posts brought to you by the category
“css”
Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the
entire database table that mapped individual entries to
categories. Such is life. What follows is a random
sampling of entries that were associated with the
category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then
it will be even more confusing. Wander around, though,
it's still a fun way to find stuff.
Oliver, Daily: 1 October 2003
I think the difference is that every email application
ever written sucks
Susheel Daswani : "We have just started a project to
integrate Creative Commons licenses into the LimeWire
(Gnutella) client."
Sighted : The B-boat
The Ascii Art Dictionary
Dominic Mitchell : XML::SAX::Builder.pm
You can't have a tag called DESTROY.
"Their real vanishing point is where our
incomprehension meets."
From the "Talking to Canadians" department :
Jean-Michel Hiver : TripleStore.pm
"is a Perl interface for a triple
store. Currently a quite naive MySQL implementation is
provided. Alternative SQL implementations can be developed by
subclassing TripleStore::Driver..."
Aside from the fact that the current iteration of this
software that runs this weblog
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is :
pelf
Pelf \Pelf\, n. [OE. pelfir booty, OF. pelfre,
akin to pelfrer to plunder, and perh. to E. pillage. Cf.
{Pilfer}.] Money; riches; lucre; gain; -- generally
conveying the idea of something ill-gotten or worthless. It
has no plural. ``Mucky pelf.'' --Spenser. ``Paltry pelf.''
--Burke. Can their pelf prosper, not got by valor or
industry? --Fuller.
web1913
pelf n : informal terms for money [syn:
{shekels}, {gelt}, {dough}, {bread}, {dinero}, {lucre},
{loot}, {moolah}, {cabbage}, {kale}]
wn
Props to Elliotte Rusty Harold for outling the changes
in XHTML 2.0
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is :
schwoopy
Exceptionally curvy. Designed without a
ruler. First official usage in Boyett's TREKS NOT TAKEN
(Harper Collins).
ex. It's hard to say which is more schwoopy,
Betty Page or a '69 Corvette. If you pour water on
something schwoopy, it'll all run off.
DSTC : JackSVG
"is a Perl application that takes
your presentation contents, written in a simple XML-based
language, and writes out a single self-contained SVG file
that contains your entire presentation."
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is :
tortuous
Tortuous \Tor"tu*ous\, a. [OE. tortuos, L.
tortuosus, fr. tortus a twisting, winding, fr. torquere,
tortum, to twist: cf. F. tortueux. See Torture.] 1. Bent in
different directions; wreathed; twisted; winding; as, a
tortuous train; a tortuous train; a tortuous leaf or
corolla. The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the
side of every hill where the copsewood grew thick.
--Macaulay. 2. Fig.: Deviating from rectitude; indirect;
erroneous; deceitful. That course became somewhat
lesstortuous, when the battle of the Boyne had cowed the
spirit of the Jakobites. --Macaulay. 3. Injurious:
tortious. [Obs.] 4. (Astrol.) Oblique; -- applied to the
six signs of the zodiac (from Capricorn to Gemini) which
ascend most rapidly and obliquely. [Obs.] --Skeat.
Infortunate ascendent tortuous. --Chaucer.
--{Tor"tu*ous*ly}, adv. -- {Tor"tu*ous*ness}, n.
web1913
tortuous adj 1: highly involved or intricate;
"the Byzantine tax structure"; "convoluted legal language";
"convoluted reasoning"; "intricate needlework"; "an
intricate labyrinth of refined phraseology"; "the plot was
too involved"; "a knotty problem"; "got his way by
labyrinthine maneuvering"; "Oh, what a tangled web we
weave"- Sir Walter Scott; "tortuous legal procedures";
"tortuous negotiations lasting for months" [syn:
{Byzantine}, {convoluted}, {intricate}, {involved},
{knotty}, {labyrinthine}, {tangled}] 2: marked by repeated
turns and bends; "a tortuous road up the mountain";
"winding roads are full of surprises"; "had to steer the
car down a twisty track" [syn: {twisting}, {twisty},
{winding}] 3: not straightforward; "his tortuous reasoning"
wn
Let it never be said that I don't like a good
hack.
José Theodore : "He's probably our best player right
now."
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is :
plenary
Plenary \Ple"na*ry\, n. (Law) Decisive
procedure. [Obs.]
web1913
plenary adj : full in all respects; "a plenary
session of the legislature"; "a diplomat with plenary
powers"
wn
Michael S. DeGraw-Bertsch : Configuring a FreeBSD
Access Point for your Wireless Network
Tony Collen : "[H]ere's the BlogML discussion
group."
<!ENTITY % Block
"(abstract,(section|include)*)">
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is
turbid
| source : web1913 | Turbid
\Tur"bid\, a. [L. turbidus, from turba tumult, disturbance,
akin to turbare to disturb. See {Trouble}, and cf. {Disturb},
{Perturb}.] 1. Having the lees or sediment disturbed; roiled;
muddy; thick; not clear; -- used of liquids of any kind; as,
turbid water; turbid wine. On that strong, turbid water, a
small boat, Guided by one weak hand, was seen to float.
