Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Firefox users have been able to use microformats-enabled web sites (like the schedules on Upcoming or BBC Programmes) for a long time thanks to a couple of extensions (Operator and Tails Exports).
Now coming alongside the release of Safari 3.1, there’s a new Safari plugin that allow the parsing of microformats for integration in various Mac OS X applications (Adress book, iCal).
For Mac OSX users, the integration with Address Book and iCal could make Safari a better microformat reader than Firefox. I cannot test the plugin myself as I don’t have Leopard which is a requirement.
Alternatively the latest version of my feed reader NetNewsWire can also parse microformats but it requires you (obviously by the very definition of microformats) to render the web page in Netnewswire not just the summary.
Safari 3.1 is available for Tiger and Windows though.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
A funny but familiar comic strip 
Your Company’s App: “Company’s”
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Another silly diagramme unearthed by the people at BoingBoing and themed on Dungeons and Dragons whose creator Gary Gygax died recently.
When you look at the full version of the diagramme, you’ll see a rectangle about “people blogging about diagrams”. I am such a nerd!
Flowchart: How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness: “Wired’s Adam Rogers wrote a lovely, sweeping obit for Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax in this weekend’s New York Times that included this flowchart showing how D&D was a gateway drug into every kind of nerd-dom:
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group…
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.
Link
(Thanks, Ethan!)
“
(Via Boing Boing.)
Sunday, March 9, 2008
I’ve come back from the open weekend organised by The London Transport Museum Depot in Acton.
Part of it consisted in a tour of all the posters, maps and the original artworks they were based upon since 1908.
These posters were used mainly as promotional material for London (and therefore the Underground), and it was quite fascinating: the diversity of artistic styles as well as the messages conveyed through them.
These posters can be browsed online on on a dedicated web site.
Among the original artworks, there was a special edition of Harry Beck’s London map:
The topology is about the same as the original, but all the station names are replaced by personalities names and the lines name are replaced by careers(engineers, dignitaries, film actors, italian artists,…)
A cross between two lines represents someone who’s known for being more than one thing, which make the whole process quite a challenge
unfortunately I couldn’t find this map on the online collection but It was quite funny to read and is nice followup to my previous post.
Here are some suggestions for other alternative London maps:
- each station represents an airport and the lines are airline companies
- each station represents a food and the lines are the group of nutriments supplied by the food
- each station represents a london pub and the lines are types of beverage served
Any more ideas?
Sunday, March 2, 2008
World Metro Map by Mark Ovenden
Originally uploaded by Annie Mole
This is a map I’ve just found on Flickr even if it’s quite old news (sorry).
It’s the metro map of the world and that’s so amazing. I do leave in a city with a dense metro system, and looking at this map make my brain start planning some exotic trips the same way I plan my high street shopping
This map is a powerful mind stimulator, kudos to Mark Ovenden.
Londoners will obviously recognize that the network diagramme is based on the London underground tube map:
the topology is almost intact and you can easily identify the central line and the circle and the others where there are supposed to be
It’s also made twice nicer as: Transport For London guards jealously the copyrights on their data (making tube map/status based creations rare and dangerous) and this one is available with a Creative Commons licence!