The W3C  has advanced CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3 to Last Call status.

Of course, this won’t do much for people still using IE.

Or at least their web site now looks like it belongs here.

Although I’m not sure if the redesign is really an improvement, other than appearance. By shrinking the navigation bar at the left of the home page they’ve added clicks to getting to a lot of content, and many of the new pages are quite incomplete.

Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites

This anecdote illustrates the most serious manifestations of the data-jail problem. Third-generation version-control (hg, git, bzr, etc.) systems pretty much solve it for code repositories; every checkout is a mirror. But most projects have two other critical data collections: their mailing-list state and their bug-tracker state. And, on all sites I know of in late 2009, those are seriously jailed.

I’ve been wondering lately if UTForge shouldn’t switch to git from subversion, and this is one of the reasons.

The winners were announced last night. Someone affiliated with the University was a cowinner of the Physics prize:

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.

I’m not sure if my favorite was the study showing cows that have names give more milk than cows that don’t, or the guys in Mexico who made diamonds out of tequila, or the brassiere that can be converted into two gas masks.

(via The Register.)