The Coding Humanist News, Dec 4, 2004

I couldn't think of a good title for all these random bits, so I guess I'll have to go generic with "news."

Are you one of those people who thinks that the idea of blogs and blogging isn't all that significant? If so, I'm sorry, because some more news just came out that is a good indication that you're wrong. According to Merriam Webster's online site, the most commonly looked up word in 2004 is the word "blog." Blogging affected the presidential race, it is putting a personal face on corporate giants, and is a great medium of personal expression for many people. Get on board!

Along similar lines is the opening of MSN Spaces, a blogging service by Microsoft. I actually heard about this on radio before I heard about it online, which is very odd. I decided to check it out, so I created a blog so I could get a taste of the interface. In short, I like it, though I myself don't plan on using it. You don't get the freedom to edit the CSS and HTML directly like you can with blogger, but that's the only significant downside that I've seen that has any relevance to me. It would be a good blogging service for a lot of people who aren't really technologically savvy and just want to blog. I'm sure it will do well, but that won't be a surprise seeing that MS is backing it. The most impressive thing about it was how you can edit the layout. You don't get to edit the markup directly, but it is still pretty customizable. I also tried the site in Firefox, and it works fine for the most part. There are a few layout tools that are only available when using IE, but that is no big surprise. And I don't think it will actually keep you from functionality. I think it might only affect how easy it is to layout stuff. I'll stick with blogger, but if you haven't started a blog yet, that would be a decent place to do it.

For you .NET developers out there, I thought this was funny: Top 10 Things to Be Thankful for in .NET. Thanks, David Hill, for the link.

Slashdot featured an article on automatically searching handwritten documents. This is apparently the work of the University of Mass. This could be very useful for the field of textual criticism. It may not be able to produce the quality that TC really must have, but it would be a good thing for new mss finds. Find a new cache of mss, take pictures, and run them through the system to get a first glimpse of your findings. Very cool.

Also according to Slashdot, 66.3 million active domain names have been registered. That's quite a bit.

And most important of all, are you interested in doing hotdog art?