More revolution or evolution

— Posted inSociety, Ukraine — 2 min read

It was too tempting to stay away from and nobody has been able to. An election where the liberal pro-Europe candidate was predicted the winner by the exit poll, but the incumbent is declared the winner in a process where the election itself got the most of the attention, leaving the country split by geography. On deeper inspection the candidates aren’t as different as presented by their propagandists, but the differences that remain are still real.

Ukraine is the biggest country in Europe by area (if you disqualify Russia as Eurasian) and among the largest by population. Even though it has been peripheral in the grand power schemes of the continent (as its name indicates), it is simply too large to ignore.

The fall of the Soviet Union did not mean a fall in corruption. Ukraine has been more thoroughly pillaged than Russia, and is now seen as the 19th most corrupt country in the world according to one index. Elections are never completely fair anywhere, among other things they usually favour the incumbent, and if they can be manipulated they will. But in this case the system isn’t just bent, it is crooked, and the Ukrainians deserve better.

I think these last months have been good for Ukraine, on the principle of “one more push”. Ukraine and even Russia have conditional democracy, democracy with flaws. There may not be a velvet or rose revolution, but discounting a Yugoslavia breakdown and doubting a Belorus path, any change will be for the better.

HTML withdrawal

— Posted inStandards — 2 min read

Yesterday I finally left the HTML working group. While it was a recent discussion that made me ask myself what was the point in staying, I have grown more disenchanted over the years.

Unlike some I don’t agree that XHTML 2.0 is an unmitigated disaster. There is much good stuff in the spec. It is also the first structural work on HTML since HTML 4.01, five years ago. In the meantime the focus has been to make HTML XML-compatible and to split HTML into modules. Whether HTML is formulated in XML or in some kind of SGML matters, but it isn’t important relative to how the language itself should evolve. HTML 4 is overdue for an update.

XML (and thus XHTML) has two obvious advantages. It separates between syntax errors (well-formedness) and expectation errors (validity), and the character set of the document is not in doubt. The XHTML modularization itself isn’t that useful for practical purposes where the conformance rules and the implicit fallback principle (ignore what you don’t understand) is what you need. A side effect of the work on XHTML 2.0 is that XHTML Modularization will be updated to actually describe the modules in the document itself, and not by reference to HTML 4.01 as has been the case up until now.

The revolutionary aspect of XHTML 2.0 was overdone. I don’t think the W3C, or browser vendors, or web editor vendors, or any other organization or group has control over the web or its formats. I don’t overly worry about Microsoft either. They tried to replace the web before and failed spectacularly. They might try again, but if they do they will fail again. The web is the world’s largest installed base. It will change, but not on command. A decade ago change by decree might have been feasible, but this is the difference between shepherding a flock of hundreds of sheep and one of several billions. That flock goes where it wants to go, not where we want it to go.

Gadget disk

— Posted inMobile, Technology — 1 min read

Saw that Virgin had made an iPod competitor, and the low weight was welcome. But the reason I have never considered an iPod applies to this thing too. I don’t care about PC synchronisation, I care about phone synchronization. A 5GB external harddisk/MP3 player is an attractive addition to a phone, especially when it weights less than 100g. The radio would have been a welcome addition if it hadn’t been largely redundant with a phone.

There are other ways to get a GB external harddisk to a phone, not that it would make any sense even if I could.

Civilisation: What made us do it?

— Posted inCivilisation, North America — 2 min read

My travelling companion and favourite publication, New Scientist has a special issue on civilisation (vanity is posed as a prime suspect for the title question). Insightful as always, it still left open the question if there really is any new science to pre-history.

I got a more present puzzle: Why do US IT companies leave civilisation behind? I have arrived at a W3C multimodal working group meeting IBM is hosting in New York, but of course not in the city. Like any other event hosted in the US this is located deep into the suburban wasteland.

European events are in the city centre. Opera for instance is well placed in the middle of Oslo. Admittedly the company started in Kjeller (“Cellar”, if you ever get there you would agree the name fits), an out of place that can boast of being the birthplace of object-oriented programming, the first Internet node in the world outside of the USA, inventor of key mobile phone technology, and incubator of Opera. Opera still had the sense to move into my neighbourhood as soon as they got any ambition.

In USA the move would be in the opposite direction. It is not as if New York is a city to avoid, it is rightly recognized as one of the great cities in the world. The communications could be better, but the system is still fairly convenient and efficient.

Instead I am at a highway in the middle of the woods. Mercifully W3C meetings consume most of your waking moments, because the nightlife here is a vending machine.

