Time: 10 August · 19:00 – 22:00
Location: Ørsted Ølbar – Nørre Farimagsgade 13, 1364 København K
Created by: Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub

Drik mindst otte glas vand om dagen. Forebyg forkølelse med naturligt echinacea, og reparer dine hårdt prøvede celler med naturlige antioxidanter.
Naturligt er godt. Eller er det? Hvordan kan det være, at medicinalfirmaernes oprensede, statskontrollerede og efterprøvede produkter vækker mistillid, mens selvbestaltet “naturmedicin” uden dokumentation anses for sikkert?

#Ohøj:@Universe #define #title:”Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub – Lone Frank: Når Naturen bliver Gud” #copSKEP #GRL:https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=259454364068100 (twitter)

#Ohøj:@Universe #define #title:”Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub” #copSKEP #GRL:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Copenhagen-Skeptics-in-the-Pub/196123913753761 (twitter)

Myten om hvor meget (vand) man skal drikke http://www.kontinens.dk/page/231/ #copSKEP (twitter)

http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=man+skal+drikke+meget+vand #copSKEP (twitter)

Antioxydanter http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=antioxidanter #copSKEP (twitter)

Vitaminer http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=vitaminer #copSKEP (twitter)

Multivitaminer – lad være siger Lone Frank – men tag D-vitaminer når der er mangel – ellers ikke http://www.google.dk/search?q=vitaminer #copSKEP (twitter)

echinacea solhat http://www.google.dk/search?q=echinacea+solhat #copSKEP (twitter)

ayurvedic medicine http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ayurvedic+medicine #copSKEP (twitter)

hømeopati http://www.google.dk/search?q=h%C3%B8meopati #copSKEP

men MIN SEO er bedre end DIN SEO #copSKEP (twitter)

The #Weddar in Ørsted Ølbar is…surprisingly mild #copSKEP (twitter)

Q:Hvad med B-vitaminer? er det også noget man skal passe på med? #copSKEP (twitter)

@Mi_Islay Broccoli? Jow god idé, men er det ikke for “naturligt”? (twitter)

Sry…There’s no s in community (twitter)

Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub – Lone Frank: Når Naturen bliver Gud var rigtig fint – I found God ♥ (facebook)

IKKE det femte element/den femte gradbøjning: God Bedre Bedst Ornli’ Naturli’

.@kmdk @Palnatoke @peterbrodersen tak i lige måde – efterlod d’herrer og damer i en “røgfyldt brun pose”, og dansede videre <3 #copSKEP (twitter)

twitter-søgninger dør efter et par uger #copSKEP – må se at få sat noget aggregering op

Næste arrangement i “Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub” (facebook link) – “Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub – Lone Frank: Når Naturen bliver Gud” (facebook link) lyder jo spændende, men jeg har jo ry for at være religiøs…OK, Kristjan siger jeg godt må “lege” med alligevel

Ateister har det jo med at sætte lighedstegn mellem tro og Gud – det har ikke-ateister jo også…hmm godt man er en slags Buddhist

Der ER jo også mange lighedspunkter mellem sjælesørger og “psyk*-protokollen” – etymologien er i hvertfald ikke til at tage fejl af – http://en.wikipedia.org/wi​ki/Psychology#Etymology.

Tror vi har fundet et diskussionsemne til arrangementet, selv om det nok er for oplagt, og betændt. Altså “psyk*-protokollen” er jo nok det felt hvor den moderne videnskab har den største formidlings-udfordring efter “sjælen” har holdt “flyttedag” væk fra hjertet, i de flestes vestlige menneskers bevidsthed.

Min egen erfaring er at psykofarmaka da virker, og det mest potente jeg har været bruger af, Li+, virker skam, ingen ved dog tilsyneladende hvorfor.

Kan leve med at vi finder Gud, og at jeg, modsat ham her:

stadig er her.

Antager i øvrigt at det er videnskabens synspunkt at det vores kultur hidtil har kaldt “sjælen” kan forklares med “kemi” eller i hvertfald “videnskab” – igen sikkert et for oplagt og betændt emne.

Nå, mange af de “religiøse” er i mellemtiden flyttet andre steder hen, såsom CERN, der kan de jo finde fælles fodslag: “OH DEEP THOUGHT WHAT IS THE ANSWER…” – det kunne jeg godt tænke mig at høre Lone Franks tanker om.

