If you click on one of the picts in this image gallery you'll see a blown-up, pixelated version of the thumbnail you chose.
If you look at the source you'll see that this is not an image at all, it is instead a CSS-based page, where classes defining colors and background colors are given to each pixel.
Practically the "image" is just a series of colored spots, no photoshop has been harmed in doing that.
What can i say, I'm surprised the woman could swim in the mud with those shoes.
Now that everybody use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), it's interesting to see that many start to show all the possible applications. Starting from managing lists obtaining cool navigation bars, to having table-less layouts with rounded corners.
Now. let's just have an earthquake on older browsers....
I'll have to start linking to our referrers, I'll start with the promise to give a plug to Eyesaw. Besides, Btezra was also another greenpeace folk!
Jason had to fire photoshop in order to find the truth. I'm tempted to, but I'm afraid to spoil the magic.
You want to develop your site using the right standards, no patches or weird workarounds. On the other hand you don't want to have your Netscape 4.* aficionados (your colleagues maybe?) pointing out that that 3% of users is soooo important so you cannot use W3C recommendations.
Well sometimes the best thing to do is to keep it simple, thinking "fluidly". Digital Web mag tells you how.
Only four years old and already so famous. Doing better than Shirley Temple.
Ah, Gillo's FOAF post includes the famous Caption Contest picture: what was he thinking?????
Tonight, G, a milestone: on my evening troll through blogdex (yes, the famous "stop reading it, you'll go blind" blogdex) I click on ScaryDuck to see what The Guardian considered the best Blog in the UK. (7.1 blogdex points, respectable, but a lot of those links are jealous slags. So ok, somebody had a very stupid idea to create a "Best Blog" award, but don't blame the winner. Even if they gave him a thousand quid. And he's using it to buy a boiler.)
And what do you know? Not only is it freakingly well written and funny, there's a link to "Greenpeace blog" on the side!
Now why do I find it incredibly cool that a random browse through blogdex links has brought me back here? The only answer can be that I need a life.
Maybe on ebay....
Mark keeps investigating into FOAF stuff. Now he found what I'd call an almost-meaningful rendering of a FOAF file. As an example, check my FOAF and then submit yours at the bottom.
btw: I promise I'll find a better pict, thanks Trina for this precious gift.
It was so touching, that I almost ended up in tears... don't forget the sfx.
Ever wondered what the Greenpeace NZ staff do when they're not abseiling off buildings, climbing incinerator stacks or tapping away at our computers? Well lots of things actually but one thing that really deserves mention is our newly formed indoor netball team, the 'Green Ferns'.
After a slow start to the season last week where we lost 16 / 9 (despite being given five bonus points), the Ferns returned in devastating form last night to post a winning score of 29 / 1 against 'Oops Premier', a team of Auckland hairdressers.
The after-match debrief attributed the improvement in goal shooting and ball passing mostly to our shiny new netball hoop installed on the wall outside.
The Green Ferns team is made up of people from right across the organisation. We've got people from communications, actions, fundraising, and campaigns. With the new success of the team the biggest problem will be to give all seventeen people who want to play the chance to make the six person team!
News media companies are getting concerned about their journalists mantaining weblogs, managers start saying that keeping a weblog compromises the journalist's ability to do his/her job.
In some cases weblogs' entries hosted on news sites are actually edited (not by their authors) before being published, because they might raise "questions of liability". So many reporters end up keeping two (or more) weblogs: one for the company and a personal one, the latter being a "real" weblog, imho, while the first being just a way for the company to jump on the weblog bandwagon.
This is terrible but luckily it raised a strong reaction from many webloggers and, imho, it has legitimized personal journalism even more.
Long live the blog.
Lot of good blogs about Gore's speech re Iraq. But it sure depresses me that this is viewed as a brave political stance. It ain't, really: he's not advocating the US walk the walk when it comes to eliminating its own weapons of mass destruction.
But it's at least good to see the respect for world opinion that he encourages, even if, as Max at MaxSpeak puts it:
"In the end, Gore is the more ambitious imperialist, if also more sensible and cautious. Clinton and Gore would only proceed with public opinion and international support behind them. Bush's political schtick is to express contempt for such political concerns."
Similarly, David Remnick and Hendrik Hertzberg in the Sept 18th New Yorker: "One may safely disdain ben pensant op-eds in Le Monde or The Guardian, but not the legitimate contentions of entire democratic nations and their elected leaders"
Damn straight.
The history of Emoticons
:)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/netnotes/article/0,6729,795227,00.html
The new Google news site is up. Although well-structured I think it goes away from the popular and minimalistic "Google style", imho it resembles a bit other news sites.
