Inferno's three rules of web design:

1. Use relative font sizes to allow all users to see the text if they are visually impared or for any reason like to have non-standard font sizes.
2. Use a fluid-width design but with a reasonable maximum limit to make sure those unenlightened who browse maximized don't hurt their eyes.
3. Do not require the use of JavaScript, applets, ActiveX controls, Flash or any other technology that your end users may not have. Requiring these things will just label users lacking them as outcasts.

1. relative font sizes
   a must if you're designing anything that isn't made to be printed. (and no, while a webpage can be printed, that is generally far from it's original intent) there are way too many combinations of resolutions, font usage, rendering methods and physical displays to say "12px aught to be enough for anybody".
2. fluidelasitc-width
   this is not as hard-and-fast as Inferno would like to think it is. There are valid reasons for using a fixed-width layout. However, they generally don't apply when you've got columned text. In that case: yes, elastic width is the clear winner.
3. JavaScript, ActiveX, Flash...
   Assume some of your audience does not always have these installed. Make it nice for those that do, sure. But with the popularity of NoScript (a plugin for Firefox to set up JS whitelists), and the ease of browsing the web on crappy displays (phones/PDAs/pagers) you've got to make sure that they can at least get your content without huge hassles.
   This means, that this rule should be extended, really. Go ahead and make those nifty-layouts and weird page designs. But make sure that there's something fairly simple for people that don't want to read your content that way. Something very flexible. Either by making sure your main layout is robust enough to work without colour, or with images off, and differing default colours. And, especially for the phone users, make sure that your pages semantically make sense: put your content at the top of the physical HTML, and navigation after, just in case everything isn't getting floated to a column off to the side because the screen's too narrow, or somebody is using a screen-reader. Yes, sometimes people need to browse web in lynx. And it's really not that hard to accommodate them.

I really like the way this quote sums up what people should be doing: (I'd just replace the word see with access) The objective of web technology is to enable all people from all over the world using different client applications to see the same content.

And hey, he even follows his own rules, on The Right Glue (but he missed rule 8: stupid names are stupid). It's a simple, but solid layout. And he even made an RSS feed, just for me!

For those who don't spend their free time reading and listening to security and open source bloggers, you might not know what OpenID is all about. At it's simplest, it's a system for a distributed identity system.

What is a distributed identity system? It's the ability to ask the proper source if this person has access to this identity. Identity doesn't proove that this is a person, group of people, my cat or a bot. All it can do is proove that some requestor should be associated with this identity.

So what's new? You already have a distributed identity. However it's not tied together at all, (unless your username is unique enough to never be taken) so nobody would ever realize that this guy on Slashdot is that guy on delicious. It's protected by 50 different passwords. And there isn't any sort of way to say if you want to know more about me then go here. OpenID has all that. One password properly protects your access to all OpenID enabled sites, and since your OpenID is tied to your own blog, there's always a reference pointing back to you. That reference is something you own or trust somebody to maintain for you, taking more control of your own identity back for yourself.

In OpenID, identities are URIs. I can be qedi.videntity.org, infornography.ca, or sad_mcemopants.livejournal.com (if I had that login, which surprisngly doesn't exist). Which makes sense from a blogger perspective. You are your URI anyway.

So once you go to some site that allows you to log in with OpenID, you can throw in your blog URI. Then, some backend magic happens and some site talks to your blog, and determines your identity provider (which could be your blogging software, something you've written youself, or some other provider you want to trust) and sends you there. You log in with your idendity provider, and determine what information you want to give or deny some site. After all, it may be useful to let some site in on one of your secrets, like your location or contact information, if you think it is useful, and this way you don't have to enter it in yet again. Your provider will then pass that on, and you'll be identified with your blog URI to some site.

It makes things a lot simpler, especially with more and more people coming on board with OpenID. AOL has made your AIM id into an OpenId for you to use if you want. Microsoft has pledged support. LiveJournal, Wordpress and a whole lot of others already provide one to use. Sites are just beginning to utilize it. Technorati, Zoomr, and Imageshack with more to follow.

