Talks will range from a focus on CSS3 features related to color, typography and media; to discussions of Open Web concepts, current case studies and demos, as well as brainstorming sessions to openly work with and solve shared challenges within our industry.

Speakers include:

• Molly E. Holzschlag, who will speak on CSS3 color including HSLa and RGBa
• Andy Budd will speak on backgrounds and borders and other cool CSS3 design stuff
• Håkon Wium Lie, who will present on Web typography
• Pete LePage on HTML5 features in IE

Slides, commentary and tracked Tweets will be available at the Standards.Next website at http://www.standards-next.org. Hash tag: #standardsnext

Mike Taylor (Tunecore.com) and Jeffrey Barke (theMechanism) will continue last month's presentation on HTML5 by covering Web Forms 2.0 and the canvas, audio and video elements.

The canvas element can be used to draw graphics using JavaScript, while the audio and video elements permit native embedding of those media elements in the browser. Web Forms 2.0 provides, among other things, strongly-typed input fields, new attributes for defining constraints and new DOM interfaces

Please note—This meetup is currently full and the waiting list is quite long. If you know you won't be able to make it, please update your RSVP.

Please contact theMechanism if you'd like to present at a future New York Web Standards meetup.

Since this was the primary volume (startup disk), the "Repair Disk" button was grayed out, and, of course, I didn't have a clue where the Mac OS X install disc is. Not sure how to fix it, I turned to Google. Turns out the repair process is quite easy:

1. Turn off the computer.
2. Restart in single-user mode by pressing the power button to turn the computer on and immediately pressing and holding the Command (Apple) key and the "s" key.
3. At the command-line prompt, type: /sbin/fsck -fy and press Return.
4. fsck will run through five "phases." If it makes any repairs, it will display ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****If you see this message, repeat step 3 until you see ** The volume (name_of_volume) appears to be OK
5. At the prompt, type reboot and press Return.

References

• Mac OS X: How to start up in single-user or verbose mode
• Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

Source: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1358

Source: http://where.blip.tv/file/2143974/ via @googlemaps

The Department of City Planning's Bytes of the Big Apple family of data, applications and base map files now has an RSS feed of new product releases and notices about existing products.

Beta version of OASIS

The beta version of OASIS is now online and the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center is looking for feedback.

A video tutorial of the site's new features is available at http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/oasis/tutorial.htm and a summary of how the OASIS maps have changed is located at http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/oasis/about.html.

via the GISMO Yahoo! Group.

So far I've read the following articles:

• Two Essays: "Simulacra and Science Fiction" and "Ballard's Crash" by Jean Baudrillard
• "'The Closely Reasoned Technological Story': The Critical History of Hard Science Fiction" by Gary Westfahl

Best YouTube comment, by Mysanthropyc: This film is a documentary, by the way. This really happened. This is how we won the Cold War.

Source: YouTube

Simulacrum (plural: -cra), from the Latin simulacrum which means "likeness, similarity," is first recorded in the English language in the late 16^th century, used to describe a representation of another thing, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god; by the late 19^th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Philosopher Frederic Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, where a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real. Other art forms that play with simulacra include Trompe l'oeil, Pop Art, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.

Read the entire article

Source: Future of Web Apps Expo

This is an impressive presentation! More than just Google Maps (Andrew didn't choose the title), it should be called "Evolved Maps, deconstructed."

Andrew begins with a brief history of mapping, including African story mapping and Polynesian navigation maps. Along the way he touches on the intersection of geography and meaning (psychogeography), slippy maps & spinny globes. Turner's Introduction to Neogeography (O'Reilly) is worth checking out if you haven't already.

So where next? How to do real rich geographic applications?