A while back, Bruce Lawson and James Craig wrote hAccessibility, about the abbr design pattern and potential problems that it raises for people who browse the web with screen readers. Since then, there has been some useful discussion on how to make microformats more friendly to screen readers, which is great.
Year: 2007
I’m working but I’m not working for you
Slack motherfucker – superchunk’s theme song, I guess. I saw them on the come pick me up tour and jumped around The Garage like a, well like a man who’d drunk too much beer, when they played this at the end. Larry Livermore bought me more beer. What a nice bloke.
Moved in
If you can see this, eat your greens has successfully moved to its new home at eukhost.
£8,890.96
£8,890.96 – the total take from yesterday’s book sale. Our highest total, ever! And this year we were actually turning donations down, since we had more books than we could handle.
Many thanks to everyone who got involved, particularly everyone who gave up their evenings and weekends over the last four weeks to get all this together.
There are many high quality books still left unsold. We’ll put those on sale later in the year. Tentative date for the second 2007 sale is 17th November.
The 33rd Amnesty book sale
Saturday 16th June 2007
Church of the Ascension, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath
Thousands of new and used books at low, low prices.
Opening the 28-inch
Last year, after @media, a group of us met up in Greenwich on Saturday morning. I gave a rough guided tour, including the history of the Royal Observatory, John Harrison’s chronometers, the adoption of standard time and ended it all by opening up the 28-inch refractor.
If there’s interest, I’ll do it again this year. Leave a comment below if you want to come along.
Z is for Zillah…
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while – revish, a social networking site for book lovers, has been launched by the very excellent Dan Champion. You should all go and sign up and talk about books that you’re reading.
Oh and come to the 33rd Amnesty book sale, Saturday 16th June 2007, Church of the Ascension, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath SE10, and buy some more books to read.
Business and human rights
Paul Eagle, from the Amnesty UK Business Team, kindly came down to Blackheath on Tuesday night and gave a talk about the Business & Human Rights campaign. Here are the notes from the evening, pasted straight from our newsletter.
Undermining freedom of expression in China
I’ve been reading Amnesty’s new report on the internet and freedom of expression in China. The specific focus is the complicity of Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in human rights abuses in China by facilitating and sanctioning government censorship.
The full report is available from the Amnesty UK website (you have to scroll down a bit to find a link to the PDF). It’s worth reading if you’re interested in business ethics and this whole Web 2.0 thing.
- Google self-censor their Chinese search engine, but at least inform users that censorship has occurred.
- Microsoft censor MSN Spaces in China by restricting the terms that users can use in their account names, space names or photo captions. A Chinese pro-democracy blog was also shut down by Microsoft in December 2005 – removing it not only from the web in China, but from the web as a whole.
- Yahoo! are the company most strongly criticised in the report. Yahoo!’s disclosure of private account information to the Chinese authorities has led to the convictions of two journalists. Both are considered prisoners of conscience.
Update: make that three people in jail.
Total eclipse of the Moon, 3-4 March 2007
From the Royal Astronomical Society press list today:
On the evening of 3 March the Moon will move directly behind the Earth in a total lunar eclipse. This is the only eclipse visible from the UK this year.
The Moon will begin to move into the lighter part of the shadow of the Earth (the penumbra) at 2016 GMT and from that time it will take on a yellowish tint. It will enter the darker core of the shadow (the umbra) at 2130 GMT. The total eclipse starts at 2244 GMT when the Moon is completely immersed in the umbra. Totality will end at 2358 GMT, the Moon will move out from the umbra completely at 0111 GMT (on 4 March) and the eclipse will come to an end when the Moon leaves the penumbra at 0225 GMT.
Although fairly common, total lunar eclipses can be spectacular events. Normally the Moon does not disappear completely but is lit by sunlight scattered through the Earth’s atmosphere and takes on a beautiful brick-red hue. At the time of the eclipse, the Moon will be in front of the stars of the constellation of Leo and from the UK it will be high in the southern sky.