“Big brother” isn’t a person, but a family. We are big brother.
"Big Brother"
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IE7 Bug
Place a container with position: fixed on top, as in a navbar. Now create another container in the normal flow of text below and populate it with some content (of any length). Set it to overflow: hidden or overflow: auto and give it a large top margin. The top container might even be unnecessary.
IE7 ignores the margin entirely, while Firefox and other (non-IE) browsers interpret it correctly. I haven’t tested this on IE6. Since position: fixed elements are not considered in the flow, this is probably something that would come up fairly commonly (placing margins on other elements to offset the dimensions of the fixed layers; klutzy, but the alternative is a fixed-size iframe, which won’t do on fluid layouts, or a full frameset, which I could use quite well here but am deliberately avoiding on this site because it has to scream professionalism).
That brings the count up to 2; the other bug I reported was entering something like “(1+1=)” into the Vista calculator (only the Vista calculator) causes it to crash. I still don’t think this is fixed, but at least it’s not major. The IE bug is worse.
If only iframe sizes were variable, this site would be a lot easier to design, but part of what I’m trying to show is that I can do the “Web 2.0” thing, and using frames of any sort of this site, even when they’re the right tool for the job would impede that. Thus I do what other “Web 2.0” developers do: write ugly CSS workarounds! (Unlike most of them, I never use outright hacks, since those are transient by nature).
I have my Master's Degree!
Today I finally resolved the issue with my diploma; the administration simply forgot to mail it despite the mailing fee that I paid. This degree, granted on August 31, 2007, one year and three days after enrolling, symbolizes the completion of the second step of my training to become a mediocre scientist. Now all that remains is for me to complete my Ph. D. as quickly as I can so I can leave Philadelphia for good (good riddance!), detach myself from the paper mill, and start doing my own research again.
Oddly appropriate quote about Temple University
“But Temple’s niche, what sets Temple apart from everybody else, is its alumni,” Reeves added. “Temple grads have moxie. They are self-starters hellbent on making their own way in the world. Nothing has been just handed to them. Ever. They have that special pride that comes when success is hard-earned, and Temple is proud to have played a part in their success.” — Temple News.
This is so true on so many levels.
I'm out of sync with today's culture
Sometimes it almost feels as if I was born into the wrong time period (although any earlier and I probably would have died in childbirth, lacking modern medical care – a debt I consider repaid, given what I’ve already done within the medical field and what I intend to do if I am permitted). I latch on to fundamentals, which I feel are fairly timeless, while everyone around me tends to flock to whatever the new hot thing is. I seek expert proficiency in more than one area while everyone around me emphasizes hyperspecialization. I consider any knowledge better than none, while everyone around me (scientists anyway) emphasizes a skepticism that often discards useful theories (not mine, which are reasonably received within the “scientific community”; this is a broader complaint). I feel most productive when I am working alone (communication very rapidly becomes the dominant factor in the amount of time required to accomplish something, as I’ve seen over and over), while everyone around me emphasizes teamwork (which has almost invariably resulted in the majority of the work falling on me anyway, except now others get to take some of the credit – usually most of it, if I’m not far enough on the totem pole yet). I cannot abide the prolonged existence of reparable suboptimality in systems such as science, while everyone around me seems content to complacently follow the status quo. I can’t tolerate decisions made without justification through reason, while everyone around me seems to think the issue irrelevant. I constantly seek challenges and am rebuffed in my search, while most people seek simply to avoid challenges.
I would like to see a society governed more by self-determination and ability than a stratified hierarchy often governed by a capricious elite. But I’m about 350 years too late for this, and it gnaws at me sometimes.
ML + Algorithms
There’s an idea that simply won’t leave me alone – coupling largely deterministic algorithms with machine learning capabilities in order to guide behavior (but not completely determine it, as with genetic algorithms). For example, if we want to search for objects with a color attribute of red and we know that red clusters with blue through ML techniques, we can do a general binary search on a blue (or red) object and focus there. In this way, we can give an ordering to data that may not necessarily have as natural an ordering as an ordinal number. If the ML doesn’t dominate the algorithm, this could potentially speed up the creation of indices and search operations, among other things.
Just a thought.
Changing it vs. not worrying about it
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.
More CSS
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).
Random Rant
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.
Searching for page attributes
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.