Archive for September, 2004
A new avatar from Yahoo
Prithvi (my brother) showed me this new avatar for yahoo! messenger. Lots of girls in Taiwan and China love this avatar.
ftp: Digital Media Conference 2004 - my presentation and other cool stuff
I did a presentation on Rich Media Accessibility at the ftp Digital Media Conference last week. I spoke about making audio, video and Flash content more accessible to people with visual and auditory disabilities.
One of the things that came up later during the Q&A sessions was should the governments force people to comply with web accessibility standards. I believe that we do need official intervention just as physical accessibilty guidelines are now embedded into building construction codes. The trouble is that most design houses and companies do not care even to get informed. They are not aware that minor tweaks like putting ALTernate text description on their images and providing text transcript can make their web more accessible. And these changes only makes our web better and faster to load. In my own case, I am running a screen reader (a speech synthesis tool JAWS that reads out the web page) through my travel pages and I realise that actually hearing what I have written helps me edit my sentences to improve the structure.
In the web design class that I used to run, I used to talk about Metaverse - a fully immersive virtual world that appears in Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash. We used to discuss issues like how far this technology is and what would be the implication of such a world on the real world. One speaker, Adrian Cheok talked about some of the interesting work they are doing merging the real world with virtual one at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore.
Using pictures from Flickr into your Wiki
Upload the picture you want into your Flickr account.
When you click on a picture, the Flickr interface shows you some of these options. Select the “All Sizes option”
On the next page you will see this part where it displays the URL of the picture. This is the web address of the picture. Copy this address.
Go to your Wiki page. Click on Edit. In the edit box, you can paste the picture’s address. Save the wiki page and you will be able to see the picture.
Dalat Cowboys, Vietnam
People come to the little hill station of Dalat to escape the heat down in the Mekong delta region. Dalat offers cool weather, nice treks in the hills, strawberry wine and the Dalat Cowboys. They are the local horsemen dressed as American Cowboys.
Online Myanmar Visa
One can now apply online for Myanmar Visa. The website (based in Malaysia) does the online visa fee processing too. Nice.