DeeKnow’s Grotto

Usability for Senior Citizens - The latest report from Jakob Nielsen finds that "most websites violate usability guidelines, making the sites difficult for seniors to use. Current websites are twice as hard to use for seniors than for non-seniors". I wasnt able to find any stats on age distribution accross staff or students at Waikato, but I suppose the median age is increasing.

11:12:11 PM  

Converting HTML to XML - is being discussed in a thread on XSL-Talk this week, it's only just started and so far the only constructive suggestion has been to use Dave Raggett's html-tidy which is a command-line tool I've been playin with.

10:58:33 PM  

Larry Ellison's Super-Yacht 'Katana' - is parked in Auckland, New Zealand at the moment while his team train for the next Americas Cup race. Kym and I were up in Auckland last weekend and drooled over it from the edge of the wharf for a good 20mins. I found it both awesome (in its glorious design and scale) yet revolting for the same reasons. Its 75metres long, cruises at 35knots, and cost over $100M.

Apparently on the 5th of January the crew parked it a little close to Motutapu Island (in the Hauraki Gulf) and the anchor severed the power-supply to the Island. Poor old Larry had to pay $160,000 in damages for the repair, I bet he never even noticed it.

8:46:13 PM  

Man vs Machine in Chess Tournament - In the last big battle in 1997, then champion Gary Kasparov lost to IBM's Deep-Blue. In an interview at ChessBase current World Champion, Vladimir Kramnikis talks about his scheduled match this year against the present top-ranked computer chess software Fritz...."Naturally the match has the character of a revenge" .... "Believe me, to lose to a computer is twice as painful as losing to a colleague"

8:31:06 PM  

XML::XPath installed on Obelix today - all tests and actual install passed OK (details here). Am using it to run XPath queries against the HTDig output summary to produce individual 404 reports for each site specified in the UOWeb database.

4:59:33 PM