Lorem Ipsum is the well-known term that stands for typewriter‘s dummy text to demonstrate a certain layout without having to use text that actually means something. This is helpful when trying out new sites. Here is the classic first paragraph:

„Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.“

There is a short introduction at the great online computing dictionary FOLDOC and an ever longer explanation of history at Lorem Ipsum along with a simple generator.

I-R-Genius provides the even more sophisticated Amazing Lorem Ipsum Generator that allow to select how long the sentences should be and if you want to have it as text or HTML.

Jens has compiled a list of interesting CSS and XSLT resources. Not much to add here.

I finally managed to get myself online via my Ericsson T610 GSM phone via GPRS. The setup is confusing but Ross Barksman‘s collection of modem scripts provided the necessary dogfood to make it finally work.

Fucking expensive. I doubt anything except text-based chatting will be worth paying for but at least there is enough substitute to keep the internet addict alive during a long train ride.

We had a nice blogger meeting today in Berlin. Read my german blog for a comprehensive blogroll of attendees.

I had a small chat with Jens on how to use Trackback pings for gathering Weblog feedback for our upcoming event, the 20th Chaos Communication Congress. We had several ideas, one is using it just for getting feedback on any kind of report about the event, the other is to provide a trackback notification for specific lectures of the three-day event.

Then I had a look at the Trackback specification to see how I can include the trackback information in HTML. The inventors suggest encoding the information in RDF and to include the RDF – separated by its namespace – in XHTML. So that it looks like this:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
         xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
    <rdf:Description
        rdf:about="http://www.foo.com/archive/12345/"
        dc:identifer="http://www.foo.com/archive/12345/"
        dc:title="Foo Bar"
        trackback:ping="http://www.foo.com/tb.cgi/12345" />
</rdf:RDF>

While I agree this not a bad way of doing it, there are some problems. First, as noted in the specification as well, some browsers might not handle the separate name-space well and tend to render the code instead of ignoring it. I am not sure which browsers are affected by this but I can assume it is the usual suspects. So MT suggests the code should be put in comments instead. Well, nice trick but this totally breaks the basic idea that the information should be easy to parse: if it is hidden in a comment, the information has to be stripped „by hand“ without the help of the XML parser.

So I want to propose an alternative to this, which provides the same information to the world but makes encoding a bit less dramatic. It only works if there is a single trackback for the whole URI (the page) as it can‘t be included multiple times. But it finds it place where I think it belongs anyway: the HTML header.

My idea is to use HTML <meta> tags to do the job. Here is the same trackback information as above but encoded in much simpler fashion:

<link rel="schema.trackback" href="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/" />
<meta name="trackback.ping" content="http://www.foo.com/tb.cgi/12345" />

Oops? So simple? Where has all the information gone? Well. I think everything is here: the described URI that the rdf:about attribute refers to is implicit in my example as it refers to the URI of the document. The same goes for the dc:identifier (which is the same) and the title (which is the title of the document). The name-space gets introduced by the link element that defines the „trackback“ prefix. The Trackback Ping URI is defined by the meta element that uses that name-space prefix.

Simple. Maybe too simple, I am not sure but maybe some tech wiz might comment on this. I think it is a clean approach and should work once implemented.

Here‘s for the crazy ones.

Sven has updated the Blinkenlights Library blib to version 1.0.2. It should now compile without problems on Mac OS X if you have glib2 installed (e.g. via fink). The download page contains the new version and all the other tools as well. Reports welcome.

What‘s new?

blib 1.0.2
----------
 - added support for the old-fashioned first version of the
   Blinkenlights network protocol
 - allow to disable build of modules
 - updated versions of automake/autoconf/libtool used to build the tarball

As promised before, the whole Blinkenlights thingie is about to take up steam in the coming days. You are free to guess what‘s coming.

A year ago, we have built a miniature version of Blinkenlights for the construction site of Haus des Lehrers (the building currently receives a general overhaul). The miniature version has been integrated into the construction sign standing in front of the building and has all the features of the original (you can even play Pong on it with you mobile phone).

To support the miniature version, Björn has updated our little authoring program BlinkenPaint to version 3. It now supports both the classic BLM format and the new XML-based BML format which we have developed to support last year‘s installation in Paris – Arcade. There is now a native version for Mac OS X as well (along with support for classic Mac OS and Windows)

Read the Blinkenlights News page for the full scoop. You find movies of the installation in the construction site there as well. Note that there is a RSS feed available as well. I am not going to spill the beans right now but I‘d recommend subscribing to the feed as there is something nifty coming soon.

On December 27th to 29th, the 20th Chaos Communication Congress is going to take place in Berlin, Germany. I finally managed to release the 20C3 web site to the general public. A bit late, as usual.

I know the web site has some serious CSS issues with Internet Explorer but it validates and renders fine on all the standards-compliant web browsers (on the Mac). I haven‘t had enough time to concentrate on eliminating these issues. As the rendering is quite terrible on IE, something must be done, I know. If you are capable of catching some of the rendering bugs and pointing me to proper CSS hacks that I could apply, I would be very pleased to receive hints on this as my testing abilities on Windows are zero: no Windows machine around. I am a Mac-head beyond remedy.

The design is simple and uses some of the more advanced features of CSS2, like position: fixed and position: absolute to have a non-scrolling navigation interface and a table-less layout with good accessibility. I wouldn‘t say the design is a big hit. It should be simple and easy to read. Nothing more. The logo looks a bit like the Nine Inch Nails logo, but that wasn‘t intentional.

But let‘s talk about the Congress a bit. For five years, the Congress took place at Haus Am Köllnischen Park but the venue has been closed down and the team moved over to the brand new Berliner Congress Center (BCC) – and the Congress now moves as well.

So we are going to meet old friends again: the BCC – formerly known as the „Kongresshalle“ – was housing our five-day exhibition XXCCC (the 20th anniversary of the Chaos Computer Club in 2001. And the building to the left of Kongresshalle – known as „Haus des Lehrers“ – was the home of Blinkenlights, our interactive light installation (the link might be dead – we are having trouble with the name servers right now. it will be fixed soon).

So this is going to be an all-new experience for everyone of us. The new location has been recently reconstructed and is a real beauty of the 60ies stuffed with brand new equipment of the 21st century. And it has a marvellous view on Alexanderplatz and the cool Berlin TV tower. Bringing the Chaos Communication Congress to the very heart of Berlin is a big chance for the us and be sure we are going to make sure nobody is going to miss this. Hint hint :-)

The motto of 20C3 is „Not A Number“ which is a play with both the mathematical term and its philosophical meaning which should be obvious. It is partly inspired by a TV series called „The Prisoner„. The protagonist is an agent of the British secret service. After he quits his job, he gets hijacked and finds himself locked into a Village where nobody has a name – just a number. Listen to the famous words: „I am not a number! I am a free man!„

So much for now. I can only invite you to join. More news on the 20C3 in this blog in the coming days.

I have a problem and maybe the Blogosphere can come to my help. I just can‘t get XML::LibXML to work on Panther. I need it to make an important script running on the upcoming 20C3 web server. I tried many things but nothing helped. There are many open bugs on the web site but there is no update in sight so far.

Has anybody managed to make this module run successfully on Mac OS X 10.3?

Update: It‘s always the same. After having received the first „it works for me“ report I tried it again and have no problems now. The confusing part is I changed nothing. I will dig into this further. I guess I have to go for a complete reinstall sooner or later anyway. Thanks for the help so far :)

Before I forget it again: vector graphics of company logos can be obtained from logotypes.ru and Logotype Free.