Visited Jane's blog because of Tantek's. And read that : "Screw your non-standards-compliant browser. Upgrade, already! And AOL users, don't use AOL as a browser. Open IE on its own."

Come on... Calling IE a standards compliant browser in a nonsense. I mean WinIE of course.

Mac AOL users already have Gecko in their client, and Win AOL users should have that some day too. Use AOL as a browser !

<George> Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?
<Condi> Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.
<George> Great. Lay it on me.
<Condi> Hu is the new leader of China.
<George> That's what I want to know.
<Condi> That's what I'm telling you.
<George> That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China?
<Condi> Yes.
<George> I mean the fellow's name.
<Condi> Hu.
<George> The guy in China.
<Condi> Hu.
<George> The new leader of China.
<Condi> Hu.
<George> The Chinaman!
<Condi> Hu is leading China.
<George> Now whaddya' asking me for?
<Condi> I'm telling you Hu is leading China.
<George> Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China?
<Condi> That's the man's name.
<George> That's who's name?
<Condi> Yes.
<George> Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China?
<Condi> Yes, sir.
<George> Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East.
<Condi> That's correct.
<George> Then who is in China?
<Condi> Yes, sir.
<George> Yassir is in China?
<Condi> No, sir.
<George> Then who is?
<Condi> Yes, sir.
<George> Yassir?
<Condi> No, sir.
<George> Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone.
<Condi> Kofi?
<George> No, thanks.
<Condi> You want Kofi?
<George> No.
<Condi> You don't want Kofi.
<George> No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the U.N.
<Condi> Yes, sir.
<George> Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N.
<Condi> Kofi?
<George> Milk! Will you please make the call?
<Condi> And call who?
<George> Who is the guy at the U.N?
<Condi> Hu is the guy in China.
<George> Will you stay out of China?!
<Condi> Yes, sir.
<George> And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N.
<Condi> Kofi.
<George> All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone.
(Condi picks up the phone.)
<Condi> Rice, here.
<George> Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you Get Chinese food in the Middle East?

3rd thursday of November, the Beaujolais Nouveau is available !

You use Netscape 7, Mozilla or Phoenix on Windows and want a real full screen mode, as good as Opera's, ie without any toolbar at the top of the screen ? Check out that little XPI made by joe@krickelkrackel.de.

Oh, and don't forget to disable Flash...

From Dr. Daniel Glazman, Senior Head of The Composer Bank of DevnullLand, son of everyone deceased in the area during the 4 last years.

Dear Mister Kin, I am a colleague of President Joe 'Mambo' Francis from the free Republic of the WoodooMoodoo. Presently there is a war going on in my component and so my family, linked to all the Royal Families of both the Old and Ancient Worlds, urges me to reach peace and please our customers.

After a careful study, it appears that the State of War could be stopped if and only if you, or one other member of your Cast of Super-Reviewers, review a diplomatic document and give it Your Approval. Even if I don't have about $20 Million united state dollars for this request, I decided to contact you to help me.

I am prepared to give you 20% of the acknowledgements for solving this big problem if you can assist me in super-reviewing this bug #179055 that my fellow Kathy 'Umbalala' Brade reviewed in bugzilla before the week-end started.

Please, do contact me immediately for us to discuss. As soon as I hear from you, and confirm your assistance you can be sure I and my descendants will hail your name during the 684 coming years.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179055

Best regards,

GLAZOU M'GLAZOU

Pierre Saslawsky waves at ex-colleagues and Mozilla community (he called me yesterday evening, and he is back from Marocco after a long motorbike ride).

Jean Paoli, co-editor of XML 1.0, my former technical manager when I was working at Grif and now Mister XML at Microsoft, speaks of XML in Office 11. If they do XML like they did HTML in Office, this is deeply frightening.

Oh ! Forgot to mention that Gabriel, my second son, had his first birthday the 16th ! Happy birthday my little shrimp :-)

Went back home at 5pm today to fix the hot water, again... and I succeeded ! FINALLY ! Oh happy day !

