philisha.net

After spending time perfecting my elemental themes on philisha.net, I loaded up the site in Internet Explorer, and with a shock realized how broken IE is. There is no support for transparency in images, so my work spiffing up the buttons is lost on most poor fools. It can’t render Courier properly, so viewers stuck in their ways get this hideous pixelation when using the Fire element. There are loads of layout and alignment issues, but the most ironic problem is how the Mozilla Firefox button doesn’t even show up right due to the transparency issue. So they can see my invection in text instead.

I just about expressed my frustration by loading a popup to the Firefox home page whenever anyone looked at the site in IE, but decided against it. Punishing people for ignorance is not the answer, as satisfying as it would be.

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Philisha.net: now with added themeability value!

So now you can customize your browsing experience according to which of the four elements is your favorite. Unfortunately due to the immense ineptitude of Microsoft, the Sky element is the only one that looks decent in Internet Explorer, that vile hideous machination that some people use to browse the web. Personally my favorite is the Fire element, although it’s hard on the eyes for extended reading.

Coming soon: Earth theme!

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Today I attended an Easter performance.

I think it was supposed to be a church service or something. It was a bloody concert. :sigh: We’ve got a long way to go. So what if church is nothing but a concert? People like concerts, right? And if you don’t like this concert, there are other concerts with different music that might make you happy.

Because that’s what’s really important, you know. Making you happy.

Quit trying so hard and everything will fall into place.

This is when it’s damn tempting to despair over the impotence of the church.
Must resist….

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I had my 100th post a while back. That was fun. I think I’ve passed Strong Bad now.

If years were measured in 1024-day chunks, I’d be about seven and a half years old. See how old you’d be.

http://philisha.net/wedding: check it out! I laid out the engagement page better and updated some of the wedding info.

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My apologies, the Biola servers died inexplicably and without warning a few days ago. Things are back now, but the problem is Biola has no uptime guarantees to maintain. Grrrrr….

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Faithful followers of my blog may notice a new orange icon in the lower left corner. Labeled ‘XML’, it allows users to keep track of what’s going on at philisha.net at a glance without actually visiting the site in the web browser.

A little background first. Ever since the beginnings of the Internet, technology has been used to get more and more information piped to its users. The paradigm has always been to get as much input as possible. We are now reaping the effects of such immoderation—from spam to always-on IM clients to popup advertising, only recently have we started realizing information overload needs to be dealt with.

What we now need are tools to sift through data. That’s why Google is the most powerful company on the web in many respects. People are now far less concerned with how much information they have access to, and the shift is over to narrowing down the information.

RSS responds to this need by providing summaries of sites that get updated often. Instead of getting email updates for your favorite sites, you subscribe to their RSS feed and you choose when you want to check it. But instead of going to their site to see what’s new, you get a quick summary: all the recently posted articles with a snippet from the beginning of the text. Advanced RSS readers even show you which articles you’ve looked at and how many new stories each site you’re subscribed to has.

I’d say it’s worth looking into an RSS reader if you spend a lot of time browsing the web. It can save a lot of time by cutting back the fluff, and you have a lot more control over what you read. I’m looking forward to watching this technology catch on at more and more news sites and blogs.

I use Liferea on my FreeBSD desktop and it seems to work fine. For users of another operating system Feedreader would be worth looking at.

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The comments page is dead.
Long live the comments page.

Nobody posts in the forums anymore. That’s why I added comments on a per-post basis. I figure people may be more inclined to post about something than just post on my site in general as it doesn’t really have a topic that inspires people to post about. Cool. It may have been a waste of time as on Jon’s Blog the only posts on it are me posting about posts…. But we’ll just have to see.

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This article Patently Absurd shows what’s wrong with the US Patent and Trademark office. Like I keep saying, beaurocracy is the mother of ineptitude…. and squelched innovation…. and extortion.

Ceterum censeo USPTO esse delendam…

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