http://nidahas.com Musings on design, web standards and free software from a Sri Lankan geek Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:38:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There are people who are good at blogging. I'm not one of them. The time has come to lay this blog to rest. Many thanks to the readers who cared to put up with my sporadic postings. I'll continue my writing at the Vesess blog. http://nidahas.com/2007/07/07/silence/ The community backlash over Ilija Studen's announcement to alter the development path of activeCollab is a typical example of what happens when successful FOSS projects go proprietary. Perhaps it was Ilija's lack of faith in FOSS values from the very beginning, or perhaps it was simply the lure of venture ... http://nidahas.com/2007/03/09/activecollab-making-the-numbers-but-not-sharing-the-values/ We have reached the first milestone of the Season of Usability project I'm participating in: the Serendipity user survey is now online. If you're a Serendipity user, please participate! It'll no doubt help us improve your blogging experience. On a somewhat unrelated note, the word Serendipity stems from Serendip, the Persian ... http://nidahas.com/2007/03/07/serendipity-user-survey/ There seems to be a renewed interest in atheism, especially in the western world, for a host of different reasons. The discussions vary from how certain countries are at risk of becoming theocracies and liberties are compromised to why atheism is harmful to the society. My intention is not to ... http://nidahas.com/2007/02/23/buddhism-vs-atheism/ I've had no formal training in interaction design, information architecture or usability (not many card-carrying IxDs do anyway, let alone grasshoppers like us). I'm very lucky to gain a certain amount of practical insight through the work we do at Vesess, but that hardly makes up for the lack of ... http://nidahas.com/2007/01/27/season-of-usability-20062007/ Companies like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Comcast spent more than $150 million to push Congress to gut Net Neutrality. But in the end, they couldn’t overcome widespread public opposition. Net neutrality survives, for now. http://nidahas.com/2006/12/10/net-neutrality-survives/ The Word Challenge 2006 winner has been chosen, and it's none other than Maximus, the Sri Lankan papermaking firm that makes high-quality products from a variety of wastes, including paper from offices and bark from banana trees, and most interestingly, elephant dung. From the intro on the competition site: The firm set ... http://nidahas.com/2006/12/07/the-world-challenge-2006-winner/ Earlier this year I posted an article on a CSS-based form template, originally done for the Sahana interface. It was modified based on the feedback I received from the readers who stumbled upon the article, and the final version made it to the Sahana system. I have come to realize certain ... http://nidahas.com/2006/12/06/forms-markup-and-css-revisited/ I've had a nightmarish experience with my earlier web host, Page-Zone.com. They seem to be going through a Dreamhost period, but three weeks without any response to the numerous support tickets was a bit too frustrating at the end. Hopefully they'll be able to fix things soon for their existing ... http://nidahas.com/2006/11/19/nidahas-is-back/ Google SoC has come to an end. This is not my official thank you note - that'll come in a later, longer post. This is a pointer to the Thank you Google image created by Manu Cornet. I was overjoyed to see the blue-green padma of this site, used as my ... http://nidahas.com/2006/08/22/thank-you-google/