The sticky notes at the front of the page

for my 3 MPs (no, not my MP3s...)

Blogroll has moved to a new page. It was just too huge (close to 1000 blogs in Bloglines) and helps the page load time tremendously. Blogrolling.com just sucks, and Bloglines has too much. Oh, and I have updated Blogrolling.

Have a nice day!

Now I understand about HTML comments and JS - Delimiter: July 2004 Archives  

From Delimiter: July 2004 Archives:

The Strange Zen Of JavaScript #3: script-killer comments

This one seems like a no-brainer, but it had several of our best JS experts stumped for a good while, until we saw what was right in front of us all along.

A script for preloading images was failing. The source was similar to this (imagine 20 or more lines of unbroken script):

<script type='text/javascript'>
<!-- preload_images ('header1.gif', 'header2.gif', 'logo.gif');
//-->
</script>

Notice how the first line of script is preceded by an HTML comment delimiter. This prevented the preload_images function from running, as the JS interpreter just skipped over the entire line. For the want of a linebreak, the script was hosed.

This seems to be common when JS is generated from some backend process. The above JavaScript was generated from a server-side application written in C .

This explains why, when I was trying to make my blog pages valid, putting the one-liner javascript code in HTML comments didn't work. Well, it made the error go away, but the code never executed. :-P

Interesting...

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/31/2004 10:59:00 AM    0 comments Links to this post

Voting in Flori-Duh!  

All the news out this week about voting, especially here in Florida, is not good. Court fights about whether or not recounts can or should be done. And of course, if a recount is even feasible with the voting methods. Hard drive failures loosing the history of votes. The GOP sending out notices that voters should vote via absentee ballots because the GOP doesn't trust the touch screen voting machines.

Where I live, we use Scantron voting machines. Now, how much different that is from punch card, I'm not sure.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/29/2004 01:21:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Monday, July 26

Get your Google PageRank right here!  

<a href="http://my.rank.online.fr" target="_blank" title="pagerank"><img src="http://my.rank.online.fr/pagerank.php" border="0" width="44" height="15" alt="pagerank" /></a>

copy and paste into your page, and you get a graphic that shows your page rank.

Via Dougal, via wordlog, via photomatt.

Update: The rank that you see may not actually be the rank of the site, due to cacheing of the image. This is certainly true of Mozilla, but evidently not for IE, since IE likes to have 5 different caches going, and so you won't neccessarily have the same cache. Poor Dougal's page ranks as 0, not the 6 that he was seeing earlier. My google bar also states that his site is a 0. :( He needs to check/change something.

Another update: The original code isn't up to XHTML 1.0 standards, so I put in the quotes to make it that way. Sigh.

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/26/2004 08:48:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, July 25

Weirdness, polls and what the heck is going on?  

I find this weird, poll questions with percentages:


Now, Bush's lowest approval is 48%, with a high of 52%. But only 45% think we are on the right track? That's pretty amazing!

Here is how who answered what.


Very, very strange.

Graphics © 2004 Columbus Dispatch, fair use claimed.

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/25/2004 09:13:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Updates  

I had a job interview Wednesday. I should have blogged this earlier, but…

I feel the interview went well, I tried to push my personality as much as possible, seeing that the previous position holder didn't deal with people well. I can deal with them. Doing the job isn't the problem. I'm probably over qualified actually. I did like that the interviewer took interest in my supervising past. I wonder what the salary is going to be. But I'm old. 5 others are being interviewed for this position. And I have to wonder about my competition.

My latest modification to my url2mail.c program was adding 0xa0 as a special character to be encoded. According to the specs, that's an unbreakable space, so I encoded it as &nbsp;. Checkit it out in Mozilla 1.7 and IE 6 both render it as a regular 0x20 space on output. So why am I getting freaking titles with the 0xa0 character that I have to encode? They must be using &#160; or &#xa0; instead. Sheesh.

AC went out on the Marquis. Again. It lasted two months. Eh.

I've been getting beat up about Sparx again. It doesn't help that Sparx has sat on his ass for 6 weeks after I told him his number 1 priority was to get a job. It seems to be that way now, but I dunno. He's got some bills that he has to get paid, in less than two weeks no less. He's not going to have the money, even if he starts working Monday. He still hasn't taken care of the title and the tag to his truck, which asks the question of how the hell he's going to get to work if he can't walk there. The Cunt is now not a big factor in his life, but I'm still upset that she's still a part of it. The boy (and I do mean boy, as he might be emotionally 15 at this point in his life) will not learn, as still dealing with the Cunt, and not even looking for a job points out very well.

