I am considering adding Mike Davidson to my personal list of web/html heros. He has something called sIFR (flash replacement of text so a nicer anti-aliased font can be used). Or as he puts it: Introducing sIFR, The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text.

I think I will try playing with this. If I understand it right, and I have to admit it is presented in a way that makes it a little hard for us slow people to follow, you have your text, use his engine to export your text, and it is embedded as a swf file.

This article is a must read! This guy Mike Davidson just participated in a major redesign of the ABC News Site. The breadth and wisdom is so significant that I have included this post in six of my blog categories (general, web design, css, html, news, rss).

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CSS on the fly at this site. You can try various layouts via drop down and radio buttons and the css is generated for you.

In an effort to stop Europe from following the US into patent depravity, a new site has been launched to try and co-ordinate efforts to lobby against software patent adoption from being put into place in the European Union.

Patent wars are only a possibility for companies with very deep pockets, as has recently been demonstraited by Sun’s payout to Kodak of 92 million US dollars. The question to be asked, is what happens to small developers and Open Source groups? If companies are allowed to patent basic software building blocks, then you will eventually not be able to write anything without stepping on somebody else’s toes patent wise. Which means that you either have to have millions, or you have to work for one of the big companies, or you have to find another occupation.

The new site http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com has the backing of some significant companies, not the least of which is ZDNET.

Any of my readers in Europe should really write to their local members about this, because if it goes though, you can expect the cost of software to rise as well. After all, if you have to pay millions of dollars to licence patented ideas, you’re going to pass that cost on to your customers aren’t you?

While you’re out browsing, you might also want to check out protectinnovation.ffii.org.uk as well.

Regards

Franki

Reading this article on news.com I found myself somewhat surprised. It seems we may soon start buying our music on memory cards rather then CD’s or DVD’s. I was surprised not that it has happened, but that it has happened so soon. I didn’t think the market would be ready for such a thing for a couple of years yet.

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AMD has recently released 2 new high end CPU’s (Central Processing Unit) otherwise known as the brain of your PC. The AMD64 4000+ and the FX-55, the former being the consumer CPU of choice and the latter being the high end workstation and heavy duty gamer choice.

Every test I’ve read, (and that’s been a few, as I’ve long been an avid AMD fan) has stated that the new AMD CPU’s totally trounces anything Intel has released or seems likely to release in the next 6 months (at the very least). In fact several of the tests I read were clear on the fact that the AMD chips even beat the Intel CPU’s when they are over clocked to their maximum, and this is while running 32 bit applications when WinXP64 is released, it will pull ahead even further ahead.

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Orwell High School, in Felixstowe England has just completed a change over from a Windows based network to Linux and they are overjoyed at the cost savings and new features of their network. The only part of the system that still uses Windows is a Terminal server 2003 system which is used to provide access over the network to any Windows only legacy applications. That machine is slated for removal once all the software has been replaced with Open Source equivalents.

For graphics, they use “TheGimp”, for desktop publishing there is “Scribus”, for Office application tasks they have OpenOffice.org and for database duties, they have MySQL. As an added benefit, the students have access to Squirrelmail (webmail) and their own FTP share, both accessible from outside the school.

The workstations don’t boot from their own hard drives any more, they now boot over the network from a Linux application server. That step alone drastically reduces the workload of their previously overworked techie as instead of updating dozens of Windows desktops, he now has only to update the application server. Not only that, but the budget allowed them to achieve far more then they could have with a Microsoft network.

This is likely to be the forbearer of a new trend, and these guys are happy to help any other schools that wish to give it a try. The students of the school have apparently been delighted with the new set-up and have taken to it like ducks to water.

Read the full article at TheRegister.com.

regards

Franki