08.31.07
Posted in Personal at 2:37 pm by Michael
Isn’t it funny how one is content to simply deal with the foibles of a field, until one realizes that it should not be this way, it should be that way, and then it becomes a constant source of anguish that one’s vision is being prevented from being actualized by meaningless bureaucracy?
Or is that just me? Maybe that’s why society and I don’t usually see eye-to-eye. The idea, the thought, the content, the meaning must come first, and yet society clings so tightly to the status quo that it admits no improvement on sheer principle! This is what Ayn Rand was talking about in Anthem.
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Posted in Art, Ideas, Programming at 2:26 pm by Michael
CSS is very prone to overspecification, and though I do write CSS, I find the notion of a “class” that has a background color of black, 5 pixel margins, and blue links being distinct from a class that has a background color of black, 6 pixel margins, and blue links completely at odds with the object oriented paradigm. Yes, we can make it one class and override on each individual ID, but that’s klutzy. Surely there must be a better way.
One thing I’d love to be able to do is define my own elements, inheriting from a base element and automatically applying CSS (and adding HTML) to create customized functionality. For example, I have a list of checkboxes on HireGeeks. I should simply be able to define the tag “checklist” or something and have the browser interpret that as “a list with checkboxes and this default styling”. How would one go about introducing such a standard anyway? It’s an idea that should be adopted, but short of making my own browser, I don’t see any way of introducing it to the community. It’s not as if W3C would listen (I wonder how Tim Berners-Lee would have done in such a regulated environment; probably not too well). Maybe XSLT? Or parse it on the server side?
Or does a standard exist for this already? I thought that was what XForms was supposed to be, but looking at the W3C’s page on it, I’m greeted with:
“The Forms working group is chartered by the W3C to develop the next generation of forms technology for the world wide web. The mission is to address the patterns of intricacy, dynamism, multi-modality, and device independence that have become prevalent in Web Forms Applications around the world. The technical reports of this working group have the root name XForms due to the use of XML to express the vocabulary of the forms technology developed by the working group.”
Well, uh… thanks, I guess. Wow, I can’t wait to “address the patterns of intricacy, dynamism, multi-modality and device independence!” in my web pages! So how do I use it? Is it supported by common browsers? What exactly does it do? Of course, that information is absent. Why does everyone do this? Is this the logical outcome of a society that values form so completely over function? One that mistakes sesquipedalianism (my favorite word in the English language, meaning “the attitude of using long words”) for insight?
Coupled with the mess that W3C has made of XHTML, their position as a gatekeeper of web standards, their abuse of this position by neglecting individual contributors (unless you run a business, you’re invisible to them, however good or even popular your ideas may be), and their general failure to solve common problems plaguing web developers today, I think the time has long passed where the W3C should have been dismantled, to be replaced by a community-based model (or even a grassroots one, as the web began in). Since the majority of web developers are either self-employed or belong to small firms, W3C is causing nothing less than the stagnation of web development with this attitude. Even worse, the companies that have the most influence on the panel (read: Microsoft) have a history of screwing things up (read: IE 6).
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Posted in Personal at 10:24 am by Michael
If you’re going to buy a huge plasma TV and leave it on all day long, even when you are not there, please don’t complain about your energy bills. I don’t want to hear it.
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08.30.07
Posted in Ideas at 10:30 pm by Michael
A completely obvious idea that I should have thought of earlier, but so should the search engines.
An advanced search should allow querying on presentational properties of particular pages. For example, I want to search for portfolio sites with black backgrounds. You can search for “#000000″, but since CSS files are not indexed, this only shows pages that contain that particular markup – and most good web designers put that sort of thing in a CSS file nowadays.
This is just one example. I could want to search for pages with a certain layout, with certain placement of images, etc. I can’t do any of that with current search engines.
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Posted in Ideas, Philosophy at 12:03 am by Michael
Plato’s allegory of the cave is appropriate for the ideas that Plato was trying to present, but I think he fails to distinguish between different layers of meaning. I think using a mountain would perhaps be clearer. For example, let’s say a cellphone rings and begins to play Mozart’s Sonata in C Major. In Plato’s terms, there is one Form for the Sonata in C Major (despite being a construct on the part of Mozart, but whether constructs can be Platonic realizations is a separate philosophical question), and that this ringtone is just an example of it. However, the ringtone isn’t just Mozart’s Sonata in C Major: it’s also a cellphone ringtone, a series of pitches, a piece of synthesized music, a particular type of wave propagating through space, a movement of air causing bones in the ear to vibrate, and a series of nervous signals between the ear and the brain, among many other things. So either it’s a realization of many manifestations of one Form, or it’s a realization of multiple Forms. Consider the first choice: if these were all manifestations of Mozart’s Sonata in C Major, what about printed sheet music? Surely the appropriate sheet music is also a manifestation of Mozart’s Sonata in C Major, and yet it is not a piece of synthesized music or a sound wave propagating through space. Therefore, these properties are not intrinsic to the Form of Mozart’s Sonata in C Major, and may be considered the Form of a cellphone ringtone, or perhaps of aural music itself. In object-oriented terms, this piece inherits from at least two classes (doubtless more). So how can we prioritize these? Well, since Plato’s philosophy strove towards a universal Good in the realm of the abstract, it would make sense to prioritize them according to their generality, with the Forms themselves being the most general of all concepts which are expressed. Thus we have a mountain, rather than a cave – “Gradus ad Parnassum” (steps to Parnassus), in a sense.
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08.29.07
Posted in Ideas at 8:58 am by Michael
I’ve noticed that there appears to be a “window” period about 2 hours before going to sleep (lasting maybe 15 minutes or so) wherein one’s dreams are influenced by waking events. Yesterday, one of my friends called me at about this time, and sure enough, he was in my dream (I owed him a dog or something and he came to collect?)
Again I’ve noticed this on Feb. 13, 2008. I was viewing the Wikipedia page on Grizzly Bears about an hour and 45 minutes before going to sleep, and sure enough, I dreamed I was being chased by grizzlies.
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08.28.07
Posted in Art at 10:01 am by Michael
I noticed that 70% of the content of articles on CSS techniques is dedicated to fixing problems in various browsers (usually IE), 20% is a bunch of unrelated attributes that have nothing to do with the intent of the code but are needed to coerce the page into displaying that way, and about 10% is the code that should be needed. This indicates to me that CSS needs to be cleaned up and standardized.
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08.27.07
Posted in Personal, Research at 8:02 am by Michael
I think I misunderstood the reason I was being asked to show up frequently in the lab. I think it isn’t so much about face-to-face communication (which there never was much of even when I was there), but rather about being seen there by whoever apportions lab space. Still, it’s a high price to ask when every day that I commute loses at least 3 hours of productive time… and an even higher one to ask of a naturalist amidst one of the most urban environments in the country.
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08.26.07
Posted in Ideas, Philosophy at 7:52 pm by Michael
One possible resolution to the “problem of evil” (the paradoxical existence of evil in a world ruled by an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God) might be a reinterpretation of “omnipotence”. Simply, anything might be possible… but it might be hard.
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Posted in Ideas at 7:50 pm by Michael
While discussing possible evolutionary reasons for the existence of lactose intolerance, I realized that certain evolutionary traits in offspring may result in benefits that propagate back to ancestors, rather than being useful to the actual organisms in which they are present. For example, lactose intolerance evolving to prevent breastfeeding during subsequent pregnancy of the mother.
I found this idea fascinating.
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