--Whittier. 2. Disturbed; confused; disordered. `` Such
turbid intervals that use to attend close prisoners.''
--Howell. | source : wn | turbid adj : (of especially
liquids) clouded as with sediment; "a cloudy liquid"; "muddy
coffee"; "murky waters" [syn: {cloudy}, {muddy}, {mirky},
{murky}]
Me : Outline Markup Language 1.0b1
"is an XML application for formatting
data in a hierarchical structure. The data is organized in
groupings of node elements which may contain child nodes,
text elements or references to nodes both internal and
external to the document. ... This DTD is in it's infancy so,
please, be gentle."
Me : Userland::weblogUpdates.pm 0.3
www.foodclub.org
"promote[s] community food-buying
clubs. When I first joined a food-buying club in Alsea,
Oregon, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I never knew
such a thing existed. I decided to use my programming skills
to contribute back to the people who started it and made it
work, and to help this great idea spread. I have written
internet software that makes the administrative and
organizational tasks of running a food-buying club very
simple. It allows people to join their orders together
quickly, keeping track of prices for each item, and can even
handle splits, where many people split a single case of
something. It takes much of the headache out of combining
orders to send to the wholesaler, and then figuring out how
much everyone owes after the order comes in. ... Starting
with release 0.15 you can run it simply as standalone CGI
scripts, eliminating the need for mod_perl."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is
repine
| source : web1913 | Repine
\Re*pine"\ (r?-p?n"), v. i. [Pref. re- + pine to languish.]
1. To fail; to wane. [Obs.] ``Reppening courage yields no
foot to foe.'' --Spenser. 2. To continue pining; to feel
inward discontent which preys on the spirits; to indulge in
envy or complaint; to murmur. But Lachesis thereat gan to
repine. --Spenser. What if the head, the eye, or ear repined
To serve mere engines to the ruling mind? --Pope. | source :
web1913 | Repine \Re*pine"\, n. Vexation; mortification.
[Obs.] --Shak. | source : wn | repine v : express discontent
Morning Becomes Eclectic : Joe Henry and Daniel
Lanois
Commander Taco : Handling the Loads
"[Following the events of September
11, 2001] many news sites collapsed under the load, we
managed to keep stumbling along. Countless people have asked
me questions about how Slashdot handled the gigantic load
spike."
You would think that the first thing on a bank's list
of things
Marc A. Hershberger : svg2swf.pl
"I'm working on translating Rob
Lanphier's svg2swf (which is written in Python) to a Perl
extention."
No, Windows! No, Mac! No, *nix! Mmmm, beer.
The Perl-XML kids on RSS and DTDs : "So, ignore the
slashdot idiots
is the only conclusion I can say for
this. Oh, and implement a catalog system. I know I'm going to
look into doing one for AxKit, after this debacle left
AxKit.org dead in the water for a couple of days."
Simson Garfinkel : The Internet on a Chip
"Pervasive telemetry will create
unprecedented opportunities to collect personal information.
An engineer at Zojirushi, for example, proudly showed
iReady's Koyama a cell phone, displaying a message indicating
that the engineer's grandmother had used her wireless hot pot
that very morning.
"What does she think of this?"
Koyama asked the engineer.
"Well, she doesn't know!"
answered the engineer—who then said that if his
grandmother were aware that her hot pot was monitoring her
actions, she almost certainly would object.
"There is this whole Little Brother aspect" to the
project that is a little unsettling"
, Koyama concedes." see also
Behind the Bar Code
Gisle Aas, Dick Hardt and Paul Everitt : "The Perl for
Zope Project
lets Perl code and Python code run in
the same process, focused on making Perl an alternative
scripting language for the Zope Open Source application
server."
National Post : The Inert-net for cyber-sloths
"The chair allows users to log on to
the Web through a keyboard that is built into a folding
tray-table in the left arm. The keyboard connects to the
receiver through wireless technology, and the chair's arm
also features a 120-volt outlet with surge protection. The
chair also has a port for cable Internet connections, as well
as the ability to connect through standard phone lines."
Joshua Allen : OPML and XSLT
"Since OPML is designed to represent
information that real people usually want to look at, and
since web browsers are accustomed to dealing with
hierarchical data, OPML is an ideal fit. The following files
allow you to view, edit, and format OPML files in a web
browser..."
DJ Adams : Fun with [ Net:: ] Jabber - Headline
Delivery with RSS
Steffan Andrews : Make Your Own Visor Flip Cover
"By combining two inconvenient
covers, you can make ONE ingeniously handy and durable case."
From the Pen is Mightier than the Sword department
:
comes the
Write Here
Suite
that brings handwriting recognition software to the desktop,
using PalmOS gadgets as the interface. Meanwhile, the rumours
are not just that Apple is building handwriting software into
OS X, but that the plan to "
eliminate the need for a keyboard.
" Over coffee, this morning, I wondered aloud why no one had
yet made -- or atleast properly marketed -- textured surfaces
for digital tablets. There is a reason that artists don't all
work on the same kinds of paper or canvas or stone and the
fact that surface is imitated on the screen demonstrates that
someone isn't paying very much attention to their customers.
