The Australian media hasn’t been very good at keeping government accountable, and it’s about to get worse with the new all-conservative, all-the-time Australian Senate. Cross-media ownership laws will doubtless be abolished and Murdoch will be rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of buying up every last remaining independent traditional media outlet.

Which leads John Quiggin to speculate about the role of new media, and, specifically, blogs, in this brave new deregulated world

The other big question is technology. Would it be possible to put together something readable as an online newspaper, using blog software as the basis rather than the more elaborate content management software used by the Internet versions of mainstream papers? [...]

I would say yes. Blog-style CMSes are evolving rapidly, but already are substantially better than most of the horrendous websites developed for traditional newspapers.

Furthermore, I think it’s going to be a matter of extreme urgency that designers, journalists, and technologists begin to collaborate, to develop a more effective response to the shrinking and lessening of our media.

More on this soon.

Sweet.

I’ve been trying to track down a simple way to incorporate MLA citation style into LaTeX. Not easy. You can find style packages that get you some of the way there, but finding a package that allows you to easily cite computer programs and videos is a bit harder.

This might be a start, though. Using CTAN BibTeX Styles

Boy, this article would have come in handy 2 years ago. Pity Sam Ruby only wrote it a couple of days ago.

Copy and Paste

we have a page which is correctly encoded as utf-8. Mozilla ignores this as well as the declaration inside the body that this is so. Instead it choses to respect the HTTP header, which it finds to be incorrect, so it compensates by introducing a windows specific encoding.

Via Simon Willison’s Weblog, the straight dope about online newspapers and registration

This has to be useful: shell scripting in 20 pages.

How To Attack An IE/Win Bug

My grandfather passed away two weeks ago and I haven’t felt that I could update the site until I noted it in some way. And of course I haven’t wanted to do that for a while either.

Goodbye, Grandad. We miss you so very much.

Simplebits is polling the question What is the best way to markup snail-mail addresses.

I’ve used a few different methods, from the address tag to definition lists.

Guide to LaTeX Documentation

Here’s a simple trick that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere.

Say you have a series of thumbnails of a known size. You want to give them a fancy border effect but don’t want to waste a lot of time in Photoshop applying it to every one.

The simple answer is to create an image — larger than the original — that contains the border and its background. Then you simply apply that image as a background image with CSS (give it a “center center” position and sufficient padding) and bob’s your uncle.

Freeware graphics app developers for Mac OS X. Pixen is a nice pixel editor. RepTile is a cool-looking tile map editor. I’m really going to have to start writing my pixel-art rpg soon.

I wish I’d had this when I was about 14. A guide to pixel art

Some people ask Hulk why Hulk not run for president.

Hulk have simple answer.

Hulk not smart enough to be president and Hulk knows it, unlike stupid puny human Bush in office now. Only saving grace of puny human Bush is his face looks like MONKEY.

HELLO MONKEY!!!!

Genius.

from The Hulk’s Diary