Too much text and long scrolling drives me crazy, but maybe "news-freaks" will love it.
Another obsession: wireless networks. You've probably heard that Nokia started getting really angry for all these warchalking activities. What is warchalking?
"Warchalking is the process of looking for wireless computer networks and making chalk marks to indicate their locations so that others can more easily find them"
The reason why people can use bandwith organized by groups like Nokia is because these networks are too open, so I don't find this illegal or even immoral, they should make them more secure! So, as long as they remain like this, warchalkers will continue to exist.
I find it also a new way to express the tribal-geek in all of us, look at these super cool symbols! I might get a tattoo with one of those.
You can start by finding your closest wireless network and, if you're a real environmentalist, you should think of using sustainable sloutions.
Now what I need is to check how far is that friend of mine with HDSL...
Although the geek explanation of FOAF (Friend of a Friend) could be quite long, it's better to start with this short summary found on an article written by Edd:
"FOAF is an XML and RDF application which allows the expression of personal information and relationships, and is a useful building block for creating information systems that support online communities"
Sounds cool? It is indeed. Consider the FOAF as a massive decentralized address book, where each record is stored on separate places on the Web and each contains links to other records. Once aggregators and search engines start spidering these FOAF files, finding people, their addresses, pictures and so on will be very easy. In a way FOAF brings one step further the community building process started with weblogs.
You can write your own FOAF file, using the FOAF-a-matic, and add it or search others on some aggregators like the FOAF Bullettin Board. Once your file is ready you can always update it adding more info/friends to it. As an example here's my FOAF file.
If you have a FOAF file, send me a message so I can add you to my FOAF profile. Happy FOAFing.
It has been since june 2002, when we were working very hard to launch our new CMS, that I haven't worked a whole weekend (saturday and sunday). This time, the office was less crowded and there was no crates of redbull but anyhow I managed to go through the two days without major problems!
I am anxiously waiting for the new announcements that will certainly happen at Photokina 2002, in particular the new pro digital SLR from Canon, the EOS 1Ds. I am still more interested in the analog world (film, slides, negative) even with the add hassle (as some people will see it) of having to buy film, develop, print, etc ... I read in a forum of http://www.dpreview.com/ that one of the advantages of film is that you can spend 8 euros on a roll of Velvia, and you are shooting superb slide film, another 8 euros and you can move to a very fast negative that will certainly render the colors in a different way. I am starting a course very soon and will certainly take loads of pictures (assignments) and will scan/post them for those who are interested.
Now it's time to get off the computer and "get a life" :-).
Giles finally sent his entry for the Viridian Design Biofuture Robot Dog Contest.
Pooch is an open-source, artificial intelligent, solar-powered robotic dogpanion, although a bit hairy.
Way better than an Aibo, and I don't even link to that.
Unfortunately for Mac users only, now available:
iBush: An artificially unintelligent Oval Office Occupant simulator.
For mac-unimpaired, check the screenshot
Hi - I'm the web manager at Greenpeace New Zealand - about 37 degrees East / 137 degrees South in the Pacific ocean. Youve probably met the odd New Zealander around the world somewhere were notorious travellers and we say tin instead of ten and mulk instead of milk.
NZ is often referred to as 'down under' but I'm thinking of reconfiguring the spinning globe on our new look website to reflect the fact that this is an entirely relative and subjective judgement. I think the globe would look a lot less top heavy if Antarctica, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa were at the 'top'. Any volunteers?
Its September 20th here, so when I post this story it should travel back in time to the 19th . Let's see.
This is old news, "ancient" in computer terms since the Project Gutenberg began in 1971.
The project involves volunteers to get copyright clearance for certain books, scan them and, after some checks, the books will be available for download. Purely wonderful!
I remember visiting the Project Gutenberg site some years ago, but now I went back since I found (incredible!) the whole autobiography of Casanova ("The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt").
I might get blind reading the whole of it on the screen but I don't care.
What is this? Adrenaline? Bored people? Time to waste? I don't know, but if you really want, now you can drop your car from 13,000 feet. For the sake of it obviously..
Welcome to the WWW, Geocities tried to give space to everybody, then .coms boomed and shadowed any personal attempt to come out on the Web.
Then weblogs came, people started writing about themselves and the subjects they like, we finally had the possibility to know more about others on the Web.
But now we go a step further, not only we read other people's articles, check what they do, now we see them, through their webcams or their photos thanks to the wonders of digital cameras. We become part of their life or, at least, they become part of ours.
I have to say I've been tempted to submit a pict myself, but now I'm skeptical, how far whis will go? At a certain point I think it will be a privilege to keep an anonymous face, so for the moment I'll just keep seeing you while i hide behind my turned-off webcam.
