PUBLIC MARKS with search thursday

This week the biggest dust storm in 70 years blew through Australia, and the photos of it were stunning. So on Wednesday at noon, I decided to make a photo magazine. It was published on MagCloud Thursday night. All told, it was 31.5 hours from idea to publication, and that’s with a few hours of sleep thrown in.

Well, the author can say it is anything they want, but that doesn't change what it actually is. It is literally not possible to send XHTML5 as text/html, because as soon as you label it as text/html, you are stating "it is HTML".

I used to think that too, but then I realised that in the real world it is different. Browsers sniff, and media types are hard-wired into software, rather than being an extension point. You have to row with the oars you have got. As I said, I send documents with media type text/html, not because they are necessarily HTML, but because I want them in the browser. I agree that the document gets *processed* as HTML, but the document doesn't magically change type just because it gets sent with a certain media type.

Cover letters are all the same. They're useless. You write the same lies over and over again, listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart, but this is how it's done.

And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don't know if he'll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-numbers cover letter, something entirely different comes out.

You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your childhood and your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.

And you send it anyway.

The Federal Trade Commission had some sharp words for Internet companies Thursday, saying that they are not explaining to their users clearly enough what information they collect about them and how they use it for advertising.

Sony, the Japanese electronics company, said Thursday that it expected to post a record annual operating loss of nearly $3 billion because of the rapid deterioration of the global economy. It also announced a major restructuring that will include layoffs and factory closings.

Nokia Corp., the world's largest maker of mobile phones, on Thursday posted a 69% drop in fourth-quarter profit as demand for its phones waned during the key holiday season, particularly in emerging markets like China.

hCalendar will be gone from /programmes by the next deploy (probably this Thursday). In the meantime we'll be looking at the possible use of RDFa (a slightly bigger S semantic web technology similar to microformats but without some of the more unexpected side-effects).