. Although Ebert was on to promote his new book, the interview itself was all around funny and interesting and it showed that Ebert and Stern both possess a quick wit and a good deal of intelligence.

One thing that was fascinating: Ebert told a story about the last time Ebert saw his friend, Russ Meyer, alive. If you don’t know who Russ Meyer is, go read this work-safe article. Anyway, the “punchline” of the anecdote involved something Meyer had said on his hospital bed about a nurse and it contained the t-word.

But rather than just bleep the offensive word, the entire end of the Ebert’s story was edited right out. What made it fascinating was that when the edit occured, at that instant Stern wasn’t even sure what had made it out onto the airwaves, he had to check with his producer. What ensued was then a discussion of the FCC and its current censorship crusade.

Ironically, Stern’s show is usually much raunchier and this anecdote was actually quite innocent in comparison, but because it contained a single offensive word it was cut out…