Inversarium

With the new version of the Flash Player (Flash Player 9, update 3) released on December 3, 2007, besides support for high-definition video, what's even more interesting from an accessibility perspective (besides caption support) is the inclusion of MSAA support for Firefox.

Flash movies will finally be accessible to JAWS screen reader users in Firefox. Even though screen reader users will now be able to access Flash content in Firefox, I doubt this will mark a shift of a portion of screen reader users to Firefox since it isn't as usable with a screen reader as IE is as yet.

Download the latest Flash player

Other slightly unrelated but interesting links :
Internet Explorer keyboard shortcuts for JAWS & Firefox/ JAWSAssist hotkey command list pretty old
Mozilla's implementation of MSAA

I came to know about Blender this Friday while discussing open source with a coworker this Friday.

I was impressed to hear that it had features comparable to high end 3d softwares such as Maya and 3dsMax which include intuitive easy to use UI with a lot of keyboard shortcuts to speeden up work, a particle system, GLSL shaders, HDR rendering, even a fluid simulator! You can use it with YafRay (yet another free raytracer) allows for GI (photo realistic rendering possible!).

I'm hardly a decent 3d artist but manage to work and painstakingly pull of what is required when I am designing party flyers, posters and cd covers. Now that I've heard of Blender, I plan to move from 3dsMax and shift onto this powerful open source 3d program and hope I can learn it well to make the best of it. I hope you guys try it out too. In case you have used Blender, plan to start using it, just have good relevant resources to share, or would like to share your experience with it, do drop a comment.

Relevant links:
Blender website (The website uses the Typo3 open source CMS.)
YafRay (Yet another free raytracer) Blender hotkey reference
Blender video tutorials
Blender 3D: Noob to ProNoob to Pro- a free book on Wikibooks

If you can't enable clean URL's in Drupal when set up locally, chances are that mod rewrite is disabled and all you have to do is uncomment a line in your httpd.conf file in order to enable mod rewrite disabled. If you're using XAMPP, it's located at xampp\apache\conf.

Open the file in notepad or a text editor of your choice and search for the following line:
#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Uncomment it by getting rif of the #.

Restart Apache and you should be able to enable clean URL's now. In case you can't, drop a a comment and I'll be glad to help out.

...FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide...

This is one website I would urge you to visit. It throws a word at you after which you're supposed to select the right synonym. For every answer you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN which go to people who require it the most. Rotating ad banners pay for the rice.

When I first played this game around a month back, I think you got 10 grains and 10 points for every correct answer. I kept the browser tab open for two days two days and made 2000 points before I closed it. It's rather addictive.

A really cool feature added is that you can now click on the 'Options' link available in the global navigation, located at the top, and set the website to remember your score/ grains donated. While this is an interesting feature, I believe that having a descriptive link to this feature in the global navigation would be more effective in letting people know that they can save their score and come back to continue from there, thereby increasing the usability of an otherwise well implemented website.

As quoted above, the rotating ad banners pay for the rice. A pretty neat concept.

Mo betta vocab= Mo betta karma

Inspired by Tristan Louis's research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I've created this little applet using Technorati's API which computes and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

I don't know how much this makes sense but should be no harm in checking it out. Enter your web site's uri and find out.

Check how much your blog is worth.

The Delhi International Arts Festival (DIAF) opens here in the capital, Delhi this Friday and entry to all events is free.

The first International Arts festival in India, you can expect some great visual and performing arts, films, poetry and food such as classical/ folk dance/ music/ art, theater besides performances by international artistes, a short film festival, western music, book releases, academic sessions, exhibitions and a 'kavi sammelan', a 'mushaira' and a poetry session, and a youth festival in different parts of the city.

While Sufi music event will see performances by the famous Wadali Brothers of Punjab and Warsi Brothers of Hyderabad, Indian classical dance festival will see a Kuchipudi performance by Raja and Radha Reddy.

Details on DIAF events and venue

(Badge 1)

(Badge 2)

When
Saturday, December 8, 2007

Where
Impetus Technologies
D-39/40, Sector- 59, Noida, Uttar Pradesh
(Yahoo! Maps,Google Maps)

Schedule (check BarCamp page for updates if any)
Log On - 9.30 am
Lunch Break - 1.30 pm (45 min)
Log Off - 5.30 pm

More details
BarCamp Delhi 3

The Impetus office also has a creche where you could baby-sit your kid! So having to take care of the young ones at home cannot be an excuse for not turning up at the event...
P.S: This is our conspiracy to "...catch em' young..." and turn them into hard-core barcampers when they grow up.....

On a side note, I'm pretty zapped to see that we're asking for creation of buttons/ banners without mentioning guidelines for them because the submissions are way off the actual logo. The result is that there's going to be no one clear identity.

While it was probably assumed that volunteers would create banners around the actual logo, I'd suggest adding a note requesting users to create buttons/ banners around the actual logo with a few general guidelines to follow. Actually, since its a Wiki, I might as well do it on my own instead of ranting about it.

IE Solution
Add the following to your styled div and you're done. This is IE specific however.
word-wrap: break-word;

Solution for other browsers
Use JavaScript to break the string after a certain length.

Reference:
word-wrap Attribute | wordWrap Property at MSDN
Alan Wood's suggestion
Alan Wood's example