DUB – DENIM: “DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input,
allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming.”

Bienestar International manufactures union-made footwear & casual clothing under the brand name No Sweat. Our gear is produced by independent trade union members in the US, Canada, and the developing world. We believe that the only viable response to globalization is a global labor movement.
Awesome.

Remember Apple Jacks? Remember Ready Eddie from the Ready Brek? I want to hear from you.

There’s been an awful lot of talk about Web 2.0 lately. I’ve been reading Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0? – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. I have to admit, maybe I’m not seeing it all. What it seems to say, in a nutshell is that things on the web have just evolved slightly, so instead of Doubleclick, we have Adsense, instead of websites, we have blogging. We had blogging in Web 1.0, though, didn’t we? Didn’t we have Adsense back then as well? Surely, there must be more to it than just that? It also talks of more permissive usage rights on the web, aka ‘some rights reserved’ with the likes of free culture licenses like Creative Commons ShareAlike – now that’s a good thing, but that’s an evolution of peoples attitudes and the availability of the licenses. It appears to actually have very to do with the web itself.
As I see it, the future of the web relies more on distribution, choice and freedom. We need to have the freedom to build things, choice of platform to build upon (no more ‘Built for IE!’) and maximum distribution, which the likes of RSS afford us pretty well. I can create a service, using web standards to distribute content with some pretty decent usage rights, automatically to your desktop. I’m not sure that putting all my photos on Flickr, or buying music from Napster, or using Ruby on Rails is going to help me any. It might be the done thing, and they’re all pretty neat (well, Napster might be neat, I can’t actually tell you.. no Mac version!) but it’s not revolutionary.
Web 2.0, as I would like to envision it, would be the semantic web – giving meaning to things on the web seems a whole load of a 2.0 feature than text ads or DRMd major label music in a proprietary format. I’m all for progress, I’m all for better websites, and beautiful apps on the web.. but these aren’t 2.0 features… they’re all being done with the same web browsers we’ve had for the last five years. I like the idea of Flock – that’s a potential nice thing, but it needs to really shine first.
I hope Web 2.0 when it comes, will put an end to the tirade of marketing buzzwords.

Spent some time putting Subversion behind Apache 2 (with SSL, self signed cert) today, thanks largely to a great little HOWTO from Sean O’Donnell. As the link to his blog, appears to be down at present, I’ve mirrored it.
SCPlugin is to Mac OS X, what Tortoise SVN is for all you Windows people.

Lispbox
“The purpose of Lispbox (and Lisp in a Box) is to get you up and
running in a good Lisp environment as quickly as possible. When you
start Lispbox it launches the text editor Emacs with SLIME (the
Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) already installed and starts
Common Lisp for you. Lisp in a Box is designed to not interfere with
your existing Emacs installation, if you have one. If you are already
an Emacs user, you may wish to install the no-Emacs version designed
to work with an existing Emacs installation.”
Playing with this, in an effort to feel like I’m doing more code. Allegro’s license scares me (“YOU MAY NOT MODIFY OR OTHERWISE PREPARE DERIVATIVE WORKS OF THE SOFTWARE.”) though, so it’s OpenMCL for me.

Started using Google Analytics to try and work out who comes to CNUK, and what they’re using. We’ve been lucky, traditionally, attracting a strong Macintosh and Firefox user base. I’ve added Explorer Destroyer code to this blog, as all the smart people I know are using Firefox anyway. Sorry if you’re reading my blog with IE, it’s nothing personal, but IE is pretty bad… I’m not confident that IE 7 will be any better, either. I think it’ll just be a different set of problems to fix, but none of the IE6 ‘hacks’ will work, so everyone who relies on hacks to get things to work, will be scrabbling to fix their pages.
Microsoft, please – consider setting up some servers so web developers without IE7 can at least get a heads up on what their site looks like, in the way BrowserCam does. Or you know, support the standards. Gecko’s not a bad engine, it has a nice license too, you could just use that?

Joel on Software: “Aardvark’d DVD Goes on Sale”
Ordered this earlier in the week.

Took most of the day for me to get there, though. Spent most of the day on the sofa, watching TV and drinking lemony things.. went into the office at 5pm to have a look at the migration stuff. It’s going well!
Tonight, I pushed out some example UI stuff for RemixAnywhere over at CNUK Labs. I need to get the competition stuff up ASAP, and sort out tickets for Saturday with the FCUK crew in Peterborough at Rob’s, and Sunday with Lucy (we’re having bean curd. It’s a no fish thing. This is not the rehearsal) – I can’t buy train tickets online, because no train ticket website accepts my postcode. Why not just trust me? I actually am smarter than your outdated databases, guys.
More web apps need to be beautiful.

Okay, that didn’t happen. I’ve just been ill, again. Went to the office yesterday, but was told by pretty much everyone to not come in today. A good idea, as I feel like dying. Hot lemony things helps, as do these new anti-viral (FUD?) tissues help a little, but not much. Spent most of the day lying on my back, feeling like crap. Now I’ve woken up for a bit, doing emails and things.
The most pleasantly random things happen when you least expect them. Today, I figured out something I’d been pondering on for a week. I also fixed my washing machine, and found the most wonderful album on my iTunes.
Everyone should sing like Olive Oyl, but more importantly everyone should go see more random girls sing in the street.