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Kiara surprised me last night by taking me to see the Matrix. I didn’t expect to be there opening night; since Owen was born we haven’t been so gung-ho about seeing movies early on. So wow, what a surprise!

Very, very cool. Maybe not quite as cool as the first — if this movie stood alone I’m not sure that I’d be hyped up for a sequel — but I am already looking forward to seeing it again. I have a lot of questions, most of them having to do with Neo’s conversation with the Architect.

Here’s a tip: stay through the credits. You’ll be treated to a preview of The Matrix: Revolutions.

Update: I forgot to mention: the Matrix runs on Unix! Unpatched Unix, too, as these screenshots demonstrate. Note how she’s able to get root.

Via Bob Regan’s Macromedia accessibility weblog, a list of (US) state accessibility laws and policies.

Minnesota’s done some good work with laws, but our web accessibility guidelines are pathetic. A group of state agency webmasters spent a few months reviewing and editing standards and had a decent document, but for reasons that I still don’t understand the version that was forwarded for approval was a watered-down, error-riddled, piss-poor excuse for a set of guidelines. It was as if someone whined, “hey, this is too hard,” and ripped out everything that was good, correct, and meaningful.

Not that I feel strongly about it or anything.

And really, reading through it again, it’s not a completely useless document. But I strongly believe that it needs to be reviewed and updated.

I’m quite impressed by Illinois’s standards and, now that I have a list to work with, plan too spend some time looking at other states’ standards and guidelines. I’m curious how many have created their own rather than just adopt Section 508 or the W3C’s guidelines.

I can’t believe that you‘re two years old already.

I just stumbled into this: the Open Source Digest, now in its second issue. I can’t tell anything about it from the web site, but the articles are informative.

Bookmark cleaning time.

• Web development and business goals. In which Dirk Knemeyer argues that your web development needs should match/serve your business goals. An idea that escapes some.
• Migrating Legacy Content to your new CMS.
• The .NET Abstraction Pile. Excellent.
• Tim O’Reilly: The Architecture of Participation.
• Testing the Three-Click Rule. Are those marketing types insisting that everything be accessible within three clicks? Have ’em read this.
• Open Source Content Management Blog.
• Build It Free. Open Source for CIOs. “The prime driver for us is not really the cost—though the cost savings have been very substantial—but the software quality.”
• Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing. Bruce Eckel takes a crack at the debate. Finally, something interesting to add: “Strong testing, not strong typing.” I’ll have more to say on this in a little while. (via Simon Willison)

This is nifty. Combining weblogs.com, RSS, and GeoURL, Mikel Maron does a sort of real-time geographical display of weblog updates. Every minute or so one or more new dots appear on the map, along with an excerpt from the RSS feed. Click on the dot to visit the updated site. If you use GeoURL, you can log in with your geocoded URL and see who else is watching the world update.

So says Nat Torkington, and ye gods I’m with him.

I’d like to quote the gem of a last paragraph but then this site might be blocked the filters at Kiara’s school. Then the kids couldn’t see pictures of Owen. So just read it yourself. I’m still laughing a day later.

No, I don’t mean “Mumble grumble,” which I suppose is actually the last paragraph. Sheesh.

And he included a pointer to where he’s got a .dmg of Perl 5.8.0 build for Max OS X. Thanks, I’ve been meaning to look for that, just in case I didn’t feel like building it.

Those damn freedom-loving Canadians:

The State Department report on global terrorism for 2002 suggests that while Canada has been helpful in the fight against terrorism, it doesn’t spend enough on policing and places too much emphasis on civil liberties.

That’s right, “too much emphasis on civil liberties.” Of course, that article is from Canada.com, and you know how those Canadians are hell-bent on world domination.

Here’s the US State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report, by the way. Should make for interesting reading. I, for one, am interested in why concern for civil liberties has become a threat to freedom.

There’s a new group in town. Those of you in the Twin Cities might find this of interest: Twin Cities Web Development User Group. Discussion’s already ramping up.

I don’t want to miss this: Text and Image in Medieval England, a conference this October at the University of Minnesota. I’ve been out of the medieval history scene for the last several years and miss it a bit. I tend not to like to do things half-heartedly, and this is one area that could quickly consume my life if I let it. Still, an occasional refresher is in order. This conference is right up my alley.

It usually comes as a surprise to those who know me only in the web world or at work that my academic background is in French and linguistics. What I don’t usually mention is that it’s actually in French, linguistics, religious studies, and medieval history. I spent an inordinate amount of time struggling to bring those disparate worlds together, time that I now think was wasted but that nevertheless led me to a fascinating study of the Danse Macabre des Femmes. The Danse Macabre was a fifteenth century memento mori, often containing both text and illustrations, in which Death danced with people from all walks of life, reminding the reader what awaits those who do not lead a good (i.e. Christian) life. The Danse Macabre des Femmes, as the title indicates, was a version in which Death danced with women, usually female counterparts of the male characters in the Danse Macabre des Hommes but also including roles specific to women.

I was drawn to this work in part because the imagery in both the poem and the accompanying illustrations reveal a great deal about the attitudes toward women in 15th century France. Study of these manuscripts involved creative attention to minute details drawn from a variety of disciplines (skills that serve me well in the work I do now — ah, the beauty of the liberal arts). You can see, then, why a conference that addresses text and image and what they reveal about medieval society might hold some small interest for me. Gotta go.