Archive

Archive for September, 2010

Skynet Says

September 21st, 2010

In the future, artificially intelligent computers take to blogging, but they miss the point:

Blogfile 2023-10-03
by Apache73984759

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) was like GET /index.html and I was all like 200.

Then,

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) is all like GET /index.php and I said 404, LOLz!

A couple scary things to note:

  1. While considered “missing the point,” it’s not all that much better then actual intelligences
  2. And scarier, IE6 is still being used

Visions

Removing input focus rings in Safari

September 19th, 2010

You know, the little blue glowing border that highlights the text box you are working in. I was looking for a way to get rid of it as it was detrimental to the visual flow of my site.

I found this little bit of css gets rid of it easy as cake:

:focus {
    outline: none;
}

Presumably, you can add other stylings to the border if you’re not looking to remove it. For instance, the following gave my input boxes an evil red glow:

:focus {
    outline-color: red;
}

Thanks are in order to this post on removing the ring, as this could have been a fairly tricky google search.

Fleeting Sanity

Go be alone somewhere…

September 14th, 2010

I heard some person being interviewed on the radio recently. He was, among other things, a medical doctor turned professional ballet dancer turned Goldman Sachs broker. And, from what I gathered, he was actually good at all these things–not just someone with a healthy dose of ADHD.

Clearly I don’t remember much of what he was being interviewed about, but something he did say struck a chord with me. To paraphrase:

Go where no one else is. That is, instead of clamoring for attention in an overloaded trend, become an expert in something you like that no one else is studying. Your time will come eventually.

I thought that was pretty good advice. Unless you become an expert in type setting or something. To further that line of thought, I offer this corollary:

Go become an expert in something in an area that no one else has focused on…so long as a machine can’t do it better than you.

Musings

Getting Pulled Over

September 9th, 2010

You’re just cruisin along, thinking of your latest killer app idea, when lights start flashing behind you. After the initial burst of adrenaline pierces you to the core and shortens your breath, you briefly stop to consider the technology of the trailing officer’s light bar (rotating beacons or LEDs). But then you manage to pull yourself out of your internal dialog, which was going over LEDs superiority as a light-bar technology, given its better visibility, no moving parts, and more efficient energy usage. What do you do next?

The first part is relatively straightforward:

try
{
    You.PullOver();
}
catch(RetardException e)
{
    Officer.Arrest(You);  /// Do not pass go, do not collect $200
}

The next part gets a little more complex:

float getTicket()
{
    float fine = officer.GetFine(you.Speed - context.SpeedLimit);

    while (officer.IsTalking)
    {
        try {
            if (you.Gender == "Male")
                you.PolitelyAgree();
            else if (You.Gender == "Female")
                you.FakeDistressedSobbing();
            else
                /// ?

            if (officer.LetOffWithWarning(you))
            {
                fine = 0;
                break;
            }
        }
        catch (UncooperativeException e)
        {
            if (e.MyTaxesPayYourSalary == true)
                fine *= 2;
            else
                fine *= 1.2;
            break;
        }
    }
    
    return fine;
}

The elusive black box that is the officer’s LetOffWithWarning() function (highlighted above) is probably of particular interest. It’s probably a combination of factors involving the mind set of the officer as well as your behavior and is probably worth much deeper research. The dramatic sobbing attempts (which, as seen above, only work if you’re a woman) are an attempt to incite a true return value for LetOffWithWarning. Everything else is pretty much targeted at keeping you out of jail.

A Coder's Guide to Life