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June 20, 2008 - Comments Off on ISXubuntu—Linux distro optimized for security and privacy while online

ISXubuntu—Linux distro optimized for security and privacy while online

While at the ISOC-NY monthly meeting last night, I learned about a cool project of theirs: ISXubuntu. ISXubuntu will be a Linux live CD, based on Ubuntu Linux, which has been optimized for security and privacy while online. The global Internet Society has provided a grant to cover development costs and so that CDs may be distributed free of charge.

ISXubuntu will feature anonymous Web browsing using Tor, ad blocking with Privoxy, encrypted email with Enigmail, encrypted instant messaging with OTR and the ability to store a personal home directory and other configuration settings on an encrypted USB flash drive.

Volunteers are needed for this project, so if you're interested, get involved: http://isoc-ny.org/isxubuntu

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 18, 2008 - Comments Off on ISOC-NY monthly meeting

ISOC-NY monthly meeting

ISOC-NY's next monthly meeting will be held at tomorrow, 19 June 2008, at NYU.

Date: Thursday, 19 Jun 2008
Time: 7:30 pm–9:30 pm
Location: Room 317, 251 Mercer Street NYC (SW corner of West 4th)
Note: Use the entrance on the west side since construction blocks the Mercer Street entrance. Must bring photo ID.

Provisional Agenda

  • Meet new members
  • By-laws reform
  • Planning future meetings and events
  • ISXubuntu Linux project progress report
  • OneWebDay—planning progress report http://onewebday.org
  • Access advocacy program

All meetings are open to the public, wheelchair accessible and free.

If you plan to attend a meeting, please RSVP to president@isoc-ny.org or via Meetup.com.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 17, 2008 - 6 comments

Firefox 3 Download Day 2008

Download Day 2008 Help the Firefox community set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours by downloading Firefox 3 on Download Day (some time in June).

You can pledge and get buttons and banners at the Download Day Headquarters.

Update 2008-06-12: The date of the download day has been set: Tuesday, 17 June 2008. While you wait, check out Deb Richardson's Field Guide to Firefox 3 to get an overview of all the new features and improvements.

Update 2008-06-17: Today is the day, but Firefox 3 won't be available until 10 am PDT.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 12, 2008 - 6 comments

The Rather Difficult Font Game

In pursuit of finding some free fonts to load onto the new iMac, I stumbled across The Rather Difficult Font Game, which proved not to be toooo difficult, but there were some challenging ones in there. If you think you know your typefaces and are in need of some validation that you're as awesome as you think you are, give it a go!

After being slightly bitter about my score of 29/34, I decided to search through the rest of the I Love Typography website, and it really has a lot to offer. The blog posts are thorough, and they've compiled a significant amount of typography resources that are worth checking out. But for now, I'm going to go study some fonts so I can get my score into the Hall of Fame!

The Rather Difficult Font Game

Published by: christygurga in The Design Mechanism

June 11, 2008 - Comments Off on Custom cursors and pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6

Custom cursors and pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6

Cursors

It's been awhile since I had to implement a custom cursor, but I figured it wouldn't be a problem—just set the cursor property to url(path/to/cursor.cur), right? Of course it's never that simple…

The full scoop can be found here, but in summary we need three rules:

cursor: url(cursor.cur), url(cursor/cursor.cur), default;

cursor: url(cursor.cur); works in Safari, but we need to add default to make it work in Firefox. url(cursor/cursor.cur) is for IE, since the base URI is the source element, not the style sheet.

A nice table/demo of CSS2 and CSS3 cursors can be found at http://www.worldtimzone.com/mozilla/testcase/css3cursors.html

Pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6

I just discovered that it is possible to use pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6 and put together a demo/tutorial.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 10, 2008 - 6 comments

Spamming ahead of their time…

Monty Python's Flying Circus, a comedy sketch show broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974, was conceived, written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Little did they know how ahead of their time they were with their homage to SPAM, a canned & precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation.

Revisiting this sketch this morning made me further appreciate the sketch’s melodious repetition as I deleted another 1575 Spam posts from my email box. If you get a lot of Spam, I highly recommend watching this video. It will ease the pain of dealing with this unruly menace. If you’re on a Mac, I recommend SpamArrest, which does a pretty good job of learning (with your assistance) what to keep and what to mark as Spam. Finally, if you’re eating dinner, I recommend feasting on anything other than SPAM...

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. He admits to having tasted SPAM as a youngster, but cannot recall how sick it made him.

Published by: davefletcher in The Thinking Mechanism
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June 9, 2008 - Comments Off on Forum on Participation and Politics

Forum on Participation and Politics

A forum presented by OneWebDay, ISOC-NY and the Information Law Institute at NYU during Internet Week New York as part of the build up to a politically-minded OneWebDay on 22 September 2008. It brought together a variety of renowned scholars, thinkers and activists to provide their perspectives on political engagement on the Net

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in Government
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June 6, 2008 - 2 comments

Dzone Snippets and Webmonkey.com

After benefiting from the site multiple times, I decided to start contributing to DZone Snippets, a source for useful source code snippets. There's not much there yet, but you can follow my snippets at http://snippets.dzone.com/user/jeffreybarke.

Also Webmonkey.com is having a re-launch party next Wednesday, 11 June, from 6 pm through 8 pm at Sweet & Vicious in Manhattan. There will be music, beverages and good cheer, and theMechanism will be attending.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

June 3, 2008 - Comments Off on Robots.txt and the Sitemaps protocol

Robots.txt and the Sitemaps protocol

At Google I/O, I discovered you can add a line to your robots.txt file so that search bots can autodiscover your sitemaps built to the Sitemaps protocol. The format:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 3, 2008 - 12 comments

When will IE 6 die?

As a recent Mac and Safari convert (I only use Firefox for development now), I just read with enthusiasm that Safari currently has a 6.25% market share. While welcome news, unfortunately it reiterates how important it remains to make sure our sites work in Internet Explorer.

After hearing about Safari's growth, I became curious about IE7's penetration. How close is IE6 to death?

Unfortunately, not close enough. According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 (the same site that reports Safari has 6.25% market share), IE has 73.75% market share. The site does not differentiate between IE 6 and 7. thecounter.com reports that between 1 Feb 2008 and 31 May 2008, IE7 was used 40% of the time and IE6 still has a 37% market share!

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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