philisha.net

“Which of the browsers sets forth our page layouts as they were meant, this which Microsoft vomited forth, or that which we have downloaded and compiled from the Mozilla Foundation? If our browser be not CSS compliant, nor able to antialias fonts, nor render PNGs with suitable transparency, you shall have leave to say what you will, and so shall the users, and the present developers.

But if Firefox be standards-compliant and secure, and rendering pages as is proper to their code, and ‘blessed for ever,’ is it not becoming to obliterate and blot out that other browser and those nonstandard sites, as but a pattern of bugginess, a store of all security exploits, into which, whoso falls, ‘knoweth not that zombies are compromised with her, and doth accumulate an abundance of spyware?’

This they know themselves, and in their craft they conceal it, not having the courage to speak out, but uttering something else. For if they speak, a condemnation will follow; and if they be suspected, proofs from CERT will be cast at them from every side.”

Paraphrased from Contra Gentes by St. Athanasius (Chapter 3 Section 10)

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What’s sadder, the fact that thousands of people around the world are throwing parties to celebrate the final release of Firefox 1.0 or the fact that I’d really like to go to one?

I’d be on contract, so it’d be less fun than it could, but I’m just imagining how crazy it would be to have a room full of people who are strange enough to be excited about the release of a standards-compliant, fast web browser.

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‘Life is hard, but it’s a lot harder when you’re stupid.’

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Neal Stephenson was interviewed on Slashdot recently, and this was just dynamite:

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don’t have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building’s roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling’s professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers’ conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.

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WHISKEY MAN

Whiskey Man’s my friend. He’s with me nearly all the time.
He always joins me when I drink and we get on just fine.

Nobody has ever seen him.
I’m the only one.
Seemingly I must be mad.
Insanity is fun
If that’s the way it’s done.

Doctors say he’s just a figment of my twisted mind.
If they can’t see my Whiskey Man, they must be going blind.

Two men dressed in white collected me two days ago.
They said there’s only room for one and Whiskey Man can’t go.

Whiskey Man will waste away
If he’s left on his own.
I can’t even ring him ‘cause he
Isn’t on the phone.
Hasn’t got a home.

Life is very gloomy in this little padded cell.
It’s a shame there wasn’t room for Whiskey Man as well.

Whiskey Man’s my friend. He’s with me nearly all the time.
He always joins me when I drink and we get on just fine.

We get on just fine.
Just fine.

© The Who

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So, according to Macromedia, Coldfusion will increase your productivity when compared to PHP!

This article is just too ridiculous. It takes a bunch of really bad examples of PHP code, and shows how well-written Coldfusion code is shorter, cleaner, and easier to read. Classic straw-man arguments. For instance, he uses the example of sending mail, and pulls out a twelve-line piece of code just to send a piece of mail in PHP, and compares it to a four-line bit of Coldfusion code. But the PHP code is strung together in a messy way which could have been written to be just as quick and simple as the same function was in Coldfusion. He then goes on to explain conditional includes with a bunch of code that could be written much more cleanly in PHP while implying that it’s not even possible to do in PHP. It’s just too much.

Remind me again why anyone would want to use Coldfusion to program web sites? I guess they must be getting pretty desperate for reasons when they have to pull out junk like that.

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Well, so much for Kerry’s claims to be a Catholic. That’s the nice thing about Catholicism—there’s a central authority. None of this searching through records to see if something is true. If it comes from the Church, that’s what goes. It’s also encouraging to see that not only political motivations led to it—simply convictions against killing:

Balestrieri, a self-identified political independent, says that his actions come as a defender of the faith and Holy Eucharist from sacrilege and scandal, not as one focused on an electoral outcome. “Our victory can come as early as today: It would be for Sen. Kerry, who publicly calls himself a Catholic and yet in violation of Canon Law continues to receive Holy Communion, to repent of his grave sin and publicly recant his abortion advocacy.”

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It’s official: 47 percent of the visitors to my old site are there because they were searching for Banana Phone. It is the fourth site that comes up when you search for banana phone mp3 download, (which seems to be a relatively popular search. I can’t imagine why….) but the first one that actually gives you what you’re looking for.

I guess everyone who really has a reason goes to the new site, but the search engines still remember the old one. Google never forgets.

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