antikoan

 |::| Saturday, November 02, 2002

 |::|   10:37:43 AM 

From Scripting News:

Hey I didn't know that Variety has an RSS feed. It's been out since July. Yow. Unfortunately it's not valid. It's got HTML markup in an item title.

Sounds to me like a bad standard. Why in hell woould you spec a standard that didn't let you put some kind of markup in item titles? Or did they simply make the decision to discard the information that might be provided by sub-block-level markup like EM, CITE, I, STRONG, .... Frankly, it boggles my mind still that RSS stores content in attributes, and not in containers. What a strange notion.

 |::| Cool! I always wanted to be a minion!  9:10:02 AM 

Hey, now here's a job opportunity I hadn't thought of: Minion of COBRA, the evil foes of G.I. Joe! And you don't seem to even need any skills! I'm sure I'll be just the guy to show those G.I. Joes what COBRA is made of! Thanks, McSweeney's!

 |::|   8:40:39 AM 

I have to love Radio's automatic update feature. It ensures that I get new interaction-changing features whenever they're released, without having to actually learn about what they do.

At some point in the past few months, something changed about the way that Radio determines the layout of pages. Where once it referenced templates with the extension ".txt", now it references templates with the extension ".htm". And I found an additional, undocumented template that appears to determine the layout of many pages.

As a result, I was finally able to get my relatively simple site changes to percolate through all of my pages. With any luck, my cute new DHTML buttons will now show up for everyone using IE5+ or NN6+. (I already know that they break for Opera. Lots of things break for Opera. Unless you've got RAM issues, you should use Mozilla, instead.)

 |::|   8:30:10 AM 

This morning's edition of "Today's Papers" and the rest of the news are full of the [latest] Microsoft settlement.

When Microsoft falters and fades back into the pack to become a merely mortal company (and it will), there will be literally generations of argument over the cause. Was it the Visible Hand of judicial and regulatory oversight? Was it greed and stobbornness? Or was it Open Source, and its spiritual essence, the implacable, irresistable, ineffible, sanctified Spirit of the Market? ("And lo, the Customer and Supplier did ride together upon the Cluetrain, and their passage was fueled by the Holy Spirit of Commerce, and it was as though the Market Itself reached down with an invisible hand and pushed them toward their Just Destiny. Amen.")

As always, and of course IMNSHO, no single cause will suffice to explain it. We humans will always seek such causes, though, if not in the markets, then in the skies or the waters or the engines of stars. That kind of seeking is a highly adaptive trait, after all...