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
see also :
Study
for a Portrait, 1953
and
Portrait of Jacques Dupin, 1990
. No one is accusing anyone of creeping Wegman-ism here. I
am just enjoying the echo, so to speak.
meta
I think the difference is that every email application ever written sucks
and RSS aggregators (like
everything else, so the truism goes) are striving to be
email clients.
meta
Susheel Daswani : "We have just started a project to integrate Creative Commons licenses into the LimeWire (Gnutella) client."
I have never had any compelling
reason to care about Gnutella but this is pretty cool all
the same.
foobar
.
meta
Sighted : The B-boat
The Ascii Art Dictionary
Dominic Mitchell : XML::SAX::Builder.pm
"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..."
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Aside from the fact that the current iteration of this software that runs this weblog
is tied up with RSS and that I
can't ever find the time to finish it, I am going to scrap
all things RSS in any future versions. Fuck it - and I mean
all of it. On bad days, I have some pretty bitter ideas
about what it all means. On good days, I simply realize it
is not worth the trouble. Instead, I am going to spend more
time with
xbel
since it is more
interesting
and has always mapped better to my idea of
weblog
. This whole idea cropped up again when I noticed that
someone had
modelled XBEL as RDF
(ick ick ick) but then I noticed that
monkeyfist syndicates as XBEL
and that settled it. So the bad news is you've been warned.
The good news is it probably won't happen for a
while.
meta
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
meta
Props to Elliotte Rusty Harold for outling the changes in XHTML 2.0
in bullet-form. I will reprint
them here, for the curious, since Elliotte doesn't have
permalinks.
- The applet tag is repleaced with the object tag.
- The img tag is repleaced with the object tag.
- Forms are replaced by XForms
- Events are replaced by XML Events
- Frames are replaced by the as-yet unreleased XFrames
- All deprecated tags from HTML 4 are removed.
- The href attribute can be attached to most elements so that any element can be a link.
refers to
meta
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.
meta
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."
refers to
meta
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
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Let it never be said that I don't like a good hack.
But I tend to think that the
Etherpeg hack that they whipped up over at the Emerging
"look ma, I can blog my poop" Technology conference is
well, a bit lacking. No, what I'd like to see is Etherpeg
combined with [
insert name of (MacOS) application that generates
sounds from a tcpdump here
] and used to generate real-time videos which could then be
streamed onto a Fahrenheit 451 display. The resultant
Warhol-esque ambient nightmare room would have the Biennial
new-media nerds wetting themselves like Pavlovian
dogs.
meta
José Theodore : "He's probably our best player right now."
That's a good one, Josie. You
just keep doing whatever it is you need to be the "second
best" player, okay?
meta
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
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Michael S. DeGraw-Bertsch : Configuring a FreeBSD Access Point for your Wireless Network
Tony Collen : "[H]ere's the BlogML discussion group."
Which got me thinking about
DocBook
again
; what it can already do and what it can't do in a weblog
context...
workflow -> /article/ @status categories -> /article/articleinfo/subjectset/ subject # subjects even have a weight attribute. bonus! issn -> /article/articleinfo/ issn via -> /article/ ackno footnotes -> /article/ note...DocBook has more ways to specify dates and authors than you'll ever care about. DocBook can head, deck and lead . DocBook has hooks up the wazoo for denoting formatting (lists, code entries, etc.) DocBook also has hooks for indexing specific words or passages which has got to be a good thing for the people trying to make life easier for Google. Problems with DocBook include : the lack of an
ID
attribute which make permalinks pretty hard; the inability
to create nested relationships (for example, comments or
footnotes each with permalinks; the lack of any sort of
root level href element for a blog/article; can be time and
CPU intensive to munge. Interesting... see also :
W3C, Requirements for a Web Ontology
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<!ENTITY % Block "(abstract,(section|include)*)">
So, the other day I registered
a
new domain
and sat down to start fleshing out the contents of the
site. Eventually, the inevitable questions of separating
form from content gave way to the inevitable questions of
separating form from content from structure. In the past, I
have relied heavily on server-based widgets, like PHP, for
doing headers and footers. Later, I even wrote an
Apache::Aaronland handler to take that PHP site and
mod_perl-ize it without changing a single character in the
source files. But both solutions just break if the site is
moved to a server with no bells and whistles. At the very
least, the raw HTML is all fucked up and won't validate.