All of us having a virtual life need an Instant Messenger, possibly open source but others are good too. there are some very popular among the bloggers and some among the techies.
In any case they are everywhere, and although sometimes they raise concerns among managers and sysops, I don't see many negative sides in using them, they help me contacting my friends, my contacts on the other side of the world, my team mates... I just have one big problem with them:
What do you mean by "I'm not available" ?!?!
Yeah you! I thought you were one of those folks who use Flash to make animations, cartoon-like... Are you sure it's not you? Maybe you don't remember, too many drinks, parties, I know how these things are. You'll get over it.
Ah, btw, if you have a flashback and recognize that you are indeed a flash designer, let me know, we have stuff to do.
Atlantic Ocean - 18 september 2080
Nano-activists launched nano-zodiacs from their new nano-ship, the NSV (Nano Sailing Vessel) "Nano Nano", preparing a nano-demonstration to nano-stop a plutonum shipment.
Their nano-spokesperson told us: "This will be a peaceful nano-action to raise awareness about the shipment's dangers, as you know we are a non violent nano-organisation and we use our creative nano-confrontations to expose global environmental problems and to force solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future"
The captain of the plutonium carrier said: "We are sick and tired of these nano-agitators, we just want to do our work and we cannot waste any more water hoses to pin down these nano-hippies"
Other nano-activists also managed to climb up the ship and unfurl a nano-banner saying: "Nuclear free seas, you won't silence our nano-voice". At present they are still there but we cannot see them really well.
Thanks Plastic
At least my imagination. If I were Michelangelo I'd probably be p***ed off to see my art used for such eBay item.
I could probably spend my whole life on Google if only I didn't have a real life. One of the last findings, dated May 2002 this year unfortunately, comes from the USA Army, Nato forces website.
Beside the funky layout, Google sent me to their May newsletter (I suppose), where a paragraph described a Greenpeace action against an Exxon-Mobil Plant near le Havre.
Beside the fact the action wasn't really blocking "the smooth flow of a productive process in which some fairly hazardous materials are used", I can only be entertained by one of their main lines:"This is but another of the flashy public events staged by Greenpeace to draw attention to its ecological causes"
"Flashy"? I would have expected a different use of dictionaries on a .mil site. The old times are gone...
Mozilla.org might change look and back-end. Perl is good but at a certain point you have to move on...
Zope is a good software and we're also using it on our cybercentre, although we preferred a different solution for our main site, since we had a lot of different requirements.
The new site looks good and responsive, however I'll miss it a lot. Oh lizzy, where art thou?
I had to do a double take this morning when I saw that BBC-Online were running news of the flotilla getting ready to protest the nuclear ships as their 2nd story - and the fun hasn't even started yet.
Gets you wondering about the elements of a story that convince big media outlets like the BBC to cover them. GP doing what it does best and confronting those who risk us and our environment is made even more powerful when we're joined by other strongly committed and passionate groups like the flotilla sailors.
I think the media sometimes anticipate what the GP line will be on an issue as they know the organisation, it's work and what it stands for. To my mind, when like minded individuals are driven by their commitment and passion to organise themselves to take action and speak out and GP can help in some small way to facilitate that, the result can be amazing. A purer, sometimes clearer voice comes through and maybe that's what gives the story more profile in the media - not just whether it's a big, bold, GP trademark protest.
If you can't beg, borrow or steal a boat to join the real flotilla, you can still join our virtual flotilla - happy sailing.
Offered by the always interesting JOHO
At last the summer is over. Here are the top ten reasons why vacations suck:
- The better the vacation, the worse the bandwidth. It's a law.
- Huge disruption in your schedule of daily activities.
- Hourly encounter with non-human species.
- The rest of the world doesn't stop sending you email.
- Stephen King and Tom Clancy: ridiculous plots, stupid characters, a cliche a minute.
- Bugs think they own your ass.
- It's someone else's toilet.
- If your real house hasn't burned to the ground by now, it's probably either been looted or infested with silverfish.
- No matter how much you use, calamine lotion doesn't work ... and it tastes damn funny.
- When you get back, people have no sympathy for what you've been through.
Yesterday I was housebound, or at least watching my house being battered by Hong Kong's most severe tropical cyclone this year - look up Typhoon signal 8, and that's what we had to do yesterday. Later, I had to drive thru the deserted streets to collect my wife and daughter. Deserted streets in HK are very, very strange as the rest of the time they teem with life and activity. The only thing that stops HK life with such a crunch is a typhoon. HK stops for nothing else and runs for 24 hrs a day - a veritable NY of the East. Geeze, even the stock exchange closed down. For such a $$$$ oriented city as HK this is an amazing step. HK yesterday evening reminded me of certain northern european cities on a Sunday when everything closes down for church, or for family get togethers.
