Really quite a long time ago, I checked the standards compliance of design portals of the K10K ilk. Of course they had invalid code, often severely bad. Are things better now? [continue with: Design sites do Web standards II →]

I now have a piddling little page up on Web standards. It includes the old bookmarks for standards testing. (Its URL now redirects. Cool URLs do sometimes change; they just don’t break.) I also include a second set of bookmarks for standards testing. Go to town.

I also have a shitty page up that attempts to test real small caps using CSS. I can’t get it to work. Can you?

I see we’ve found yet another way to write the word it[’]s – with the s in small capitals.

At least it ain’t its’.

Neuland means “African-American” according to popular usage. Apparently Cooper Black now means “rye bread.”

I suppose it beats blackletter. Possibly too many connotations there.

Looks like the type on one of those notice boards with the black grooves and the white letters you stick on, doesn’t it?

I explained this already: A file format cannot be “accessible” or “inaccessible.” It can merely have accessibility features. The state of Massachusetts wants to standardize on an open XML document format, but the entire discussion of accessibility thus far has been about how well a blind person can use Microsoft Office with Jaws, a separate topic altogether.

Proponents of the unpublished and closed document format known as Microsoft Word are trying to snow the organizing committee on this point. Surely these proponents must be able to differentiate between software and file format. They seem to be relying on Massachusetts state representatives’ inability to tell the two apart.

A recent Weblog entry is exhaustive, but requires correction. [continue with: A file format cannot be ‘accessible’ →]

I think “lifehacking” is trendy buzzword bullshit from start to finish and I know where you can shove each and every one of your 43 folders. The concept seems to be that you could finally improve your “productivity” if only you had a better system. Because that’s your problem, surely – a system. You just need something external to bring order to your life.

Well, your external system sounds to me like an ex-gay camp. It sounds like you’re signing up for a scientifically dubious mechanism to expunge something about yourself that you hate. If you’re a procrastinator, then you’re a procrastinator. You are not some other kind of person who is inexplicably afflicted with procrastination. You are not a whole, complete, productive person with this added other thing (or this subtracted other thing). You are one entity complete with procrastination.

The same applies to distractability; the difference there is it can be treated with medication. You probably know people with ADD who are taking pills. I expect you’re perfectly willing to accept that these people have a brain neurochemistry that makes them the way they are. You certainly accept that concept with depression and bipolar disorder, right? (Even Anil Dash is bipolar and treats it with medication.) You accept it because distraction, depression, and bipolarism are brain states. That’s noncontroversial, isn’t it? That we’re talking about the brain and not the mind?

Procrastination is the same. You cannot wish your procrastination away. Lifehacking and some hot, sexy number of folders both constitute wishing. Procrastination is a brain state. I told you this already. Read The Midnight Disease, for Pete’s sake.

Trying to fix procrastination is like telling yourself that really giving yourself over to God will turn you straight. You are what you are and you’d better get used to it.

If hacking your life and counting to 43 solve your organization problem, then you never had a problem. You had a lifestyle.

It is thus unhelpful to read even really talented writers, like Paul Ford, who end up doing nothing but giving procrastinators even more reasons to hate themselves, wrapped up in nice quotable quotes: “When I’m not getting enough done, I get unhappy and depressed and think about the billions of years I’ll be dead before the heat death of the universe erases everything. I want to feel like I did something during my brief life besides check my E-mail.”

If that’s what you’re worried about, start doing other things that will make your life worthwhile. Doing more work cannot be one of them. You already do all the work you can. Do not bother trying harder; “trying harder” is a recipe for failure. Do not let lifehackers try to scare you straight. You are intrinsically a procrastinator and there’s nothing wrong with that. Tell yourself “This his how much work I got done” and “This is how long things are taking,” because that is how much work you got done and that is how long it’s taking.

You were a procrastinator today and, when you get around to it, you’ll be a procrastinator tomorrow.

An entertaining article by Erik Blankinship et al., “Closed Caption, Open Source” (PDF), presents a little system he and his friends hacked together to scan caption text, link it to video segments, and allow people to reorder and remix those segments.

Every Web browser since the original Mosaic browser has a “view source” menu item that reveals these HTML source files, making it possible for people to copy and modify a Web page and use it as a template for their own page. Television, a far more ubiquitous medium, does not have an equivalent option allowing people to “look under the bonnet.”

