I’m probably the last person to see all these new North American political maps floating around the Web. But, just in case, here are three from: Richard Friedman, Mena Trott, and Tim Bray.

If Australia’s going to be aligning itself closely with the U.S. (it is, and it does), then perhaps we should be joining the Federation – I’m sure they’d accept representation on the western rim of the Pacific :-).

It turned into more of a political weekend than I’m accustomed to.

First, my friend and former colleague, Bill Malkin, wrote asking if he could borrow my site design for a website he was setting up in support of Brian Deegan. Brian is contesting the Adelaide Hills seat of Mayo, against the incumbent member, federal minister Alexander Downer, in the upcoming federal election.

Then, on Sunday evening, Theen had organized for us to see Michael Moore’s “Farenheit 9/11”. What can I say – what a web of lies; fear, uncertainty and doubt; and corruption. The lies I’d heard of, the FUD I knew about, but the corruption was largely new to me.

Tim Bray recently likened MP3 encoding of music to Vandalism, and again made the point in more detail when discussing a New York Times article about online music purchasing.

While I agree that 128Kbps MP3s are not really up to scratch, it's worth noting that at least one online music vendor, Magnatune, lets you download your music in a number of different formats, including two lossless formats, and a couple of higher-than-usual-quality lossy formats. More should follow their lead, as I've not been happy with the quality of files from another online music vendor.

I’ve started to implement my structured text ideas as PHP code.

Currently it handles levels of indenting Python-style, and uses them to determine nesting of lists and heading levels.

This allows me to do things like:

• Have individual list items.

• Some of which can contain

sub-paragraphs like this one.

• As well as

  • nested lists,

  • like this.

This section includes some gratuitous code:

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
  sprintf("i: %d", i);
}

Some final closing remarks would go just about here.

What do I really want from structured text for a CMS?

My wish list, in a rough order of importance:

• The ability to just type normal text and get paragraphs and probably line breaks (not that I use them often).

• Lists–I tend to organize my thoughts in lists – often nested. So ideally lists should be nestable. It would be great if list items could contain whole multiple paragraphs too.

In his now-famous, A Plan for Spam, Paul Graham wrote:

… the spam of the future will probably look something like this:

Hey there. Thought you should check out the following:
http://www.27meg.com/foo

because that is about as much sales pitch as content-based filtering will leave the spammer room to make. (Indeed, it will be hard even to get this past filters, because if everything else in the email is neutral, the spam probability will hinge on the url, and it will take some effort to make that look neutral.)

Reading this article on Wireless USB, prompted me to think about just how pervasive the RF modulation known as OFDM is becoming.

I'm someone who pretty much has to know how something works, once it enters my consciousness. So, in mid-2000, while researching Australia's chosen form of digital TV, Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial (DVB-T), I discovered a fascinating form of RF modulation, known as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM).

The Technology

Traditional forms of modulation send one stream of information over one channel. OFDM sends many streams of information at once, over multiple, slower, channels (sometimes thousands of channels), simultaneously. By doing so, it increases the robustness of the individual channels to effects like multipath distortion (reflections from buildings, hills, trees, etc. that manifest as ghosting in analogue TV). By using appropriate levels of error correction, it can also be relatively immune to effects like selective channel-fading.

I've been ongoing'ed, or is that Tim'ed – the ongoing version of being Slashdotted. The main difference is the smaller number of visitors, and the fact they're an even more geeky bunch (so far they all use Firefox or Safari).

Anyway, the link in question came from Tim Bray's Genx page. If you're looking for a way to generate well-formed XML from C/C++, and don't want to sprinkle your code with printfs, or equivalent, then check out Genx.

Norman Walsh recently posted a link to Akiyoshi’s illusion pages. I’ve got to say these are really fantastic. They are excellent illustrations of the physiological factors that make our vision work the way it does.

I recently read Margaret Livingstone’s Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, and although it’s not the sort of book I would have bought for myself (my mother gave it to me as a birthday present), it’s excellent. It made me a lot more aware of how human vision works and evolved – things I always had a general idea of, but not much in the way of specifics. This book really made a lot of those ideas a lot more concrete for me, and illustrated them with artwork and optical illusions that demonstrate them.

Several times over the last couple of weeks, I've found myself refactoring CSS – making changes to simplify and group rules, but with the aim of not changing the appearance at all. To test my work, I've been taking screen shots and swapping backwards and forwards to look for differences.

It suddenly struck me that what I really need is a CSS/HTML-specific diff tool. One that can take some CSS and some specific HTML, work out all the borders, margins, placements, etc. for the combination, and save them in some format that I can easily compare. As a first cut, it wouldn't need to understand browser quirks, but it would need to understand all the cascade rules.