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and class less and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

There’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

BTW! We’re trying to build a community site at barcamp.dk, so check back often for updates

Pre-camp game
I’m a 3 time veteran of BarCamp Copenhagen, and this time I had multiple roles, primary Henriette challenged me to host a pre-camp game, and this article is focusing on how that unfolded.

My roles were these:

• Co-organiser
• Co-host
• Host of pre-camp warm-up – hmm, it was freezing wasn’t it – event
• Co-sponsor through Nabz.dk – reseller of the Nabaztag
• Speaker (accept my sincere apologies for that disaster of a session, but I did learn some important Xcode/Interface Builder tricks)
• Webmaster at barcamp.dk

Phew! I think that’s about it, no wait, I also found time to be a participant!

“Un-conference”
For those of you not familiar with the concept, BarCamp Copenhagen is part of the world-wide phenomenon BarCamp, and can best be described as a conference with a twist, a so-called un-conference.

I’ll try to illustrate the differences between a conference and BarCamp below.

Conference

• The list of speakers usually is announced and scheduled
• Active participation is neither required nor the norm
• Speakers are invited and often payed
• Attendees usually pay a fee

BarCamp (un-conference)

• The list of speakers and the schedule is made up just before the camp starts
• The audience is expected to participate actively
• Speakers are volunteering, and access is only limited by the number of presentation slots

Technological treasure hunt, huh?
My major contribution to BarCamp Copenhagen 8.2 was being organiser of the pre-camp warm up.

As mentioned, the task of organising a pre-camp warm-up was given to me by Henriette Weber, she had envisioned a “technological treasure hunt”, and I immediately jumped at the chance, but what to do?

Technology and treasure hunt, we’ll that should be something with GPS, isn’t that something you can assume that people have these days?

After looking into what existed in the market, and even considering if we should try to build our own, I was sort of stuck for at while.

I suspect that Henriette was getting a bit worried, so she sent Mark Wubben to the rescue, and that was great! Mark is probably the coolest guy I’ve ever met, and it’s hard to believe that he’s only 22. Mark is destined for greatness, and I’m humbled by his presence!

I quickly started down an avenue of sending the participants out to research the history of the neighbourhood where the event was to take place, but Mark, in diplomatic terms, told me that that sounded too boring, I instantly agreed, it did sound like a school project didn’t it? I guess my short career as a school teacher had a bad influence on my creativity .

Brainstorm
On October 28th I met with Mark, and he made a couple of important points.

• The game must not be boring
• The game should be “hackable”
• The game should be directed using SMS by the game master

We had a great brainstorming session, and immediately we were turning in the direction of spies, conspiricies etc. Mostly because I instantly made the connection to November 22nd and the mother of all conspiracy theories, since November 22nd is the day of the JFK assassination.

So what we came up with was the concept of a spy-game where you were supposed to find an assassin, take a picture and return with it to the headquarter.

The assassin would be meeting with a contact at an undisclosed location, I thought of Nørrebroparken because it has a “grassy knoll” .

The participitants would be divided into teams, and then sent around in the area looking for codes that, when found, should be relayed to HQ, resulting in another hint about the whereabouts of the assassin.

Planning
On the 8th of November Mark Wubben and I met to investigate the area, and we found several places that would be suitable for waypoints, we decided that Nørrebroparken would be too far away, since we only had two hours for the game, and wanted 5 hints/waypoints.

I didn’t really work too much on the detalis of the game, after the 8th, but when the 22nd of November approached, I suddenly decided that we needed a website to support the game, and what you can whip together in two shakes of a rats tail using Drupal is just amazing, I had a full community site with full geolocation support up and running in a few hours.

Calls for participation
Approx. one week prior to the event, we issued an e-mail with a call for participation, and people were asked to sign-up for the pre-camp event, this was before I had configured the website, so I received a possitive answer from a few people.

Teaser
On the eve of the event, I then sent out this e-mail to the people that had responded to the call for participation:

Dear Agent,

You’ve been selected as a prospect to lead a team at BarCamp Copenhagen.

You will be given a mission that requires that you operate as a field agent from 10am to 11:59am.

Any technology you bring can potentially help you, but you’ll need, at least a camera and a cellphone.

