These are my links for August 25th through September 1st:

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
First essay of the late Prof Carlo Cipolla.<br />
Law1: Everyone underestimates the stupid population. <br />
Law2: Stupidity is independent of other characteristics.<br />
Law3: A stupid person causes loss to others while deriving no gain or incurring loss.<br />
Law4: Non-stupid people underestimate the potential threat & cost of stupid people.<br />
Law5: Stupid types are the most dangerous.
Bug Labs: modular, open source hardware
Small mobile devices, perfect for sensor experiments.
What is data science?
Data is the new Rock & Roll, the new black, the new new, the new Beatles. Semantic markup is therefore the new Brian Epstein.
500 Internal Server Error
500 Internal Server Error
The CSS website Awards
Some nicely designed sites. Some are usable, some not, but for looks these are worth a gander.
OWL Manchester Syntax
A frame-based syntax for OWL2 ontologies.
The Official Guide to HTML5 Boilerplate | Nettuts+
Mozilla Developer Network
Mozilla Developer Connection has a new name and a clear mission to be “a comprehensive, usable, and accurate resource for everyone developing for the Open Web.”
Specification proposals from the WebKit project
Proposals from the WebKit project written up as specs. Some have made it into the W3C for more general use.
Soft Drink Industry Structure
A semantic look at the structure of the soft drinks industry
500 Internal Server Error
500 Internal Server Error
A List Apart: HTML5
Articles related to HTML5 from the always well-written "A List Apart".
Firefox 4: HTTP Strict Transport Security (force HTTPS)
Sid Stamm recently integrated HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) into<br />
Firefox. HSTS, specified in an IETF draft, allows sites to specify when they wish to be accessed only over https.
Firefox User Agent string changes coming in Firefox 4 « Daniel Witte
The User Agent string is changing in Firefox 4, not much, but enough to break some older scripts and sites.
Data.gov – Semantic Web
US Government releasing data as RDF Triples sw rdf triples statements
BBC Micro Programming
Programming as it should be: on a 32K ram machine, with most of the memory used for the screen (especially when double buffered). Ahhh BBC Basic we miss you.
Mr.doob’s blog
Some good examples of HTML5 canvas and javascript.
boakes.org » Postalicious is Breaking
This is a test to see if my postalicious fix works.

In an attempt to rescue a couple of files I fired up the “old” PC today. It’s about 3 years old now, so not what you’d call obsolete by any stretch of the imagination, and when it was new no OS would recognize the Gigabyte SATA RAID drivers. I tried Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, Redhat, Knoppix, and Windows XP all to no avail – the hardware was just too new and no drivers existed. So I tried Windows Vista, and it worked. Yes, a success story that involves Vista.

On boot today there was a problem with one of the aforementioned RAID disks, and the machine failed massively. I dutifully went and found the Vista installation Disk as suggested, but hmmm, when I tried to use the “repair computer” option, it couldn’t find the disks to repair them! Total failure. My prefered option now is to resort to the latest live Linux CDs and access the files that way. I just hope todays builds are support the RAID hardware.

I’ve assembled and maintained several PCs over the years, but after 15 months using a Mac I’d blithely forgotten all the crap that building windows PC entails. Yes I paid a little more for the Mac, and I’m limited to pretty much the hardware that Apple choose, but the beauty is that it works, solidly, day-in day-out. Since my goal is not “to build a working system” but “to do something with the system, and not always wonder if I could do it faster with a different driver or kernel tweak” I’m happy to pay that small premium for a machine that works reliably.

So that’s it, my last Windows machine is dead. Fifteen years after I was forced to start using Windows for commercial purposes, I am free of it. Normally a dead machine is a sad day, but this marks the first day of a Windows free life. It’s a good day.

I’m using Postalicious to pull my links from Delicious.com and republish them here, however, several times lately it’s published server errors such as those below. I’ve dropped the author a line so maybe we’ll get to the bottom of it “real soon now”.

Update: My fix seems to have stabilized things and Pablo rolled it into the release a few days ago, so it’s available in release 2.8.3.

These are my links for August 19th from 11:30 to 22:00:

• When does JavaScript trigger reflows and rendering? – 'Reflowing and rendering HTML is the single most expensive operation browsers do'

These are my links for August 12th from 16:12 to 16:23:

• Douglas Crockford – Really, JavaScript? – A very accessible Doug Crockford presentation on JS. It's his usual content, but good for a fairly novice audience.
• Ryan Dahl – Less is More with Node.js –

These are my links for August 12th from 15:01 to 15:30:

• JS Strawman –
• blip.tv (since 2005) –
• Brendan Eich at JSConf 2010 – what’s coming in ECMAScript 5 and more ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog –

These are my links for August 12th from 13:06 to 13:16:

• Adequately Good – JavaScript Module Pattern: In-Depth –
• Online javascript beautifier –

These are my links for August 7th through August 12th:

• YUI Compressor –
• Code Standards | Isobar –
• Adequately Good – Saner HTML5 History Management – AJAX and restful apps break the browser history model. Some thoughts on how the HTML5 changes could help.

These are my links for August 6th from 05:40 to 05:45:

• Full Frontal – JavaScript Conference – 12th November 2010 – I recommend this. The 2009 show was very good indeed.
• Shifting Mind » Postalicious – Alternative to delicious auto-log-posting. Control the conent. No XMLRPC necessary.

There’s been a lot of talk about bankers bonuses and whether they’re right or wrong. There appear to be 2 main problems.

1. They’re too large
2. They’re paid regardless of overall bank performance.

Here’s an alternative: use a bonus-malus system that is regulated and applies across the European banking sector.

If a banker / bank does well and deserves a bonus, they can have one. They can, however, take an equal malus if they or the bank do badly.

This would limit the size of the bonus to what the banker can afford to lose (pay back).

The system would need European regulation to ensure malus were paid back even if the employee jumps ship.

Perhaps they should even be required to invest that money in advance, in a central fund.