Month: October 2003

I would never have believed it myself but there is actually a specification for <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt" title="RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines">netiquette</a>.

<img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/primebear.jpg" alt="Prime Number Shitting Bear" height="95" width="128" />



If you have the time, you should definitely go see the <a href="http://members.surfeu.fi/kklaine/primebear.html" title="Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu">Prime Number Shitting Bear</a>. Those crazy Finns. :-)

If you find yourself feeling a little down, and feel that finding a glimpse of the master plan that interconnects everything might give you a lift, here is a fun &#8212; nay, &#8220;silly&#8221; &#8212; thing you can do. Surf on over to the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/" title="The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).">Internet Movie Database</a> (IMDb), select the &#8220;<a href="http://us.imdb.com/search" title="The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).">More searches</a>&#8221; link, scroll down to the &#8220;On This Day in History&#8221; section, enter your birthday, and press the &#8220;Go!&#8221; button. The resulting list will tell you who was born, who died, and who was married on your birthday. Now don&#8217;t you feel better?



For instance, here is a selection from the people who were born on my <a href="http://us.imdb.com/OnThisDay?day=21&amp;month=September" title="births/deaths/marriages 21 September">birthday</a>.

• Stephen King
• H.G. Wells
• Chuck Jones

Kinda makes you think. Doesn&#8217;t it. <img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/wink.png" height="18" width="18" alt=";-)" />

I am trying to see what cool, compliant things I can do with the latest version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/" title="Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2">Cascading Style Sheets</a> (CSS). When it comes right down to it, I guess I basically have a need to follow the rules. I am like that. However, there really are some <em>cool</em> things you can do.



There are a lot of sites that provide great references, tips, and tutorials. Here are a few:

• The Noodle Incident has some great tutorials, including the CSS Panic Guide and the Box Lessons
• Meyer Web includes two large sections on CSS including CSS info and css/edge
• Glish has a section on CSS layout techniques
• A List Apart has all kinds of articles for people who make websites — including articles about CSS.
• Blue Robot has a few interesting bits on CSS including the Layout Reservoir and this piece and this piece on CSS centering.
• Code Style has a CSS style guide which includes a font sampler that provides a reference to the most common fonts available.
• The Web Design Group has a few CSS articles including a nice description of the CSS structure and rules and a listing of the CSS1 properties.
• Web Reference has a number of CSS articles.
• Apple also has a few articles on CSS in their Developer Connection.
• The World Wide Web Consortium has a page dedicated to CSS news, browsers, authoring tools, other software, and specifications.

In the “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction” department:

Speaking at the company’s annual meeting for financial analysts here, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s cofounder and chairman… acknowledged today that the company’s error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day.

Markoff, John (2003, July 24), <i>Microsoft Moves to Weather Time of Slow Growth</i>. Retrieved July 26, 2003, from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/25/technology/25SOFT.html" title="Microsoft Moves to Weather Time of Slow Growth">www.nytimes.com/ 2003/ 07/ 25/ technology/ 25SOFT.html</a>.

First World War Head Injuries

In the First World War the number of head injuries was very high and soldiers took a long time to recover. To begin with, the soldiers only had cloth hats to wear, but after the introduction of tin hats the number of injuries to the head increased dramatically. No one could explain it, until it was revealed that the earlier records only accounted for the injuries, not fatalities. After the introduction, the number of fatalities dropped dramatically, but the number of injuries went up because the tin helmet was saving their lives, but the soldiers were still injured. This demonstrates the second rule of statistical interpretation: which question is being asked? A leading or misleading question used to gather statistics can result in misleading statistics.

<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/U196159" title="BBC - h2g2 - Star Trek Nut - U196159">Atlantic_Cable</a> (2003, July 28), <em>BBC - h2g2 - How To Understand Statistics</em>. Retrieved July 31, 2003, from <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1091350" title="BBC - h2g2 - How To Understand Statistics">www.bbc.co.uk/ dna/ h2g2/ A1091350</a>.

I have been filling in the Beats Per Minute (BPM) field in the ID3 tags of my music in iTunes 4 and have an hours worth of good 109 BPM tunes in sequence on my iPod which makes for a nice soundtrack for a vigorous walk over lunch. To clarify, I had external motivation for this.

In December, 2001, the U. S. Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher issued “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity.” In this report, Dr. Satcher joined former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop by highlighting the health risks and costs of overweight and obesity and issued a call to Americans to take action. Dr. Koop founded Shape Up America! in 1994 because of his concern about the increasing prevalence of obesity in America. The mission of Shape Up America! is to provide you with solid (scientific) information on weight management. Over the years, the Surgeon General has warned Americans about such things as the hazards of cigarette smoking or a high cholesterol level in your blood. In 1996, the Surgeon General issued an important report on physical activity and warned us that regardless of our age, we are just not active enough.

In short, there are now some studies suggesting that walking 10,000 steps a day is the right ball park to be in.

If I walk in time with my music at 109 BPM for one hour every day, I only get 6,540 steps in. My job is pretty sedentary, so I get little exercise beyond my daily walks. So, if I want to get my 10,000 steps, I have two options:

1. Either, I extend my walks to 1 hour and 32 minutes,
2. Or, I speed up my walks to 167 beats per minute.

I don’t know about you, but I consider 167 BPM to be jogging.

The <a title="css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design" href="http://csszengarden.com/">CSS Zen Garden</a> is a technical <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=tour%20de%20force" title="Dictionary.com/tour de force"><em>tour de force</em></a> regarding what can be done in site design using Web standards. All of the pages use the same HTML source and affect their changes solely through the selection of a different style sheet.

There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really.

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure. To date, most examples of neat tricks and hacks have been demonstrated by structurists and coders. Designers have yet to make their mark. This needs to change.

Bush Diagnosed With Attention-To-Deficit Disorder

WASHINGTON, DC—Pointing to massive war-time tax cuts, physicians from the Congressional Budget Office diagnosed President Bush with attention-to-deficit disorder Tuesday. “The president exhibits all the symptoms of ATDD: impulsiveness, restlessness, inability to focus on mounting U.S. debt likely to reach $400 billion by the year’s end,” Dr. Terrence Spellman said. “Failing to address his affliction could lead to serious long-term fiscal health problems for future generations of Americans.” To treat the president’s ATDD, Spellman prescribed Ritalin and an introductory course in high-school economics.

<a href="http://www.wired.com/" title="Wired News">Wired</a> has a great <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html" title="Wired 11.09: MIT Everyware">article</a> about the <a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html" title="MIT OpenCourseWare | OCW Home">MIT OpenCourseWare project</a>.