There will be a briefing at 10am on November 22nd @Lygten 16.

Until then you can get updates at the barcamp.dk site, so check back frequently. http://barcamp.dk/content/barcamp-copenhagen-intelligence-agency

If you choose to accept the mission I’ll need your cell-phone number.

Kind regards
Kim Bach aka. K.ox
BCCIA Director

I received commitment from 4 people, I picked them as team-leaders, so that we would have four teams, and now I started building the website, having specific locations geocoded on the website helped me produce nice maps, so all I needed was to finalise the plot.

In the week leading to the event I had enlisted two of my friends to act as agents, and one of them is an experienced role-player so she helped me debug the game, she suggested that I should get rid of the good/bad distinction, and focus on making it much more confusing what was good and bad.

We met the night before BarCamp and decided that the mission should be for the teams to located the whereabouts of an agent, deliver documents, that they should document the handover of the documents, and return to base. What they weren’t aware of was that there was a second agent operating, and that he should steal the documents and disappear.

Hackable game
As mentioned, Mark Wubben tought me the importance of the game being “hackable”, this means that you should be able to bend the rules, so what I came up with was this:

• Information about the waypoints would be made available on the website once the teams had departed
• It would be possible to guess the access-codes, and get the hints faster. I choose these numbers for the 5 codes that should be gathered: 13-21-34-55-89 – does that ring a bell? Not? Well it’s the 5 two digit Fibonacci numbers
• You could get help if you asked for it

The plot
I ended up with a plot where the participants were sent out to locate field agent Szeba, they would be guided by hints that were given to them once they had gone to a waypoint and located the access code and sent it by SMS to HQ

The mission was to hand over some documents to the agent, and return with proof that the documents were delivered to the agent, and return to HQ.

The twist
What the participants didn’t know, was that I had also enlisted another agent, Petrus. The idea was that the agent would steal the documents once they were delivered to agent Szeba.

Game-on
On the eve of the evening I met with agents Szeba and Petrus (aka. Signe and Kim, thank you for helping me, you guys rock).

We went over the plan.

Szeba would be at Nørrebro Station at 11:30 waiting for the documents, Petrus would be lurking, wait for the next train, steal the documents and jump on the train just before it left.

We were ready for the game – mu-ha-ha-ha – it will be GREAT!

Stay tuned for the part two of this where you’ll be told how the game actually unfolded.

The picture that accompanies this article was taken by Karin Høgh, it’s copyright Karin Høgh and she has allowed me to use it here. The picture shows one of my bags!

Despite this, I’ve never really managed to build anything useful using Drupal!

It’s not that I haven’t tried, actually I’ve ventured into a number of projects where I’ve tried to use Drupal as an application framework, because I, strongly, believe that Drupal is so much more than a CMS.

The projects haven’t failed completely, and I’ve learned valuable lessons, but I never really managed to finish them.

As a developer trying to work with a CMS for development is rather frustrating, since you get to spend most of your time configuring the system, and you constantly run into limitations, that mostly are related to the fact that developers and non-developers alike, has to be able to configure the system.

Why did the projects fail? Was it due to lacking skills on my part, or is Drupal not suited to use as an application framework or are there additional factors?

I’d like to explore this, so I’ve signed-up for the very first DrupalCamp Copenhagen, that will be held November 15th and 16th 2008 in Copenhagen.

I’ve also proposed a session: Using Drupal as a Web Application Framework, let’s see if that is accepted, but for sure I’m not going to be a tourist, and I’m going to actively pursue an answer to my questions.

You’ve come a long way baby
Like I mentioned, I was present when we took the first steps trying to establish the community back in spring of 2006, but since late 2006 I’ve been mostly absent from the community.

Since then Drupal, and Drupal Danmark, has grown stronger and stronger, and if you take a look at the sign-ups for DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2008, you can see how strong the community has grown.

The fact that there’s a significant number of international attendees is impressive. This has a lot to do with Drupal Danmark and evangelists like Morten DK’s and Mikkel Høgh’s very active participation in the international community.

So thank you all for growing the community, and having the guts to go ahead with DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2008. YOU ROCK!

Drupal Danmark: You’ve come a long way baby.

Hope to see you at DrupalCamp Copenhagen.

