There are three main components of any car crash, although they do not seem to occur in the order one might expect. The cause (part 1) slowly burns into your conscious in the minutes and weeks following the crash.

The truth of the matter is that the real cause will never be known. It started too long ago; a chain of events, large and small, snowballing into this final collision.

Did you check the mirror? Did you see anything behind you? The blind spot is always there and becomes a matter of much self-loathing after the crash.

Maybe you did see something coming. Maybe you hoped it would be alright. Yeah, everything will be alright. Keep your eyes on the road ahead and never deviate. Focus and ignore the doubt.

Delude yourself. Do what it takes to believe that “it’ll be alright”. You are heading for a car crash.

Time for some more random links:

• Nifty Tricks For Emacs – Lots of interesting little ideas for extending your text editor.
• Verbless Book – A Frenchman has written the first book without verbs. Why? Because he could, dammit.
• PDML – A markup language and processor to turn XML into PDF. Good use of php minilanguages.
• Metroid Cubed – An isometric version of the original Metroid. Absolutely awesome.
• Man 1, Bank 0 – Very long, but highly entertaining story about a man who banked a junk mail cheque and got more than he bargained for.
• The Return Of Andy Kaufman – Can we really expect to see him soon? Maybe, just maybe.
• Why You Should Never Put Your Picture On The Internet – Dozens of spoof pictures.
• Reuters RSS – Reuters are now providing categorised RSS feeds. Nice.
• The Infinite Cat Project – Cats looking at cats looking at cats…
• Adventure Morality Fable For Boys #7 – Don’t eat rubbers.
• Is Evil – Bert is, apparently, most evil.
• Navigation Matrix – Very nice looking CSS navigation.
• Regex Tutorial – Great tutorial on regular expressions and the problems they can cause to amateurs.
• Pacmanhattan – Pacman played in the middle of a city.
• Drinking Alone – Why drinking alone is a noble art.
• PearPC – OSX on Linux.
• The Shining In 30 Seconds (with bunnies) – Flash animation that is exactly what it says it is. Excellent.

Updates will be sporadic for the next few weeks, as first exams are tomorrow.

Erik Benson is saying some very interesting things about self-explanatory objects and context, by extension.

Is it possible to remove an item from context, away from social convention and understanding? To truly understand something you have to be able to contextualise it. The untrained ear might be forgiven for thinking that heavy music is just noise. Those more familiar with a band’s influences find it easier to pick out melody, inflection, and more significant technical achievements (tapping a cow bell every 16 beats, while still hammering away elsewhere, say).

Context is key to all understanding and enjoyment. There was a study many years ago to do with the influence of music on film. They played a really serious scene (violently so) and showed audiences it with dramatic music and then more comical music over the top. From the context of the music, audiences were either highly uncomfortable or laughing heavily. What does that say to you?

Tags in markup languages give text a predefined semantic meaning; whether it be a simple P tag to indicate a paragraph, or an H1 tag to indicate headers. These tags clearly delimit the text and provide meaning to certain areas.

There are people who say, with good reason, that a markup language should be purely about semantics; that there is no place for other elements.

A question: do hyperlinks really have any semantic value?

Consider that hyperlinks are used to create links from one page to another, thus providing a layer of functionality in the markup language. Where are the semantics in that?

Well, most people would argue that the link location gives the link text more meaning by being related; providing further details in another document. That makes sense. It also means that the semantic value of the the markup is intrinsically connected to the relationship between link location and link text. If the link location is unrelated to the link text, then there is no value added.

Generally, the semantic value of a hyperlink is disputable.

From the moment certain people started shouting about how blogs are killing Google, it was inevitable that the company itself would start an official blog.

The fresh Google Blog is only 2 posts old, but one worth watching. I just wonder if the backlash will start against this particular blog.