Carl discovers the world

I logon this morning, open my Google homepage, and almost every news service whose RSS feed I subscribe to is dominated by the story of the US population hitting 300 million. Worse than that though, their frontpages are littered with commentary on what this means for the average American family.

I'm not anti-american, but all this garbage surrounding the US population hitting 300 million seems a little over the top, and frankly I think some of these people need to wake up to themselves. Why on earth would anybody feel threatened by the increasing number of black or hispanic people in the US, you know we're not talking about aliens with scales and slobbering mouths, we're talking about people, just like you and I, people who want opportunities and education for their kids, just like us.

Maybe its because I was brought up in South Africa and have spent my life surrounded by people with different skin color, or who speak a different language, perhaps even have a different religion, or maybe they just have more sense of local family and community, any which way you look at it, I feel like I can cope with people who aren't like me.

What I can't cope with is when the major news services tout the prejudices of a bunch of misguided Americans whose outlook is so limited they can only see the differences between people. Let me say, if you believe some of the stories coming out of the US, white America is fast becoming a minority in their own country - what a load of crap, it isn't just their country, they share it with 100 million other Americans.

Fortunately, those of us who aren't US citizens, or don't actually live in the States, aren't terribly concerned about the US population hitting 300 million, why would we be? But to hear it told on every major news service, this is the story of the moment. I know the Americans have done a lot of good things, they are after all champions of democracy, but we seriously need another major world power (my pick is the EU) to act as counter-weight to the US. At least then our news services might be a little less partial to American centric stories.

Today the BBC are running an article on the Future of the Internet in 2020. The article seems to be completely unoriginal, I've heard everything before, but it made me think, how does this site actually look on a mobile phone. I don't have any special plugins installed to convert code to WML, and I don't have a separate wap site, so essentially the way my site appears in any standard desktop browser is going to be how it appears on a mobile phone. Obviously this poses probles given the screen size of your typical mobile phone.

Anyway, I came across mobile phone emulator which uses your regular browser and some javascript to to emulate how a site looks on the screen of a Nokia N70, or Sony K750. I have no idea how popular these phones are but I do know I've seen a lot of ad's for them both recently and big budget marketing campaigns in the mobile phone world usually translate into big user base.

Anyway, the interesting thing seems to be that any css-only content first site (like this site) actually presents quite well. I also tested the Serendipity blog (coded by me) which includes a text only navbar at the top of the screen, and this worked as expected, although the footer info shows up before the entry. This isn't too much of a problem but should be possible to change using css. I haven't conducted a rigorous investigation, although I did check a couple of other blogs and several couldn't be displayed. Looking at their sourcecode they include additional javascript, or the page is structured using tables, or they include poorly written HTML. This quick test proves to me that I need to do something about my own site to improve its usability for mobile phone browsers, but at least I know my site visitors can use their mobile phone..

I guess I need to learn about the different browsers available, and probably about the reduced XHTML used by modern mobile phones. Updating my templates to handle the reduced XHTML used by these devices should be a no-brainer once I understand which tags and styles are not supported.

Finally, proof I'm not imagining everyone is out to get me, they even spammed the search engines to destroy my reputation check out these search results. Read More

Boungiorno, my partner and I have decided to start seriously learning Italian, and after months of watching any Italian tv programs we could find, we now feel ready to embrace language study.

We bought a language pack, the Hugo Italian in 3 months course, a couple of dictionaries and a software program for Windows that teaches Italian using short sound bytes.

So now that we've started, we plan to spend about half an hour a day going through new exercises, and as often as possible we're going to speak Italian to each other. Read More