Ars Pentia News

Special thanks to Seth of Macrobyte Resources for offering to update the old www.free-conversant.com/arspentia domain to my newly registered www.arspentia.org domain.

ViewFromTheHeart : That Lonesome Road

ViewFromTheHeart Reviewed
Somehow I found VFTH firmly in the crosshairs of a couple of ''Weblog Critics'' with the unlikely names of Ed Champion and Tom Working, who have a website called Blog You.

I am not going to link to Blog You because I disagree vehemently with their assessment of ViewFromTheHeart. It's one of the few weblogs that I try and read every day. More often than not after my daily 'dose' of that site I am left in awe of caring professionals like Al Hawkins, the weblog's author. Al started weblogging about the same tiime as I started. ViewFromTheHeart is a perfect title for the site. Weblogs like it are not things you can just dip into and judge at face value. Regular readers are drawn into Al's life and work and certainly in my case become bound to the real-life drama that is Al's life. It's his experiences as a critical care nurse - and the truly honest way that he writes about them and his reactions, etc., that makes VFTH compulsive reading. Sure, it'll not be to everyone's taste but I for one am delighted that Al takes the time and effort to write about his thoughts and deeds. I am not ashamed to say that sometimes his weblog entries reduce me to tears and at other times I have been known to ROTFL and/or curse at the antics of the patients, family, nursing staff or the hospital management. Al does us all a service by making us confront our preconceptions about the sick and dying and those that care for them and the situtation they find themselves in.

Al, don't take the criticism to heart. Please keep on weblogging. The world's a better place because of you. I don't think I could say the same thing about these so-called critics.

Best wishes,

Duncan

PS Later: Al's reply seems to suggest that he's bearing up ;-). Nice one, Al!

Wes [HtP] Felter linked to The Register: Intel's Jackson will offer 2 chips for 1 before I'd caught up on my Register e-mail backlog:

Intel will be introducing SMT into their Foster chips in the summer, sources close to the project have confirmed to The Register. And with Project Jackson, its codename at Satan Clara, Intel will break with its traditional approach to microprocessor design by introducing SMT, or 'simultaneously multithreading', which presents two "virtual" processors to software application.

How any of my students can claim Computer Architecture and Design is boring is beyond me ;-)

A version of this posting will appear on the http://www.arspentia.org Conversant site once I have done some house-keeping over there - and once its DNS records have propogated fully so I can deep link into that site. Whilst at Wes' site I noticed that he's moving his server too. Fortunately, I normally reference his site using a Conversant resource - invoked as |htp| - so all I'll need to so is change the URL in the resource and when pages are served from this site the new URL will automagically be used. Some of the deep-linking URLs will break unfortunately but I'll update these by hand as and when the need arises.

A List Apart - This HTML Kills: Thoughts on Web Accessibility by Jim Byrne:

WHEN I STARTED OUT as a web designer, accessibility seemed quite a simple and achievable goal: provide alternative descriptions for all your graphics, and make sure the background colour and text color have good contrast. Accessibility was easy, took little extra work, and the resulting page didn't look different from millions of other first-generation web pages out there, i.e., dull, grey and unattractive.

It ain't easy

Time has moved on and accessibility on the web is no longer simple. From being a largely text-based medium that was easily accessible via a variety of high- and low-tech devices, the web has now become a rich multimedia environment.

Jim is the Director of the Making Connections Unit at Glasgow Caledonian University - just down the road from my workplace. I must arrange to meet him one of these days.

The Register: PlayStation 3 graphics chip to crush PS2 version

The PlayStation 3 GS will feature 256Mb of on-die DRAM. The current implementation has just 32Mb of embedded memory. 'GS 3' will be capable of handling 75 million polygons per second with a fill rate of 1.2-2.6 billion pixels per second. Its 2Kb internal bus provides a bandwidth of 48GBps.

Woah!

The Curmudgeon links to a story about a Harvard professor that attacked grade inflation. John comments:

He gives two grades: One that the student "deserves", and another adjusted up to reflect the average grade distribution. It's a bit of a stunt, but not really wacky. One grade has to carry too much weight. What is it supposed to mean? How much one learned? How much one knows? Is it for the students to know how they rank? For the school to determine who should go on to the next course? For graduate schools to decide whom to admit? For potential employers? Why not have one grade to indicate to the student what the teacher actually thinks, and another for public consumption?

A month or so ago John mentioned on his site [cuwu] that the grade inflation police would be after him. I've just finished marking a bunch of exam papers so I know how he feels except in my case it'll probably be the grade deflation police that'll be after me ;-)