posts brought to you by the category “scrabble”
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.
Why does the CSS first-letter selector only work with block
elements?
Leo Lapworth : SVG::TT::Graph.pm
Why I'm doing this 3 days before my wedding is anyones guess!
Excerpted : I emptied my studio at 06H30 this morning
July 24, 2003
Montreal
<snip />
Anyway, there are two things I'll remember about my studio :
On the far fall, as you walk in, the previous occupant had fixed a towel
rack to the wall. Over that, she glued mirrored glass which had been cut
into individual letters to spell the word : F U C K E R
On the near wall, as you walk in, there was an old and short filing
cabinet that had been left behind. I didn't use it at first; I just
moved it out of the way a lot. Finally, I did a Big Cleanup and put the
cabinet near a table where I could easily reach things like tape and
pencils and erasers.
The first time I opened the top drawer to put something in it I found
myself staring at a single fridge-poetry magnet that had wedged itself
into the corner where the drawer's bottom met its face. It said : LUST
Like I said, the rest of the year was really just one false start after
another.
Movable Type is now part of the FreeBSD ports collection,
Oh my god, someone please CueCat this thing.
Using English to Avoid Semantic Navel Gazing
Sean Burke has set up an RSS feed for "Recently released RFCs"
From the "My hands fucking hurt, now" department :
Bitflux Editor
"is a browser based Wysiwyg XML Editor. ... Now
you can edit your content semantically and at the same time display it to
your users and editors in its final form. "
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : tocsin
Tocsin \Toc"sin\, n. [F., fr. OF. toquier to touch, F.
toquer (originally, a dialectic form of F. toucher) + seint (for sein)
a bell, LL. signum, fr. L. signum a sign, signal. See {Touch}, and
{Sign}.] An alarm bell, or the ringing of a bell for the purpose of
alarm. The loud tocsin tolled their last alarm. --Campbell.
web1913
tocsin n 1: the sound of an alarm (usually a bell) [syn:
{alarm bell}] 2: a bell used to sound an alarm [syn: {warning bell}]
wn
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is :
elevendy-three
To avoid giving a true number when
questioned.
ex. How old are you mister? Elevendy-three.
The Drupal-gang discuss the "Collaborative book and Instant
Outlining".
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : shift
To snog, neck, or make out.
ex. "I shifted Anna at the club last night. Big
mistake."
see also :
shift dict-ified
From the "Because I Can" department : Searchable RSS
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : gripper
An obviously too tight piece of clothing.
ex. Come on, that`s a bit of gripper. We don`t want to see
that.
see also :
gripper dict-ified
Eric Murphy : Jabberzilla Whiteboard update
Radio Crankypants 18-19 : Not Invented Here
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : labatyd
"Life's A Bitch And Then Ya Die" Usually in response to
whining complaints.
ex. A. "Can you believe it? He only gave me a 3% raise!"
B. "Yeah, yeah, labatyd."
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : claque
Claque \Claque\, n. [F.] A collection of persons employed
to applaud at a theatrical exhibition.
web1913
claque n : a group of followers hired to applaud at a
performance
wn
Perlmonks : SOAP::Lite and Security
"But the fundamental problem is that SOAP is a
poorly designed protocol designed with no eye to security, and built
largely for the convenience offered because most firewalls will let
through http traffic. This was said pointed out a long time ago by Bruce
Schneier, but it is amazing how many people have missed the basic point.
The point is that firewalls are retroactive protection for security
mistakes in applications. If applications seek new ways around firewalls
but continue to make the same basic mistakes then you are guaranteed to
get into a situation where firewalls need to retroactively filter a more
complicated protocol."
Big props to Dave for giving me the push
Simon Winstow : WWW::Amazon::Wishlist.pm
"grabs all the details from [an] Amazon
wishlist."
Michael S. Shapiro : Copyright as Cultural Policy
How To Use the AbiWord [Perl] Bindings
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is neoteric
| source : web1913 | Neoteric \Ne`o*ter"ic\,
Neoterical \Ne`o*ter"ic*al\, a. [L. neotericus, gr. ?, fr. ?, compar. of
? young, new.] Recent in origin; modern; new. ``Our neoteric verbs.''
--Fitzed. Hall. Some being ancient, others neoterical. --Bacon. | source
: web1913 | Neoteric \Ne`o*ter"ic\, n. One of modern times; a modern.
Conan Heiselt : Sauté
"is a recipe organizer/cooking aid. It is
designed to be 1) easy to collect, store, catagorize, and retrieve
specific recipies, 2) able to handle thousands of recipes, and 3)
visually appealing."
Fabrice Desré : XSLTDoc
"This tool is itself an XSLT stylesheet that
analyzes another stylesheet and builds a clean documentation on it."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is doyen
| source : web1913 | Doyen \Doy`en"\, n. [F. See
{Dean}.] Lit., a dean; the senior member of a body or group; as, the
doyen of French physicians. ``This doyen of newspapers.'' --A. R.
