Posted on by lhl

Out of curiousity I just took the SelectSmart 2004 Presidential Selector. It’s not bad, although not that informational. It certainly could be made much better by specifically gridding out the issues, allowing something akin to a +/-5 type thing, and being interactive so you could pop up each candidates stance and see how they reflect to your opinions. That being said, it at least has some semblance of accuracy. It put me as most closely matched to Dean. By comparison, Bush was at 7%.

Posted on by lhl

Currently at work I’m working on drop-down menus. While there are some pretty heavy duty scripts out there (like the hvmenu), best-practice suggests the use of semantically structured menus, a la gazingus’ or eric’s list-based DOM/CSS menus.

As an aside, I just ran some stats, and at least for the summer, our NS4 stats are much improved. It looks like we’re at about 3.5%, still higher than the average, but much lower than earlier this year (8%). A large effect is that with the students gone, the user labs aren’t being used. Thankfully, NS4 is scheduled for removal from lab machines for the fall.

In any case, all should be good an well. I have a JavaScript shunt for disabling the drop-downs for NS4, and the rest will just be straight lists. However, of course there’s complications. In this case, spacing. Looking through the css-d archives it seems that this is pretty unavoidable. That is, in the DOM, whitespace is read as #text. Oops. (related: table spacing).

There seem to be two options: 1) remove all the spaces in the source or 2) remove the spaces via the DOM. For simplicity, I chose a variation of the former, and used comments to preserve some sense of legibility. An ugly hack, yes, but well, nothing unusual when dealing with making things ‘look right’.

  • Test 1
  • Test 2
  • Test 3

<ul>
  <li>Test 1</li>
  <li>Test 2</li>
  <li>Test 3</li>
</ul>

  • Test 1

  • Test 2

  • Test 3


<ul><!--
  --><li>Test 1</li><!--
  --><li>Test 2</li><!--
  --><li>Test 3</li><!--
</ul>

Related:

Upcoming: return of permalinks, playing w/ TypePad

Posted on by lhl

God, I sincerely hope the stupid chimp was who wrote the layer handling for Netscape 4 has either 1) learned how to program or 2) gone back to waiting tables and isn’t inflicting more pain on the world. I’ve wasted an hour tediously debugging a page layout because ‘document.write’ was blowing up in an absolutely positioned div. DOCUMENT.WRITE! Good lord.

The problem? Turns out, that although elements within an absolutely positioned div somewhat respect the z-index, both background rendering and event capture (the click-plane) don’t, and instead are laid down in document order. Don’t ask me how this interaction barfs with document.write but not static content, I have no frickin’ clue how something could be this badly written.

I’m sure this has been documented somewhere before, but frickin’ A. It’s disgusting.

(not even going to talk about why absolute divs were necessary in the first place because of other NS4 shortcomings — this is why doing front-end work drives me batty)

Posted on by lhl

Current programming projects:

  • Comic Book Reader – learning Cocoa/Objective-C, what better way to learn than to program something useful?
  • Azureus – doing some work on this BitTorrent client to see if it can be easily ported to OS X.
  • P2P Identity/Relationship Tool – as yet unnamed project, but it should be pretty cool
  • blogging tool – finish blikiliner. To possibly add: bitflux/other integration, nEcho support, post aggregration (via bookmarklet? scraping?); do cool stuff w/ blo.gs rss cloud
Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl

Mark Twain:

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations and articulating your superficial, psychological and sentimental observation. Beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your extemporaneous decantations, unpremeditated explanations have voracious veracity without any rodomontade and thrasonical bombard. Sedulously, avoid all poly-syllabic profundity, pussilanimous vacuity, pestiferous profanity and similar transgressions.

Elsewhere:

A writer of lyrical rhythms
Encountered a creative schism
When those who spoke terse
Demanded his verse
Lose its sesquipedalianisms.

Also in the wiktionary

Posted on by lhl

From next week’s New Yorker: Patent Bending

All patents, of course, stifle competition. That’s why inventors like them. But business-method patents have an especially chilling effect, in that novel approaches to commerce can be ruled off-limits to others. What eBay was accused of copying was a concept, not a computer code. As James Boyle, a law professor at Duke, put it, “Under this logic, one could get a patent on the idea of fast food—not a different way to broil the burger but the idea of fast food itself.”