Netscape.fr is back with a new super-powered search engine. Well, at least when you search in the french pages. It uses the Exalead engine and I must say that the results are impressive. The UI is simple and useable, and has a lot of very cool features. If you search on the whole web, it uses Google.

I am not saying this because it's Netscape.fr. I am saying this because it's really good. If you're a French speaker, use it and love it !

I want one. Don't you want one too ?

When I started using Dreamweaver, ages ago, it was incorrectly generating nested HTML lists, exactly like Composer generate them right now, ie with sublists siblings of top list items instead of being contained in them.

It took 5 years to Dreamweaver to fix the problem, and I just found a quite doable way of solving it too in Composer. This is covered by bugzilla's bug 54479. Unfortunately, this is not very high priority on my todo list... I'll try to make it happen as soon as possible anyway.

The v0.3 of CaScadeS, my CSS editor for Composer, is available in XPI form for Netscape 7 and Mozilla.

You're a Mozilla or Netscape 7 user ? You want to have access to most of the hidden prefs without having to tweak yourself by hand the prefs.js file ? Check MozillaTweak, an add-on by the Polish Mozilla Team MozillaPL.org. Install it, use it, love it. And make sure to try the signature manager in the mail composition window !!!

"Only in Silicon Valley cafe can you randomly overhear folks quoting from a W3C mailing list that you also happen to read." Well, first it's false because it happened to me here too. Then only in Saint-Germain en Laye can you meet a former W3C Chairman when you go to the food market a sunday morning at 9am. AH !-)

The question to Mrs Hamel, that she kindly forwarded to Professor Vennemann :

Hello,

I appreciated a lot your article about Vascon published in "Pour la Science" and I had a question related to the name of the city of Paris.

As you surely know, the name of Paris comes from the name of the gaulic tribe of the Parisii, and the name of the tribe is supposed to come from the gaulic word paryo, coming itself from the indo-european *k^weryos meaning cauldron. I read from a few sources that this interpretation is highly questionable and wonder if the name could in fact come from the vascon ibar.

I am not a linguist, and don't know if a vascon "b" could turn into a gaulic "p" but I found the similarity interesting enough to contact you.

Looking forward to reading you,

Best regards,

Daniel Glazman

The answer :

Dear Mr. Glazman:

Thank you for the friendly letter addressed to Mrs. Hamel.

The traditional etymology proposed for the name of the Parisii is indeed not very satisfactory, and there is a general theory about the origin of tribal names, albeit issued by a toponomast held in low repute by most contemporaries, Hans Bahlow, according to which a goodly part of those names derive from toponyms, including e.g. that of the Franks and that of the Swabians. The name element "bar-" is frequent in European hydronyms, and the name of a river flowing a few miles from my village, "Paar", from older "Baraha"(*), i.e.  "Bar-aha", meaning 'Bar river', suggests a hydronymic significance of "bar-", cf. "Ur-ach" (I believe that one is in the article) and others. The loss of initial vowels (called aphaeresis/apheresis by linguists), in your etymology "ibar-" > "bar-", is not uncommon, and missing the exact voice quality of a foreign sound in loan-word adaptation, in your etymology "p-" for "b-", is not either. The "-is-" of "Parisii" (if morphologically "Par-is-i-i") could be the frequent river-name termination, identical with the reconstructible Basque "is-" '(body of) water'. Names possibly deriving from *"Barisa" (e.g. "Berese", now "Beerze", in Brabant) could be investigated (which I have not done); *"Barisa" would be a potential source of *"Baris-i-", and perhaps then, with a Latinizing termination, of "Parisi-i".

So yours is a workable and, indeed, ingenious hypothesis. But, as I have pointed out, it is not an obvious one, because two auxiliary assumptions are required. But this may be compensated by a better semantic fit than in the traditional etymology.

Sorry I have no better news than this.

With best regards,

Theo Vennemann.

17 November 2002

e-Copy to Mrs. Elisabeth Hamel. (Hallo, Frau Hamel!)

(*) With a regular South German sound change "b" > "p".

:-) :-) :-)