In Living Can Kill You Archive
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Living Can Kill You From 2004
Posted on April
“Living Can Kill You” first appeared as a chapbook poems in 1994, before being the name used to describe a regular blog starting in June of 2000.
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A public Google
Google’s mantra is to not to be evil, but might that also mean not going public? A cleverly illustrated New York Times piece speculates the company’s co-founders want to keep Google eccentric, and by necessity, private, for as long as possible. That article, and two related pieces, provides a timely reminder both of why the dot-com bust and why the market might not always know best. -
Mozilla and GNOME
UserFriendly tries to poke fun at the Mozilla browser. (The Mozilla Foundation recently met with the GNOME Foundation … I wonder what about?) -
Bleeding, but not leading
Did you know about the massize train disaster that occured in Norh Korea this morning? Given the treatment of the story online, it wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t -
Toronto 1, f--k
One of the knocks against Toronto 1 is that it is trying to be Citytv; and now its seems to be copying City’s delicate sensibilities. We all remember the blooper reel from Gord Martineau and crew, and now Toronto 1 has one of its very own -
Mozilla offering page-specific CSS hooks
Asa points to a great soon-to-be feature for Gecko based browsers: a means to apply custom CSS based on the URL of the page loaded in the browser (vote for it). This has been bandied about on the www-style list, and there have been a number of suggested workarounds, including CSS signatures. Until this gets implemented, try Chris Neale’s extension, URIid -
The Webbys struggle on
The collective yawn heard across the Web was the announcement of the latest Webby nominations (why do they force you to re-register every year?). Admittedly, given how far this medium has come over the past decade (need proof: look at the state of the medium circa December 1994), this blasé attitude is kind of bizarre. -
Off-shoring may benefit Canada
Unlike the U.S., off-shoring hasn’t notuceably affected the Canadian economy. A recent PriceWaterHouseCoopers study suggests there will be about 75,000 Canadian IT jobs sent to places like India during the next six years.The net gain in jobs, though, may be double that figure. Ironically, the effects will be tempered by American companies “near-shoring” jobs in Canada -
Netscape back? Or is it the Net ninjas?
In other news, AOL is trying to resurrect Netscape and a UofT prof is training “net ninjas” to get around government censorship on the Web -
TCP flaw
The myth goes that the Internet could survive a nuclear attack. Though it was never true, the network has proven surprisingly robust. But the British government has disclosed flaw affecting the transmission control protocol that was discovered late last year by terrorist.net owner, Paul “Tony” Watson. The result is someone could trick, within seconds, computers and routers into severing connections by restarting. The hack will revealed in detail by Watson on Thursday at the cansecwest conference -
A reading list
A quasi-annotated list of some of the articles that caught my eye over the past few days: -
Define Web standards
Signal vs. Noise is challenging people to define Web standards in 10 words or less. (Speaking of which, WebStandards.TO has its first anniversary get together tonight at Fresh on Queen at Crawford.) -
The good and bad of Craig and CHUM
Eric Reguly has some very strong words about both the CRTC and Craig Media in terms of the Toronto 1 deal -
Quoting and adjusting font sizes
The latest version of Firefox now supports nested quoting via q, meaning this renders correctly: There was a pause. This won’t work in IE, he said. That being said, I do have a script for rendering quotes in Internet Explorer — it’s not really production quality yet, though. -
Searching with Amazon
Hmm…searching with Amazon’s A9; interesting dHTML interface (possibly built in part by Scott Andew), too. The John Battelle’s Searchblog broke the news, and there you can find more details. There is also a complete analysis underway at Signal vs. Noise and a Firefox plugin from Steven Garrity -
Developing with Web standards
Roger Johansson has produced a nicely-presented document on Web standards aimed at both clients and anyone learning Web design (via Webgraphics) -
IE7 update
Dean Edwards has a released a major update to the still alpha IE7, including a way to make it, theoretically, future compatible. Dean’s also released the heart of the IE7, its CSS query engine, as a separate JavaScript file. -
Mr. Walrus
MediaBistro profiles Mr. Walrus, Ken Alexander. Not a lot of new news for Canadian magazine junkies, but it is interesting to read an American publication parsing the idea of a Canadian magazine -
EPpys and eyes
The finalists for Editor & Publisher’s annual EPpy Awards have been announced. There’s nothing too surprising in the list of all-American nominees (except maybe Google’s nod). -
Bought by CHUM
Get one redesign done, and dive into work on another. Difference is this time, I like the design. More details to in the coming months (and, no, it still is not this site)… -
Telcos revolution
The telecommunications industry, especially in -
Final Disclosure
Ironically, The Eleventh Hour has been renewed, but one of its real-life inspirations, Disclosure, has been cancelled. What’s more, there’s speculation a hockey strike could affect the CBC’s other news programs. Antonia Zerbisias has a bit more on this and the Toronto Sun’s surprising redesign -
Rating the news
Newsknife claims to rate news sites, but the interesting thing is how it does just that: it partly relies on Google’s relevance ranking -
Getting them to register and pay
With so many sites considering registrations and subscriptions (Reuters business news is the latest), it’s worth heeding some tips for getting users to pay and remember why they would even want to. I wished CBS MarketWatch followed some that advice as I was forced to register in an error-inducing process just to read a piece on MSNBC -
Rwanda, ten years on
We need look no further than our own backyard to see why it’s so important to remember what happened in Rwanda ten years ago. -
Digital librarians
Online journalists as we once imagined them may never appear, but Robin Good imagines an alternative: the digital librarian -
“Real” bad design
Wired News explains how bad Web design can potentially destroy a dominant product. -
Standards: to follow or not
Microsoft really likes what the Mozllia Foundation is doing. First it releases XAML to compete with XUL, now it looks like it’s taking on XPInstall with its open-source (!) WiX. Combined with its support of InfoPath over XForms, it seems Microsoft is trying, again, to create a new de facto standard at the expense of those already in existence. -
CTV’s big intranet
The Globe and Mail profiles (in a convergence-friendly story) another way the Internet has changed the way news has gathered. CTV, Canada’s big private network, relies on, essentially, an intranet to shunt videos between bureaus. By not relying on the technology revolution of the sixties — satellites — the network is saving phenomenal amounts of money and time -
Online-news evolution
Although I know it’s true, I still find it hard to believe I’ve playing with this medium for ten years. Steve Yelvington, though, has been working in it for that same period (for me, it’s only eight). His look back is also a call to arms, challenging online journalism to live up to the potential we once saw in this “new media.” -
Microsoft pays-off competitor
In the “It Worked for Apple” Department, Microsoft pays Sun US$1.95 billion in damages over antitrust and patent related issues. In return, Sun begins a “new phase of legal and technical cooperation with longtime foe Microsoft.”