Month: November 2012

Things for which I am grateful

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it!
Happy regular day to the rest!

My laptop acted up last night and today and what a prank it was for it to assess the disk corrupt, claim it can’t be fixed, and declare that reformatting and restoring from backup were in order. Turned out the disk got repaired and I tweeted I’m grateful for it:

This is the short-term gratefulness and there are other things I am deeply grateful for: I am healthy and literate in a country where life is good, I have a family of good people, I have a son whom I love from the bottom of my unfathomable heart, I live with his sweet father, I have a job I live for and colleagues who are kind, talented, dedicated, funny that I admire them. This is a fraction of the things I am grateful for. Today I thought about them, and I’m thankful.

Attribution links to pasted content? – Something is wrong on the Internet!

Some websites will transform, at the paste event, the content that you copy. This isn’t recent, and it was a mild annoyance until it made its début in Opera, the browser I use the most (I installed 12.11 beta RC last last week).

What happens is that when you select text from some web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text that you paste.

What a terrible idea.

As John Gruber put it in a 2010 article on the subject:

It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.

I looked at the Tynt website, and soon found that users can opt out. o/ http://www.tynt.com/opt_out.php

If you don't want Tynt tracking copy activity or adding attribution links,
you can disable Tynt, by clicking the Opt Out button below.
You will need to Opt Out for each browser you use, and have cookies enabled.

It appears that there aren’t any other competitor. I hope it stays that way.

But what I wish even more, is that Websites would just NOT do this. It’s not privacy that concerns me, it’s the fact that in many cases, what I want to paste is lost.
In all cases, what I want to paste is what I select.

I don’t want to need any work-around. Yes, I can view the source of a page and select from there. It’s tedious. Yes, I can paste in a text editor, strip to what I need, copy again and paste what I want. It’s also tedious.

Last week’s scribing performance

One of the things I did a lot last week was minuting meetings, that is capturing a record of what people talk about. At W3C we typically do that via IRC and then a handful of bots and scripts generate HTML minutes.

So I scribed. Friday was particularly intense, being the second day of the Advisory Boad face-to-face meeting, the agenda for the day still being pretty full, and people’s heads being quite full of long talking points on what I consider complex topics.

I cleaned up the minutes the same evening, as I usually do, while things were still fresh in my memory. And what surprised my was the small amount of typos and spelling mistakes I had to fix.

Thanks to grep and wc, I found that of the 949 lines in the IRC log of the Friday meeting, 687 were my scribings (amounting to 8835 words). And the number of typos and spelling mistakes I find so low is: 32. That is all. I performed significantly better on that day than I usually do.

Of course, the worst part is now; I need to synthesize 2350 lines (15K words) of minutes into a summary. And “again, the Advisory Board saved the Consortium” isn’t enough (nor is it true just yet!).