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  Tuesday 31 January 2006
  A friend asked what IDE I'm using for Python these days.
  Because it was already in use at my new job, I'm using
  Eclipse.
  Here are my impressions so far.
  »
  read more of: Using Eclipse... (18 paragraphs)
  Monday 30 January 2006
  I was interviewing a woman for a QA position, and asked her why she liked QA.
  She said,
  Where else can you get paid to complain?
  Sunday 29 January 2006
  This page about a fractal representation of tic-tac-toe is from
  Fractal Images of Formal Systems.
  I don't understand the larger work, but the image is very cool: it shows the progress of a game of
  tic-tac-toe by drawing the next state of the board in the square the current player fills.
  Words don't do it justice, go take a look. Even better is the
  animated version
  (clever titled tic-frac-toe), which lets you actually play the game, zooming in to see the branching
  possibilities visually represented. End states are represented as colored squares showing who won.
  Very clever.
  Thursday 26 January 2006
  Just.
  Monday 23 January 2006
  Just:
  NameArtistAlbumPenn Jillette Pennillette.
  Sunday 22 January 2006
  One.
  Antonio wrote today about
  Unwitting Bloggers.
  He started by pointing to Bill Burnham's pompously-titled
  A Unified Theory of Search,
  Social Networking, Structured Blogging, RSS and the Active Web, so I started reading there.
  Bill is very excited about RSS, and its extension into
  Structured Blogging. He forsees a world in which everyone
  has a web page, and rather than post bits of content on sites like eBay or Craigslist, everyone will post
  structured blog entries on their own sites. Specialized search engines will find those pieces and aggregate
  them for people looking for movie reviews or apartment listings.
  This is a nice ideal, but there are a pile of things wrong with it.
  »
  read more of: Unwitting bloggers and witless structured blogging... (8 paragraphs)
  Luckily, Antonio didn't buy into the structured blogging thing either. He's excited about unwitting
  bloggers, and I think he's right..
  I don't need this, but it looks interesting:
  HTML Screen Scraping
  and
  sgrep, a structured grep.
  From a quick glance, it looks like something XSLT or just XPath would be good for.
  Saturday 21 January 2006
  My.
  Wednesday 18 January 2006
  I'm trying to create a table layout with a lot of cells spanning rows, but it doesn't render properly.
  Both Firefox and IE add extra gaps into the table cells (differently, of course). I'm hoping someone has
  a suggestion for how to get the browsers to display the table correctly. I know this is a particularly
  troublesome area, but I have a great deal of faith in all of you!
  »
  read more of: Tricky rowspan tables... (6 paragraphs)
  Tuesday 17 January 2006
  Driving.
  Monday 16 January 2006.
  »
  Read the entire review... (8 paragraphs).
  Thursday 12 January 2006
  The.?
  Tuesday 10 January 2006
  Tim Bray has two new posts:
  Don't Invent XML Languages,
  and if you must,
  On XML Language Design.
  I have a couple of quick thoughts about them.
  Tim is clearly coming at this from a document-centric (rather than data-centric) point of view,
  and from an interoperability rather than convenience point of view.
  Let me explain.
  There are two broad camps of XML languages.
  Document-centric languages are for describing rich content, with flexible structure.
  They are often arbitrarily hierarchical, and can have nested namespaces for mixing applications together.
  Data-centric languages are for more structured information.
  There's no clear distinction between the two styles, and there are middling languages that have some flavor
  from both camps, but these are the two ends of the spectrum.
  There are also, broadly, two reasons for using XML.
  The first is interoperability: you want a data description that can be used for many things, by many different
  systems. The second is convenience: everyone's already got an XML parser, so why not use XML to describe
  data, it'll be easy to parse, and people will know what they're looking at when they encounter it.
  The two dimensions are closely coupled: document-centric languages tend to focus on interoperability,
  and XML chosen for convenience tends to be about structured data.
  XML's design center was interoperability of document-centric languages, and Tim is coming from that point
  of view. But many many XML applications are not.
  The public, highly visible ones are (XHTML and RSS for example), but the base of the iceberg is more about
  convenience parsing of structured data.
  If you are considering using XML, first understand whether yours is an Interoperability solution or a
  Convenience solution. If yours is Interoperability, then take Tim's words to heart.
