Weekend linkage.

Weekend linkage.

A pile of loosely connected links. As an added bonus this time, most of them are actually quite useful.

• How come none of my Toys’R’Us stores have Ferris Wheels inside them?
• Every so often, something happens that really makes me wish I knew Japanese. The trailer for Casshern is the lastest of those things.
• Trapped by undead, need help: “This is not a joke. We are alone and constantly battling for our lives.” There are blogs for everything these days.
• Epson’s new R800 printer looks to be quite nice. Digital Outback Photo has a usage diary and Alain Briot has a pdf review.
• Tomorrow I get my Vonage telephone over broadband device. Unlimited calling and an impressive set of features for $35 a month. More on that once I start using it.
• TypeKey is a new system from SixApart for insuring/validating identity for web-log commenters. There will me much debate over the advantages/disadvantages of a centralized vs. a distributed system for this. But this is definitely sometime to keep an eye on. And SixApart, the makers of MovableType, have done a pretty good job of not being evil so far.

• MacDevCenter: Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics. This has been on my list of things to learn about for quite a while. And it looks like I have a project coming up that will pay me to get it working. Bonus.

• John Gruber has created a new HTML shorthand format called Markdown. Here’s what he has to say about it:

  The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

  While not as all-inclusive as my previous HTML-shorthand formatter of choice Textile it has quite a few advantages. Like allowing multiple elements inside list items or blockquotes, smarter handling of inline HTML and nice handling of code elements. But for me the best part is how it lets you separate link references from the text and include them as footnotes. Which makes it much easier for me to just focus on the righting and match up the links later. Very slick. Go play with the Dingus to see how it works.

  This post was written in Markdown. Which means all of you who have blogs here on Mintchaos can now select it as a text-formatter. I have also updated the installed version of SmartyPants to 1.5.1.

  Out of the box it functions as a straight Perl script, MovableType and Blosxom plugin.

  The masses seem to approve:

  • Aaron Swartz has built a HTML to text script that will turn any HTML document into Markdowned plain text.
  • Dave Walker shows us how to use Markdown as an OS X system service to have instant text-to-Markdown action available in all OS X apps that support the services menu.

Xian 11:12 PM, 03.21.04 - p-link