George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency.
(via Tim Bray)
I’ve set up a category for software extensions that I’ve written or want to comment on. It’s currently targeted at Firefox and Thunderbird. Share and enjoy.
Vanna made the coolest comment in the Wheel of Fortune forum the other day….
…and our returning champion, a software engineer from Utah, Ken Jennings…
My brother forwarded this breakdown of Jennings’ achievements during his season-ending run on Jeopardy!. The most impressive thing about them, I believe, is how few (relatively speaking) of the Final Jeopardy! questions he’s answered correctly.
As always, Wikipedia has even more scoop on KenJen, including a bio and more links than you can shake a stick at.
There’s been a lot of hubbub about XHTML2 being incompatible with XHTML1 and HTML. Of more concern to me (in this post, anyway) is an inconsistency in the XHTML2 spec itself, one that I haven’t seen considered by the hoi polloi.
Several attributes in the current draft of XHTML2 are specified in a form that’s tied to transmission protocols. One example, the type attribute, states that it is a comma-separated list of media ranges… as defined [in the HTTP specification] as the field value of the accept request header.
Why is this bad? Most other attribute values in all versions of HTML or XHTML (XHTML2 included) use space-separated values; among them are the core attribute class, the document properties attribute resource, the object module’s archive and the table module’s headers. The only ones that don’t are used to specify values that may include spaces, which MIME types can’t. Added to this, there’s no way to efficiently parse comma-separated values using CSS selectors, XPath or XSLT, to name but a few of the current golden children of the W3C.
Making these values conform to the format of what is, ultimately, an unrelated specification–not to mention one that’s divergent from current/expected/common practice–is a bizarre choice, and one that seems predicated on making implementation easier for browser makers than authors (and authoring tools). Look at IE7 and Sjoerd Visscher’s XHTML2 sample; if nothing else, they show that the browser isn’t the bottleneck in adoption of new technologies.
The W3C’s making a mistake if it’s making XHTML2 harder on content creators than it already is. The reason HTML took off–and why other things didn’t–can be summed up with a meme: It’s the authors, stupid!
Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the past 6 years knows that quantum gravity in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space has unitary time evolution.
Houston, uh, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.
Here’s what it comes down to kids. Ronald McDonald doesn’t give a damn about you.
Nine days ago I became the proud owner of a PowerMac G4, which nicely matched my new(ish) 15GB iPod. This evening I became the not-so-proud owner of a 13kg silver paperweight and a credit-card-sized white doorstop.
Somehow, between turning off the machine on Friday night and attempting to turn it on tonight, it flaked out. Symptoms seem to indicate the power supply is fried, and to replace it myself will cost upwards of 1/3 of the price of the entire computer. The other option is to have Apple fix it, which will cost just a few dollars less than the computer itself did. Neither option takes into account replacing the now-dead iPod I had connected to it.
So ends my first–and last–experience with Apple hardware.
Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles… the iPod, she lives. Apparently there is a problem with the iPod where the battery would drain if connected to a Mac that was off or sleeping.
Nice going, Apple.
Saddle up, the Mac lives again too! Thanks to Andy Skuse at Mostly Digital, I discovered that I needed to perform a PMU reset. Even better, he diagnosed the problem via e-mail, and at no cost. Needless to say, Mostly Digital is my new favourite Mac store.
Wincent Colaiuta shared a similar story about a year ago.