crazyskillsbloginitiative

Good stuff here [mintywhite.com], speaking of BSOD’s.

There are some on here I hadn’t seen before.

Everyone knows the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) on Windows. It usually means failing hardware or in the least a reload is needed.

I’ve also seen the Sad Mac, the “Bomb”, Guru Meditation (my personal fav, though it did have a tendency to piss me off regardless of its intrigue) and Red Screen Of Death on Windows development builds. Believe it or not, I have even seen the BSOD on GNU/Linux, though this is usually due to a misconfiguration and most often can be fixed fairly easily. But yeah, there are a few on here which were new to me.

My Black Cat Linux system here even has a nifty little screensaver on it that displays various Screens Of Death in a slideshow. Anyway, here’s the Wikipedia article on Screens Of Death [wikipedia.org]. An entertaining read for those of us with computers that work.

Yeah, so what is it¹, what browsers support it², what good is it³ and when is it going to be the standard⁴?

¹ HTML 5 is the next generation of the standardized hypertext markup language. This is the language that internet pages are written in (somewhat simplified.)

² HTML 5 is currently supported by Firefox v3.5b99 and Safari 4.

³ It supports native embedding of richer media than HTML 4. For instance, HTML 5 supports the <video> tag. What this means is less (eventually no) reliance on 3^rd party embedded applications such as Flash or Silverlight. HTML 5 also supports CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) version 3. A css file is what gives text and other parts of internet pages attributes such as color, underlining, paragraph formatting, and more.

⁴ When HTML 5 [w3.org]/ CSS 3 [w3.org] will actually be the standard is a tough question. It could take years, I suppose, though a draft has been available since January 2008 (W3C). The changes being added are going to make the internet better for everyone, arguably moreso than the transition from HTML 3 to HTML 4 did. (December 1997)

To sum up, there is a great deal of effort being put into these new technologies. The internet is moving further toward a rich multimedia experience and richer development environments as well. This is the direction the internet is going. It will really be something to watch this come to be, and as usual the crazyskills dev team will be making the most of the new technologies - bringing them to a browser near you. We’ll keep ya posted.

For a little demo of some of what is coming, check out www.dloh.org [dloh.org] if you are using an HTML 5 supported browser (listed above.) It’s pretty cool, but it is really a demo of the technical side of things and not everyone will be able to appreciate it. Another interesting site is this one [alistapart.com] which does not demo HTML 5 but delves into the changes and streamlining to code. It’s an older article (120407) but touches on a few of the new tags to be added to HTML 5.

The end times are almost upon us. This week, the German government have finalized plans set to go into effect on the 18th which will censor the internet for the German people. This is a step in the wrong direction. I mean seriously, what is up with this? It’s all in the name of protecting the children, but what’s next? Not letting children go outside in fear that they might be hit by a car? Not letting them inside anywhere in fear that the place might burn down? This censorship is a step backwards in the global fight for personal freedom and rights. It’s another example of the government (in this case, of Germany) trying to be the peoples’ mother. It’s just frightening. When this goes into effect on Thursday, the people of Germany will not have the same rights and freedoms that they have now. Certain internet sites (hundreds, thousands?) will be blocked for everything from pornography to conflicting religious or political views. Hell, who’s to speculate exactly all of what will be denied to the German people? Maybe there will be no more visits to crazyskills. Who knows? I am not upset that this will affect me in any direct sense - I have never been to Germany - but I am upset for those who live there, and for the potential downward spiral this could potentially put on the global community. If this trend continues, pretty soon they’ll be back to book burning.