It’s Prague Gypsy week

— Posted inCzechia, Tribal — 2 min read

Or to be far more accurate, World Roma Festival. This is the same week Lidové Noviny had a notice that the recently published book Psychologie Romů (The Roma psychology), which among other things claims that Roma have smaller brains than non-Roma, is under police investigation for racism. And Týden in an article on Czech likes and dislikes (for inexplicable reasons illustrated with two semi-nude girls) quoted a 2001 STEM poll
“Who would you consider as problem free neighbours?” with the following results:
Slovaks: 90%
French: 71%
Americans: 64%
Jews: 57%
Czechs*: 48%
Germans: 48%
Russians: 22%
Vietnamese: 15%
Roma: 9%
Big city Czech were more neighbourly, while communists were more hostile.
* The Czechs weren’t Czechs in general, but from re-immigrants from the Czech minority in Ukraine, and seemingly just as bad as Germans and five times as likely to be troublesome as Slovaks, the Czechs’ favourite neighbours.

(more…)

Bokbålsvarsel

— Posted inLiterature, Norway — 2 min read

Jeg har gleden av å invitere til det første årlige bokbål i Oslo førstkommende lørdag 29. mai. Selv om bokbål har røtter helt tilbake til bokbålet i Alexandria og enda tidligere, har denne ærverdige tradisjonen ligget brakk de siste årene. Det er de som ser en fare i denne unnfallenheten, og likner bokbål med påsatte branner i skogbrannutsatte områder; ved å ha små kontrollerte bokbranner nå kan vi forebygge de store destruktive bokbrannene i fremtiden. Bokbål kan dermed ses på som god bokrøkt. Uansett er det god, sunn moro.


Teknikken skulle være kjent. Det er det samme prinsippet som for leirbål, bare at du steker bøker i stedet for pølser. Når du føler lysten komme over deg tar du en bok og slenger den på bålet, gjerne med en fyndig begrunnelse. Siste tilgjengelige eksemplarer eller originalmanus gir ekstra karma. Tidskrifter, tegneserier, grafikk er også OK. Malerier, CD-er og annet plast/giftmateriale er frarådet, men det kan være tilfeller som oppveier for risikoen for lungeskader.

Tid og sted: 17:00 i Middelalderparken i Gamlebyen. Ta med lesestoff, leskestoff, og en venn hvis du har.

Synopsis in English: The readers of this journal are invited to a literary picnic in Oslo this weekend where you are encouraged to bring your own books.

Live and texting at the end of the line

— Posted inCzechia, Travel — 2 min read

This entry keeps me awake on the Czech-Polish boreder. It is past midnight and still one and a half hour to wait. Bohumin might be a nice town for all I know, but at this hour I wish I wasn’t here.

That is the odd thing about train travel, it insists on marooning you at times and places you don’t want to be. I would fondly forget Frankly am Awful, Tonabrick, Frustracia, Catatonia, Maimed, as well as the wrong station in Berlin (no, there is no other). At least in this place you can stay inside at the station, electrical outlets and all, the night is warm and dry. Electrical hums, screeches and clanks from one side of the curtains, quadraphonic snoring from the other.

(more…)

On WAP and Web: A matter of weight

— Posted inMobile, Standards — 4 min read

One common statement from the WAP advocates (who, like the World War I veterans, are getting fewer by the year) is that WML is a more compact language than (X)HTML. Not so. It is a simpler language, you don’t need an as advanced browser to handle it, but the WML source is actually more bloated than HTML precisely because it is a simpler language. Since WML 1 doesn’t even have the headline elements (‘h1’ to ‘h6’), you can’t use code like <h2>A subhead</h2>, you have to do something like <big><big><b>A subhead</b></big></big>. Not only do you lose the useful information that “A subhead” is a headline, you need more markup to say less.

(more…)

Circus Českomoravska

— Posted inCzechia, Sports — 3 min read

The venue for all this hokej was the recently built Sazka Arena in Vysočany, naturally the target for the daily pilgrimage. I had an additional reason for a visit. After the revolution but before the normalization I used to live there. In fact it was the first flat I had of my own, a penthouse pad with a great view over the humongous ČKD industrial complexes just across the street. I even tried to buy it with my pocket money; Vysočany was unpopular and no-cost real estate, primarily for being the most polluted area in Prague, which truly was saying something at that time.

But all things heavy industrial must pass, and so would the low grade coal that gave winter its distinct colour and aroma. The Metro was coming through and would shorten a half hour tram ride to the center down to ten minutes. My lack of Czechness and drive to circumnavigate the city bureaucracy left me homeless, but the location made great sense for a sports arena. The half-fallow land is still cheap and the Metro can push people through like no other transport system could, and does on a daily basis.

(more…)