Yearly Archives: 2002

I’m at a Loss for Words

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From Rachel: NPR : Wait Wait — Which Newsmaker Are You?

YOU’RE BILL CLINTON

You’re smooth. You can sell anything to anyone. You can tell lies with a smile that’ll melt the hearts of those you’re lying to. At the same time, you require boat loads of unconditional love to compensate for your deficiencies. People spend their entire lives and fortunes trying to bring you down. Someday, they might just succeed.

Cell Phone Torture Test

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This has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. Basically, it’s a Dutch show where they conduct humorous torture tests on different products. First off, the Dutch language is one of the strangest things I’’ve heard in my life, and that alone made the video worth it, but also they torture test my phone, the T68 from SonyEricsson. You can watch the stream here (WMP link, broadband), or with RealPlayer here. Forward to about 20:30 to see the water thing. For those of you without broadband, let me paint a picture:

Basically they’ve set up what looks like two showerheads, and they give the phone in question to the host of the show who stands under the two showerheads and talks. They did this for about 15 minutes with the T68 and it was still running. At one point they bring him a glass of Coke and he sticks the phone in that and it keeps going. After about 15 minutes I think they got bored, and the guy goes ahead and throws the phone into a bucket of water. Where it keeps going. The phone actually went for another three minutes completely submerged, all the time with that prerecorded voice they had on the other of the line talking. Thinking back the only way I can think of them being on hold that long is if they called Sony tech support :).

Dreamweaver again

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Okay, I’m over the hot emotions from yesterday’s (or this morning’s) Dreamweaver “experience,” but in reexamining my Dreamweaver ban I don’t really see any loss of productivity. I do about 95% of my coding by hand, usually in HomeSite, but in the past I’ve found Dreamweaver to be useful for times when I’m cutting/pasting large amounts of text, or putting images in, but I have to admit that is easier to simply to just drag an image onto the page then manually typing the tag with the image diminsions, etcetera. But these are all things are available in Homesite, albiet hidden under some dialogs.

Anyway, today I begin my quest for the perfect editor. I want a small, fast, and easy-to-use marvel of programming that will make the most arduous tasks a breeze and not bother me with unecessary fluff. Thinking back there were several things I liked about editing code in DW, specifically the code hints that would come up, allowing you to enter things without actually typing them. I liked how when you used a PHP function it would tell you the proper attributes, and their order; I liked the way you could glance at things in design mode to make sure everything was kosher, and it would even pull include() files in, a templating technique I use quite a bit. So in addition to all that, here is my wishlist for this editor I will find:

  • Full Regex suport/Robust search and replace
  • PHP syntax highlighting and context tips
  • Small footprint.
  • Tons of keyboard shortcuts
  • All generated markup should be XHTML
  • Nice file browsing mechanism
  • Server mapping support
  • Thought completion (j/k)
  • Good support, quick bugfixes

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Dreamweaver MX == Evil

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I’ve been working for about the past 6 hours converting a large PHP project to be XHTML compliant. It was an arduous process, but the nice syntax highlighting helped and the search and replace function saved me a ton of time. Or so I thought.

One of the routine (or so I thought) changes I made was converting all the onMouseOver and similar attributes to be lowercase. This is required for validation and for the javascript in the behaviours to be executed (in strict mode). The first time I ran everything through the validator there were hundreds of errors, and so for about 3 hours the onmouseover case errors escaped my attention. Finally I came to a point where that was all that was left. Try as I might I couldn’t find the code in question. I searched through all the include files, yet still nothing returned a case sensitive match to what I was seeing in the source. Then I did a case insensitive search through every occurrence, and double checked that everything was lowercase. The file must have been saved dozens of times and uploaded to the server just as many times. I thought the validator must be caching it or something, anything, so I waited and tried again at different intervals. I restarted Apache, I loaded and unloaded the PHP-Accelerator from the php.ini file, with subsequent restarts.

Finally at some point I fired up trusty Homesite to see if maybe I could spot it with that. Much to my surprise, the case of every onmouseover was capitalized just like everything was saying it was. It turns out even though Dreamweaver said it made the search and replace changes, and showed that it made the changes, it hadn’t made the changes at all.