"Well, maybe the tablets are very sensitive," said my friend.
"And an uneven surface would interrupt how much information
it received from the pen." Exactly.
Matt Sergeant : RSSmirror.pl
"The clean-up process, in addition to
fixing "uncuddled &'s", also converts the Latin-1
entities used in RSS documents into XML characters references
to improve portability among non-validating XML processors."
If anything is going to drive me away from
computers
it's the fact that my handwriting
just sucks these days.
Heather Champ : Random Rothko
Personally, I can't stand Rothko's
work (the postcards are alright, but the paintings are just
too chalky and dusty of colour) but I really am
a sucker
for this kind of thing.
This one is for the people with the teeny weeny webcam
thumbnails
small .... big ... .small .... big
..... mmmmm.
Good Housekeeping :
the Lincoln Stein article on all
things Napster that
I mentioned
a while back, is now
online
.
Shut the fuck up bullets
CBC on the future of radio : Surviving the
Internet
"The Internet is still not making
money. They [radio stations] make money. Webcasting doesn't
make the money that regular radio does...it will. It will
probably make a lot more money, but that's what is gonna keep
radio alive [for now]."
Studio B : Tim O'Reilly on E-Books
Yeah yeah yeah
Greg Wilson has been thinking about scripting
languages
"Second, I want to see a VHLL defined
by an XML DTD ... if a program's source is defined using
<method>, <parameter>, and
<block> tags, then individual programmers can
choose whatever superficial appearance they want. Three
different programmers, for example, could view nesting using
indentation (Python), curly braces (Perl), or parenthesized
prefix notation (Scheme). I believe this would be as big an
innovation in practical programming as applets were, and
probably more useful."
Harvey Blume thinks the barbarians are the gate
only this time they "are camouflaged
by Linux to appear friendly, cooperative, even cuddly (with
adorable Finnish accents)..."
Simson Garfinkel weighs in on the Unix wars
"If I had to pick out the single
difference between the BSD community as a whole and the
proponents of Linux, I would say it is something called
'correctness.' The BSD developers are more concerned that the
underlying technology in their operating systems be
implemented in a manner consistent with the overall design of
the systems. Linux developers, overall, are more interested
in just putting together something that works."
The First Virtual Meter
How do you measure space when you can
just change the resolution? via
calamondin
.
PC Week : Compaq to Halt NT on Alpha development
About a year ago, I got to test-drive
an Alpha/NT box for a couple months. This was when DEC was
trying to woo the Mac crowd with a faster, cheaper graphics
machine. Stuff that been ported to Alpha (Painter &
Quark) screamed. Everything else ran under an NT emulator.
The really impresive thing was that the machine "learned" NT
as you used it, re-compiling into native Alpha code.
Unfortunately, we could never get QuickTime installed which
basically meant it was D.O.A. via
slashdot
.
I wandered over to the website for Saturday Night
magazine
and discovered a feature called
"Canadian Letters". Every issue they get a half dozen or so
people from across the country to write about...whatever is
going on where they are. ( Canada has the world's second
largest land mass and fewer people than California so the
physical distances do make a difference. ) I especially liked
Jonathan Goldstein's memories of living in St. Henri
. "One of Saint-Henri's greatest mysteries involves the old
men who sit in running cars. You'll find them in the middle
of the night, idling on a side street, staring at the
dashboard. Sometimes I think Saint-Henri is Disneyland for
nihilists; if it is, then idling cars are its Space
Mountain."
Help out and sign the petition
asking Adaptec to release the
necessary code for Be to write a driver for 2940UW SCSI card.
Eli M. Noam : Will the Internet Be Bad For
Democracy
"My skepticism about the Internet as
a pro-democracy force is not based on its uneven
distribution. ... The problem is that most analysts commit a
so-called error of composition. That is, they confuse micro
behavior with macro results. They think that if something is
helpful to an individual, it is also helpful to society at
large, when everybody uses it."
Quebec anglos : 'Divided we stand'
"Listening to them, you'd think we
are completely repressed, undergoing some sort of ethnic
cleansing," he said. "They don't listen to young anglophones.
The average young anglophone is not bothered if the sign that
says '3 per cent discount' is written in either language.
It's all the same for us."
wtf?
-
dude, where's my car
This document uses
CSS
kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering
its contents. Efforts have been made to separate the
form from the content so if you are viewing this in a
text-based browser it shouldn't be an issue.
On the other hand it may look funny if you are
viewing it in a browser with incomplete
CSS
and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6
comes to mind.
It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is
limited and I no longer feel very good about spending
it working around any one browser's inconsistencies
with little, or no, confidence that they will ever be
fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some later
date.
On the other hand, if something is down-right
unreadable
please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.
-
yes, we have no bananas
This page may not validate. It's not that I don't
care, it's just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of
the reason that I rewrote the entire back-end for
managing this site is that the old stuff made it too
easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through the
cracks.
See also :
W3C::LogValidator.pm
-
it's the software, stupid
Use the source, Luke.