Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Oldest Evidence of Jesus?

Oct222002

Scholars are studying an ancient ossuary (burial box) which may contain the remains of Jesus Christ’s brother. The box bears an Aramaic inscription which translates to “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these three names refer to the personages so identified in the New Testament,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review.

The article notes that while most scholars agree that Jesus was a real person, this may be the first physical evidence from the first century to be conclusively tied with his life.

Further Reading

Oct112002

Mark Pilgrim is a source of a lot of my web-related reading these days. He’s sharp and stays on top of current happenings in the bleeding edge of the web. I’m not sure I like the summaries in his “Further reading” list (it clutters up the page, IMHO). But I’m all about the new RSS feed. I’ve added it to my FeedReader list.

The Artists Fight Back

Oct022002

The recording industry has been lamenting over the past few years about how music sharing on the internet has hurt their sales, and that artists’ rights are being violated. Of course, most geeks who burn MP3s know that they’re just blowing smoke.

The RIAA is not working in the artists’ best interests. They don’t care about art, they care about profits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against profits. I’m pure capitalist, through-and-through. But you can still make profits without being greedy to the point of illegality.

[update:] Fight piracy — regulate baby monitors!

[another update] Oh, what the heck — let’s have some fun with this.

There are Four Lights

Oct012002

I don’t share very much in this weblog. Partially, this is because of time constraints — I don’t often have time to work on the computer at home, and I’m usually too busy at work to post more than very shallow links to other sites, often as a sort of centralized bookmark for my own future reference. Another reason is privacy — not for myself, but for the other members of my family. I have no real qualms about sharing things that happen in my personal life. There are many events, both funny and sad, that happen with my family that I’d enjoy sharing. But my wife is more reserved about that sort of thing, and she has good reasons for that, and I respect that.

Perhaps this is why I enjoy reading many of the other weblogs that I come across and read on a regular basis. It gives me a taste of something that I’d like to do myself, but can’t. Every time that Zeldman writes another installment of My Glamorous Life, I laugh, or cry, or get angry at all the appropriate places. I like it when Scott talks about what he saw during his vacation, or his ongoing battle with the yellowjackets in his yard. And I’ve gotten to “know” Mark Pilgrim through the various writings on his site. While I never went as far down the road as he did, I did travel on it for a short while, so I can understand some of what drives him.

“What road?” you may ask? Read on, dear visitor. Read on.

Real World CSS

Sep302002

For anyone who is still mired in the HTML Tag Soup of old-style web page design, the question, “Why should I switch to using CSS” often arises. Here’s an excelent real world example. [via scottandrew.com]

It’s true that busting your butt to make a webpage fully XHTML (or even HTML 4.0) compliant might not be “necessary” for your application. And I don’t necessarily agree with those who cry “tables are evil!”. Those of us working in the real world know that sometimes you have to compromise. You try to do the Right Thing whenever possible, but there are times that you have to just do the Working Thing, instead. Heck, this page doesn’t validate. But if you have the patience to check, you’ll see that most of the errors are pretty minor — mostly it’s internal URLs that don’t properly handle “&” characters. If I was worried about trying to parse the page as XML, I’d have to fix it. But I’m not, so it’s not a priority for me.

On the other hand, if you view the page source, you’ll see that I rely heavily on CSS and structural markup. I try to use HTML markup elements as they are intended to be used. I don’t use <blockquote> tags just to indent something — I use it when I’m actually quoting something. If I want something indented, I’ll create a CSS class and just style a regular paragraph with it. This makes the underline code and page stucture much easier to understand, both for humans and for machines. If someone wanted to screen-scrape info off of this page with HTML::TreeBuilder, for instance, it would be a fairly simple task, because the page elements are used in a logical and consistent manner. Of course, there’s not much reason to screen-scape, because I provide an RSS feed.

Hubzilla

Sep202002

Do you use Firewire peripherals? Don’t let Hubzilla eat them.

Disclaimers:

*Charismac claims no responsibility for broken personal or business related property should Hubzilla go on a rampage. As always, a clean and fed Hubzilla results in a happy Hubzilla.

**Please keep small children away from Hubzilla, just in case.

The First Smiley

Sep132002

Pretty much everybody these days can recognize a smiley when they see one: 🙂

After much painstaking research, the original invention and usage of the smiley has been rediscovered, from September 19, 1982 at CMU

New Site Features

Sep112002

You might have noticed a couple of new things here recently. The first, and more obvious one, is the little [b] links in the postings. Clicking one will pop up a window containing links to other sites where the related link has been discussed. This feature courtesy of Blogdex.

The second feature is for those of you who arrived here via a search engine. You should find that your search terms are automagically highlighted on the page. For example, try Googling for “ApologetiX MP3 samples“, then click the link that leads back here. Unfortunately, it’s case-sensitive, so it won’t highlight the terms if your search capitalization is different from what’s in my postings. This is courtesy of Kryogenix, but I found out about it from Dithered.