Older blog entries for cpw (starting at number 1)

The front page of useit.com has a quick screed on the merits of careful manual line breaking for small-screened devices. It suggests _ you should attempt to _ break the text _ into meaningful units.

For a device-independance Nazi like me, inserting BRs seems daft.

I wonder how hard it would be to do this automatically using an approximation of an English language parser. Here's the end of a noun phrase - good place to break!

Alternatively, perhaps some more aspects of the text structure could be encoded at authoring. Authoring, however, is already too much work.

Damn natural language problem.

Today is my day at Interact+IT for Linux Users of Victoria. I was hoping that the several years I've avoided such things would make this more fun, but judging from Skud's report it won't be enough. Oh well. Perhaps the LUV contingent will show up. Perhaps people will ask good questions. Perhaps the stand will have a machine with Unreal Tournament installed.

I really need to get XFree86 4.0 up and running on my home machine. That will probably be a good opportunity to rant about nvidia for a bit.

Later: LUV's stall was hopping with LUVsters and punters alike - a success, I'd say, and I had a good time. The rest of the show was lamer than I'd expected, though. Oddity of show goes to the two Acorn True Believers hawking ARM/RISC OS point-of-sale boxes, showing off their custom motherboard and talking about ATX power supplies that couldn't cope with it sucking as little power as it does. It struck me as sad in an Amigaesque kind of way - those Archimedes boxes were so damn cool in 1988, but x86 has triumphed over clever design with clever implementation driven by huge volume sales.

Amigas, Archs and NeXTs are gone, and MIPS, PPC, and Alpha seem to be going. ARM, MIPS and perhaps PPC will survive in portables and embedded systems. Alpha, the only performance contender left, has no such bolthole.

I worry.