So, the thinking goes, maybe I will just create YA generic
DTD for webpages or use one that someone else has written.
Personally, I was considering using
acmeml
(for lack of a better name) or
otlml
and running the files through an XSLT processor. But, it's
the same problem : what if you don't have access to an XSLT
widget or it breaks? Further, there's always just that
extra little bit of formatting that you want to able to add
to your content; witness the
description
element in RSS. Wouldn't it be nice to have a markup
language that you could add structure and logic to? To
which arbitrary tags could be applied and that still "just
worked" when the document proper is sent to a browser. Even
if the backend magic suddenly broke, the site might look
like crap but presumably it would still be usuable. HTML
is, we'll all agree, not the best candidate at first blush.
XHTML, on the other hand, comes pretty close. Through the
magic of parameter entities and the ability to define and
tweak them
inside
the
DOCTYPE
declaration, you can essentially wrap (X)HTML in your own
case-specific tags.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" [ <!ENTITY % dtdMods SYSTEM "http://www.eatdrinkfeelgood.org/dtd.mod"> %dtdMods; ]>This is still an imperfect solution. The first problem is that the browsers have never been taught to deal with this syntax so the
%dtdMods;]>
from the DOCTYPE declaration gets printed to the browser
window. Dunno. The second problem involves the fact that I
am overriding the
%Block;
entity, in
dtd.mod
, which is used to
determine
the child elements for the
body
tag. The good news is that I can re-assign the list of
valid children, in this case :
abstract
;
section
;
include
, thus applying more structure to my document than a pure
formatting language allows out of the box. Since the
children of the first two elements are
p
and
div
, respectively, I can start tapping away in HTML to my
heart's content. The bad news is that the
%Block;
entity is also used by the
blockquote
and
noscript
tags. There isn't much to do about this since you can't
redefine elements; oh well. A third problem is that you can
not use already defined parameter entities inside new
definitions...
<!ENTITY % foo "(a|b|%c;|d)*">...without causing the w3c validator grief. I don't know why. Rudimentary testing suggests that you should not waste your time trying to assign styles to your new tags. Your mileage may vary.
meta
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}]
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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."
refers to
meta
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."
refers to
meta
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
meta
Morning Becomes Eclectic : Joe Henry and Daniel Lanois
(real evil g2)
meta
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."
meta
You would think that the first thing on a bank's list of things
to tell customers when they
don't want to sign up for Internet banking because they are
concerned you [the teller] will lose your job is : Don't
leave this document out for customers to see. Atleast not
to the page that recommends you say "I love for working for
the [insert bank here]!"
meta
Marc A. Hershberger : svg2swf.pl
"I'm working on translating Rob
Lanphier's svg2swf (which is written in Python) to a Perl
extention."
meta
No, Windows! No, Mac! No, *nix! Mmmm, beer.
refers to
meta
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."
meta
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
meta
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."
meta
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."
meta
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..."
Cool. This has always seems like
The Right Thing to do with OPML; I just didn't know enough to
write the code.
meta
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."
meta
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.
meta
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."
refers to
meta
If anything is going to drive me away from computers
it's the fact that my handwriting
just sucks these days.
meta
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.
meta
This one is for the people with the teeny weeny webcam thumbnails
small .... big ... .small .... big
..... mmmmm.
meta
Good Housekeeping :
Shut the fuck up bullets
go out to Greg Knass for writing the
following nonsense :
If you're
instantly repulsed by this concept, congratulations: you're
probably a woman.
It was all kind of cute and endearing, in a
what are you...sheep?
sort of way until then. That, however, is just plain stupid.
meta
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]."
meta
Studio B : Tim O'Reilly on E-Books
Yeah yeah yeah
whatever. I want an OS that is
stable, networked, can play with all the cool Unix toys and
*builds* on everything that is good about the Mac.
Throbbing dialogue buttons and goofy email attachments were
not exactly what I had in mind.
refers to
meta
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."
refers to
meta
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)..."
meta
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."
meta
The First Virtual Meter
How do you measure space when you can
just change the resolution? via
calamondin
.
meta
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
.
meta
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."
refers to
meta
Help out and sign the petition
asking Adaptec to release the
necessary code for Be to write a driver for 2940UW SCSI card.
meta
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."
meta
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."
meta
wtf?
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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.
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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
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it's the software, stupid