Do you like to play around in InkScape, or want to learn how to design an SVG icon? Here’s a challenge for you…
Even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve seen the great icons from Mark James’ “Silk” icon library. You can download them here:
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
The designer is a genius at designing 16×16 icons, but web applications need bigger icons, preferably vector-based, to fit modern displays:
So, here’s the challenge: pick an icon and design an SVG file inspired by it.
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My brother, Joshua Tallent, will be giving a tutorial on formatting ebooks for the Amazon Kindle at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference:
http://www.toccon.com/toc2009/public/schedule/detail/6712
If you’re there and are interested in the ins and outs of Kindle publishing, go check it out!
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I winced today when I heard Supreme Court Justice Roberts botch the wording of the Presidential Oath of Office.
There are no excuses. Roberts, of all people, should have the Constitution memorized backwards and forwards.
I’m just a normal citizen and I knew immediately what happened when I heard it. Obama, a Constitutional lawyer, obviously caught him as well, but recovered.
Sadly, I think Bush wouldn’t have even caught it if Roberts had accidentally started reciting the Apostle’s Creed…
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I haven’t been a UNIX admin in over 10 years and didn’t have time until tonight to figure out why my WordPress installation went bonkers. Apparently it was because I installed a new version of MySQL and it didn’t move the database files automatically.
So now I’m back… and successfully upgraded MySQL and WordPress again since they changed since the botched update.
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Forget OSS, we need OCC.
As in Open Cloud Computing.
By an “open cloud,” I mean something to the effect of:
an Amazon S3-type service of distributed hosting and virtual computing, combined with a set of virtual platforms that can be easily throttled and secured on any machine, combined with something like a Creative Commons license for using particular computing/bandwidth resources in the cloud, combined with an iTunes-like method for people to select which services can run on your free resources.
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Does anyone else have any suspicions about upstart-search-engine Cuil‘s privacy policy, given that one of their founders was the Homeland Security officer for IBM, and another VP was the communications director for the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security?
Perhaps I’ve just been warped by 7 years of DHS-led privacy invasions and “public-private partnerships” with the telcos, but I have a little trouble accepting claims of privacy from a company whose leaders have been playing in that sandbox.
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After 232 years, do we really have a “representative” form of government anymore?
Unfortunately, no, we don’t.
“Your” congressman in the House of Representatives represents 700,000 other people.
“Your” senator? 3,000,000 people.
“Your” President? All 304,000,000 of us.
The federal government cannot effectively represent the people any more than a 16×16 thumbnail can “effectively represent” a 150-megapixel photo.
Both just end up being a worthless, random greyish smudge of red, blue, and green rather than showing the rich tapestry, texture, and nuance of what they purport to represent.
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Haven’t been posting in awhile, but just ran across Bruce Schneier’s latest article and had to link to it. Right on.
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I’m not against tax cuts… as long as there’s a plan for paying for them.
But the rhetoric this week left me wondering, who will cut MY taxes more?
Fortunately, CNN did the math. The result? I’ll save more under Obama’s tax cuts than McCain’s. And so will almost everyone else I know.
Furthermore, everyone I know will still either have their taxes cut under Obama, or on the extreme end, will have the same tax bill as before.
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Now that Obama’s site has an updated issue list, I decided to do a quick comparison of his issues and mine.
Civil Rights: I agree with most of his punch-list, except expanding “hate crimes.” All crimes are crimes of hate, and attaching more meaning to a crime because the driver was racism/sexism/etc. merely diminishes the crime itself. Hating is a sin, but it’s not a crime.
Disabilities: As someone with a somewhat-mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome, I’m excited to see Obama’s position on better research and education tools for autism-spectrum disorders.
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