Recently Radigan mentioned things he'd like to see on the Internet. I'd watch all three of those ideas. In response I'd figure I'd whip up some things I do watch on the Internet that's out there now. There's actually a fair amount of video content online, this is just the bit I know about, and am most of which, I'm subscribed to.

On the tech side of things, there's DL.TV (twice a week; Tuesdays and Thursdays, which I watch on a regular basis), and Crankygeeks (once a week: Wednesdays, which I watch from time to time). Both productions of Ziff-Davis, and both essentially just tech news. Crankygeeks can sometimes be funny, as it's full of curmudgeons, or merely inane.

For more tech news, there's Diggnation (Thursdays). Featuring Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, they're pretty much the Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar of the internet era. It's a low budget show of the two of them sitting on their couch, drinking beer, and reading Digg news while they talk into their laptops. The show itself can be fairly funny, because the two of them are pretty funny together. However, the content, top stories posted to digg is just filler (mainly because I don't like what ends up getting to the top of the digg pile, it's usually just asinine). But, it's still probably the most popular video podcast.

Revision3 are the makers of Digg. They do a lot of video, actually. A lot of the same stuff. inDigital (which currently seems to be dead) more gadgetry (with Wil Wheaton!), is nothing spectacular, but decent gadget review show I watch from time to time when I feel the urge for gadget porn.

But I do really enjoy one Revision3 show: Ctrl-Alt-Chicken (irregular releases). It's a cooking show. Well, it's a funny show, that just happens to have cooking in it. The two hosts don't claim to have any sort of cooking knowledge, but they'll walk through a recipe in an fairly entertaining way. It may or may not actually work out to something edible.

I should also mention NerdTV. It's PBS's Robert X. Cringely doing in depth interviews with some of the most interesting people in computing. Though, sadly season one has ended, and season two has still yet to begin.

On the more comedic side of things, there is some really great stuff.

You all probably know of Homestar Runner. It could really be considered a forerunner of regularly released video content on the Internet. And, interestingly enough, it seemed to do whatever it wanted to do. It reached a large audience and sold a lot of merchandise without having to get any distribution deals. It was just put up to be viewed, and downloaded. Recently, they've started to offer downloadable video versions of their things to watch, all conveniently wrapped inside a RSS feed.

I'd also really recommend watching Ask A Ninja (releases every week or two). It's absolutely hilarious. An unnamed ninja answers one email per episode in an exaggerated manner. It's short, non-sequitur answers to daily ninja life. It has a distinct up close view with very short edits. "Every time we shoot one of these episodes, I've got 14, 15 ninjas that try and kill me while we're shooting! Thank goodness for Final Kill Pro. ... If I didn't edit that stuff out, it would just be a bunch of blinding extraordinary fight sequences, and nobody wants to see that."

I also watch Tiki Bar TV (more or less monthly). All about the perils of being in a Tiki-themed bar that's stuck in the 1950's. It is made of pure science and drinking. More hilarity.

And if you have more things that you watch online, but I didn't mention, comment them!

I just started to create a claimID profile. So now you can check out my claimID.

I'm still debating the usefulness of this over the simple concept of just having a home page (like this one) that's properly laid out. However, data duplication issues aside, it is a well done site, simple to use and has a well-focused attention.

Why it's useful:

It's fully controlled by me so I can show off the person I think I am to the world. I determine the importance of the links, who I choose to link to and who I don't. It can be the things I write, participate in, have done, or have said about me. I could even throw my own crediblity out the window by claiming I wrote all of Slashdot.

It's also current; it properly uses MicroID to validate the sites I actually own. It creates a proper HCard page I could use for integration with and to other identity sources.

Why it's not:

It's not yet visible enough. If people don't know about the page, they won't be able to see what I want them to, they'll be back at the position of just googling Ryan Bianchi and coming up with data that I might have been a fullback for California State Polytechnic University (which I wasn't). But even that is always changing.

So I think it can be a useful "personal resume", a kind of addendum to the more formal resume. I think of it kind of like a resume for someone who just met me. An interested new co-worker or something like that.

infornography
Function: noun
obsession with, or excessive working with the gathering, storing, creation and manipulation of information

I now am a CIRA member, and have a domain name. The school term is done, and the summer begining. Thanks to Jay for the gift.

