Accesskey, l'essai non transformé de l'accessibilité Le principe des accesskeys est particulièrement simple et direct : permettre à l'utilisateur d'atteindre et d'activer liens et contrôles de formulaire HTML à l'aide de combinaisons de touches clavier librement déterminées par le concepteur. De la sorte, l'interactivité dans une page ne dépend plus de la seule souris : un utilisateur de lecteur d'écran, un utilisateur handicapé moteur, ou un banal amateur de racourcis clavier... peuvent renseigner un formulaire ou activer un lien avec le périphérique de leur choix, puisque d'autres dispositifs sauront exploiter ce qui est prévu pour le clavier. Cette solution est d'autant plus attractive que le prix à payer pour le concepteur est réduit : un simple attribut de l'élément concerné suffit à spécifier la touche à utiliser. L'immaturité de ce mécanisme nous fait pourtant reprendre ici l'expression de Joe Clark, qui, tout en soulignant son excellent potentiel, le qualifie de délinquant juvénile du HTML accessible... Conclusion ? Touche 0
Science Made Cool Science Made Cool: Biology My personal fitness plan revolves around trees. We have a wood stove which contributes a not-inconsiderable fraction of our home heating during the winter, and that means I have to spend spring and summer refilling the woodpile. Mostly I cut up deadfalls, but occasionally I do cut down trees which look as though they're going to fall down anyway, or which are in places I don't want them to be. (I've tried asking them politely to move, but they ignore me.) Earlier this summer I took down a medium-sized pine tree, about 40 feet tall, in order to bring more light to part of the yard. Now, pine wood isn't as dense as, say, maple or oak, so it doesn't burn as hot. A couple of weeks later I happened to pass the stack of pine logs, and I noticed something. The first was the sawdust. I bent closer and noticed the second thing. My resident scientist did some Googling, and we guess it was some sort of beetle larvae, from one of the many species of beetles which attack pine logs.
ScienceBlog.com Making the University a Police State This weekend The Chronicle of Higher Education published an opinion piece by Michael Morris arguing that in the name of campus security campuses should start data mining all student internet traffic. Or as the not so subtle, fear mongering, almost fit for Fox News title says, “Mining Student Data Could Save Lives.” Morris’s article to put the matter bluntly is a phenomenally bad idea. Indeed his argument so ill conceived that it is difficult to know where to begin in exposing the problems. I even question The Chronicle’s choice to publish this piece. Yes, opinions are helpful for generating discussion, but a certain amount of competency should have to be cleared before The Chronicle is willing to co-sign your piece, even if done under the commentary section. Let’s start by being clear on what Morris is calling for. Technologically Morris doesn’t know what he is talking about and ethically he equates himself with some of the world’s most oppressive governments.
Profound Heterogeneity » About Burning the Boats/Books For the past 400 years, give or take 100, knowledge has primarly been structured by the codex form. Since the inviting of the printing press rules, customs, laws, and social practices have become organized around the idea that a book is the ideal medium for delivering content. It is all too easy to forget that the alliance of academic publishing and the academy is a rather recent historical developement, so that we should not all be surprised that like many seemingly ageless print institutions, academic publishing is at least substantially chaning, some might argue even threatned by the digital networked substructure. A brief story to explain . . . In April of 2010 I gave a talk to the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, titled “Burn the Boats/Books.” What Would Scholarship Look Like If It Were Not Designed to End Up in Books? Both sections are an attempt to perform both the process and product in a public way.
cluster - Node.js v0.6.0 Manual Cluster A single instance of Node runs in a single thread. To take advantage of multi-core systems the user will sometimes want to launch a cluster of Node processes to handle the load. The cluster module allows you to easily create a network of processes all which share server ports. var cluster = require('cluster');var http = require('http');var numCPUs = require('os').cpus().length; if (cluster.isMaster) { for (var i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) { cluster.fork(); } cluster.on('death', function(worker) { console.log('worker ' + worker.pid + ' died'); });} else { http.Server(function(req, res) { res.writeHead(200); res.end("hello world\n"); }).listen(8000);} Running node will now share port 8000 between the workers: % node server.js Worker 2438 online Worker 2437 online The difference between cluster.fork() and child_process.fork() is simply that cluster allows TCP servers to be shared between workers. cluster.fork is implemented on top of child_process.fork. cluster.fork() # cluster.isMaster #
The US ZIPScribble Map What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid? The result is surprising and much more interesting than expected. The idea for the ZIPScribble came from playing with Ben Fry’s excellent zipdecode. That little applet allows you to explore the ZIP codes interactively, and reveals some very interesting patterns. (ZIPScribble Map PDF) The patterns and density distribution are readily apparent, and can in fact be seen much better than when only the dots are drawn. (ZIPScribble Map Color PDF) Not surprisingly, some of the white lines really separate states, others don’t. (ZIPScribble Map Color with Names PDF) Adding the colors clearly adds information, but it also removes some of the mystery. Since the lines between the denser areas could still be artifacts, let’s add a backdrop to see if they really are state lines. Is this visualization? See also the interactive version!
Javi Santana