Dharma

January 24, 2007

iPod Index

By echomrg

One of the buzzwords of the day in the apple related blogosphere (1 2) is the so called "iPod index" that the biggest Australian bank (the Commonwealth Bank) decided to use to compare the value of diffent world currencies.

From what Yahoo reports it looks like people from Brazil pay a hefty 327$ for what people in the US pay for a 2Gb iPod nano.

The piece on Yahoo states that: "Purchasing power parity surveys compare the prices of goods in different countries and at their simplest level can help show whether one currency is undervalued against another.".

In simpler words it means that the chart simply compares the iPod price in different countries and the exchange rate between different currencies, not the real purchasing power of a standard salary.

I think there's something wrong here.

Here in Italy a 2Gb iPod costs 149€.
As of today 1€ is worth a little more than 1.30$.

It means that buying an iPod in italy costs around 114$ while the chart states that it would cost 192$.

I think that either they did something wrong or the Yahoo article is reporting a grossly oversimplified version of the parameters involved.

Oh, sure, there's also a slight chance that I did get everything wrong 😉

1 comment

January 24, 2007

Eschatological Taxonomy

By echomrg

from Jamais Cascio's Open the Future weblog, through Warren Ellis' Blog:

He should absolutely get in touch with Exit Mundi and categorize every item on their list. My favourite still is the Bible's own Apocalypse with its multiple comebacks and delirious timeline.

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January 10, 2007

Lifetype templates – reprise

By echomrg

During the new year bug squashing session we (Shah and I) managed, to check and fix some of the templates that had problems. We found the cause of the "<ul> error" that afflicted some of the themes (probably most of them are afflicted, but we fixed only the ones that only had that single error): when a link category had no links the template would create an <ul> with no <li> elements, causing a validation error. We had to add an IF smarty directive to check the presence of links and leave the whole <ul> out when it contained no links. We also added links back to noblogs and autistici or admin and album links to some of the templates that lacked them.

The list of validating templates has thus grown a little:

blufill
cab
connections
darkfire
dots
drove-all-night
flower
flyupsky-daytime
flyupsky-evening
gutenberg
human condition
innerscape
mars-spirit
minitemplate
outback
pink_lilies
reic
reic1
ShadedGrey
StreetCorner
toni
water_play

We chose to let user-modded templates untouched, so if you were using one of the templates that we corrected you may want to go back to their default version and reapply the changes you made, so you can take advantage of the fixes.

Unfortunately it looks like deleting existing templates can cause some troubles so the "they-give-you-motion-sickess ugly" ones are going to stay.

Unglyness is never out of fashion.

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January 10, 2007

Sometimes dreams come true…

By echomrg

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December 4, 2006

Template Validating

By echomrg

I've just finished checking and validating all the lifetype templates installed on our platform, the results are abysmal: of the 90 templates that I checked only 5 validates against their declared doctype and the w3c validator:

blufill
flyupsky-daytime
flyupsky-evening
reic
reic1

The others all have different problems. As I already mentioned before there are more than a few that present the same error, so I hope we'll be able to salvage them.

Beside that, there are a few of the themes that are really ugly to look at. And with really ugly I mean "they-give-you-motion-sickess ugly".

Sooner or later we'll do some cleansing.

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November 21, 2006

Lifetype Templates

By echomrg

I've been validating the lifetype templates installed on noblogs agains the w3c html validator: the results are discouraging. After validating 48 themes i've found only 3 themes that are compliant with the xhtml specs:

blufill

flyupsky-daytime

flyupsky-evening

All the others have errors: most of them are amateurish, with uppercase tags, <font> tags and general problems, a couple of them contain characters that are outside the UTF-8 charset so the validator refused to even parse them. The most embarassing are the ones that have a badge proudly claiming compliancy with the standards and pointing to the validator which, of course, respond with a nice red page.

Finally there are a bunch of templates, roughly based on the same theme, i guess, that all have the same error:

Line 275 column 15: end tag for "ul" which is not finished.

As soon as I manage to get my ssh connection back I'll have a look and try to fix the latters, it should be a pretty simple problem.

I've also found out that the LifeType admin interface has a bug, when you try to save a draft it gives a javascript error:

getPostEditFormElements is not defined

saveDraftArticleAjax

plogui.js (line 43)

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November 20, 2006