The_Rose has practically brought this up as a fight. A fight that I'm ready to throw at this point. If I don't get the job I just interviewed, then maybe it's time I drive up to Columbus and see what jobs I can apply for there. She can then handle Sparx as she wants, since I won't be there, and it won't be up to me to handle it. I don't think that's what she wants, but it's about the best way to handle the situation that I can think of. The_Rose "can't" (won't) deal with him, evidently thinking that I hold some sort of veto card or something.

Meanwhile, on the "lighter" side of things, I'm currently wearing shorts that are size 38. They are a little tight, but not that much. I can cinch the belt a little tighter than the shorts, so it's good. I'm still wearing a size 20 neck though. Blech! My suit is at least 3 sizes too big for me now, 6 inches or more could come off the waist. The jacket is also on the large size. I doubt that the suit could be cut down to fit me now, and still look good. The_Rose and the salesman when I bought it three years ago thought it would be good if it were on the loose side. I wanted one to fit me me then, and deal with getting larger/smaller later. The past times that I have worn, it's been too big.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/25/2004 01:55:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Friday, July 16

Open HTTP redirectors (Michael J. Radwin's blog)  

From Open HTTP redirectors (Michael J. Radwin's blog):

Open HTTP redirectors

There has been much discussion about open e-mail relays, but very little about open HTTP redirectors. An open redirector is hosted by foo.com, but will unintentionally send you to bar.com. This can have interesting effects on PageRank or can trick users into clicking on something that isn't what it seems.

After many months of abuse by spammers, the rd.yahoo.com redirect server is now closed.

Yahoo! has used a redirect server for a long time for tracking clicks from one Yahoo! website to another.

Interesting. I know that Teoti was using this, but to hide the referring site more than anything else.

They bring up Google's redirect server http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.dontbeadumbass.com/,
MSN's redirect server http://g.msn.com/http://www.dontbeadumbass.com/. Which may or may not work, since I'm unsure how it works.

And then there are the Indian http://in.rd.yahoo.com/*http://www.dontbeadumbass.com/,
Australian http://au.rd.yahoo.com/*http://www.dontbeadumbass.com/,
Taiwanese http://tw.rd.yahoo.com/*http://www.dontbeadumbass.com/,
and Japanese http://jp.rd.yahoo.com/*http://www.dontbeadumbass.com/
versions that are still live.

Interesting what you can learn from the comments.

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/16/2004 07:37:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Thursday, July 15

Blogger update  

I guess we're now experiencing a new version of Blogger for editing. The font for the message box is now Times New Roman, which contrasts a bit with the Arial that I see for everything else (including the graphic buttons…) But I can now do a <ctrl-i> and do Italics. It is also now more WYSIWYG. And it also does some encoding for you, whether you want it or not is the question.

Interesting.

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/15/2004 06:24:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Monday, July 12

Sellotape Copyright Information Page  

These people are idiots if they think this inane copyright notice ("Hyperlinking to this site, is not permitted without the express prior permission of Sellotape®.") will prevent anybody from actually linking to them. It is simple people. If you don't want people linking to your "stuff", don't put it on the web, or at the very least, password protect it. Otherwise, it is fair game for linking. I don't care what your fancy lawyers tell you, or what you think your rights are. Live with it.

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/12/2004 05:00:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Wow. I made it.  

This main page of my blog validates as XHTML Transitional.

Wow.

After cleaning up my current blog entries, I ended up with an extra </a> in my footer.

Clean up the rest of my entries? Who knows. :/

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/12/2004 12:00:00 AM    0 comments Links to this post

Blah! It's even worse than I imagined!  

I rewrote the offending JavaScript funcitons into PHP. I think I was having precedence issues with PHP, since I had to replace my xor that I was using with an increment and modulo. Still works, but what a bitch.

Speaking of bitches, my RSSifying script now makes my blog invalid. Sigh. It uses a <span class="rss:item" to do markup on the blog so it can create the RSS feed. That then disallows things like <blockquote> that I use quite frequently. I was also setting an ID in my header, which I've gotten rid of, and that seems to have fixed a bunch of things. And I missed a <script that should have been moved into the PHP code as a comment, which was also screwing this up.

Just a little over 152 errors.

Strip out the RSSifying script and go with Feedburner to create an RSS from my Atom feed while I wait on Blogger to support it? Or just go with Atom (like I'm doing with my linkblog?)