Colquhoun. | source : wn | doyen n : the senior member of a group; "he is
the dean of foreign correspondents" [syn: {dean}]
Steve Mann : Computer Architectures For Personal Space
"I always found it strange why individuals so
willingly acquiesce to the mechanized invasions of privacy caused by
video surveillance, yet the same people become angered when overtly
photographed by an individual wielding a handheld camera. To resolve this
seemingly strange paradox, I have experimented with making myself into a
corporation, with its own body-worn video surveillance cameras, for the
protection of its body's property. What I have learned is that if I can
abandon (or appear to abandon) my autonomy, by becoming a corporation, I
have much greater freedom. In particular, I discovered that if I am bound
by external forces of policy and procedure (as is typical of a
corporation), I can be, in some ways, much more free."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is hinterland
| source : web1913 | Hinterland \Hin"ter*land`\,
n. [G.; hinter behind + land land.] The land or region lying behind the
coast district. The term is used esp. with reference to the so-called
{doctrine of the hinterland}, sometimes advanced, that occupation of the
coast supports a claim to an exclusive right to occupy, from time to
time, the territory lying inland of the coast. | source : wn | hinterland
n : a remote and undeveloped area [syn: {backwoods}, {back country},
{boondocks}]
The Spread Wide Area Group Communication System
"Spread is a toolkit and daemon that provide
multicast and group communications support to applications across local
and wide area networks. Spread is designed to make it easy to write
groupware, networked multimedia, reliable server, and collaborative work
applications. ... Spread currently has programming API's for C, Java,
Perl and Ruby."
ActiveState : Regular Expression Cookbook
FreeBSD Diary : Installing via wireless NIC
"I installed a wireless NIC into my desktop,
configured it to act as a gateway, enabled NAT, and used that as the
gateway for my laptop. The laptop then communicated with the gateway
using its own wireless NIC. Together, these two boxes allowed me to do an
install on the laptop using wireless. This was after I'd failed using the
laptop's CD, which I now know is broken."
Lingua Franca : Marxist Literary Critics Are Following Me!
"How Philip K. Dick betrayed his academic
admirers to the FBI."
A guy named Blars : mod_access_rbl
"allows you to restrict access to web pages based
on MAPS RBL style DNS servers."
I don't have a whole lot of time for the BOFH mythos
Andrew Ford : Tie::SentientHash.pm
"provides intelligent objects. The objects are
represented as hashes which: provide read-only elements, provide
'special' elements that are handled by user-supplied functions, disallow
changes to the data as specified by metadata, track changes and call a
'commit changes' function when the object is destroyed."
They don't call it a slippery slope for nothing.
Why am I spending all my time writing Perl code?
Weblogs, Theory and Practice
This is a very casual and unscientific project to
keep a record of the various writings on and about weblogs. Generally,
I've tried to exclude the semi-annual flamewars that break out
surrounding The One True Weblog.
Kip Hampton : Simple XML Validation with Perl
"Now what does Test.pm have to do with validating
an XML document? The answer lies in its combination with the XML::XPath
module. The XPath language provides a simple, powerful syntax for
navigating the logical structure of an XML document. XML::XPath allows us
to take advantage of that power from within Perl."
Webreview : Using CSS2 to Layout HTML Pages for Print
On the off chance you've got a browser that
supports CSS2...
Gisle Aas : Data::DumpXML.pm
mmmm... arbitrary data structures.
I think websites need more hot tubs
Observant readers will note the return of
the sweater
. Summer pretty much ended, as if on cue, last Friday. As we pulled out
on the road that night, we joked that it would be snowing by Tuesday. No
one will be surprised if it is. Upset maybe, but not surprised.
webCDCreator
"can be used to make a single CD-writer available
to the users in your network. There is a server that controls the
CD-writer using cdrecord. It accepts the requests from several clients
around in the network. webCDwriter comes with a client written in java
that can run as an applet within a browser. It lets the user put together
a CD and transmit the files afterward. The server gives the CD-writer to
one user at a time and tells them when to insert the CD." neat!
Edd Dumbill : Putting RDF to Work
"So began my dream of integrating all my
metadata. Somewhere there would be a large database into which my e-mail,
web browser, file system, and so on would enter metadata. I'd then be
able to, with relative ease, query the database to make connections
between data items on my computer. On top of that database, graphical
clients could be written to maintain and annotate it, and hooks written
back into the browser, file manager, and e-mail client to allow the use
of this extra information."
Alphanumerica : JavaScript File I/O
"Currently, only basic file handling from within
Mozilla is supported. One can read from and write to a file, as well as
create a new directory. This core feature set can be expanded upon with
the help of anyone who is interested in this project." This seems pretty
cool if you can forget that it's written in JavaScript. Meanwhile,
version 2.1 of
iCab
assigns a keyboard combination that lets you "abort running JavaScript
programs that call themselves again and again."
