HN user
Thank you. I would love an article about accessibility for people who must use voice commands or those who cannot use a pointing device. Dragon is fine with spoken keyboard commands, but much of the JavaScript out there borks site navigation by keyboard and control of normal browser functionality by keyboard.
Because mathematicians, physicists, and engineers use i through n for integers in their mathematical formulas, and Fortran was their FORmula TRANslator into computerese. (Additional fun fact: They begin their matrix row and column counts with 1, which is why Fortran array indices start at 1.)
Would Perl's Unicode::Normalize module fit your bill? I believe Unicode::Collate uses it so that a single codepoint accented 'e', for example, sorts the same as 'e' with a combining accent.
I'm sure you're not alone. My beau gets motion sickness at the sight of some GUIs, and I get seizures from same. Hence, I will not be taking a look at Google's new homepage, and I'm going to warn him about this change.
... and away from people with accessibility issues.
IIRC, Ruby lets you set taintedness Safe Levels with the -T command-line option or setting $SAFE per thread.
Content MathML to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Content_MathML
You want XSLT. ;-)
Nevertheless, I've gotten so bored by the sight of movie CGI. There's just too much texture or not enough light or something. Please, someone, make a physical model, shine some lights on it, and do some stop motion.
May I suggest http://www.artima.com/, although not just anyone can post news there?
I sing in a couple opera companies in New York City.
Obligatory xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/451/
"History Lesson" by Arthur C. Clarke (http://web.math.hr/~veky/T/T1/historylesson.txt)
If you attack us, we'll use the red matter.
That people have to resort to such creative contortions is a testament to what a pile "Thou shalt not use tables for layout" is.
I, too, hate your saying this. I hope you're joking. Because bullet point summaries and trying to make the article seem non-intimidating rather contradict what the author is saying.
What do you mean by "penultimate"?
Irony is fine. I'm just tired of its current popularity: http://www.google.com/search?as_oq=ironic+irony&as_sites...
Am I the only person who wants to stab my eyes out whenever I see the word 'ironic'? I count two appearances in the article, and one in the title.
We can plan this all out in a novel called The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
"Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." -- Leonard "Bones" McCoy, 2009
> 3) Be a testing masochist, i.e., I ruthlessly try to break my own code.
'Hap' means luck. Therefore, the happy path is the lucky path. Being a natural pessimist, I can't help picturing unlucky paths and believing they will be followed. So I enjoy trying to break my code. Not trying to sound arrogant here, I also think of end users and client coders as "idiots." I find joy in trying to make stuff "idiot-proof." A humbler term would be "bullet-proof," but I picked up "idiot-proof" almost thirty years ago, and I'm stuck with it.
I smile when I think of Ruby's throw/catch (not to be confused with raise/rescue) as labeled GOTO.
Perfumes and food flavors are concocted in the same factories in New Jersey by the same chemists. In other words, food flavors are food perfumes. Factory processing of mediocre quality farm products can create a food which is not particularly appetizing. Adding "natural flavors" or "artificial flavors" makes this brand-name food smell yummy. And adding some colors makes it look yummy.
"Natural flavors" are made from plants or animals using old-fashioned processes. "Artificial flavors" are made from 1) plants or animals using newfangled processes or 2) icky substances such as petroleum or coal tar. "Natural strawberry flavor" is made from a tree (birch? willow? can't remember), not from strawberries.
I'm pretty sure I learned these factoids around ten years ago from a book called Mauve, about the history of fabric dyes, of all things. Or some of this might be found in Fast Food Nation.
BTW, my aroma memory tells me that if you slap on some Polo cologne, the scent that remains after a few hours is "blueberry flavor" from Betty Crocker muffin mix.
That's the rub. It doesn't occur to most Americans how many products contain corn syrup. Wander through any conventional supermarket in America. Study the ingredients list for whatever product you have in your hand. The list of ingredients is printed in a small, sans-serif font below or next to the nutrition chart.
Notice the corn syrup in condiments: ketchup, salad dressing, peanut butter, jam, some pickles and mustards, etc. Notice the corn syrup in yogurts, ice creams, and frozen desserts. Notice the corn syrup in fruit drinks and flavored milk drinks. Notice the corn syrup in breakfast cereals and brand-name hearty-looking breads. Notice the corn syrup in brand-name cookies and crackers (Ritz, Wheat Thins, IIRC). Notice the corn syrup in canned pie fillings. Notice the corn syrup spaghetti sauces. Notice the corn syrup in canned soups.
Any food not located at a far outside aisle is likely to contain corn syrup. If a food has a brand name and it comes in a bottle, jar, tub, or box, it probably contains corn syrup. If a food comes in a can and it's not plain vegetables, it probably contains corn syrup.
I kind of exaggerate here, but not much. I notice that factory producers have been eliminating corn syrup from some foods in the past year or two. So, you might see "cane juice" or sugar in the ingredients list, instead of corn syrup. Cane juice is the new euphemism for sugar.
