And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.

For the sixth year in a row, Rex Sorgatz compiled a well-researched list of the 30 most notable blogs.

Full Circle, an independent PDF magazine about Ubuntu Linux, published its twentieth issue. Congratulations!

New Year's resolutions at McSweeney's. What a great joke.

Goodbye 2008, hello 2009. I wish you all a happy New Year! (Do not miss the leap second.)

Classical New Year's music to party like it's 2008:

Eirik Solheim took images from the same spot (a couple of trees) over the year and merged them to a series of time-lapse videos. Try to watch this in fullscreen HD, it looks so much better.

Dave Smith is looking for an algorithm to get "nodes [that] are the most senior ancestors (speaking in tree terms, of course)" in a directed graph.

Orange juice – I am a fan.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from above. Lots of gorgeous pictures that are free for personal use.

A friend of mine wanted to compare writer Malcolm Gladwell to The Simpsons' Sideshow Bob. (Do not ask me why.) But we quickly found out that we were the last persons on Earth to have that hil-lare-ious idea.

Welcome to the machine tag. Machine tags (or triple tags?) are tags of the form:

namespace:key=value

I wonder whether there is already a "standard" for tasks like specifying the language something is written in. At the time of writing this, I use tags like "lang:en" to mark something as (here) English. Following the machine tag scheme, it should be read as "lang=en" without a namespace part (similar to the "lang" HTML attribute). The namespace would have to be a reserved global identifier along the lines of "meta".

Are machine tags useful at all? Or is there a better way or microformat to implement their functionality? I have no idea, but this is all quite fascinating.

On a lighter note: Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!

Update: I guess it would make sense to set the current domain name (or perhaps sub-domain/URL in case of multiuser sites?) as namespace if an explicit namespace has been omitted. Following this approach, it might be a good idea to associate every namespace with an URL. This would allow to link machine tags to web service APIs.

Media related to Gustav Klimt at Wikipedia Commons.

Art Deco designs by S. Charles Lee. Functional, minimalistic elements are combined to form unnecessarily complicated structures. Many Art Deco buildings would make great science-fiction settings.

The Incredible Em & Elastic Layouts with CSS. An introduction to em-based CSS layouts by Jon Tan.

Video of the moon transiting earth. Imagine where you have to place the camera to take these pictures.

"Bergwein" by Efdemin. (via tat)

Big Picture's "The year 2008 in photographs". (Part 2, part 3.)

Why you should have a web site. This post by Jeremy Keith seems to be a transcript of a talk given by Steven Pemberton at XTech 2008.

What if you want to move your photos from one website to another? How do you choose which social networking sites to commit to? What about when a Web 2.0 site dies? This happened with MP3.com and Stage6. Or what about if your account gets closed down? There are documented cases of people whose Google accounts were hacked so those accounts were subsequently shut down – they lost all their data.

These are examples of Metcalfe's law [link added] in action. What should really happen is that you keep all your data on your website and then aggregators can distribute it across the Web.

Textile designs by Leah Evans. These quilted landscape maps must take forever to create.

3quarksdaily has collected a few sites featuring On Kawara, a Japan-born conceptual artist.

Starting on New Year, I am going to read the Bible within 12 months, following one of the numerous Bible reading plans. I like the concept of the Bible Companion, but I am not sure yet.

Doing this is not meant to be a New Year's resolution. It is just neat to start at the beginning of a year. But then again, that is the whole point about resolutions too, I guess. I should have started on Advent Sunday. Never mind.

Editors – Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors.

Make Blog's intro to the Arduino. Some time ago, I thought about linking the Arduino Gift Guide. But I refrained from doing so because I had the impression that the hardware implementation does not allow assembler-like programming. I want to be able to work with the "messy details".

Backus-Naur Form as defined by Wikipedia:

In computer science, Backus-Naur Form (BNF) is a metasyntax used to express context-free grammars: that is, a formal way to describe formal languages.

BNF is widely used as a notation for the grammars of computer programming languages, instruction sets and communication protocols, as well as a notation for representing parts of natural language grammars.

Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa. Roger Alsing wrote a clever algorithm to express a given bitmap image through a combination of a small number of semi-transparent polygons. He uses a hill climbing approach. Of course, this is far from lossless but the Mona Lisa example is quite impressive. (via kottke)

Jack Cheng on how to max out your love-growth-cash triangle. I like the analogy.

The website for a 2002 MoMA exhibition of the German expressionist artist group "Die Brücke" contains a gallery of over 100 works, mostly paintings. (Based on Flash, so no direct link. Click on "prints" in the upper right corner.)

These days. A nicely composed video of playing dogs by Textism's Dean Allen. Very relaxing, I miss the summer.