afongen

Writing with Elvish fonts. This would be perfect for those who aren’t satisfied with ordinary means of obfuscating Perl.

Heck, why stop with fonts? Surely if we can write Perl in Latin, we can write Perl in Elvish, too.

Bert Bos: What is a good standard? An essay on W3C’s design principles.

Why doesn’t HTML include tags for style? Why can’t you put text inside SMIL? Why doesn’t CSS include commands to transform a document? Why, in short, does W3C modularize its specification and why in this particular way? This essay tries to make explicit what the developers in the various W3C working groups mean when they invoke words like efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility, learnability, simplicity, longevity, and other long words ending in -y.

The single-page printable version is one place where you might want to use Mozilla’s DOM Inspector to adjust CSS on the fly: you can edit any h2‘s CSS style rules to bring the section headers down to something reasonable, and maybe add a border or something else to visually mark the headers.

You could, of course, just save as “Web Page, complete” and edit the CSS files manually. I think the DOM inspector is more fun and saves me the trouble of sifting through several files.

Anyway, this all misses the point: it’s an interesting essay.

I went this morning with Kiara and a couple friends to Darien’s Dash, a 5 & 10K walk/run in South Saint Paul. Kiara and her friend Kim decided earler this year to walk or run this charity race as a motivating goal to get them to exercise together over the summer. I believe, however, that today is the first day all year that they’ve managed to walk together. Heh. Oh well.

We’ve all had our share of walking this year. I’ve lost 25 pounds since Christmas doing nothing different than walking a whole lot. I don’t really pay close attention to my weight, I was just nebulously aware that I was around 30 pounds overweight and out of shape. Hence the resolution to exercise. I might still be less in-shape than I’d like, but I’m a whole lot better off. Especially since I get to combine my walks with spending lots of time with my son.

I did not walk in Darien’s Dash, though. Instead I spent time in the bad coffee shop across the street, reading Details magazine out of desperation because I’d forgotten to bring my book. Time well spent: I learned about the International High IQ Society, an organization I understand even less than Mensa.

(Funny story: our friend S was at a party being subjected to someone’s swooning over how so-and-so had been accepted into Mensa. “Isn’t it wonderful,” the swooner gushed, “he is so brilliant.” S said that she didn’t really see the big deal. “Well! Have you ever tested genius?” the swooner shot back. S said yes. “Oh.”)

On the way back we stopped at Homesteader restaurant in Golden Valley, a great little family-owned place that serves very reasonably priced basic fare. Not much for vegetarians, but worth a visit if you’re the meat-and-potatoes type.

Now Kiara and Owen are off at the Uptown Art Fair (something I learned to hate when I lived in Uptown), and I’m settling down to watch an episode of All Creatures Great and Small, happily ignoring all the things that perhaps I should be doing instead. Ah, this is living.

I don’t have a lot of respect for our Senator Norm Coleman. He’s pretty much pissed me off since he first became mayor of Saint Paul, and little that I’ve heard him doing in Congress has improved my impression of him. I am glad, therefore, to see him exercise a bit of common sense by questioning the RIAA’s “extreme approach” to quashing illegal filesharing, expectiing that the punishment fit the crime. Good for you, Norm. (Listen to an interview with Coleman on Future Tense, a RealAudio stream.)

The fifteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style will soon be released, with some very welcome updates.

There’s a special place in my heart for the Manual. As a kid I spent hours reading and rereading it, and to this day I get a warm feeling when I hold a copy, or even see one on a shelf. For some reason I no longer own a copy myself (though I do keep Turabian handy) so I’m looking forward to this new edition.

Harry Fuecks: “PHP5: Coming Soon to a Webserver Near You”, the clearest discussion I’ve read yet about what’s new in PHP5. I should start paying attention to this, now that betas are being released.

And while on topic, I might as well mention that Damian Conway’s Exegesis 6 has been published, demonstrating subroutines in Perl 6. If ever you held illusions that exegeses were more immediately accessible than their subject texta, Conway’s series should disavow you of that notion. As they and the Apocalypses progress, I’m having a harder and harder time following what’s going on. I think this is because each assumes a solid grounding in what’s come before, which I of course forget. Maybe some weekend I’ll sit down and read through them all succession. Then start writing with Perl 6 syntax, just to get the hang of it (CPAN modules make this possible).

In my dreams. Maybe I’d do this if I weren’t back in the “refamiliarizing myself with Java in my spare time” groove.

The other night I emailed an HTML file to myself at work, but the message never arrived. At first I thought that we were blocking HTML mail, but other HTML mail was slipping past, so I set about analyzing the headers to see what the difference could be. That wasn’t the problem, as it turns out, so in a way I’m glad that my efforts were fruitless.

The file contained dummy “Lorem Ipsum” text generated at lipsum.com (a site worth bookmarking). This line was triggering the spam filters: “Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.” Cum was the offending word, and my mentioning it here will probably get this site blocked by filters in public libraries and schools. So watch the Latin, folks.

Of course, explaining that this was just Latin text used as filler has done nothing to discourage my coworkers’ notion that I’m an overeducated freak. Sigh.

It looks like there may be a Farscape mini-series that wraps up the loose ends. Of course, this could all be just rumor…

Predictably, Henson Co. is being cagey with information about a potential Farscape mini. After asking the company for a response for this story, they took four hours to come up with, “Though there are currently no plans for any immediate Farscape projects to be produced, the ‘To Be Continued’ ending in the final episode signifies The Jim Henson Company’s commitment to the property and our belief that there are future opportunities for it to grow. We truly appreciate all of the continued fan support and commitment to Farscape.” Which is a really fancy way of saying “no comment.”

I think that “woo-hoo!” is the right thing to say at this point.

North Hennepin Community College is looking for a web designer/developer.

A couple months ago, my iBook battery died. Just seemed to stop taking a charge. For those who have little experience with iBooks, the end of the power cord glows orange while the battery is charging, green when it’s fully charged. All of a sudden, when I plugged in the iBook, it would glow orange for about 30 seconds, then turn green. But when I unplugged the laptop, it would immediately power down. Too, the battery monitor consistently showed 0% charge, with no sign of climbing.

Well, dang. I researched the problem, tried all the suggestions that I read, talked with the folks in the Apple store, and nothing worked. I was all set to buy a new battery, when all of a sudden yesterday I booted up the iBook for the first time in over a week, and it worked. The battery meter showed a 50% charge. It charged up to 100%, and right now I’m running quite happily on battery power. It’s at 83% and falling.

Weird. Good, but weird.