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/11/2004 09:40:00 AM    0 comments Links to this post

Wednesday, July 7

Bloglines updated.  

Bloglines has undergone a bit of an upgrade. It appears that I could be doing my linkblog with it, although I'm pretty damn happy with what I have now. Fairly automated. Not quite what I had in mind, but it works. Maybe some final tweaking on the program to verify the explicit favicon.ico file, and then I'll post the source here. Probably should put in a few more comments as well. Oh, I was talking about Bloglines.

The management works with Mozilla 1.7 and Tab Extensions so far. Rendering graphics within RSS feeds however, is another thing. Works in IE, but not in Mozilla. Plus, it's ugly. I don't like the shades of blue that they've chosen. Too many borders and rulers, not enough variance in size of fonts, it looks much more clunky than the old version. But I'm sure it will improve as things go on. I'll wait for the next tweaking update before I throw my hat in the ring.

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/07/2004 07:10:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Monday, July 5

A Bad Way to Cut the Debt — From the washingtonpost.com  

Via dealing with national debt from: A Bad Way to Cut the Debt (washingtonpost.com)

A Bad Way to Cut the Debt

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A15

The plan was: a $400 billion federal budget surplus this year and a national debt of $2.1 trillion heading rapidly to zero. That was the plan back in January 2001, when President Bush took office. And not just the plan: That was the official prediction of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Now we have a new plan. Instead of a $400 billion surplus, President Bush's budget calls for a $500 billion deficit. The national debt is $4.4 trillion and headed to more than $6 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the CBO. Interest on that debt will cost $156 billion this year. Bush says he'll cut the deficit in half in four years. The deficit, not the debt. It's a remarkably modest brag. And even so, almost nobody believes him.

There are four ways to deal with a gigantic government debt. One is to live with it. But this is not a stable situation. Even if you're living within your current means and borrowing only to cover the interest payments, your debts will compound. When deficits turned into surpluses in the late 1990s, the achievement was especially impressive, because it required the government of the time not just to cover its own expenses but to pick up retroactively a lot of the expenses of the spendthrift 1980s.

That is the second way to deal with a soaring national debt: fiscal discipline. The third way is through an economic miracle — an explosion of productivity that increases tax revenue painlessly. Fiscal discipline and a booming economy both helped in the late 1990s. But you cannot count on another economic miracle like that one. As for the prospect of fiscal discipline: No one looking at the past four years can reasonably expect that from President Bush, and it hasn't exactly been a major theme for John Kerry either.

Luckily — or not — there is a fourth way to deal with the national debt. That is inflation. Inflate the debt away. The temptation is enormous: The United States government is a debtor that can borrow any amount of money and pay it back in a currency whose value the debtor controls. Other governments are forced to borrow in dollars, not in their own currencies, when lenders start getting suspicious. But Uncle Sam remains preapproved.

In fact the process is already at work. Inflation is about 3 percent. So this year we're adding a half-trillion dollars to the national debt, but inflation is eroding the real value of that debt by 3 percent of $4.4 trillion, or . . . let me see (where is that abacus?) . . . $132 billion. Is that right? That's about a quarter of the deficit. Every percentage point of inflation slices the real value of the national debt by $44 billion. At about 11 percent, inflation starts to reduce the debt faster than we're increasing it. Keep going and you can wipe it out.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. Inflation affects government revenue and spending in all sorts of ways. Most important is that investors aren't complete idiots. If they know that the government is going to inflate the currency, they will demand higher interest rates to compensate. That's what has been happening lately. But there's a solution: As soon as investors resign themselves to one level of inflation, just ratchet it up to the next level!

So what's the catch? If you have to ask, this shows why inflation tends to happen once a generation. It's been about a generation since the last round of inflation, in the late 1970s, and many people have forgotten or never knew what it was like. To start, it is like a tax on anybody living on a fixed income or any investor with a fixed return. It makes economic transactions difficult and planning impossible. And inflation feeds on itself, as everybody tries to beat it. You cannot have inflation of 11 percent for very long. Either it will soar until the currency is destroyed or it will be brought painfully back under control.

Fed Chairman Paul Volcker administered the pain the last time. For almost two decades now, with tremendous skill, Volcker's successor, Alan Greenspan, has preserved that expensive victory without choking off prosperity (or at least not for very long). On Tuesday the Fed raised short-term interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point. On Wednesday all the experts were saying that's not enough. But George W. Bush has put Greenspan in a terrible bind. By heedlessly running up the deficit, he has goosed the economy in the short term. And by chipping away at the tax base, he has made it harder to restore fiscal responsibility. There's a drunk at the wheel and all Greenspan's got is the brake. But he doesn't want to slam it. Can you blame him?