Anyhow, yesterday was pretty memorable for me, not just cos it was Gillo's birthday (sorry mate - forgot again, happy b'day!) it was my parents wedding anniversary. In fact my father was with me in HK 9/11 2001 when we heard the news of the WTC attacks - we were in an 80th floor revolving restaurant at the time called the Hopewell (!!!!) Centre.
What 9/11 reminds me of, apart from the pain and suffering it caused to the American people, was the effect it had of pushing the good ole US Guv even more into the corner with their claws showing than before.
In the immediate aftermath, and as the US gathered support for its 'Holy War' I remember thinking that George W would milk it for all it was worth, and that Russia and China would no longer be questioned about their treatment of their Muslim minorities. Any Muslim community asking for independence or even cultural recognition would be classified as terrorists and no questions would be asked.
What 9/11 should also remind us of is that the world needs leaders, cos there is an enormous vacuum at the moment, currently filled by another vaccum with bad intentions (George W). One person who could fill that void, even though he's 84, is Nelson. Take a look at this, just about right I'd say. Anyone for a global vote on who could lead the world away from the brink, despite his age?
Also, take a look at this very good article written by an American in the UK's Guardian. Although, I think its a cop out to blame a lot of the disinformation American people receive about the wider world on a lap dog media who pump out the govt message. What about trucking around the web for your news from other sources so you can make your own mind up.
Yesterday was also a very bad day for me as my football team lost again.
Question - do Porsche still have a 911 model? just heard that their sales had been dropping off for a while and wondered why. It's either that or there's less hooray henry stockbroker types around to buy them with their 'here today, gone tomorrow' exorbitant salaries. You know, those salaries that they earn crucifying the world's foreign exchange markets and making poor countries even poorer in the process. Here's something you can do about that.
Oh brother. It's bad enough ransacking the natural world for human aphrodisiacs, now we're treating the natural world with man-made aphrodisiacs by putting Pandas on viagra.
Looks like the Pandas aren't going for it, but we better be careful about these experiments with nature.
If some of the wealthier elements in the Animal Kingdom should get a taste for viagra, maybe they'll decide they want to turn this around on us, and do what we do to their habitats for the sake of a little rhino horn or tiger testicle.
Imagine wild animals, armed to the teeth, breaking into pharmacies worldwide and gunning down the customers for that precious little fix of viagra that'll make them rich, rich, rich. Actually, to be fair to the metaphor, they'd probably need to level whole towns and shopping malls for a single pill. Pharmacists become an endangered species as they're selectively hunted down and slaughtered -- not even eaten, but their bodies cast aside as a byproduct in the ruthless quest for a small plastic bottle that's prised from their dead, cleaver-removed hands.
Maybe the Greenpeace Eco-Sex Guide should provide some guidelines here?
I have to admit I don't feel really good at writing an entry with this over-super-always-everywhere mentioned date. Maybe because I'm still not really happy about the fact that people are sure to remember some events forever, while at the same time they easily forget others.
As far as I'm concerned, I've always had this date in mind, it's my birthday. So, if you really want, make me present.
Warren, you are definitely not invited to my party.
The web team here has been hard at work over the last few weeks doing our own research for our latest international feature.
I'm afraid we had to censor a few of the suggestions, some people just got completely carried away.
Want to know what we were up to?
http://www.greenpeace.org/features/details?features_id=25737
Would you like to continue the research and submit your own guidelines?
It is strange how many techies are actually interested in photography. I am one of them (I have been assimiliated) :-).
For the last few months I have been increasing my knowledge, little by little, of this fantastic art, that is the "photography". I am even starting now, in october actually, a course, here in Amsterdam where I should get more instructions on how to enhance my "vision".
At this stage I am still working with film, not yet gone into the digital world. I think it's too soon for me, I want first to make some incursions into the "old-traditional-film-world", play around with the analog possibilities and learn from there.
During the first half of august, I went on holidays to the south of France, more precisely to the "Provence" and I came back with 10 rolls of slides from that "expedition" :). Some piictures are pretty nice -humbly, very humbly, just nice, nothing spectacular yet-. So, I decided to scan some of those ... I went through one roll (so far) as I am no scanner expert at all (I think I could get much much better scans) ... I used a Nikon CoolscanIII to scan my slides (film used is Fuji Velvia iso50). You can see the pictures that I have so far at my online exhibition site.
