Posted on by lhl

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].

Posted on by lhl

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?).

Posted on by lhl

By popular request, the latest in the “I have way too much bandwidth series”:

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!)

Posted on by lhl

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.]

Posted on by lhl

I noticed some people coming from Google looking for reviews or information on the Acoustic Research HC6 speakers. Now, admittedly, there isn’t much on the web out there, so I can see how my post, however content free could have made it’s way up there, after all, even AudioReview doesn’t have a review on it.. To help out those poor searching souls out though, here’s what I found when doing research: Google Groups has one or two posts, basically mentioning the The Perfect Vision‘s very positive review ($3 if you want to read it, I didn’t bother). Just recently (after I got my speakers, I found a review of the AR HC6 at AudioRevolution, a very cool site. Now, they like the Energy Take 5.2‘s better, and there certainly are more reviews of the Take 5.2‘s online (also, here’s a review by Sound and Vision and a 5.2 review at AudioRevolution). I got my HC6’s pricematched at 800.com to $457+s/h (looks like 800.com no longer pricematches, or doesn’t advertise it anymore at least). Doing a quick search shows two (very similar) places w/ Take 5.2’s for around the same price range (Note though, that in both cases, the Energy 8.2 Subwoofer is being sold separately for $225, so your total price ends up being probably around $750 w/ shipping to the HC6’s $500; the price difference and my preference for how the HC6 looked made my decision; shallow, but we’re not talking about a big difference in quality on high end equipment or anything anyway. Having gone and tested a number of various lower and higher end systems, either would do equally well for my purposes, I’m sure.)

I picked up my Harman Kardon AVR-520 (purchased from etronics.com) from UPS yesterday, and will be figuring how much speaker wire I’ll be needing to hook everything up tonight. I’ll post up my own review this weekend when I get everything setup.

Posted on by lhl

Carriers Aim to Kill Number Portability – yah, cell phone companies suck.

Many cell phone companies, including Verizon, lose 2% to 4% of their subscribers every month–or between 30% and 40% a year, according to Telephia Inc., a wireless industry research firm.

Those customers are making the switch despite the number issue, the need to pay a penalty for breaking service contracts and the fact that moving to a new carrier forces customers to buy a new phone because of technological differences.

Yeah, you know why? Because VERIZON SUCKS. They were so bad that they motivated me to write my one and only epinions review. They were so bad that they continued billing me after I cancelled, and I had to call and bitch at them multiple times.

Posted on by lhl

This has not been a good week for me and computers. I came into work, and every single program I tried to run on my Mac in the Finder/Dock ended up executing StuffIt Expander on the contents of the .app package. That sucked. I figured I would delete StuffIt, but couldn’t get the permissions to do it without getting to there terminal. Couldn’t do that because I couldn’t run the application (it’d just try to unstuff it). So, I ended up ssh’ing remotely into my box and su’ing to delete StuffIt. Talk about a royal PITA. Now, I do _need_ stuff it, but I’m thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t reinstall it until I figure out where and how the file associations are stored (Google turns up nothing, but I expect it some cryptic mishmash of resource fork types, extensions, and MIME types. No central control panel to manage any of this, of course. Who said that Macs were easier to use?

Thinking back about it, I think that trying to open a corrupt .sit file may have set this whole ball of wax rolling… StuffIt certainly has a lot of bugs with OSX.

Posted on by lhl

So, a friend and I were talking in the car, and I brought up my USC Staff/Faculty parking pass hanging on my rearview mirror. It occurred to me that it really is a strange thing that USC charges money for faculty and staff to park. In fact, with all of our collected work experiences, USC was the only “company” that we were aware of that had this sort of practice. You need to get to work, and you need to park to be there to do your work. The analogy my friend was that there was if there was a computer usage fee for your work computer…

We ended up agreeing that this was most likely a policy instituted to limit the number of people parking, and to maximize the amount of spaces available for the ticketing nazis (we both agreed that on the whole, the student ticketers are as a group, a scary set of small-minded mutants).

Hah, now may be a good time to say that all these thoughts are of course my own opinion (duh, it’s on my frickin’ weblog). This of course is obvious, but hits up an interesting topic; say if hypothetically speaking, some bigwigs of a University of Some College were to want to implement a technological solution to this very problem. It seems that in this hypothetical situation, a big disclaimer doesn’t cut it (nor does… um, common sense?) when some bigwigs receive hate mail because some people discover some objectionable material? Now, my questions are: Is the current disclaimer inadequate? What kind of precedent/legal implications would this hypothetical type of dynamic modification entail (would the next step be dynamically erasing all mentions of certain topics?)? What happens when (not if) such technological solutions are hacked/bypassed? And lastly, what kind of hate mail will be sent once some disclaimers gets tacked onto every page? (stemming the flow of such feedback being the original impetus for such a hypothetical endeavor).

Now, one interesting thing about this whole use of disclaimers, while perhaps its legal validity is strong, to me, it occupies the same sort of nebulous semantic space as say… of my use of the “hypothetical.” Anyway, interesting stuff to mull over, I think, hypothetically speaking.

Just thought I’d add that this whole, “disclaimer, what I’m saying is my opinion” thing reminded me of this psycho chick I met the other month who couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying were my own opinions on a topic. Umm, hmm, if I’m talking about something and my thoughts on the subject, why would you assume that it’s not my opinion? Who else’s would it be? Like I said, psycho chick (hello, Lithium, maybe?)