I've posted my lesson in Australian geography to the wiki.
June 2001
I think my standards have lowered enough that now I think ``good design'' is when the page doesn't irritate the living fuck out of me. ... It's the same kind of feeling I get when I see someone in an SUV slowing down and using their turn signals.
To append to my previous rant, as much as I consider it unlikely, I'd love to see lots of websites pick up on Microsoft Free Fridays
Mozilla, (which will soon be released as Netscape 6.1), currently takes about 600ms more time to render a webpage than Internet Explorer. It also uses 10-20MB more memory. So why do I use it? Because at least it fucking renders things properly.
I redesigned my last-n page today. I figured that I'd test it in IE5.5, Mozilla and lynx, and tell everyone else to get stuffed. In my opinion, if you're using any IE older than the current release, you're open to all sorts of security exploits, if you're still using Netscape 4.x, you're just a masochist, but every site should still be friendly to text-mode browsers.
The resulting code for the front page was pure elegance. There was no table code at all (you should only ever use tables for tabular data), all the various blocks were done with styled DIV tags. I wrote the page with the W3C specifications in front of me, and aside from one place where it turned out to be me misinterpreting the CSS2 specification[1], Mozilla displayed the resulting page perfectly.
Internet Explorer 5.5, on the other hand:
- Didn't understand position: fixed at all.
- Couldn't draw within the lines - text was drawn over the borders of the surrounding divs.
- Borders on either side of the div randomly vanish.
Mozilla has been the victim of an enormous amount of criticism because of its bugs, despite the fact that it's not even out of beta yet. Any of these bugs would be a milestone-stopper in Mozilla, and certainly a release stopper, but they managed to make it to a release version of IE5.5. I wondered if the problem was fixed in IE6, so I asked Lonita (who has IE6 beta installed) to check the page for me. The results were even worse (the screenshots she sent me are at http://www.pastiche.org/~cmiller/s1.jpg and http://www.pastiche.org/~cmiller/s2.jpg )
So sure, the browser I use is slower, uses up more memory, and has a few quirks left. But at least it does what it says it'll do - it draws webpages properly.
I'm about to do some very, very strange things to my LASTN page. It'll be unreadable for a while.
If you're using Mozilla (or I think it'll work on the brand new Netscape 6.1 beta), create a bookmark, set its URL to http://www.livejournal.com/users/%s. Then in the bookmark properties, set its keyword to lj, then you can type "lj foo" in the location bar, and get transported directly to foo's journal.
I think it's possible to do something similar (or possibly identical) in Internet Explorer, but I don't really use it any more.
He's a twentieth century boy, with his hands on the rails
Trying not to be sick again and holding on for tomorrow.
London ice cracks on a seamless line,
he's hanging on for dear life
So we hold each other tightly and hold on for tomorrow.
On Friday night, I didn't go out to a pub and get drunk. Instead I came home and got drunk instead. Around midnight, through the bottom of the last bottle, I had the really nifty idea of sticking my photo up on hotornot.com.
No, really. Keep laughing, I am.
When I submitted my photo, the form asked me to rate myself. I took a few honest moments, and chose "6". To see how it ended up, you can click on the "more things" link. If you don't care, then feel happy in your well-adjustedness. Anyway, the voting was totally unbiased - I didn't tell anyone it was there, and it's not there any more. My original plan was to leave it up for a week, but it turns out that after 200 votes, the male photos get taken down anyway.
What I don't quite understand is how the graphs correspond to the rating number. As far as I can see, the two statistics bear no resemblance to each other.
Trying to save myself, but my self keeps slipping away.
- Candi
- o.k. I found something that really bothers me about this monitor. it has buttons and lights on the front and I keep trying to get to them with the mouse :)
- Charles
- Tell me. Do you also get annoyed when you can't cut/paste URLs from the TV to the computer?
- Candi
- umm.. well..
- Candi
- *grin*
- Charles
- A straight answer please. :)
- Candi
- it's annoying, yes :Þ
Further proof unnecessary.
Of course, I've done even worse myself. I once read the "You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When" list, and scared myself - I've had sticky-notes on my monitor, and tried to raise windows over them. I've found myself putting semi-colons on the end of sentences. Once, while reading a magazine, I found the second article in a series, and caught myself thinking "Well, I can hit esc-P to see if the parent article is still on the server."
The difference is, I know I'm a geek. Candi's in denial. :)