  If yours is Convenience, then don't worry about it.
  But another thing about Tim's screed against inventing XML languages is that it's very pessimistic:.
  Tim is right about all this of course, but his conclusion ("Don't Invent XML Languages") is I think
  an overreaction to the difficulty. After all, you could global search and replace the concept "XML language"
  in Tim's paragraphs with "software" or "startup" or "screenplay" or "sculpture", and come to the conclusion
  that no one should undertake those endeavors.
  Yes, it's hard, yes, it's undertaken too lightly by many who have no idea what they are getting into.
  "Don't Invent XML Languages" is writerly bravado meant to grab the reader's attention. Don't take it too
  literally.
  One last thing: PDF is not an XML language, and I think Tim may have implied that it was.
  I have a Tecra M3 laptop. It has an nVidia graphics adapter,
  "GeForce Go 6200 TE 64M/6600 TE 128M" to be exact.
  I have a Dell 2005fpw flat panel display, with a native resolution of 1680×1050.
  The graphics adapter does an ungodly number of tricks I don't need (who needs software keystoning on an LCD?),
  but does not offer 1680×1050 as an option.
  It offers 1600×1200 and even higher, but not the one I need.
  In a previous situation like this, I installed some
  scary hacked gamer video drivers, and they worked great.
  This time, I tried OmegaDrivers.net, which claims to provide
  nVidia drivers with more options for resolutions. No luck.
  In fact, after installing the omega drivers, 1600×1200 wasn't even an option, but now
  1440×900 is. Huh? Uninstalling all the drivers and re-installing the official ones from Toshiba
  didn't get me back my 1600×1200.
  Does anyone have any advice for how to get a supposedly high-end graphics adapter to do something simple
  like drive a very popular flat panel display?
  Sunday 8 January 2006
  Cleaning...
  S.
  »
  read more of: Email validation again... (9 paragraphs)
  Revenge of the Tattooed Nerds starts
  innocently enough, with Apple logos tattooed discreetly on a wrist or the small of a back.
  The transistor symbols are kind of cool, and the eight-bit video game sprites are a great example of
  one lo-fi art form mimicking another. But when I got to the guy with the circuit board tattooed on
  his forehead, I thought, "that's just not right". And don't even get me started on
  The Lizardman at the end!
  Friday 6 January 2006
  Window, Mac, or Linux, what's your pick?
  It doesn't matter: learn musically why
  Every OS Sucks.
  Last
  Jifty is written in Perl. If you're familiar with Ruby, Perl might feel like Ruby's quirky big brother.
  Seeing the venerable (if execrable) Perl introduced by relating it to Ruby is a real turnabout.
  Thursday 5 January 2006
  I'm just putting these here so I'll be able to find them later:
  Two online network speed testers are at
  speakeasy.net and
  internetfrog.com.
  Naturally,.
  »
  See the code... (3 paragraphs)
  Anyone else have a complaint?
  Updated: I've since improved the code to deal with some of the issues
  in the comment thread here: Email validation again.
  Wednesday 4 January 2006
  In a comment on a recent post,
  Bob pointed out that the title (which has an apostrophe)
  acquired a backslash in the comment form. He politely asked,
  Bug?
  I refrained from answering sarcastically, "No, I like the extra backslash. Doesn't it make me look cool?"
  In any case, I have now fixed the bug. It took me on a renewed tour of the travesty that is
  magic quotes, and led me to find a number of places I wasn't
  doing quoting properly. I have strings passing from cookies, to PHP, to SQL,
  to HTML or JavaScript embedded in HTML, and finally back
  to cookies again. There are many handoffs between different quoting regimens, and that means lots of
  chances to do it wrong.
  I think I finally have it nailed, but then again, I thought that last time...
  Monday 2 January 2006
  Reddit!
  Sunday 1 January 2006
  Jo.
  »
  Read all the reasons Joel is wrong... (11 paragraphs)
  For a variety of reasons, 2005 was a very interesting year, and its close finds me and my family happy.
  We're looking forward to 2006 and all that it may bring.
  For 2006, my wish for all my readers is a classic: may you live in interesting times.
  2006,
  Ned Batchelder