So up next for this humble site, is getting a signed ssl certificate (hopefully through a reputable, free certificate authority) to better secure the non-blog areas of the site. After that, I don't know what I want to do with it. Are there web based services that your lives are missing? All I have implemented for friends is a calendaring system, and this blog. I've been toying around with a Digg/Kuro5hin clone, but that idea would only work if it was used by people who weren't me. (> 5 people at least)

The OpenID spec is an interesting thing.

Since you're already logged into say, LiveJournal, you trust and are active on the site. That means that your Livejournal authentication expires rarely. On the other hand, you post here rarely. Authentication would be a big pain in the ass to remember a separate password just to post to this blog three times a year in comments.

Enter OpenID. This will let you use your exisiting (Livejournal) authentication to also authenticate yourself here, or any OpenID enabled* site. It will transfer you to Livejournal for a moment, ask you if you want this site to know who you are on Livejournal and then tell that to this site. But none of your authentication needs to even be transmitted to this site.

Damned convienent, you might say. I agree. Some buddies may have noticed infornography.gotdns.com popping up in their LJ user list. That's me, using it in the reverse. I already have a blog, so why be anonymous or create a livejournal account just for commenting? You could even trust that user if you do a friends only page, as it's still an authenticated user.

What's possible for OpenID's future? Imagine your friends list populated not just with Livejournal friends, but my blog posts just the same. Never having to create accounts on Slashdot, kuro5hin or other forums. Tying together FOAF (Friend of a friend) data, not only with blogs, but with people you regularly communicate (via blog comments, forums, etc).

So, with that in mind, I announce that I've done a bit more work on a WordPress plugin for OpenID. Try it out. Use it, break it, talk to me about it. There's no server (yet), but OpenID servers are easy to come by;

• Videntity
• MyOpenID

are two existing examples. (And linking them to your current blog is easy, if you're not a Livejournal member)

In Soviet Russia, the forum talks on you.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm posing a question to my few and loyal (you all are wearing the qedi tshirts I'm not actually selling, aren't you?) readers.

What would your ideal web forum look like?

I don't really like the flat chronological threads that most bulletin boards use, like the Ars' OpenForum or really any ubb derivatives. It's hard to talk in a few directions on one specific topic. What do you do when one topic on something wants to go in two separate directions? I mean, that's where proper threading works wonders, like usenet/email software. Is that the way to go? What other popular non-flat (ie non ubb-derivative) webforum software is there?

As I collect more thoughts on this, I'll hope to post them here.

Okay, so first things first.

What the hell does "VERHOEVEN" mean? Specifically, the google extension to POP3, X-GOOGLE-VERHOEVEN. Look at the compatibility list google responds to when connecting to it via a POP3 connection....it's in there. So what's going on? I see no other mention of it on the web, except for the single question somebody posted to Linux Gazette

Maybe it's just a developer's name. Maybe they're big fans of Total Recall and RoboCop. Who knows? Mail me.

Secondly, talk.google.com should launch at any time. Their Jabber servers are already up. I'm el.qedi, just like my gmail. So all of you with gmail accounts and jabber clients, feel free to add me. Apparently it already adds people you've emailed? (Any evidence yet?)

Well, thats all for now.

Sure, I don't normally do the whole 'quizzes' thing on this blog, but this one was funny enough to warrant it. Especially reading through all the possible results. [From BBSpot]


Which Website are You?

Feel free to post your results in my writebacks.
And back to my regularly scheduled Operating Systems assignment.

So now I have a FOAF page. If you want a more...human readable version (pfft, as if XML isn't readable...once you've learned proper syntax and a bunch of namespaces...) there's an foaf explorer. You may note that the only other people on that list with FOAF documents are livejournal members. They get one automagically. (located at http://www.livejournal.com/users/loginname/data/foaf for those who want to know)
Also, if you want to create a foaf document, there's a foaf-a-matic to create one online.
So otherwise it's pretty plain. But I do like the FOAF concept, so I've created mine. Been snubbed? Whoops. Comment it. It'll be a while before any sort of FOAF circle pops up in this list anyway...

Post huh?'s:
(relevant info for those who want to know more)

• foaf (intro, wikipedia, project)
• xml
• rdf