12.30.02
Posted in General
at 12 pm
“It is the very first incident of this kind I’ve heard of in Wareham,” he said. “It’s an aberration, I’m sure.” Full Article
As if!
I’m sure most band bus trips are just as wild as the one depicted in this article where, “Five Wareham High School band members were suspended from school at the end of last week for “gross and lewd behavior” on a school bus returning from a concert…”
I remember them all too well.
It was one of the few times where I fell into the upper social eschelon: The Drumline.
In our band the drumline was the top of the pile. Freshmen in the drumline ended up getting better seats than Seniors in any other section. It was strange. And I enjoyed it as well as an awkward high school percussionist could.
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12.17.02
Posted in General
at 3 pm
Someone should slip up on national television and introduce him as “Senate Minority Hater, Trent Lott”
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Posted in General
at 9 am
Here’s an intersting take on Bush’s verbal slips: He’s sociopathic.
“He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he’s speaking punitively, when he’s talking about violence, when he’s talking about revenge. When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine,” Miller said.
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12.10.02
Posted in General
at 6 pm
Well, when it comes to disabled access to web sites, it’s tough to argue with the American Foundation for the Blind‘s own information on Web Accesibility Tips.
Of special highlight is the use of alt=” “, aka “quote space quote” as the best method to put an alt tag on an image used only for manipulation of a visual layout as opposed to the use of alt=”” or the empty string or null sting alt.
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12.09.02
Posted in General
at 10 am
I wrote this and sent it to Macintouch for one of their reader reports on Mac OS X:
“John Woo wrote: With OS X my eyes are constantly focusing and I notice it at the end of a day. After the end of an 8-hour day without fail my eyes will be sore and I’ll be nursing a headache, despite frequent breaks for eye relief. I work a 6-8 hour day in front of a a pro 21″ CRT at 1024 X 768 resolution. I can’t imagine what life is like for those poor 12.1″ iBook users.”
Heh, heh. Those poor 12.1″ iBook users are laughing all the way past the optometrist’s office. We (I) love the screen because we’re running at 1024×768 just like you, but because our screen has such a higher pixel density, we get *much* greater use out of the anti-aliasing because our screens are displaying 106ppi (Pixels per inch).
Whereas your 21″ monitor clearly shows the additional grey pixels required for standard black on white anti-aliased text, with my 12.1″ screen makes them hardly noticeable. In fact, the pixel density of the smaller iBook shows just why certain visual attributes of OS X which people have complained about are really the direction for the future.
Let’s take the following trends into account:
- Ever-higher pixel densities (more pixels in a smaller space means higher resolution)
- The decline of CRTs, the growth of LCDs (and other “solid state” displays, OLEDs, etc)
Add the following facts:
- Icons and GUI windows have been created for 72ppi for 20+ years.
- Bitmap graphics get smaller on higher density displays.
- Vector graphics can stay the same visual size on higher density displays.
- Text can be presented as bitmaps or as vectors.
- Text measurement of ‘points’ and screen sizes of ‘pixels’ are the same by convention only.
- Macs measure type at 72 points per inch, or 1.0 points per 1.0 pixels.
- Windows measures type at 96 points per inch, or 1.3333 points per 1.0 pixels
OS X/Aqua complaint: “Anti-aliased text is blurry. I hate it.”
Anti-aliased text is going to be necessary as we move towards higher pixel densities. In order to display a 10 point typeface on a 72ppi screen you only need to work with 10 rows of pixels. But with higher ppi screen you may end up using 15 or 20 or even 60 pixel rows. These screen will need anti-aliasing to look good.
It maybe difficult to work with anti-aliased text at 72dpi, but come the future, your screen will be 106 or 150 or more ppi. Aqua points towards that future.
OS X/Aqua complaint: “The icons, scroll bars are so big.”
They may be big now, but as higher density displays become the norm, you’ll be happy to see them. Aqua has a mix of vector and bitmap graphics. Those graphics that are made with vectors can remain the same visual size as densities increase. Bitmap graphics will become smaller and the application UIs will need to be rewritten to support these densities.
Each of these issues are transition problems. OS X/Quartz/Aqua is built to support the future in this regard. Too bad it’s built to support only the past when it comes to file metadata.
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12.07.02
Posted in General
at 3 pm
I my best moments I have practiced this. In my worst, I have forgotten it completely.
Those who need me to do things could manipulate me quite easily with this sort of thing.
Structured Procrastination
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Posted in General
at 11 am
>>> When famed hacker Kevin Mitnick wrote his book on computer security, The Art of Deception (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), the first chapter was autobiographical in nature. It was included in the advance galleys that were sent to reviewers, but when the book itself came out, that chapter was not included.
Someone posted it to Usenet, and “Kevin’s Story” has spread from there. Mitnick has confirmed to Wired News that this is the lost first chapter.
Read It
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12.05.02
Posted in General
at 9 am
I’ve mirrored the original Hide CSS from buggy Browsers pages which were here:
pixels.pixelpark.com/~koch/hide_css_from_browsers/
and made them available here:
ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/webdev/hide\_css\_from_browsers/
Now when you want to find out how to hide CSS from any particular set of browsers, you can use these handy reference materials.
Like I did earlier this week.
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12.04.02
Posted in General
at 9 pm
“In the meadow, we can build a snowman…
Then pretend that he is Parce and Brown”
Yes, up until 9th grade, I thought Parce was a color, similar to brown. It was about that time that I actually read the lyrics.
I never really thought about why anyone would pretend that a snow man was a shade of earth tones…
And we were all warned about yellow snow…
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12.03.02
Posted in General
at 8 am
Now that’s a wireless driving set up. Amy and I were out last night. She and I drove over to my work because I forgot to send out an e-mail before I left. On the way back since I had my laptop, I opened up MacStumbler and we must have found 20 different access points in a 2 mile drive.
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