By the way, whenever usability experts point to Microsoft Office products as an “example” of horrendous usability, they are usually being disingenuous and just pandering to the crowd. In my opinion they're just attacking the products with the biggest market share because most of their listeners will have experience with some Microsoft UI problem. The [...]

Salon.com Technology | Geek house. Patrick Deutsch has turned an average Vallejo, Calif., condominium into a 21st century Taj Mahal. Using motion sensors, infrared transmitters, cameras and dozens of other products that communicate with each other via a protocol known as “X-10,” he's created a hip bachelor pad that's extremely, well, sensitive. [Privacy Digest]

Bray: The web moves too slowly. XML co-editor Tim Bray declared that the web moves too slowly – it's becoming boring and it's time to get XML in front of people. [xmlhack]

Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization | “Route maps, which depict a path from one location to another, have emerged as one of the most popular applications on the Web. Current computer-generated route maps, however, are often very difficult to use. In this paper we present a set of cartographic generalization techniques specifically [...]

FEED Magazine: David Gelernter's New Desktop. Users can browse this stream of cards or search by keyword, topic, or file type. Scopeware is an elegant alternative to the current desktop, an interface that, in Gelernter's view, is still mired in a bygone era when megabytes were scarce and CPUs lethargic. [Tomalak's Realm]

LinuxWorld: Python: The one-size-fits-all programming language “I don't mean to rekindle the Python versus Java wars that raged a few years back. Each language has its place. Neither is perfect for every need, although Python is closer than Java to being a one-size-fits-all language. But I happen to be as big a fan of Java [...]

O'Reilly: Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags “Most years, I have to slave over new tutorials. But this one almost wrote itself once I found the right examples. I'd start with someone's 71-line Perl program, and go over it line by line. Each time I came to a line that was unnecessary, I'd take [...]

The Standard: “American students' grasp of math and science pales in comparison to other countres. Why? Because our textbooks are so inaccurate that the Earth might as well be flat.”

Stapler is a “tool for Radio UserLand that creates RSS feeds from sources you select, scraped hourly (or every N hours, variable for each source) from HTML web sites.” [via Dave's Handsome Radio Blog] [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]

Simple Dublin Core Encoding in XML [More Like This WebLog]