What with maps of Mars and maps of parades, there’s hardly any need for a Friday Fillip.

But I’m going for something a bit more down-to-earth than Mars and more colourful even than Irish green: the early crocus, a.k.a. Crocus imperati Ten. Spring will soon be here (folks in the far, far, far West will please put their hands down) and when that particular member of the Iridaceae family graces lawns and flower beds, we know we can start to unclench. We also know that other members of the Liliales order will follow in quick succession, until even the chillier . . . [more]

In yet another first, the wonderful Google Earth has been matched by an experimental map of Mars with the same ability to zoom in, but this time in unworldly opulent colourMedia coverage can be found in the usual places.

It’s not the Mars of our grandparents, but taken from the Mars Odyssey Themis project.

The explanation behind the project is quite wonderful but check out the simulated fly-over on the new Google Video service. Or visit the volcanoes.

Welcome earthlings.

. . . [more]

Those who like to see bridges built between islands will be encouraged by the news that Windows XP can now be run on a Macintosh. The story is here. . . . [more]

Sabrina Pacifici, editor and publisher of legal research e-zine LLRX.com and blog beSpacific is the subject of an article in the Library Journal, “Indefatigable – Sabrina Pacifici” (March 15, 2006).

I have had the extreme pleasure of getting to know Sabrina over the last several months, and can vouch for the assertion that she does all these projects in her spare time, getting little sleep. On a personal basis, she has been an inspiration, and has given me an immense amount of moral support and encouragement.

She is speaking at the Computers in Libraries conference coming up . . . [more]

More on Google today, here at .

I’ve just received notification that I’ve been granted the right to play with the newest Google toy, Google Page Creator (GPC). GPC is an online wysiwyg html editor that posts pages you create to a Google server, where they’re offered up to the world.

You’re given the choice of a couple of dozen styles for your site and three or four layouts, all capable of being changed at will, thanks to the marvel of cascading style sheets. They’ve alotted the beta testers (and what isn’t on beta test at Google?) 100 megs of . . . [more]

An Irish Blessing

May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
May the rains fall soft upon your fields
And until we meet again…
May God hold you in the palm of His hand

For everything related to this day, have a look at the St. Patrick’s Day website.

For a list of parades in your city, take a look at the Parades & Events page (sorry, those of you in Ottawa, yours was last weekend!).

Cheers,
Connie . . . [more]

Some of you may be interested in this scholarly law journal which focusses exclusively on issues, practices, and procedures of appellate court systems, both federal and state, both American and international. Edited by faculty members of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, The Journal is designed to provide a forum for creative thought and dialogue about the operation of appellate courts and their influence on the development of the law. The Journal is published semi-annually; subscriptions outside the US are $30/year. The Spring 2005 issue (TOC on the journal’s website) features an essay . . . [more]

Chalk up a win to the Google twins, in a ruling out of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

A lawsuit alleging that Google Inc.’s Web search systems infringe on a publisher’s copyright was dismissed in a judgment that had interesting things to say about .

In a ruling issued last Friday and made known on Thursday, Judge R. Barclay Surrick of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejected eleven allegations contained in a civil complaint by Gordon Roy Parker of Philadelphia. Parker an online publisher of sexual seduction guides with titles . . . [more]

Sometimes, particularly at times of significant world events, I go to the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages to get a sense of how (or if) the rest of the world is reporting about them. It’s very interesting and the technology that allows you to look at so many front pages is way cool, too.

“Today’s Front Pages” is an online presentation of one of the Newseum’s most popular exhibits. Every morning, more than 400 newspapers from around the world submit their front pages to the Newseum via the Internet … the full selection of each day’s front pages is available on

In one of my recent quixotic ventures I tilted at the idea that we should put on line the tables of contents of Canadian law books. This, I reasoned, would allow them to be searched by researchers, and thus mined for the unconsidered trifles they might, and often do, contain. Accordingly I requested permission from various key publishers to get and post copies of their TOCs in digital form. Irwin was great about it, as was Emond Montgomery — whereupon I ran into one of the biggies who said no, fairly unhorsing the whole enterprise.

The reason for refusal went . . . [more]

I’m in the middle of putting up a large website for an organization and am confronting again all of the organizational difficulties that entails. I started out using an outliner to create the menu structure (architecture) of the site, so that I could get main pages, sub pages and so forth. (Somewhat surprisingly, MS Word has a decent outlining capability, though there are many beautiful small programs that do as well or better — TreePad under Windows and OmniOutliner under Mac OS X, for instance. One neat thing about Word outlines, though, is that they can be “sent” via a . . . [more]

The landmark A2K conference at Yale Law School will bring together leading thinkers and activists on access to knowledge policy from North and South, in order to generate concrete research agendas and policy solutions for the next decade. This conference will be among the first to synthesize the multifaceted and interdisciplinary aspects of access to knowledge, ranging from textbooks and telecommunications access to software and medicines. The A2K Conference aims to help build an intellectual framework that will protect access to knowledge both as the basis for sustainable human development and to safeguard human rights.

Yale Information Society Project

April . . . [more]