glish is

» deBarcode.com:

Bar codes are ubiquitous. You see them everywhere. Undoubtedly, they have become an essential part of our lives.

» More on copyright: Works Unprotected by Copyright Law.

» XML.com - Gentrifying the Web

Take a look at the W3C HTML Activity page, and you'll discover that XHTML 1.0 is just the first step down a long road which is set to radically alter the face of the Web.

» Meredith sent me this link: Startup claims digital photo breakthrough.

Foveon Inc., a closely held company in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce Monday that it has set a new image standard for sensors constructed using a production process known as CMOS, for complementary metal oxide semiconductor. That performance -- the ability to create an image with 16.8 million picture elements, or pixels -- would mark the first time that CMOS chips have reached parity with image sensors called charge-couple devices, or CCDs, that have led the field for 30 years.

» Has Google's relationship with Yahoo compromised its integrity? Eric Rumsey thinks so, and he's offering proof.

... Before March Google did a superb job of finding high-quality directory sites. But in March (no doubt, as Google and Yahoo! negotiated the alliance that was announced in June), Google's directory-finding ability began to suffer, and it's been in steady decline ever since. Now, with the latest report from August showing that Google is not even able to find one of the cornerstones of medical directory sites, its directory-finding ability seems to be in free fall.

» A bug in the legal code? - A Salon article on David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

» Low-cost Credit Card Content Sales

MicroCreditCard's system holds the potential of changing how publishers approach digital content sales. What it might do (and I hope this is the case) is spur publishers to lower the price of some of their digital content, and start charging for some high-value content that previously has been given away free.

» Until I get to read the articles on copyright and Napster and such from the most recent Wired, this Atlantic Monthly article will have to do: Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea?

Some corporations want to lock up copyright even tighter. Some naive intellectuals want to abandon copyright altogether. Where is a "do-nothing" Congress now that we need one?

» Microsoft tool helps monitor IIS problems:

The HFCheck tool lets users check whether they have up-to-date security patches on IIS 5.0, the Windows 2000 Internet server.

Related: Microsoft TechNet Security Tools site.

» While fiddling with my DHTML Magnifying Glass, reader Dave B. was reminded of an Apple II game called "Dung Beetles". He writes:

The premise is you go around eating the dots, but you leave a poop trail that the bad guys follow (and, presumably, eat). When they get you they chant "We Gotcha" and do a little La Cucaracha dance.

Yeah, kinda weird. Anyway, it's similar to your magnifying tool in that there's a square magnifying glass around your character that magnifies the board following you as you move around. I thought it was really cool when I was a kid, especially when you go to the edge of the maze and it magnifies your score.

Dave also provided me with links! This Portuguese site has an emulator and the Dung Beetles Game. This site has an emulator and a bunch of other games.

» Read this excellent interview with Mark Hurst of Creative Good (and Good Experience). In the interview is dicussed this thread from the CHI-WEB Mailing List, a thread which is worth another read.

» 10 Big Myths about copyright explained - "An attempt to answer common myths about copyright seen on the net and cover issues related to copyright and USENET/Internet publication."

Also see this MetaFilter discussion for more to mull over.

» Tony stole Derek's design (see here) and then was really mad that Derek noticed. I am amazed that things have gotten to the point that people are offended when they are confronted by people from whom they have stolen. Has Napster and the internet in general made people oblivious to the the concept of ownership? Has the extreme ease with which stuff can be ripped off made people feel that everything is fair game?

» It looks like there is some good ASP information at James Shaw's unfortunately named CoverYourASP.com.

» Some companies don't want things they put on the internet linked to, and Dave Winer doesn't want things he writes on the internet quoted:

Further, people have been posting my comments here on other mail lists. I find that offensive. The comments lack context. What I write on this DG is not for posting elsewhere.

» More on the law and the internet from upside.com: To link or not to link?

Lately there has been quite a bit of commotion in the legal world about whether linking between websites is permissible, and more and more cases are preventing links and related activities.

» Zeldman's recent episode of My Glamorous Life tells a sordid tale of having personal projects mistakenly snapped up by faceless corporations. One of the projects isn't so personal, actually: it's the Web Standards Project. Fight the Silliness, Jeffrey.

» I'm a little late to a couple of things, but if you haven't read them yet, you might find them interesting:

Escaping the Matrix, by Richard K. Moore.

What if consensus reality is a fabricated illusion? Are you ready for the red pill?

Downtime by law, by Greg Knauss.

With almost embarrassing enthusiasm, the American judicial system has recently taken upon itself the task of spanking the Internet, hard and with relish. Each day seems to bring another decision designed to leave the technically savvy sputtering with rage.

» It doesn't seem like there is much of note in the new BBEdit 6.0. Is Dreamweaver UltraDev going to usurp BBedit as the Web-authoring tool of choice on Macs?

» Milo Vermeulen, creator of i.am/bald, author of the hungry little frog 5k contest submission, and apparently all around nice guy, has coded an easter egg into exhibit no. 72 of the i.am/bald collection, the one that had me stumped last week. I wish I'd had the time to tear his code apart and figure it out for myself, but the easter egg reveals all you need to know. I think it's a brilliant trick. (Click around; you'll find it.)

» Rebecca Blood offers an interesting history and some insightful comments on the web log format in her new essay at rebeccablood.net: weblogs: a history and perspective.

»  More rambling, hopefully wrapping up this train of thought (continued from here, which was a continuation of this, which was a continuation of that):

I lied. I don't know how happy a clam can be. However, since starting to work from home and arranging things so that I need to put in approx. 4 months of billable time a year to meet my modest salary requirements, I can tell you I am much happier than I was working 49 weeks a year to make the same money, stuck in a cubicle and building other people's web sites. I still do client work of course, but now I get to be pickier about what client work I actually do. And perhaps most importantly, I now have 2/3 of a year to spend as I please. Much of that time so far this year has gone in to creating glish.com, and the pleasure I have gotten from that is part of what started me on this thread. This is my first personal website; the closest thing I ever had besides this was a cheesy thing I started and never finished in early 1996 when I was first trying to get into web work. That's not even a personal site, really, but a personal business pitch. So glish.com has been my first chance to create something from scratch, providing all content, all design, and all code, and I have found it incredibly rewarding. My traffic has been modest, but I have made new friends, had the chance to meet people I never would have otherwise talked to, and staked out a little real estate on the WWW that I am be proud to call my own.

I still find it an attractive thought that maybe one day I will have a .com business venture of my own and will not have to do client work at all, but I am not sure I really want that. If that happens I will once again have most of my time occupied trying to make money, and therefore have less time to work on personal projects. I suppose under the right circumstances my hypothetical .com venture could be something I would be happy to spend 50 weeks a year on, but for now doing a bit of client work to pay the bills gives me the ideal amount of freedom, and I have all sorts of things I want to do with glish.com in that free time (more on that in the near future).

So, in conclusion, I'd like to thank you for reading glish.com, and to encourage you to start (or keep) working on your own personal site. And if you feel like it, let me know who you are and what you're up to. I'd like to hear from you.

» The bugs are on hold for a while, and this week will be flower week at glish.com.

» Milo Vermeulen points us to uncontrol.com, which features some great flash experiments, my favorite being wurm (hint: drag laterally).