JD on EP

Steve Webster notes that some Firefox don't transfer requests from Adobe Flash Player to text-to-speech assistive technology (JAWS, eg), when the Player does not render directly to screen (WMODE parameter). Related: Andrew Kirkpatrick on how various browsers affect accessibility with different markup styles (Aug 05), and Geoff Stearns amassed lengthy comments on other squirrelly behavior from browsers (March 05).

You can pipe the messages from the debug version of Adobe Flash Player into a Firefox panel with this FlashTracer extension for Firefox.

Most weeks the newspapers carry stories about "iPod DRM" -- New York Times has one today -- when recorded music first became popular phonographs and records were sold by furniture companies, oddly enough -- this was even after the recording industry finally converged on a format. Radio sparked massive evolution too, as forgotton stories of the Petrillo ban attest. Another interesting look at the actual history of the music business comes from studying Ralph Peer.

Speaking of which, Mike Masnick has some thoughts on Tower Records being liquidated. I moved to San Francisco in 1976, and Tower Records was very impressive then. But later, at Amoeba Records, I bought some Japanese DVDs which were incomplete Chinese knockoffs. Tricky stuff, that music business.... ;-)

One more music link: 100 popular classical ringtones... if you play, then the Hal-Leonard Real Little Classical Fakebook gives melody and harmonization.

Gregg Wygonik has a new version of his Flash component to produce PDF files.

Adrian Cummings is describing how Adobe Flash Lite looks to a J2ME developer, at Mobile Games Blog.

For MacTel ports, some folks still haven't heard what Adobe execs have been advising for over a year.

Next-generation androids functioning as booth babes in Japan... spooky video on this one.

Looks like major media companies are accepting the flow of their low-res content to sites like YouTube.

I don't know how I got to this page, but it's a good collection of classic putdowns... Mark Twain is quoted as "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" (Maybe it was the way he told it.... ;-)

Nice interview with Robert Scoble here, about how his role interacted with Microsoft, but it's still strange that the pre-weblog, pre-ClueTrain conversations are off-the-radar for these folks.

New paperlike screens are increasing in area, decreasing in thickness, increasing in colors, but latency is still a problem.

Near as I can tell from reading 'way too much, this Attention Computing stuff might be about working while standing, "ten-HUT!" kind of stuff, I'm not sure what else they might be talking about here.... :(

Lots of bad news in the world today... children assaulted for not being of the correct tribe in Glasgow and Lyons... women accused of adultery still being stoned to death... Internet cafes attacked for indecency, journalists murdered, and very odd people with nuclear tests. Sometimes it seems like the work we do doesn't make enough of a difference in stopping the sick and counterproductive things, but twenty years ago we wouldn't even have known of some of the bad things going on in the world....