11/27/2007
11/26/2007
XSLT
At one point this fall I was asked, "So, how have you used HTML?" My response was something like, "uh urm huh well I made some web pages." It's like asking an accountant how they've used numbers. Says Ben: "I don't use HTML, I define a new XML dictionary for every project." I feel that "inyourface" is more semantically correct than "strong."pretend to be a time traveler day
Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day: 12-8-7. probably more fun to think about than do. via."good" cause
The Camino browser for the Mac is awesome: fast and maclike. It is my full-time browser. The Camino Project is accepting donations and Mozilla will match 2-to-1 'till the end of the year. (you should do it, because I can't). via df.dear lazyweb:
it would be cool to have a tool that gives you your site's approximate ranking in a google search on a certain term. you're basically out of the picture if you're not in the first 50 results, but it'd be useful anyway to know if you're becoming more or less relevant, or if people are desperate enough for your topic that they're going 150 results deep.thousands of apple varieties
Stalking the Placid Apple's Untamed Kin - article at the NYTimes about tasting apple varieties including wild apples from China and Kazakhstan.11/25/2007
11/23/2007
hidden dock prefs
My favorite hidden Dock preference is to make the icons of hidden applications semitransparent. Go to the command line and enter:
defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden 1; killall Dock
there's also the option to attach the dock to a corner of the screen:
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start; killall Dock
or, to pin the dock by the end corner:
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end; killall Dock
via DF, and then I realized I hadn't mentioned the 'showhidden' tip here. also: a couple more "defaults" commands.
11/20/2007
leap seconds
Leap seconds are added every few years because time as determined by the rotation of the Earth (UT1) differs from atomic time (TAI); the Earth's rotation is slowing, so UT1 falls behind TAI. via slashdot.cities
zoomy presentation on the growth of cities: 19.20.21. most interesting part: world city populations in 1000, 1500, 1800, etc. via kb.socks
Sock It To Me Socks - weirdly cheap patterned socks. wish I had known about this in high school, before I gave up on fancy feet.Transgender Day of Remembrance
November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. via Jen.kids' laptops
The Laptop Club - kids' paper laptops. (via)
The inevitability of it all drew me to the paper laptops. Parents may want to delay their children's computer use, but here they are drawing their own designs. It reminded me of taking away toy guns and seeing the kids make guns out of sticks instead.
11/19/2007
felted things to knit
- a scarf (use 100% wool, knit 30 sts wide, 60" long on #10 US needles)
- cap w/ brim. minus the mustache.
felting = knitting big and melding the yarn together by shrinking in the washing machine.
accommodations for color blindness
Frenzic - finger twiddling, attention monopolizing game. notable because it has an option in the preference panel to change colors to compensate for color blindness:
lots of games are harder to play with fewer colors; I can't play Set with my father because the green, red, and purple aren't distinguishable enough to him (he has red-green color blindness).
game via daringfireball, who linked to the iPhone/iPod Touch web version.
mobile web browsing
Mowser - a web app that translates web pages into more mobile-accessible versions on the fly. even though mobile browsers don't need as much coddling these days with iPhone/iPod Touch Safari and the latest mobile Opera no longer defaulting to using 'mobile' stylesheets.kids these days
a Kansas State U Cultural Anthropology class on students today. (via karianne).11/14/2007
LA river flood control
pictures of the LA river and explanations of its flood control features. the river bed is concrete. (via megan)Nigerian space program
Why would Nigeria want to have a space program? ... some examples of environmental problems that are best monitored from space:
- Gulley erosion in eastern Nigeria
- Desertification in the North, proceeding at 3 km per year
- Deforestation in the south
- Pollution from industrial waste, oil exploration and mining
The Nigerian Space Program (part of Ethan Zuckerman's 2007 PopTech! coverage, which I'm still sifting through)
intro to CLI jockeying
Installing MySQL on Mac OS X. down and dirty install guide, from build to my.conf. via.mathy reading
Shor's Algorithm is a "quantum algorithm" for finding a number's prime factors. which means very little to me, but that article is a wicked fun read. (via uncertain principles)
11/13/2007
reciprocating rotary gear
I went to the Boston Museum of Science today, and outside of the bathroom on the lower level there is this cool gear:
(a poorly coordinated reciprocating rotary gear, but it illustrates the point. indulge me here, it is a pretty sweet animation and I made it.)
see also: CAD model of the same gear
11/12/2007
straightforward biscuit recipe
- 2 c flour
- 4 tsp baking powder
- 3 tbsp butter
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 3/4 c milk
cut in butter, add milk last. bake for 10-15 minutes at 350 degrees F. makes ~8 biscuits. (source)
alternative spreadsheet app
checking out: Tables, a spreadsheet app for Mac OS X. Excel opens too slowly (both startup and switching between apps), is too large to leave open all the time, and crashes regularly, plus I'm not working with Office users at the moment.free rice
No, what interests me about FreeRice is the reinforcement it gives to Internet users that their attention is a valuable currency. In an economy where all anyone wants is a moment of your attention, it’s possible for many things to be free, so long as they’re sufficiently popular, and so long as their creators are comfortable monetizing them by being willing to share their attention with an advertiser.
Ethan Zuckerman on the Wikipedia fund drive and FreeRice.com.
FreeRice claims 73,566,480 grains of rice donated so far today... there are between 35,000 and 50,000 grains of rice in a kilogram... 73 million grains might run about $387.
