1790: The French National Assembly decides to create a decimal system of measurement. The metric system is born.

This came after the storming of the Bastille but still before the declaration of a republic and the execution of King Louis XVI. But revolution was in the air: “National Assembly” was simply the new name the upstart Third Estate had given itself.

The assembly was acting on a motion by Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. Under the ancien régime, France measured with an inch, foot and fathom (pouce, pied and toise) about 6.6 percent larger than their English counterparts.

The first meter was based on clockmaking: the length of a pendulum with a half-period (a one-way swing) of one second. Responding to a proposal by the French Academy of Sciences, the assembly redefined the meter in 1793 as 1/10,000 of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole.

The system was elegant. All conversions were based on 10, with Greek prefixes (deka-, hecto-, kilo-) for multiples and Latin (deci-, centi-, milli-) for fractions. The gram unit of weight was defined by the weight of one cubic centimeter (aka milliliter) of water.

The new “Republican Measures” became legal throughout France in 1795 and were made compulsory in 1799 when definitive platinum meter bars and kilogram weights were constructed. But resistance to the new measures lasted for decades.

France also used a quasi-metric Revolutionary Calendar with each month consisting of three décades of 10 days each. (Revolutionaries even attempted a metric day of 10 hours of 100 minutes each of 100 seconds each.) But Napoleon returned France to the Gregorian calendar in 1806.

The current International System of Units — or SI, for Système International — is based on the Treaty of the Meter signed in Paris on May 20, 1875. The United States was a signatory, and the metric system is the legal system in this country, although the legal alternate English system remains more widely used. (An online conversion engine can make translation easy.)

The meter was formally redefined in 1960 as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red light radiation of the krypton 86 atom (transition between levels 2p10 and 5d5). The new standard was 100 times more precise than the old. The current definition, adopted in 1983, makes the meter the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second.

That’s 39.37 inches to counter-revolutionaries.

- Wired

that is based . Not sure about you, but I still think a system based Today was the day

On my box affectionately know as sub-prime, ie8 shows me that the wordy tab instructions of ie7 has been replaced, but only with web 2.0ish gradient language telling me the obvious, “you’ve opened a tab”. This weak phrasing reminds me of the oldie but not so goodie aol phrase turned movie, “you’ve got mail”. Sorry IE8 team, but this is pathetic. Both ie7 and ie8 do not give me anything useful when I hit ctrl+t.

I am going to skip over firefox and delve right into opera because firefox is even worse than ie in that ctrl+t simply gives me a blank address bar and blank page. No instructions nothing useful. Simple, yes, useful, no. In this case the KIMAC has not been met.

My superb memory, ha ha, has faltered since I’m not exactly sure how I came across Opera again, but somehow I heard an interview with one of the oldest players in the browser space and downloaded their operamini to my phone. In general it had a nice feel to it so I recently decided to stuff the pipes of the old laptop with yet another program and download the latest opera. For the most part it has been a good experience. Its tab implementation absolutely rocks.

Opera is on the forefront of the tab. They have a feature called speed dial, invoking the paradigm from a phone where when you instantiate a new tab, ctrl+t, rather than being presented with a blank page like in firefox, or a page which explains tabs (only useful once), opera gives you a 3×3 grid of thumbnails with which you can add your favorite sites. Like a mini favorites/bookmarker it allows you to throw in a reasonable number, nine, sites you might use. The paradigm is easy for non-techies, the number of options is kept manageable and the thumbnails give you visual cues for easy nav. I love this feature.

Click here for a side-by-side comparison of the implementations.

The second tab feature of note is a thumbnail of your other tabs. We have seen this on other sites, such as ask.com, and on the windows powertoy alt+tab switcher, but opera incorporates a thumbnail of the webpage into the hover state on other tabs. This gives you a nice preview of non-focused tabs in a mouse-friendly way, if you are not a master ctrl+tab switcher.

Click here for a view of the thumbnailing feature.