One of my Russian-American friends said about ten years ago, "I khate American food. Too sweet." It's "too sweet" because so many products contain sweeteners. If you're accustomed to American food, you probably don't notice the sweetness. Therefore, it wouldn't occur to you that it contains corn syrup (or sugar).
Sounds like what New York has been doing with pseudoephedrine sales for the past year or so, though I don't know whether the limit is daily, weekly, or monthly. I find the whole pseudoephedrine thing eerie, but I'm not opposed.
> Hm. I just installed Windows XP out of the box, and Facebook works on IE6. That's as strict a test as need be applied.
I am laughing so hard. You need to put a little icon on the sites you develop saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 6," and be sure to post on the front page "Please set your monitor to 1600x1200" (or whatever your out-of-the-box resolution happens to be). Oh, that's right. We're several years past such practices by now. Darn. Yes, I know you work with a few browsers, maybe on some different boxen. But I hope you realize how silly you sound there. :-)
> Facebook has a fixed width. Is that anything new? Lots of site have fixed-width. Even if you're too narrow, can't you scroll normally?
Nope. Not in Firefox 2 on my OS X box. I can horizontal scroll abnormally, but not normally: I can easily scroll with the arrow keys, but scrolling with the mouse requires tremendous aim and coordination. Why? Because a toolbar element which sits perpetually at the bottom of the window partially covers my horizontal scroll bar. (Granted, I haven't glanced at Facebook in a couple weeks. I have no idea how it looks and behaves at this moment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515376)
If I were one of my non-tech-savvy friends, I would say, "I hate Facebook. Why does it do that at the bottom? I can't move it sideways! I need to get my friend to fix my internet for me. I hate computers." But instead I say, "I hate some aspects of CSS, and I'm starting to wish the DIV element had never been invented. DIVs are meaningless when they're put to so many arbitrary uses. Shameful."
I'm not keen on TDD, but a good takeaway from it is, "Only write testable code." When a page consists of a mass of nested DIVs and a tangled cascade of styles, when sizes and positions are controlled by a mishmash of width, height, top, right, bottom, left, border, padding, margin, float, clear, auto, px, pt, em, ex, %, you name it, the page is essentially untestable, undebuggable, and unmodifiable. Try to add an element whose position is fixed to the bottom of the viewport, and you're asking for even more trouble.
Facebook's horizontal scrollbar problem might be remedied merely by changing a margin spec somewhere to a padding, or vice versa, but I pity the poor developer who tries to figure this out. I'm assuming Facebook developers are not so idiotic as to not glance at their work in some different browsers with some different window sizes on some different platforms. But when a borked scrollbar shows up, it's a bad sign, for it means Facebook is creating something too hard to maintain. And ever more people will mutter, "Why does it do this? I hate computers."
When I say "maintain," I mean supporting a larger spectrum of users. A few weeks ago, I read that Facebook has 175M users, of which the fastest-growing segment is 55-year-old women. (Sorry I can't find a link now.) If a site reaches a point where it becomes "necessary" for functioning in civilization, it faces the nearly unimaginable task of supporting "everybody." For starts, try picturing people of assorted abilities on welfare using whatever systems happen to be available at a community center in a church basement. Good luck.
> Google sucks at design.
Today Facebook is hardly necessary to modern civilization, but Google's search might be. "Sucky" design means a web page can be used by a greater variety of people. And the daunting thought of becoming something like an infrastructure utility company probably has Google thinking long and hard about "everybody."
> There isn't going to be a "next" iPhone. There's the iPhone. The next big thing will not be compared to the iPhone at all.
Okay, whatever. I was just trying to dream up something that hasn't been seen yet. Maybe imagine a visual gizmo between a laptop and a handheld, something for which neither the @screen nor @handheld media type is quite suitable.
A small positive from the "TL;DR" post: It finally occurred to me to do a bit of research and find out what it stands for. Now I have a greater understanding of why I get a slummy feeling when I see it.
Older lady here. My little sister and I were children when Nixon instituted DST for January 1974. We stood in the Minnesota cold in complete darkness (no streetlights, often no moon) waving a flashlight at the morning school bus. We checked the flashlight each night to be sure we'd be ready the next morning. And my sister was always terrified of the dark, even with a flashlight.
That's a fine story for little-house-on-the-prairie anecdotal value, but I wouldn't wish year-round DST on anyone. Not when you're farther north. Not when the nearest ocean not blocked by mountains is the Arctic. Winter "morning" per the DST clock is just too dark and too cold.
(~_~) I know what you mean about the sun in your eyes. As a kid, I spent year after year with the sun in my eyes as I rode the school bus 15 miles each way. I told myself, "This is stupid. When I grow up, I'm not going to live west of town." The odd thing is, the vast majority of development takes place west of that city, for no major geographical reason. I shake my head in wonder at the thought of so many people trying to drive with the sun smack in their eyes a couple hours every day. And yes, you're right, the time changes reposition the sun in front of your eyes.