See also:

• Posts on Kim Bach . Org Tagged with Drupal

This is, mostly, due to the fact that Jaiku is filled with people, with whom I share interests, but the people there, all, seem to be more interesting than I am, so I can learn new things, and that is the thing in life I love the most.

One of the things I’m very adventurous about is my music, and another of my favourite online services, Last.fm, supports that perfectly.

Yesterday a conversation about Last.fm surfaced on Jaiku:

Jaiku | Det slår mig lige, hvorfor jeg er så vild med last.fm. Jeg kan holde liv i det ved at gøre noget, jeg alligevel ville gøre: Høre musik :-

Translation: It just struck me why I’m so crazy about Last.fm. I can keep it going by doing something, I’d do anyways: Listen to music

That is correct, Last.fm builds and extends your network by comparing your musical preferences to the other users, and it also gives you recommendations based on your listening habits.

Eventually the question was asked: What do you use it for?

This triggered me to use Last.fm again, something I usually only do once a month, and the feature I love the most, is the similar artist radio.

In April 2008 I travelled to Lisbon, Portugal, and I was so fortunate to attend a concert by Dorit Chrysler, a very talented artist from Austria, that has specialised in using the Theremin instrument, a very strange instrument that you control by moving your hands in the electrical field generated by the instrument, that basically is a bend metal-rod.

So the Jaiku post triggered me into finally ripping the CDs I bought in Galeré Zee dos Bois in Lisbon, listening to them, and then using that to listen the Dorit Chrysler Similar Artists Radio.

And what I dug into, was a wealth of wonderful music, that spans from Opera to Classical Chanson, over Russian Abstract Hip-Hop and even the wonderful Colleen, that I already knew.

Here’s a list of some of the wonderful artists I discovered:

• Robert – A wonderful French chanteuse
• Gudrun Gut – German female singer. Original member of Einstürzende Neubauten
• Ute Lempner – German chanteuse
• Susanna and the Magical Orchestra – Norwegian act that, for instance, does some amazing covers, especially one of Dolly Partons Jolene is wonderful
• Meret Becker – Another German singer that has be associated with Einstürzende Neubauten

The list goes on, and I’ll recommend exploring the artists that are similar to Dorit Chrysler, you will not regret it.

Last.fm remains one of the most impressive, and genuinely useful, online services – the list of these services is short, the big three are, to me, Jaiku, Last.fm and Flickr.

The picture used here was taken from Last.fm, and is, most likely an official promotional pressphoto, I hope my use here will go under “fair-use”

Services for the REST (sry) of us

RESTful web services are the predominant implementation model for web services developed by web 2.0 companies, Last.fm and Flickr are prime examples of services with extensive RESTful web services and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

A web service is a software service, or API, that software (application) developers can use to provide functionality to their applications, and thus users. The “web” refers to the fact that the service can be accessed using technology developed for the web, like a standard web-browser.

Other technologies for implementing web services exits, the best known is the web service or (WS_*) stack, often referred to as SOAP. REST is, however, much easier to use than SOAP, because it has a GET based interface, meaning that you can query a RESTful service using simple URIs for instance entered using a browser. REST is also much better understood by commercial web developers in the private sector, and the tools they use, eats REST for breakfast.

Here’s an example: http://oiorest.dk/danmark/veje?q=lindevangshusene

This retrieves the road-code and city-number of the street I live on in XML format, pretty sweet.

What IT&TS has done is that they, two years later, have picked up my idea, so that I don’t have to implement it (well it only means that I’ll never release my own code) .

Concerns that history will repeat itself

I’m pleased, very pleased, and surprised that The Danish Office for IT and Telecommunications (IT & Telestyrelsen) has begun experimenting with such a relevant service, and has actually made some real-word applications available on the web-site.

But! I fear that history might repeat itself.

Something like 3-4 years ago, a sample SOAP service Address Web Service (AWS) was developed by IT&Telestyrelsen, they even had a competition to develop a sample application, and there even was a winner. But AWS never went into production, and the project dropped off the radar, that is until now. It seems that AWS soon will be released for production, and this is great news.

The problem was that I lost faith in AWS, I felt the project had died, so I didn’t really want to develop against it, and I hear the same concerns from others regarding the RESTful services today.

Do we need pseudo-standards like REST?

