These guys are crazy. Totally. :)

Molly? Molly?!

Molly’s doing an amazing thing. She is doing her best to help all web developers around the world. She spends her own free time to do this. This is not her job– she does it because she wants and she can. Nothing but pure gratitude should be given to her.

I’m even more surprised that included some people from WaSP, although Molly does not name them. WaSP people of all should know that our world would skyrocket forward once IE is better and more standard-compliant. Too many people use it and too many people will use it – it must be changed in order for web dev to progress.

I personally dislike IE as much as possible, but in no way would I ever say that anyone of MS developers is the guilty party for the way IE looks like or works. Let alone anyone from outside of Microsoft.

When you are working in a big company, the decisions are always on the managers. Always. Developers are asked, but in no way they can enforce anything. The fact that we now actually see the glimpse of changes coming in IE7 is a welcome thing. Any improvement is still an improvement.

Go Molly!

However, with the speed this is coming now, I have a feeling I will reach 1GB sooner. This wave will hopefully calm down soon, but it’s very unpleasant. Sifting through 1500 emails one could easily miss something important. I’m far from 4 million emails per day that Bill Gates gets hit with, but from the emails I got from ISP owners, I could easily be the most spammed person in Serbia. They litterally told me that new viruses usually result in waves of emails but nothing even close to what is happening to me. :(

The thing is – all these emails look just like regular emails and can be detected as virus infected shit only after they are received. There is no blind option you can set and kill them, as all the efficient system require human intervention. One look at the email I can tell whether this is real mail of spam/virus, but there is nothing that email server can look up or check for.

I got some statistics from the ISP. That month, I have received over 37.000 emails with viruses (those that passed spam-database checks) from little over 25.000 email addresses. How can one defend from that?

I don’t see any reasonable solution to this, except that some very updated virus-scanning software is installed on every possible node that email gets transfered through and which will scan for it.

For what is worth, if you really need to contact me, use the contact form on this web site. That’s the only way I can guarantee that will get through to me. For now.

Is it me or could I have called this thing Blogomerica�? Building this things made me realize that the US are still making things happen in the high technology business. This is not a bad thing of course, but a little more European influence would not hurt.

Is this really true?

Didier is from Holland, there’s a very strong scene in UK, and I follow some people from Sweden, Denmark and Germany. But those are people writing in English. I can only imagine how much people are out there, speaking in their own language. Probably the best known example is Petr Stanicek aka Pixy, who only recently started english speaking web site, altough he’s still publishing developing stuff in czech.

When Joe Maddalone discovered that different IE version can be run side-by-side, it stormed through the english-speaking community. However, it soon appeared that this was already known for at least several months – the “problem” is that it was published on japanese web site.

When I started my site, I started it in english because I knew virtually no one interested in the modern web design, here in Serbia. Now I know few people here, and have seen the works of some others I don’t know – question is are they willing to spend time on maintaining blogs and participating in mailing lists.

On serbian bloggin’ scene, things are getting in shape, with the start of Planet Serbia aggregator. Very nice and clean design, and keeps all of serbian blogs in place, for easy followup.

And the best part is that design is done by woman – Ivana Jurčić aka geekchix – hey Doug, take note. :)

First article I wrote (for March ’04 issue) was purely a commentary on that finding, written in the single breath. When it was published, I realized large part of the article was edited to better fit the mag’s style…and soften my bashing a bit. Lesson learned.

Later articles deal with importance of markup validity, semantic markup, CSS etc. Each next article had less and less edited parts. The lesson I learned is that print articles are written over period of several days, even weeks.

The second article I wrote was done in 3 days. I let it be for two days. Then I read it again and realized that it’s poorly written. There was no clear flow of the content. I would talk about one thing, then mention something related, then expand the related part to whole paragraph until the point I completely lost the context. Someone reading that would probably be very confused what exactly I’m talking about.

So enter streamlining process.

Print publications are not blogs. Once it’s printed, there is no going back. You can’t return and correct mistakes or re-phrase sentences. Over the last few months, I developed the process of writing.

In the first phase, I simply collect resources. I write like a maniac, two or three paragraphs in a spree. Some of them are not really related to each other, but all related to the subject. This can last from 2 to 7 days or more (like in the case of CSS basics I’m currently writing).

In the second phase, I organize the parts so they have natural flow. I decide on the main theme and exclude parts not strictly related to it. All usually done in one or two days.

Then comes the hardest part. I read the whole piece and re-phrase parts, divide into chapters (err…sort of), connect them…Then I repeat this after a day or two. Then repeat again, and again…

On each reading I find parts sounding bad or don’t fitting-in with the rest of the article. After that is over, I ask friend(s) to read it, to gain different perspective. I’m lucky in this, as I have friends working for the web but mostly on the server-side. They understand what’s written, even though they have never used CSS-based design or semantic markup. Such feedback is very valuable and always result in subtle changes which I would not bother with, since I eat & breath with CSS, semantics, validation and rest of the crowd.

Only then it’s ready to be sent to the editor.

Writing articles is hard. Very time-consuming. But worthwhile and rewarding.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it
with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the
stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him.
After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the
stairs, he will be assaulted. Next, remove another of the original five
monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and
is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with
enthusiasm!

Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth,
then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is
attacked. None of the monkeys that are beating him have any idea why they
were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the
beating of the newest monkey. After replacing all the original monkeys, none
of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water.
Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the
banana. Why not?

Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around
here. And that, my friends, is how company policy begins.

Found all over the Internet.

Thanks Ivan, this made my day.

http://www.zug.com/pranks/viagra/index.html

Ray wrote dozens of novels about the fantasy world called Midkemia which resembles Earth in a great deal. It all starts with The Riftwar Saga, with Elfs and Dwarves (very similar to Tolkien’s), as well as demons, giants, trolls, many races of mens, wizards, goblins and other wonderfull characters and races. After reading all that Tolkien ever wrote, I find that Raymond comes very, very close.
Tolkien wrote with great detail, created languages and history for his races. While not that thorough, Raymond offers incredible story-telling depth. With each novell (or better said, with each cycle of novells) his worlds are offering more, and deeper secrets, that were only hinted in the previous books, are revealed. Something Tolkien never really got to (I wish he could live 5 centuries).

You won’t find a better fantasy world today. Of all the books Raymond wrote, I have few favorites. Rage of the Demon King, 3rd part of Serpentwar Saga is my highlight. Featuring almost all of the characters of the previous books, it gives answers to many questions raised in previous ones, good deal of characters that spaned several books dies, and everything falls apart. And rises. Still gives me thrills.

In colaboration with Janny Wurts, he wrote Empire trilogy, a master-piece in story development. Ray’s first trilogy, published in first half of the 80′s deals with Midkemia people being attacked by unknown nation from another planet called Tsuranni. In those books, we only get a glimpse of invader’s strange culture.
In Empire, published in the mid-90′s, we get to see the other side. These books are solely based on Tsuranni and other fantastic races on this world, with astonishing connection points to moments described in the Riftwar saga. Janny’s books are next on my fantasy target list.

I hope I will find time to read The King’s Buccaneer soon, and start digging through The Wars of Light and Shadow…