NY Times : The Electronic Fishbowl
"She is frequently approached by people who want
to touch her hair."
So, apparently the States
Wired asks 'What is your price for being ad-jacked?'
Despite the fact that "ad-jacking" is an
especially clever play on words, the time has come to make
The Magic
Christian
mandatory reading in high school. "Some friends, when I pulled up, they
were like, 'What the hell is that on your car? Did you start working for
an insurance company?' I'm like 'No, I'm getting paid to have
advertisements on my truck.' And they're like, 'Oh, are you gonna sell
your soul next?' I said I already sold it. It already belongs to
someone." see also :
RTMark's The Magic
Christian Fund
.
For those of you in serious contract negotiations
Parand Tony Daruger : Manipulating XML documents with Perl and
other scripting languages
CBC : In America's Web
"To my mind, Canadian content is a story, a
product that's produced here in Canada that's consumed potentially by
Canadians but it's an exportable product that people around the world are
interested in. The fact of the matter is we live north of the most
successful cultural exporter on the planet and that's not going to
change. And everything else about our economies is moving closer
together...The argument that I have always had with people about this, do
we have to put a moose, a beaver and some guy in a Mountie suit in the
thing and then call it Canadian which in that case it's just a trapping."
Well, not since the Mounties sold their licensing rights to Disney,
anyway. The problem I have have with this kind of drivel is that culture
is equal parts history and history is not just some catalogue of past
content to add value and a tie-in to this week's spin-cycle.
Unless,
of course, you're the victor...
Paul Krugman : Being Bob Forehead
"So why can't people like Steve Forbes simply
declare victory and go home? The well-off would, of course, like to see
even lower taxes -- which George W. Bush, his life made easy by the
revenues a booming economy generates, promises to deliver. (Is he
sincere, or is he just doing this because that is what Republicans are
supposed to do? Who knows?) But there is one important thing that the
supply-side movement has not gotten, and still desperately wants:
intellectual vindication."
Simson Garfinkel : Excuse me, are you human?
Michel Venne : Groupes communautaires, entre l'État et
l'individu
"Ce mouvement constitue un rempart contre la
réduction de la société québécoise à un simple espace de marché, ajoute
le théologien. Il contribue à resserrer les liens de solidarité et ainsi
à raffermir la conscience que nous formons une nation."
Palm Infocenter
considers entire OS modules for the new Visor
PDAs. Neat! via
ars technica
Have you never really believed
that Canadians are the funniest people on the
planet?
Leah McLaren feels your pain
: "This, after all, is a country where a governing body once refused to
let the rock band Barenaked Ladies play a benefit concert on the grounds
that their name objectified women. It's the same place that recently
refused to retail a full-bodied French chardonnay named Fat Bastard on
the grounds it might be offensive to fat bastards."
United States v. Baugh
"A federal appeals court overturned 70
protesters' convictions for demonstrating without a permit Wednesday,
saying the government can't make free speech conditional on a promise not
to trespass."
The Coroner's Toolkit
First Monday, July 1999
Includes a
rebuttal
to David Noble's critique of "distributed learning technologies" (my
mouth is full of potatoes) which I am looking forward to reading.
Richard Morrison on the public domain
"Then last year the US extended its 75-year
copyright rule by a further 20 years - primarily because Disney lobbied
Congress to keep Mickey Mouse in copyright."
Voix d'extinction?
The imperiled anglophone community in Quebec.
Yeah...that's a good one. The article points out that most people leave
the province largely because they're too freaked out to learn how to
write French properly.
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.
I want to be able to do the following:
span.footnote { display:inline; } span.footnote:before { content: "<footnote/>"; margin-right:5px; margin-left:5px; font-family:monospace; color:brown; } span.footnote:hover:before { content: "<footnote>"; } span.footnote > span.content { display:none; } span.footnote:hover > span.content { display: inline; font-family:monospace; } span.content:first-letter { color:#fff; } span.footnote > span.content:after { content: "</footnote>"; margin-right:5px; margin-left:5px; font-family:monospace; color:brown; } <div>hello <span class = "footnote"> <span class = "content"> * This is the network of our disconnect. </span> </span> world.</div>Which should render like this in a CSS-enabled browser :
And like this in a text-browser:
But it doesn't. Specifically, the leading asterix (which is included to denote a text as a footnote or afternote in user-agents that don't do formatting) is supposed to by assigning it the same colour as the background.
span.content:first-letter { color:#fff; }If you're wondering why I didn't just define the
:first-letter's display property ashiddenit's not for lack of trying. Based on my experiments it simply doesn't work. Another mystery.But it only works when the
span.contentelement is displayed as a block. I want to display it inline for foofy design considerations, which since we're talking about CSS is as a good a reason as any.Actually, I'd also like a
last-letterornth-letterselector so that I could wrap my footnotes in parentheses for text-browsers and then hide them when the CSS kung-fu enters the building.