The RESTful experiments will probably never launch, but with the SOAP/WS_* AWS likely to go into production, we don’t really need them do we?

What we do need is an open and free infrastructure, for instance for eFaktura, it’s way too expensive to use the current providers, so I suggest that the next thing you do IT&TS, is to pick up another of my old projects

In many ways I fail to see the real need for a RESTful service, but RESTful APIs are so much easier to implement than SOAP.

What I’d like to see is light-weight data-formats, like JSON, and JavaScript APIs Google style. The light-weight data-formats are simpler to parse than XML, so I’d love to see a JSON, or similar, version, e.g. something that is closer to the internal representations of data, without going to binary interfaces, even though they’re coming back, for instance through WCF (Windows Communication Framework).

Conclusion: BIG thumbs up! (but it was overdue)

All in all BIG thumbs up to IT&TS for this initiative, keep it up, and stay above the radar in the future, please. We need widely available, and free, services like AWS, and with the competition from Google GeoCoder, which can be implemented with few lines of code – and works with other than Danish addresses, and findvej.dk – that is using it’s own, outdated, copy of data from Kort og Matrikelstyrelsen to provide a nice, URI based service, reviving of AWS, and the new initiatives, were way overdue.

Ideen til Æbletræet udsprang af det danske forum for Apple fans, Macnyt.dk, en gruppe af faste brugere var blevet trætte af at besvare de samme spørgsmål om og om igen, så det blev diskuteret om man kunne skrive en bog eller lignende.

Fra start af var det klart, for mig, at man absolut ikke skulle skrive en bog, men lave det online på Internettet, og jeg havde noget i baghånden, MediaWiki, det samme system som driver Wikipedia – der er åben og fri software.

Første møde blev afholdt den 3-April-2006, og da jeg kom hjem installerede jeg MediaWiki på min server og oprettede de første artikler.

Der gik noget tid inden de andre projekt deltagere forstod ideen, og indlæringskurven for MediaWiki er ikke just lav, derfor opsatte jeg også et traditionelt forum, som stadig kan findes på http://macwiki.kimbach.org/portal, og diskussionen flød.

Det er fantastisk at arbejde sammen om at producere indhold, og når man kan se at der er mange rettelser på MediaWikis recent changes, så virker det simpelthen ganske inspirerende, og man får lyst til at skrive mere.

Jeg føler det er nødvendigt at aflive nogle myter, da den slags opstår når folk ikke taler sammen.

• Jeg har ingen ambitioner om at være leder eller bestemme noget som helst
• Jeg er blevet beskyldt for at tage Æbletræet som gidsel – det kan jeg ikke se – grunden til at vi ikke er på PHP5 – som jeg helt ærligt – ikke forstår er så vigtigt – er at vores udbyder Site5 ikke understøtter det, og da projektet er baseret på gratis og frivillig arbejdskraft, så har det været svært at få ejeren af serveren til at bruge tid til at få flyttet server

Og så et par ord om hvordan jeg fungerer: jeg bliver stresset af at tænke på produktions-problemer, og i påsken forsøgte jeg at opgradere Æbletræet.dk, det gik ikke helt som ventet, jeg bad derfor om, først at få os på PHP5, derefter ville jeg installere MediaWiki 1.12, og så flytte til Gigahost (hvilket jeg ikke tror er så god en idé), hvis man spørger kan man jo få svar, og jeg venter på min frivillige hjælper.

Fundamentalt hader jeg simpelthen drift, og her mener jeg ikke den første installation, men de problemer der – næsten altid – opstår når man skal opgradere serveren – så vidt jeg husker – så har vi nu ikke haft de store produktions problemer – en enkelt gang var vi nede i 48 timer – fordi Site5 havde skiftet IP adresser.

En grundregel – som gælder al drift – er: “if it ain’t (totally) broke – don’t fix it” – på Dansk: “pil ikke ved noget der fungerer, også selv om det ikke fungere helt optimalt”. At dette så betyder at “change” ikke sker, er uheldigt, men det er simpelthen ikke noget man kan byde frivillig arbejdskraft – så ting tager tid!

