Quizilla provides a short online form to test which Matrix persona you are.

Confused by GPRS terminology? GSM World has a handy overview over GPRS Class Types explaining which speed can be achieved in which configuration. The list also compares GPRS speed to other data transmission options like HSCSD.

Jogger is a project which uses the Jabber protocol as a posting mechanism for weblogs. Very interesting as the Jabber protocol is completely XML and extensible.

The project is still in its infancy and things are just coming up somehow. Apart from supporting RSS, there is also something on the wish list called „Jogger Syndicated XML“:

Jogger Syndicated XML was created in order to provide users with a way to fully integrate with their stored content. Using this format requires you to write the interface to your stored content by parsing the data that you request in this format. You will have the power to write a complete interface to your stored data in this manner

It will be interesting how this gets together with developments like Atom. I think the whole drive behind Jabber (eventually leading to the XMPP protocol suites) is pretty strong.

The run for candidateship in the USA seems to raise opposition against Mr. You-Know-Who. Candidate Dennis Kucinich has posted an impressive flash movie which is an outcry against the current situation in Iraq.

The is more of this stuff at BushFlash.com.

As promised, GSMK has finally released the full source code of both its PDA-based CryptoPhone and the CryptoPhone for Windows client. The latter is free to use, the PDA-phone is bit more expensive (but worth its price as competitive products like Siemens Topsec and Beaucom Enigma cost a lot more, are closed source and have no free program desktop machines that are compatible with them).

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.