After initially being modded down, my AC humor is finally being appreciated. I normally wouldn’t have bothered, but the article had just shown up and honestly, who can resist a good first post, especially with such a perfect topic?
Category: Legacy
For some instant fun, go around to various sites in Mozilla and CTRL-+ until you’re at maximum font zoom on various sites. Try it on here. Weee! (who needs the shredder when you got moz?)
POTATOLAND.org has some cool stuff, but the page doesn’t work in Mozilla.
Last night, I received my package from Post-Parlo Records (since it was so cheap, I went ahead and bought Everything). The original impetus was that I was going through my MP3’s and came across some from Subset, a band that one of my former co-worker’s is in.
Since I’ll be resuming my archiving of my CD’s soon for my MP3 Jukebox for my home system (this USB->Coax converter is the only component I have left to get), I figured that I should probably get started seeing what’s out there nowadays. Two formats that I haven’t looke at quite yet, but may should are: Ogg Vorbis (waiting for v1.0), and Monkey’s Audio (Windows only? Grrr).
In any case, I grabbed and reset up the latest version of EAC (v0.9p11 still), checked out Dibrom’s latest recommended compile of LAME (v3.90.2-ICL) and fired away.
- 01 – Subset – Anchor.wav – The straight Secure Rip WAV file
- 01 – Subset – Anchor (alt-preset 128 cbr).mp3 – Dibrom’s tweaked 128kbps CBR. I’m using this as a baseline for 128kbps MP3s, although the majority of those floating on the net are much, much worse (more reviews for those who aren’t familiar with the issue but want to learn some more).
- 01 – Subset – Anchor (r3mix).mp3 – This is using the standard r3mix setting
- 01 – Subset – Anchor (alt-preset standard).mp3 – Dibrom’s baseline high quality suggested setting which seems to have by general consensus supereceded –r3mix.
Listening through my 4 year old pcworks speakers, you really can’t tell the difference between any of them. With a quick run through my Grado SR-60s that I have at home right now, both r3mix and alt-preset standard sound really good. My Sennheiser’s are at work, but I’ll probably hold off on comprehensive testing with PCABX and multiple tracks etc. until I get my sound system set up. Feel free to give these tracks a spind and send me an email w/ your thoughts.
I was looking for a Mozilla sidebar (Browse By Number), and knowing it was attached to a humorously titled bug in bugzilla, did a search for “porn browser“. One of the 3 results that turns up is just hilarious. Be sure to check out the linked testcase.
Oh, Browse By Number while I’m sure is useful for those who surf for porn, also is great for catching up on other reading.
No place for political correctness in film – Hell yeah. Fuck political correctness. And fuck censorship, fuck em right in the ear.
It’s funny realizing how unintelligble and badly written a late-night tract when one is quoted and forced to re-read it the next day. 😉 In any case, I cleaned up one particularly unintelligble passage, so hopefully it makes a bit more sense.
Some addendums: “creativity” can also be hard when the grammar is arcane and the production tools immature or non-existant. I don’t think anyone would argue that TeX would be much more widely used if it were more accessible (despite it’s power), or that visual artists only really started proliferating with say, pixel pushing when relatively usable graphical tools became available.
Lastly I wonder if part of the reason that CSS, at least on a visual level isn’t really designed to do much more than the technology it is replacing? People who want pixel perfect control, motion graphics, etc. are already using Flash, people who want full backwards compatibility and standard layouts are using graphics and deprecated HTML? On the other hand, the really cool stuff, like advanced DOM and other styling features are for the most part not very well defined/implemented. CSS3 and DOM L3 are both in draft format, and no browsers really support even the DOM L2 and CSS2 comprehensively. Lastly, I want to emphasize some of the ridiculous design choices made (ie, how current the box-model specifications append padding and margins to the width (very inconvenient for using %’s) as well as the relative complexity of doing simple things like vertical aligns (and we’re not even talking about to the document, but just to the viewport), [oh, and how about namespaces? grr.]. If you do searches on these things, you’ll find all kinds of similar business. I suspect that many people view CSS as a rather retarded and slightly useless standard, written by a committee of academics and monied interests who had no intention of eating their own dogfood (say like MS, which participates in the standards process and goes of on it’s own [although admittedly, some of it’s CSS interpretations, while being incorrect when compared to the standards, seem to make more sense, and it’s DOM collections and addressing methods are much more convenient in real world usage].
Just when I start to get completely tired and annoyed by OSX, something comes along and makes it all worthwhile. The new version of Fire.app does local/remote automatic language translation (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese). It’s great, basically like playing w/ an IM Babel Fish. And what’s more fun than passing back phrases through multiple translations in Babel Fish? I’d find a link to some fun, but the answer is obvious. Nothing. Nothing is more fun than Babel Fish. Carry on now.
Actually, what would be pretty cool would be if Fire did swedish chef or jive (whatchu talking bout willis?).
By popular request, the latest in the “I have way too much bandwidth series”:
- Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood.mpg – The video that started it all.
- Gorillaz – 19-2000.mpg – <voice type=”simpsons/prof.frink“>And the moose, and the aliens, and the explosions, Ng-hey.</voice>
- Gorillaz – Tomorrow Comes Today.mpg – A different aesthetic, but pretty cool.
The Gorillaz will be in town (Los Angeles) in March, but well, $40 (after Ticketmaster tax) is just too much. I’ve started to get really picky when I have to pay more than $20 for entertainment. It’s not even so much a matter of money as of principle… or psychological hangup I suppose.
Doing these edits in the Blogger textarea for IE5 on OSX, I’m disappointed that there aren’t emacs key commands. One of my favorite things about the OSX environment (everything from TextEdit, to Mail.app, and even third party software like Fire.app (new version came out yesterday!)
I was catching up reading some glish this week, and one of the posts caught my eye. Your CSS Bores Me is an interesting article by Chris Casciano; he poses the question: why is there seemingly so little visual creativity in CSS design? Eric responds that there are still significant barriers due to broken and uneven CSS capabilities in the various browsers. He then wonders why that with such limitations, people aren’t more creative when in other cases design becomes more creative in the face of limitation.
My take on it? CSS does not benefit from this limitation issue because the limitations do not deal primarily with the medium (as in the CSS ‘vocabulary’ itself, although in the case of CSS1 and to a lesser degree CSS2, there certainly are limitations within the language), but rather we’re talking about bugs. Annoying, annoying bugs. Quite frankly, they’re annoying to work around. In all the mediums that Chris mentions (Flash, Shockwave, static images, PDF), the designers do not have to deal with instability in the actual presentation medium. When creating advanced (technical/programmatic) works in client-side web technologies (CSS, DOM), one spends more times working around implementation bugs and with poorly documented interfaces, etc. than with real stuff.
My comparison is, well, would anything have been written if C compilers were as bad as web browsers in correctness? If you think about it that way, it’s just ridiculous. I suspect that’s why many more technical-minded developers have moved towards creating interesting back-end tools. Imagine an environment where you can experiment and play and with code you write that actually runs and works like it’s supposed to. Well, if these people are moving away to more stable platforms (whether it be PHP or (I hate to say it, but it’s true) ActionScript), then who’s left to push CSS and the DOM? Oh, and don’t push too hard, because it’ll break. And all the cool stuff? Yeah, that’s not implemented yet, in fact lots of cool and useful stuff isn’t even defined yet.
Maybe people just realized they have better things to do with their time? Like finding gainful employment.
[neuralust is pretty cool; Chris’ explanation.]
“Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.”
– William Strunk, Jr., “The Elements of Style“