Jeg har – længe – forsøgt at få vores server opgraderet til PHP5, men igen – frivillig arbejdskraft skal man ikke presse – man må væbne sig med tålmodighed. Tro mig, jeg ved det – for 3 år siden prøvede jeg at køre et del-projekt i min Frivilliggruppe hårdt, det faldt ikke i god jord – og folk hadede det jeg producerede, men jeg producerede! Siden dengang har jeg væbnet mig med tålmodighed.

Efter 2 år kan projektet dog, sagtens, stå på egne ben, og jeg føler at min fortsatte deltagelse i projektet ville betyde en fragmentering af fællesskabet, der – efter min mening – ganske enkelt ikke brug for endnu et Dansk Apple site, og nøj hvor er det imponerende med de nye Apple fora, som i kan se havde vi et Drupal baseret forum allerede for 2 år siden.

Jeg vil derfor, fremover, ikke deltage i projektet som andet end bidragyder, med mindre jeg bliver udelukket – hvilket jo ikke kan udelukkes (pun intended).

Faktisk er det eneste jeg er ked af, at jeg har mistet en fantastisk god ven – det bedste minde jeg har er dengang vi bagte en kage til brug for Dansk Flygtningehjælps 1000 flere arrangement, og jeg undskylder MANGE MANGE gange for Beyoncé, som blev Skypet til dine sarte ører mangen sen nat.

Det sjoveste er faktisk at vi, mest fordi vi havde en åben proces, blev udsat for en domænehaj. macwiki.dk blev registreret af en af den slags personer ,der ikke burde have lov at betræde Internettet, sjovt nok blev navnet jo æbletræet.dk, så fjolset brændte inde med domænet LOL.

God vind kære Æbletræ, det har været fantastisk sjovt! Specielt tak til David, Esben men også Thomas x 2, Wendelboe, Sebastian, Allan, Liv for at have holdt mig ud så længe, noget af en bedrift .

Et par fakta – Æbletræet.dk kører videre, så længe det ønskes. Hvis der er interesse i at bevare navnet, hvilket jeg da tvivler på, så kan det redelegeres, jeg ejer det p.t. I øvrigt sletter jeg aldrig indhold, men da vi ved at dublikeret indhold er noget Google ikke bryder sig om, trækker jeg stikket så snart der er flertal for det.

Jeg er blevet beskyldt for gidseltagning – intet er mig fjernere – jeg er SUPER stolt af at have været med til dette – og det var det jeg kunne få jer med til. Fremtiden tilhører egen-produceret indhold, som man selv hoster og ejer, websitet er dødt! Elvis har forladt bygningen.

Billedet der ledsager denne artikel er en manipulation udført af Esben Thomsen, det er Copyright Esben Thomsen, men jeg håber at dette falder under fair use. Esben kender mig bedre end de fleste, og det “grønne skrig” opsumerer “mig” ganske godt (man kunne sige perfekt)

The reason: yesterday we had a meeting in relation to a project, and webgrl extraordinarie, Henriette Weber asked if she could bring a guest. Sure! His name is Mark Wubben, do you knew who he is? No, not really!…Well it turned out that I did, he’s the man behind the incredible piece of code known as sIFR.

In case you don’t know what sIFR is – chances are that you don’t – it’s a method to display rich typography on the web, using Flash, but in a completely transparent, and accesible way.

So as a tribute to Mark and the fantastic work he’s done with SiFR, I’ve switched my sites theme to the sIFR experiment, I never got quite finished with last year – it’s based on the standard template.

I got to look at some of the work he’s done at his company, and it’s SUPER cool.

Mark is also finding time – which is amazing – to work on sIFR, and I got a sneak-view of version 3.0 of sIFR, and it’s going API, will be fully scalable etc.

The main reason I stopped my experimentation with sIFR, was because it didn’t support Danish characters, but Mark would LOVE to hear from you, so I’ll ask him for advice – really it’s “just” a matter of providing the correct Flash files. Another reason I stopped using sIFR, was that I didn’t have the energy to chase down nicer fonts, the defaults aren’t exactly the nicest.

Wondering what Mark is up to these days? You’ll better watch it!

If you’re using sIFR, do give Mark a shout, he’d appreciate it, and his work deserves ALL the recognition in the world!

ps. Incidentally I just lost a good friend, due to COMPLETE stupidity on my part, I guees that I’m an a**hole, and the irony is that, he was the one, who drew my attention to sIFR. So long buddy