Using inflation to counteract the effect of his huge deficits is not an explicit part of Bush's economic plan. But shortsighted indifference to inflation is built in. I sorta miss that earlier plan, don't you?

The writer is editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

I can see his point. It's rather chilling. And it certainly doesn't really do anybody any good.

Relevant Link

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/05/2004 01:07:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, July 4

Happy 4th of July!  

Happy Birthday America!

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/04/2004 03:50:00 AM    0 comments Links to this post

Administrivia  

Found out that there was a new version of Ultraedit 10.20 out, to the b version. I just installed a not too long ago!

I also created a .blogger type that uses the php language template (since I'm using PHP in my blogger templates) which includes HTML (thank you!), and put in the Blogger templates.

/C8"Blogger Tags"
<$BlogArchiveName$> <$BlogArchiveURL$> <$BlogCommentAuthor$> <$BlogCommentBody$> <$BlogCommentDateTime$> <$BlogCommentDeleteIcon$> <$BlogCommentNumber$> <$BlogCommentPermalinkURL$>
<$BlogDateHeaderDate$> <$BlogEncoding$> <$BlogItemArchiveFileName$> <$BlogItemAuthor$> <$BlogItemAuthorEmail$> <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> <$BlogItemAuthorURL$> <$BlogItemBody$>
<$BlogItemCommentCount$> <$BlogItemCreate$> <$BlogItemDateTime$> <$BlogItemNumber$> <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> <$BlogItemTitle$> <$BlogItemURL$> <$BlogMetaData$> <$BlogOwnerAboutMe$>
<$BlogOwnerEmail$> <$BlogOwnerFirstName$> <$BlogOwnerFullName$> <$BlogOwnerLastName$> <$BlogOwnerLocation$> <$BlogOwnerNickname$> <$BlogOwnerPhotoUrl$> <$BlogOwnerProfileURL$>
<$BlogPageTitle$> <$BlogPreviousItemTitle$> <$BlogRSDUrl$> <$BlogSiteFeedLink$> <$BlogSiteFeedUrl$> <$BlogTitle$>
<ArchivePage> </ArchivePage>
<BlogDateFooter> </BlogDateFooter> <BlogDateHeader> </BlogDateHeader> <Blogger> </Blogger> <BloggerArchives> </BloggerArchives> <BloggerPreviousItems> </BloggerPreviousItems>
<BlogItemComments> </BlogItemComments> <BlogItemCommentsEnabled> </BlogItemCommentsEnabled> <BlogItemTitle> </BlogItemTitle> <BlogItemURL> </BlogItemURL> <BlogSiteFeed> </BlogSiteFeed>
<ItemPage> </ItemPage>
<MainOrArchivePage> </MainOrArchivePage> <MainPage> </MainPage>

Copy the php template, and add this at the end. Or, if you aren't using PHP, then use the HTML template, or XHTML for that matter. I use the orange color with these tags.

So, I then had to rename all my template files to .blogger instead of either .php or .html. And add them to my Favorites, and get rid of the junk IN my Favorites.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 7/01/2004 10:20:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

 

Article Index

Nicely Done...: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal
Now I understand about HTML comments and JS - Delimiter: July 2004 Archives
We have acheived full validation!
Voting in Flori-Duh!
Microsoft makes unicode entities SO fun. NOT!
Get your Google PageRank right here!
WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /
Weirdness, polls and what the heck is going on?
Ouch!
Updates
Saw this, it needs to be repeated...
Open HTTP redirectors (Michael J. Radwin's blog)
Martha Stewart
Blogger update
Some fun with Unicode characters/fonts
Sellotape Copyright Information Page
Moore's Lore: Con Game
Wow. I made it.
Replacement for RSS feed is here...
Blah! It's even worse than I imagined!
XHTML validation + JavaScript = Driving me *nuts!*
Bloglines updated.
Hollywood Bitchslap — Michael Moore Under Attack: Right Wing Group Publishes his Home Address
A Bad Way to Cut the Debt — From the washingtonpost.com
The New York Times > Opinion > The Sluggish Wage Recovery
Happy 4th of July!
It's my anniversary!
Administrivia
Nothing like self-spamming