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Friday September 03, 2004

Online Science Fiction Archive

For all you science fiction fans, there is a great archive of stories here.
The main site has lots of other SF related stuff, of a more glossy nature.
While I'm here, I'll pass on pointers to the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker and World Fantasy award winners. If you are ever short of something to read in the science fiction, horror and fantasy fields, then these links are a good place to start.

[Technorati Tag: Science Fiction]

( Sep 03 2004, 12:58:58 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

HTML Validator?

I've been trying to find a free, easy to use HTML validator.

I've noticed that when I go to the web page I've setup that will display all my blog entries, that sometimes, the entries start wandering across the page the further down the page you scroll. What's really annoying is that sometimes they don't, and the page is displayed just fine. I'm suspecting this is a roller bug, but I'd like to validate the HTML that's generated, to make sure I don't have any incorrect or missing tags.

I've spent an hour or two on this this morning, and I'm getting nowhere quickly. I've tried:

Offline HTMLHelp.com Validator - this requires you to download some Perl and C++ source code. I did this. Unfortunately it doesn't use the Gnu autoconf/automake tools and the Makefile defaults to gcc/c++. Fair enough, I tried that, and it started generating errors for:
`uint64_t' does not name a type.
No doubt I could fix this, but I just want a free, easy to use HTML validator, not something that tests my programming ability.
JTidy - even though the web site say this is "an HTML syntax checker and pretty printer", this seems to just be capable of being using as an HTML fixer-uper from within another Java app. The documentation is really bad. I even read the mailing list on Sourceforge to see if I was missing something obvious. I don't think so.
Doctor HTML - this one had potential, but it has a limit of 200,000 bytes on the size of the web page you can check online just by giving a URL, otherwise you should buy their product. Fair enough, but I really don't want to do that just for checking one page.

So, any suggestions on something that will easily validate a web page of mine which is about 500 Kbytes, and generate a report of the validated HTML, will be gratefully appreciated. I like the online approach - just giving a URL, but I can understand that this might not be acceptable for such a large web page.

I also suspect internally at Sun we probably already have something that'll do this, I just don't know about it.

[Technorati Tag: software]

[Technorati Tag: HTML]

( Sep 03 2004, 09:50:16 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [16]

Mobius 8

Recently, I seem to have become fixated with the ability to show visual output from audio input. From my post on the work of Golan Levin when he was at the MIT to the one about the iTune visualizer. Now I've just learnt from an article in the November 2001 edition of Computer Graphics World about Mobius 8.

Mobius 8 is performer John Laraio, who

uses Zuma, 3dMaxMedia's real-time graphics performance technology to translate audio into visual motion as he controls 3D images, video, lights and lasers with both his gestures and the audio frequency generated from his customized instrument, the Hydra, which uses infrared light beams.

Mobius 8 has toured with NSync and Yes and has a web site, (note though that it seems to be written for Internet Explorer).

[Technorati Tag: Art]