Lavonardo

Mozilla Labs, whose pages I definitely ought to read more often than once a year, have introduced the very first version of ubiquity.

A tool that’s actually hard to explain concisely. Basically it allows the creation of mashups using quasi-natural language and a selection of thirty web services.

And unlike traditional mashups, it’s all done in the client’s browser.

Participated in A List Apart’s Survey. Not that I’m actually working in the target segment or anything, but this time they catered for hobbyists as well.

Knol is now open to public.

But it will have a long way to go to pull even to sighting distance to wikipedia. The initial barrage of articles seem to be heavily geared towards medical matters and (perplexingly enough) DIY sanitary tricks. And some of the articles seem to have been released at a very early and persistently unedited state. When compared to a couple of quality articles (say, the ones on William Gibson and the mysteriously named T206 Honus Wagner) featured in wikipedia recently, the gap seems long indeed.

Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum is a collection of more than twenty lessons on web development. The initial set covers HTML and isn’t exactly the cutting edgest of the cutting edge, but the documents are laid out well, and easily browsable.

[ via Matkalla, which I certainly ought to read way more often. ]

According to an article in ComputerWorld, CAPTCHA, a credible weapon against the legions of spammers has been broken.

With all three big free e-mail providers’ protection torn wide open with readily available toolkits, the threshold to engage in unfriendly practices on a massive scale is lower than before.

Stay tuned for the inevitable update to the brand-spanking new version.

And based on the short video extolling the virtues of the new version, it does have some significant goodies: Gears integration and version control are the two biggest guns, and the introduction of captions for the images may decrease the need for tinkering.

Andy Baio’s eclectic link collection very much rubs me the right way, and I tend to click almost everything that he links to.

Here’s three great examples of pages I would have likely missed:

• The greatest bug of all, description of an epic error hunt by the author of Delicious Library.
• One Post Wonder, an entire blog devoted to blogs that never got off the ground (most having stalled at the very first entry).
• Touch Arcade, which neatly proves that Apple has created a state of the art gaming phone with its very first try.

I’ve used the site as a source for links before, and will, in the future. With or without attribution (been quite lazy lately).

Following the analysis of the robot-collection t-shirt, three more popular culture-dredging shirts have been produced by Chop Shop

The Internets chews the memes of the last decade, and has been analyzed in Flickr, just like the selection of droids. I’ve missed lots and lots of these, but at least a few of the less than obvious (like the Ceiling Cat) were instantly familiar.

A shirt on aliens has apparently not been analyzed yet, even though several instances of it are featured on Flickr.

The latest arrival, a weGo, shirt about cars, on the other hand, is the subject of a thorough identification already.

I’m quite impressed by the quality of WordPress as the underlying engine in this very blog.

But organizing an International WordPress Day seems to be going too far into the shrill fanboy territory for my liking.

Then again, the prizes for participants do seem to be on the valuable side, so maybe it would be wise to just swallow my pride and join the teeming masses.

Firefox downloading seems to be beset with difficulties on account of a massive rush.

I’ll get mine. When the servers actually do serve.

Firefox 3. Allegedly on june 17th.

Count me in.

I’ve always been interested in typography. And with the introduction of Fontstruct-tool, it’s now possible to carve just the set needed. Or a horribly maimed approximation thereof. The latter is far more likely.

Unsurprisingly, Jonathan Zittrain’s brand new book, Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, is available for download under a CC license.

The book clocks in at 300+ pages, and I for one will read it printed out. After all, lugging a laptop to a park is far less preferable than dealing with actual hardcopy.

Nifty collections such as Noupe’s come in useful when browsing for new ideas and techniques. Not that I’m really looking for any significant updates here, just randomly seeing what’s available.

[ via Schizoblog ]

Based on the length of this Vanity Fair article on the birth of the internet, it’s much preferable to read this off a paper copy. So, mr. Newsagent, pencil me down for a copy of the July issue.

Pintprice.com, the cost of a beer in 202 countries.

My inner geek (well in check most of the time these days) is somewhat delighted with the arrival of goosh - a shell-like interface to Google’s search engine.

Obviously, the word “shell-like” must be interpreted very broadly in the above. Goosh is by no means a real shell, with piping of greps and all kinds of useful chaining of tools. Right now it’s nothing but a gimmick, but one that’s certain to drum up absolute barrelfuls of web traffic.

Meh, Google did not yet release the Google Earth plugin for Mac yet.

And there’s no word on its future availability, either.

Same thing happened with Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Telescope, a Mac native version was not released concurrently with the Windows implementation.

Both seem very interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant experimentation with the likes of Bootcamp or VMWare Fusion. But these two definitely pile up in the scales already weighed down with Civilization 4.

Rule #1 for using countdown flash applications to drum up excitement for a new film/album/whatever: rememeber to disable the counter when the said entity arrives.