I have had a few crashes most notably when trying to add cookinglight.com to the speeddial, but overall it has taken over as my default browser for everything but web development. There are probably ways to manage this better, but ff has become clogged with development tools, firebug, webdev toolbar, yslow etc that impede on my general surfing not to mention the memory creep.

The company chatter mill was discussing the recent blog-talk about the relatively low line count of tadalist. I’m not sure how one can disregard the framework line count and the years of other work which resulted in the RoR framework. Lets take a look at where this task management software is failing me, and ript it a bit.

First off the design seems to follow the personal shit/task list management style of clearing your lists proposed by management self help gurus such as David Allan and Timothy Ferris and The Steven Covey. What happens if you are not the typical type A person and you have a list that is growing like mint in spring, no matter its dead state over the winter it keeps growing back?

Figure 1. - My personal list.
This is a mix of people to call, crap to fix around the house etc. Hmm it quickly grew to around 20 items and seems to hover in this state no matter my relative mix of sitting my fat ass on the couch vs getting jacked up on coffee and “getting things done”.

So in this perpetual state of 20 items, the add another item link (btw, links are for navigation, buttons are for actions, but that is another point), is redonkulously placed in the middle of my list serving as the dividing line between stuff to do and stuff thats done. To rectify this problem I might throw the add link at the top instead. Maybe I’d put it at the bottom of the page, at least I’d be able to ctrl+end to get to the button. Maybe I could split the stuff to do vs stuff done lists in half, thereby pushing the bottom to the bottom, but that might invade on the google ads revenue on the right. In any case the last place the link belongs is in the middle. Finally I could add a keyboard shortcut to add a new item, this might be there but I tried some Usually combo strokes and did not find anything.

Figure 2 - DoubleClick to add an item.
Next, why the hell do I click a link call “add another item” only to expose a textbox, cancel link, and a button titled “add this item”. This design paradigm has the code smell of dhtml click-trickery. If a developer in my shop did this they would face a grilling about why we would force a user to click another link to perform a primary action, adding an item. The clutter of the textbox, button and link does not need to be hidden. This type of flashiness is common for people who are just learning the artistry of dhtml. Remember, just because some browsers supported the <marquee> or <blink> tag does not mean we should have used them.

I could continue on with how the separate click into reorder mode renders the act of prioritization more annoying than I want, or how I do not understand the sorting mechanism on the main my lists page, or how this page is not reorderable, but my point in this dissection is not to catalog the design issues.

While its an admirable but questionable fact that tadalist was written with 600 lines of code, the “simplicity” of this app actually has some critical flaws. An honest evaluation of clickability, and navigation could result in no more net lines of code but a better product. As we move agile into the mainstream look out for more sophisticated methodologies to synthesize client feedback to migrate products from KISS to KIMACS.

Flying cars, pill-sized meals, moon colonies, ergonomic, yet-oh-so-revealing space suits; for some of us, these popular predictions for a futuristic 21st century have yet to come to fruition. But some sci-fi fantasies can be made real, as advocates for tracking chip technology have recently demonstrated. The United Kingdom prison system is moving towards an under-the-skin monitoring system for its inmates, and this same technology may be coming to an epidermis near you.

The UK Ministry of Justice is planning a widespread adoption of implanted tracking chips for prison inmates, parolees, and sex offenders. It’s rumored the paparazzi has called for implanting British royals as well to make their jobs easier. Each chip emits an individual Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) code that allows officials to keep tabs on the tagged individual’s location. The chip, which is about the size of two grains of rice and encapsulated in glass, would be implanted within the musculature of the subject’s right triceps muscle (lefties catch a break here). According to VeriChip Corp., the chip’s Florida-based manufacturer, those implanted with the RFID tag would not be able to feel the device under their skin, nor would they be subject to any health hazards (except the nagging feeling someone may be watching them).

- read more @ ohmygov

Seems like VeriChip should have been watching Heroes and implanted the tracking device in the trapezius. Even better they should have gotten themselves a little product placement deal and some celebrity backing. While my baby will not get implanted at birth, I wonder what the odds are that my grandchild will not be?