Blue Sky On Mars

A group of 1360 scientists report that two-thirds of world’s resources are being ‘used up’:

The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.

I have seen other warnings about human usage of freshwater. This is pretty scary stuff, and the United States is the worst abuser of them all. Our current administration does not just have its head in the sand on this one. They actively support those who gain financially from the exploitation of the Earth’s resources.

I’m a geek, not a Luddite. But, I’m a practical geek. I want this world to continue to exist after my retirement. I can’t imagine what it would be like for my daughter if we face the kind of freshwater shortage that is possible.

I’ve got to agree with Ian on this one. It’s fine for an open source project to try to figure out how to bring in some money to support development. It’s another thing entirely to abuse search engine advertising to do it.

The decision of WordPress’ founder to use his PageRank to get revenue via advertising for completely unrelated topics was a very poor one that will certainly alienate his constituency.

Scientific American’s April Fools joke talks about how SciAm has shortchanged ideas like creationism.

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

I’m glad that they have finally realized their mistakes and are now willing to listen to other opinions.

Ruby on Rails 0.11.1 features some improvements to the Ajax support added in 0.11.

The Ajax wave is sweeping across Rails. In this release, we’ve added a :position option to both link_to_remote and form_remote_tag that can be set to either :before, :top, :bottom, or :after. These options make it possible to add new DOM elements to existing lists without replacing the whole list. When working on big lists that are in a fixed order anyway, there’s a considerable speed increase to be had.

Nice! In my earlier post mentioning Ajax in Rails, I talked about Nevow’s LivePage coming first. While that is true, and while it is also true (as far as I know) that Rails doesn’t support LivePage’s ability to call from server-to-client at will, it is cool to see new ease-of-use API ideas coming up.

Mark Cuban shows that he’s a content owner with a clue: Let the truth be told - MGM vs Grokster. Though content companies are fighting Grokster P2P in the Supreme Court, Mark Cuban, who is very much a content company owner, is putting his money on the side of Grokster. He wants to ensure that the rule of law says that software doesn’t steal content, people do. Good deal!

I should really order this. The SLEEPTRACKER watch wakes you up within a time period that you specify, attempting to do so when you’re in your “almost awake” state. The idea is that by having an alarm go off then, rather than when you’re in a deep sleep state, you’ll wake up feeling more refreshed. According to Gear Live, it really works.

I’m seriously considering Camtasia for doing annotated video demos (with audio and all), but FlySketch for the Mac looks like a great tool for doing screenshots. It’s hard to design something to be as easy as what you see there! (Via Ian Landsman)

Ian Landsman has put together a detailed article about Search Engine Optimization, which is a very important topic for any business today, and is way up there in importances for a micro ISV. If you’re considering making help desk software, don’t read this article though

Ahh, cross-browser fun. Even when you’re only supporting very recent browsers (my targets are IE5.5+, Moz/Firefox and Safari), there’s always cross-browser joy to be had. I was positioning a div in response to a click, and it worked just dandy in Firefox, but gave an error in IE. I was using event.pageX and event.pageY, which IE knows nothing about. I found many references that said to use event.clientX+document.body.scrollLeft, but it was clear that document.body.scrollLeft was always zero. I finally found the answer here: Event handling in the DOM Part 2- Page 3/4

For IE, the above code adds the scroll offset values of both the HTML tag (represented by document.documentElement) and the BODY tag (represented by document.body). This is because IE 5.5 uses the BODY as a base for rendering and measuring offsets, as does IE 6 when in compatibility mode. But in standards-compliant mode IE 6 instead uses the HTML tag as a base.

So, if you want the document position of an event, the formula is: x = event.clientX + document.documentElement.scrollLeft + document.body.scrollLeft. (y is left as an exercise for the reader).

For many parents in the US, the name Graco is usually associated with top quality, well-engineered baby products. Apparently, though, Graco has not been diligently reporting injuries that have occurred through use of their toddler beds and was fined $4M as a result.

”At Graco, the safety and welfare of our consumers is always our top priority,” the company said. “As this settlement makes clear, it is our understanding that Graco did not knowingly violate the CPSC’s reporting requirements.”

The article doesn’t go into detail about how they misunderstood CPSC’s reporting requirements… but, Graco’s been at this a while. They’re a big company that is part of an even bigger public compnay. It’s easy to be skeptical and think that perhaps Graco just didn’t want to get involved in recalling 1.2 million toddler beds if they could avoid it.