Coudal Partners are celebrating their 10-year anniversary, and are having a contest: send an email. From 1999.

I would’ve liked to contest, but I find it would be rather anachronistic: in 1999, I was 10 years old, and at this point in time I had been taught English in school for some two months.

I learned some years ago that symbolics.com was the first ever domain name – I never understood why that name was chosen, though.

The first domain of a company I’d heard of was xerox.com. (And while all this internet, domain stuff is still considered very new, I find it worth noting that the last one from that list was registered one and a half year before I was born.)

(Via Rands).

A very thoughtful and philosophical post by Mark Pilgrim on the case of his Dive Into Python being published by someone other than Apress, and listed on Amazon.

This is a great post, because it really shows that Pilgrim isn’t afraid to take the consequence of his choices, and he demonstrates how this can be a superior way to publish books.

Comparing the most famous font rivals ever.

I’m late to the game, but please do support what I think will be an interesting case study, if nothing else. (I say please support it, because if people don’t, I won’t get one either.)

I had this idea all set up, including code and domain, and then I discover this. Oh, well, then I won’t have to maintain it, and focus on watching all those films. (My list is also publicly available.)

(Via barklund.)

That sounds awful. I can only echo what Simon said:

Don’t speak at or attend Sys-Con conferences (which include AJAXWorld, the Cloud Computing Expo and Ajax in the Cloud), don’t write for or buy their journals (including AJAXWorld Magazine, JDJ and .NET Developer’s Journal), and don’t visit or advertise on any of their sites.

Aaron Swartz might not be the best writer in the world, but he’s very passionate about his writings, and I find that his views on life are often interesting and thought-provoking.

I must certainly attempt to get more offline; it sure would be good for me.

HTML5 is backwards-compatible with what’s already on the Web, but – despite their best efforts – there’s a lot of new stuff in it, and the WHATWG blog tries lists some helpful tools to make sure you produce good mark-up.

I don’t do much that could be labelled ‘design’, but there’s some general advice that makes sense in most industries.