This has been enough for me to give it up entirely. Whatever time I might have saved since it came out using the GUI has been irrecoverably lost.

Power?

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The strangest thing just happened: I’m in the case of my desktop taking out the old modem card, because I don’t use it anymore and I have no free PCI slots. Actually, I do have one free PCI slot but whenever I plug anything in it freezes my computer, so I try to avoid it. Anyway, I was swapping out the modem card for a firewire card, but while I was pulling out the modem I heard thunder and the computer started turning on! I immediately reached for the ‘real’ power switch on the power supply but I forgot that this case doesn’ have one, so I unplugged it. The card was half out of the PCI slot when this all started so I was very worried that it would hurt something, but it seems everything is alright. This has been the strangest day.

Aural Bliss

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I just got back from the store and I purchased a set of Logitech Z-560 speakers. They’re absolutely amazing, the sound is so crisp and clear, and the bass is incredible. Not to mention the volume, at 400 watts I have to keep it turned down almost all the way to be bearable. The subwoofer is gigantic, and you can hear the difference. The first thing I popped in was En Vogue’ Never Gonna Get It to hear how it sounded with heavy vocal and bass, and also that song has some neat stereo stuff, and is very well produced. The result was everything I imagined it to be; I can’t express how having four channels of sound really makes a difference.

Right now I’m listening to Joshua Redman and Mark Turner on Leap of Faith. In the a cappella intro I could actually hear Turner’’s keys as he played. Since the song is a battle of sorts Turner and Redman are divided into the right and left channels, respectively. Listening to it closer than I really have before, I think Mark Turner really shines the brightest on this song.

xml.house.gov

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Via Zeldman, there seems to be an initiative to eventually stucture legislation in XML. Browsing around, I espescially liked the member list of the 107th Congress; it’s beautiful XML styled through an XSL style sheet, the only major quirk I noticed was that the validation DTD was a local path. While this won’t make the content of the stuff coming out of DC any better, it will certainly make it better structured. I wish I had seen more of this kind of thing on my trip.

Interesting Article

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Myth America 2002
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
(from this morning’s NYTimes)

LONDON

Here are a handful of myths that cause what’s left of Europe’s left to misperceive U.S. foreign policy:

Myth 1: America is temporarily dominated by self-serving isolationists who reject treaties designed by sensible Lilliputians to tie down the superpower Gulliver.

Reality: In the past decade, the U.S. saved Europe from becoming an economic vassal to Iraq, which was on its way to conquering Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. A few years later, as Europe temporized, we led NATO’s defeat of Serbia’s takeover of the Balkans. Recently, we drove Islamist terrorists, who threaten Europe as much as America, from their training bases in Afghanistan. Is it too much to ask to protect our 250,000 troops defending freedom abroad, along with aid workers and journalists, from a treaty enabling publicity-hungry prosecutors to harass them?

Myth 2: (flip side of first myth) We’re interventionist bullies, with no regard for the sovereignty of countries whose threatening leaders are better dealt with diplomatically.

Reality: Saddam Hussein has been jerking around the United Nations for seven years, ignoring his surrender agreement and buying off French and Russian defenders while building a nuclear and germ-warfare capability for delivery by North Korean missiles or, more likely, through terrorist cutouts. Sanctions, dumb and smart, have dismally failed; the danger of nuclear blackmail grows to head-in-the-sand Parisians and Berliners as well as vulnerable New Yorkers. Brits and Turks may reluctantly help us, but European handwringers and Arab monarchs want a free ride.

Myth 3: The Bush administration, with its disdain for treaties, does not understand the nuances of dealing with nuclear-armed Russia, which must never be allowed to feel humiliated.

Continue reading Interesting Article →

Growing

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You may (or may not) have noticed some new widgets on the site. First, I’m working on the JazzQuotes system. Right now all it does is echo a random quote, but eventually as the database becomes more inclusive it’ll have more features, including being able to browse by author (jazzer) and the ability to submit your own favorite quote. Also there is work being done on the toy section of the site, and I’m coding out a little script that will show what I’m listening to on my computer right now.