Feel free to comment on the pictures but ... I am just learning and wanted to share this ... :)
I managed to avoid touching almost any electronic device while I was away, I just concentrated on "real" stuff like food, chats with friends, beach (not too much since weather was not as good as I expected), relatives. Obviously I had to deal with Italian traffic which made me go through a mountain pass to avoid a 7 km jam on the highway!
(note: for those who plan to travel by car on the highway between Bologna and Florence, remember that there's ALWAYS traffic between Barberino del Mugello and Roncobilaccio so avoid that piece going in/out the highway at Barberino and in/out at Pian del Voglio, through the Futa Pass, nice countryside and no exhaust pipe poisoning)
I arrived home just in time to witness a massive storm that made plenty of damages around here, luckily the only problem I had was the lack of electricity for a whole day and a dead phone line for three days. I though my modem fried too, but it seems it's a sturdy one.
Lessons learned:
1) Avoid Italian traffic jams.
2) Reduce the number of holidays with your parents/relatives, prisoner is not the right word though.
3) Sicilians friends are very kind but, especially if restaurant owners, might not be helpful to your diet.
4) Buy solar panels and windmill.
Well, finally, after the speech from Powell at the $ummit, one can clearly see that the US Govt. is only interested in supporting its corporations' interests and not the worlds' ones. It's really scary to see this super-power, that keeps on building it's military machine bigger and bigger, act this way. What's left for the world?
One good thing on this is that, I hope, it will raise the consciousness around the world about the actual state of disaster and poverty that we are in and will activate people to opose these policies of "we don't care, we are powerful and we do whatever we want!" and do something alternative that will opose this way to proceed. I might be too optimistic here, maybe, but hey! what's left? Hope and action! Back to work after this terrible show-off of incompetence and blindness from the heads of state... More than ever what we are doing is critical for our planet (IMHO).
Reading the weblog from the Greenpeace Youth Delegation it makes me proud to have young people that are so aware (more than the eldery decision makers at the $ummit) about the current state of our planet (both socially as well as environmentally).
I wish we could have more youth involved like them into this fight to preserve our natural environment, protect our scarce resources and try to reduce the terrible abuse by the richest countries and corporations.
but not the Earth.
Despite the lack of government action, there were some mumblings about saving the planet
"Climate change is no longer a sceptical prognosis, but a bitter reality. This challenge demands decisive action from us" - Gerhard Schroeder, German Chancellor.
"Poverty and environmental degradation, if unchecked, spell catastrophe for our world" - Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister.
"Today in Johannesburg, humanity has a date with destiny" - Jacques Chirac, French President.
"We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world" - Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan President.
"Let us not be deceived when we look at a clear blue sky into thinking that all is well. All is not well" - Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General
So the messages are starting to get through to world leaders, we are in trouble, the whole planet is in trouble, and we need to do something about it.
But the man who didnt even show up, is the one who controls the strings and it seems that leaders who may know in their hearts what must be done, are still being pulled by the big US buck.
Yes it seems that Bush and the US government have learnt nothing since September 11th. Instead the US is now holding the rest of the planet hostage under polluting policies, economic weight and military might. The US continues its war on the environment with interests of oil in Iraq rather than true global security in the form of clean, renewable energy.
It may take a while for countries to back away from Bushs agenda, but the holes in his allied armour are beginning to show. Blair has already criticised Bush for not ratifying Kyoto. Countries took an unusual stand late Sunday night when they removed one sentence from the summit agreement that would have made environmental regulation secondary to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements and trade considerations.
The will to resist is there, and I have to believe that eventually, it will grow and governments, countries, people everywhere will escape the grasp of those who would pollute for profit.
"What are you talking about?" would come the reply. "That's to keep you in."
In a similar vein there is our exclusive report from C. Creature on the "success" of the fisheries agreement and of course the people who stopped the summit achieving anything that might cost the rich nations a dollar or two.
I have been receiving e-mails from my friends that are working in the Greenpeace Delegation to the World Summit in Jo'burg @ 03.00AM and times like that. Looks like frenzy over there as the head's of state are arriving and starting to make their show.
Some small achievements are being accomplished (IMHO) but still, the $ummit doesn't look very promising. It's amazing, you have most of the world leaders all together, in a country that should show them "in their face" what poverty is like, I mean, just a few minutes away from the posh neighborhood where the conference is, you have a massive poor slum ... And guess what? They don't give a damn about it! They look more concerned about feeding the rich than caring about the poor and the impact that all the abuse of the environment will cause!
I don't want to sound too pessimistic, it's just that it seems to be a massive oportunity to set the path for "better ways" to live in this planet but it seems like big corporations and big powerful governements keep on imposing their ideas over the rest of the world!
