The second part of yesterdays link-o-rama:

• The Scourge Of Arial – The history of Arial, and its borrowing of Helvetica,
• How To Spot Arial – How to tell Helvetica and Arial apart. For obsessives and typographers only,
• 4096 Colour Wheel – A colour wheel that demonstrates the difference between websafe, websmart and pure hex colours. The difference is quite pronounced,
• Gameboy Advance Car Tuner – Turn your Gameboy Advance into a logger for an engine tuner. People go to some stupid lengths to show off,
• MUTE file sharing – A new file sharing program that works anonymously. Although, I very much doubt this will last,
• Link blogs in PHP – Use link blogs provided by del.icio.us in a PHP powered site. I’ll be looking into this,
• Enemy Of Progress – An alternative view of Lord Of The Rings, with a discussion of Romaticism versus progressive society. Kinda turns the world on its head,
• XFN – A way of creating a semantic network of friends using standard HTML mechanisms. Way too much work, I’d rather do this implicitly,
• Illuminopoly – Alternative rules for Monopoly that focus on mind control. Seems quite interesting. I particularly like the various winning conditions,
• Rise Of The Spammers – They’re getting very serious. Spamming is big business these days,
• Plain English Campaign – A guide to using English in a formal, yet accessible way.

And that’s that for a few days. I’ll be back before Christmas.

Since I’ve been unable to update this week, the random links have amassed into a huge pile. To make sure you’re not completely overwhelmed by them (there are around 30), I’ll prune them a bit and split it into two posts. The other half should be out either tomorrow morning or Monday night. Onwards:

• Snowfight 3D – Following on from the classic Starcraft clone, Snowfight, comes the 3D version. Requires Shockwave, but damn good,
• Fan And Ball – The rather tricky game of moving a ball along a track using a fan. Also requires Shockwave,
• Simpson’s Paradox – An odd bit of maths that occurs due to weighting differences,
• Atlas Of The Universe – A map showing the major formations within the universe, centred around our solar system,
• RSS lightcone – Following on from the previous, get an RSS feed of the major astronomical bodies entering your lightcone. Only 13 months until HR8832 enters my lightcone and I can be blamed for stuff over there,
• Non-Semantic Semantics – In a genuinely ironic move, the European Semantic Web Symposium’s website is pretty far from semantic. It uses tables for layout and, painfully, uses images instead of text for every single word. Via Zeldman,
• PHP highest scripting language – Although, as Simon Willison notes, Python is highest on a search for programming language, on a google search for scriping language it takes second place to PHP,
• Bluestumbler – Information on the horrible insecurity found on most bluetooth enabled devices; including mobiles,
• Computerman – I wish I had broadband so I could see Jack Black’s new show.

Next lot will be coming soon.

Since it is the season, I’ve done a tiny bit of Christmas redesigning. Hope it appeals.

I’ve been fairly busy this week, so posts have been thin on the ground. Real posting should reemerge tonight or tomorrow (it is the end of term after all).

A brand spanking new Atom snapshot is out (Atom 0.3 examples are available on diveintomark).

Due to FTP problems, I can’t upload the new templates at this moment, but I’ll at least talk about what will change.

To be honest, not a lot has changed. The link tag (feed level, and entry level) has changed in syntax (it’s now an empty tag). It also now requires a rel attribute (generally going to be set to “alternate”) and a type attribute.

The former could allow some interesting and smart parsing of documents (once the rel values are bulked out). The latter seems utterly useless. It doesn’t take into account multiple representations (one of the lovely aspects of a URI), or allow for content without a registered media type. It adds nothing (except a lot of extra bytes on a feed).

The new mode attribute will make feeds easier to parse, but seems to be lacking a plain text value (currently acceptable values are xml, escaped and base64).

That’s really about it. I added type attributes, changed some syntax and got absolutely no returns from it. At the moment, that particular attribute looks like bloat.

A reasonably large random link post today:

• Towers Of Hanoi – The classic puzzle in dozens of different computer languages, including an OS designed to solve the puzzle,
• Ocarina Of Time 2D – Someone is recreating the classic Zelda 64, in 2 dimensions. It looks quite nice, in a retro sort of way,
• Blogshares is gone back – After the recent closing of Blogshares, the site is now back with new management. It’s a fun game, in the short term,
• Atom Info Proposal – A proposal to make Atom readable in browsers (and by means of an extra tag and CSS. Why not just cut that down to using an XSL processing instruction? Makes sense to me,
• Ideogram Maker – Decide what various ideograms mean. Via Kevan,
• New IE bug – A very nasty Internet Explorer bug, making it a lot less safe to enter important details into that browser. Why does anyone still use it? It is garbage,
• How Not To Blog – Starting a blog? Pay attention to most of these rules and you’ll be fine, possibly even interesting,
• Find MIDIs – An excellent resource for finding MIDI files,
• Free Flight – A very absorbing, 3d paper plane flying program. It’s in shockwave, and is very relaxing,
• Airspeed Velocity Of An Unladen Swallow – Someone finally figured out the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. Pythoners worldwide rejoice.

And I’m done.