Just when you thought the corporate & political world couldn’t get any more evil, it turns out even their attire is unenvironmental.
Category Archives: blurb
Proposal for labeled break and continue in Python
I’ve created and submitted a new PEP proposing support for labels in Python’s break and continue statements. Georg Brandl has graciously added it to the PEP list as PEP 3136. Yay!
For added weirdness, read the alternative specifications… I came up with a few quite bizarre ways to implement loop-specific break and continue.
Self-referential modal dialog box
This gem of a dialog appeared on my dad’s computer when I opened Canon’s photo management tool ZoomBrowser. It was the only dialog open. Even if there had been another dialog box open, making that dialog modal would have prevented the need for a second (modal) dialog.
Needless to say, closing the dialog helped the situation quite a bit. Canon should stick to making cameras and leave the software to the professionals.
The X-Files, dog version
Smithsonian magazine reprinted this snippet by Simon Rich, previously printed in the Harvard Lampoon. Makes me feel better about alien abductions for sure.
Get out of the way, II
Another person (other than me) who thinks the CSS working group is irrelevant.
The angels have the phone box
Hooray for direct and unambiguous
Now you too can construct meaning out of color directly and unambiguously. If only we could come up with a font to convey the news fairly and balancedly.
Detailed, in-depth review of eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
XSLT is the runt of the litter of the unholy offspring from a drug-fueled menage-a-trois between Kernighan & Ritchie C, Lisp, and XML.
No problem, John
John Ukec Lueth Ukec, the Sudanese ambassador to Washington, has threatened to take away the United States’ access to Coca-Cola in response to sanctions against Khartoum. Nevermind that you’re complicit in the genocide in Darfour, and apparently an idiot too. And nevermind that Sudan’s supplies of gum arabic can’t be as critical to the soft-drink industry as you claim, since your own government predicts the sanctions will have little effect on your economy. Mr. Ukec, if this is what it takes to get your government to cease its mass murder campaign, I’ll stop drinking Coca-Cola.
Optimus keyboard released
Somebody promised to buy me one of these if they were ever actually produced. At $1,500, I don’t think my gift is coming anytime soon. This keyboard seems now like one of those ideas that is clever but doesn’t go far enough. If you’re going to put led screens on the keys, why have individual keys at all? Why not have just one big touch screen, or one big LED array which detects finger motion? Then you could have any key layout, or scale the entire thing for the size of your hands and the width of your shoulders, or rearrange the keys into a grid or offset individual columns for the different spans of your different fingers, or switch to a one-handed layout, or switch to a chording style keyboard, or anything else. Why stick to the traditional physical key layout when you are going to all the trouble of making the keys themselves totally configurable?
Update 2008-01-09: Ars Technica reviews the Optimus.