(The article was written by MIT grads but published in a British journal, giving it a few localisms that are amusing, like the one just above, and others that are annoying, as with frequent references to captioning as “subtitling.”)

They came up with their own XML schema to mark up closed-caption text. (That makes it about the 14th such markup language for subtitle and/or caption text that I know of.) Their system infers timecode, which you can modify without destroying the original inference. They roughly synchronize the captions to the video frame; they should document that algorithm. (The researchers should also be aware of cases in which we deliberately and for good reason do not time the captions perfectly. I suppose it’s a bit late for that now.)

You can thus re-edit the source video into your own remix using captions as a way of finding the scenes you want to reuse. The authors claim to “embed” the original captions in any video you export. Exactly what mechanism they use, and how they convert from Line 21 to QTtext or whatever format, is unstated.

Most fun of all, the researchers took this system to a con and let science-fiction geeks have at it, though people could not store or forward a copy of their remixes.

This part I don’t get:

It took a while for the participants to understand that only closed captions were used to organise the available video clips. For example, a few participants queried for “explosion” and expressed dissatisfaction when only dialogue about explosions was retrieved.

Explosions, even if they produce a visible result, are almost always captioned as such. I view that as an ambiguous case, since it is not always clear that what you are seeing is an explosion, nor is it always unclear. Remixers might have to search for the morpheme explo- rather than “explosion,” but they’ll eventually get something. If the system tagged non-speech information as such, then remixers could simply scroll through the sound effects. NSI is often lexically discernible, and it was always discernible on broadcast episodes of Star Trek: TiNG, since the Caption Center captioned all of them and their punctuation is unambiguous, viz. ( explosion ).

Copyright intéressé(e)s will enjoy the authors’ footnotes about trying to license even a single frame of The Lord of the Rings, which unambiguously would be fair use in the authors’ context. However, there is no question in my mind that these remixes are derivative works. That puts creators in a classic clash-of-rights scenario: Is the infringement of creating an unauthorized derivative work saved by the fair-use defense? Is that even possible?

The authors did take the next step, though: They linked the captions and video from a film adaptation back to the original book.

Our software program, Adaptation, displays linkages between the source material and the movie. It does this by displaying the book and the movie as two parallel timelines, and graphically connecting corresponding sections to show how the book may have been expanded or condensed in adaptation. Adaptation also calculates how many minutes per page are spent on adapted scenes, and contrasts the relative size of scenes in their respective media.

Publish that software! It’s a great idea. (Hansard staff at legislatures could use it; see relevant article.)

If wiggers are white niggers, e.g., white people (usually teenaged boys) who thoughtlessly reuse stereotypically “black” styles, then isn’t it time to expand the franchise a little? It ain’t just white boys who be frontin<apostrophe>.

I swear I have witnessed all of the following:

indiggers

Indic guys (always guys) with ’do-rags, cocked ballcaps, super-expensive overlarge sweatpants with extra-thick raglan-sleeved licensed shirts, and bling. Never seen alone and always drive a riced-out car like a heavily-modded Civic, a two-generations-old Cherokee blasting bhangra at 110 dB, or – going all the way – a Hummer.

chiggers

Chinese (sic) version. Interestingly, half of them seem to be FOB, half CBC. Like white tuners, shows absolute allegiance to small Japanese cars (many of them built in Canada, the U.S., or, unbeknownst to them, England) that are a few too many years old to be fashionable, for which is overcompensated by lowered suspensions, imported engine components, wheels-within-wheels, and, above all, new white or blue signal lights.

kiggers, filiggers

Like chiggers, but Korean or Filipino. I repeat: I have seen these people, and they aren’t wiggers, indiggers, chiggers, or any other kind of -igger.

italiggers

A difficult case, as italiggers can be tricky to distinguish from Ginos (Canadian) or Guidos (American). Seems to require more jewelry than usual.

giggers (pronounced “jiggers”)

Perhaps rarest of all – the ginger wigger. Yes, this subspecies of wigger has red hair (and often lashes and brows), hence is about as far removed from being black as an ice blond or an albino. One I know of has full-sleeve tattoos and needs to eat more (and looks away from me in discomfort whenever I so much as glance at him); another had full-on knit cap, facial hair, and Clorets-like rectangular “diamond” ear “stud.” He thought I was making fun of him as I narrated his wardrobe sotte voce to my esteemed colleague. Little did he know.

See also: Chavs.