11/08/2007
trying two new monospace fonts
because of links spiraling off this.
... aaand I'm sticking with Monaco 9, on the Mac at least. I like the looks of Osaka-mono, except that it doesn't render well without anti-aliasing.
11/07/2007
Facebook gone meta
Facebook's new ad features include company/band/entity pages (the excerpt above is from Facebook's facebook page). For a less evasive description of the new Facebook features, TechCrunch's early summary.
spice and wine
in case I go back to school and study electrical engineering again*: LTspice is a free SPICE implementation with GUI. That link also talks about running Windows apps on a Mac using a transparent wine layer called Crossover.
*unlikely. at this point I'd study computer science or math.
Comet
"Comet" is the name being given to javascript that provides "push" data in web pages. A web app using Comet would receive new data from the server as it is made available, rather than by polling the server to check for new data every x seconds or only updating in response to user actions (an AJAX-y strategy).
Actually, Comet-style scripts still poll the server, but the server leaves the script's HTTP request open and doesn't respond until there is new data to send (or the request times out, after something like 200-300 seconds); when the response is received, a new request is opened. Regular polling asks the server for new data and immediately gets a response (either something saying "no new data", or the new data), then waits x seconds and makes another request.
The entry on Comet at wikipedia is straightforward, see also this post on Comet for more context. There is an interesting graph on Comet latency at the Comet Daily blog. (via)
"cats are the ultimate killers"
Cat Bib. prevents cats from killing birds (some, at least; the study on the CatBib site says CatBibs stopped 81% of cats from catching birds). Also: it looks really funny. I wish there were bigger pictures."got what I wanted"
NYGirlOfMyDreams.com: I don't think this is charming and funny, I think it's creepy and entitled.SQL in TextWrangler
SQL syntax highlighting for TextWrangler (BBEdit plugins, or at least language modules, also work in TextWrangler). TextWrangler is my code and text editor of choice.11/06/2007
camera
PENTAX Optio Z10 - digital camera with an internal zoom lens, and the on-off switch is a panel that you slide off the lens. This is definitely something I'd check out if I hadn't just bought a new camera last spring. via an ad in the NYTimes magazine.11/05/2007
sock knitting patterns
For my first pair of socks I have chunky yarn and I don't want to use tiny needles. These are some free sock patterns I've found that use medium-sized needles.
- legwarmer socks. possibly to make without the legwarmer part. knit on #7 and #8 needles, or 17w by 24h = 4" square.
- knit socks. knit on #5 needles or 21w by 29h = 4" square.
- "significant other sock". knit on #8 needles or 14w = 4" in k2p2 rib.
- campfire socks. on #4 needles or 6w by 8h = 1" square.
- plain ribbed socks. knit on #3 needles, or 24w by 32h = 4" square.
"broken pole" pattern
from a book of traditional knitting patterns from Gotland (a Swedish island). There are plenty of goofy flower and vine patterns, but among them are a couple gorgeous geometric ones. The Swedish Mitten Book, Inger and Ingrid Gottfridsson, © 1984 Lark Books.
Also: the book was originally published in Sweden under the title Gotlandska Stickmonster. "Stickmonster" is "knitting patterns" in Swedish!
HTML5 links
- waffle on HTML 5 - good summary of changes.
- HTML 5 advantages, XML and XHTML 2 issues
- HTML 5 elements and attributes reference
11/04/2007
vintage knitting patterns
Vintage Purls - Free vintage knitting patterns. Specifically I like the tall socks, the crossover baby sweater, and the spiral socks. I think the patterns use UK needle sizing; the site also has a knitting needle size converter.math layout on the web
the state of MathML on the web - comment on a Slashdot article on a new comprehensive set of math fonts. summary:
- LaTeX is the classic solution for laying out math but it's not appropriate for browsers
- MathML is math in semantic XML, so should be good for browsers
- but currently you have to do a lot of config to view MathML on the web, including having a specific set of fonts available
- and MathML fares better with XHTML, because they're both XML. Firefox won't render MathML as math unless the page its on is valid XML.
beyond validation
HTML Good Practice Checker. It is specifically for HTML; if you put XHTML through it, it checks it against an HTML DTD and notes some XHTML features as errors. The same site also provides a tool that validates XHTML parsed as HTML, which is what browsers see when XHTML is sent with the "text/html" MIME type. via notes.natbat.net.svn
on my to-do list: familiarize myself with Subversion/versioning/source control. possibly useful in that: Unfuddle, a free source control/bug tracking web service.insert/update
SQL INSERT ... UPDATE use. I didn't have this quite right when I tried to use it last.11/03/2007
Maine Huts & Trails
Maine Huts & Trails - an organization that is making a hut and trail system in western Maine.11/02/2007
christmas present ideas
defective yeti's list of "two minute" card games (specifically No Thanks!)canning with boiling water
Using Boiling Water-bath Canners: the boiling water should cover the jars. It's ok to add water to cover the jars after you put them in; just start the timer when it boils again.11/01/2007
HTML5 doctype
There's no official HTML5 doctype yet, but some people are already writing HTML5 and using<!DOCTYPE html>
Interestingly, this isn't intended to address validation issues, only to trigger "standards mode" in browsers. (see: W3C recommended DTDs, doctype of HTML5, HTML5 doctype as 'quirksmode switch', doctypes and triggering IE6's 'standards mode')