I want to welcome all the IE 8 users that can finally see the site as it was designed. Since this site was launched I’ve had to hide the style sheets from IE users as the CSS engine just wasn’t able to render the design at all, even though it could be rendered 98% perfect by Netscape 6 (released November of 2000. The 2% of rendering issues, were that the fonts look bigger in Netscape 6 and the drop down menus are finicky. Netscape/Mozilla fixed the out standing issues in their CSS engine by Netscape 7.1 [aka Mozilla 1.4], and thus rendered this site 100% perfect since June of 2003). Hey at least you can say your browser of choice finally joined the party of being able to view our site as it was designed, even if it took Microsoft about 9 years to catch up with it’s CSS 2 support?
So last year was the 10 year anniversary of the film Gattaca. It’s an interesting film that questions whether science really has all the answers when it comes out smarting Nature. It puts us in a world where if you where not genetically enhanced you are a second class citizen divorced of all the rights we enjoy now, all because you are a health risk, since science can supposedly predict before birth exactly what you will die from. Have you ever sat back and thought about what if the technology shown in that film was available to us today, whether we should use it or it not?
I tend think about these things any time I watch a great Sci-fi film like Gattaca, and then find my self wondering if and when any of the films’ predictions will come true. Take blade runner for example, it predicted that by 2015 that we would have flying cars and so over run in pollution in LA that we would have Acid rain all of the time. Well we have the acid rain but still no flying cars, and LA is cleaner than it has been in years, mainly due to advances in energy efficient cars and machinery, granted we still have a ways to go, to really clean the City up for good, but it’s in a better position then what Blade Runner assumed we would be at by now.
Which brings me back to Gattaca…
- Do you think in our life time we will be able to genetically enhance our children during conception?
- When do you think we will have such technology available to us, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years or more?
- If do end up creating that technology do you think that our society will fall into the same traps as Gattaca depicted in the film? If so why?
As I’ve been pondering these questions lately, I found it weird that, today I happened to stumble upon something that excited me as much as it frightened me, at how close we really are to having a world just as Gattaca predicted it could be.
All I can say is that this is completely disturbing and deeply saddens me, that we have come this far. But this is just another step deeper bellow the line of despair. And as we move further away from God it can only get worse. :’(
For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse
–Mit The Destroyer
3 Years ago today, I had only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before due to my current job. That afternoon I had an interview in San Louis Obispo, as I was looking for a new job that wouldn’t take my entire life, as my current job was requiring me to work on average 7 days a week 12 hours a day (which didn’t mean I was working Saturday or Sunday). So I asked my mom if she would be willing to drive me up to the interview, as I felt I was in no condition to drive to San Louis Obispo and back, which was a 4 hour round trip from where I was living at the time. My mom obliged as she didn’t want any harm to come to me.
I arrived at the interview at about 2:30pm, with 30 minutes to spare, as my interview wasn’t until 3pm. The 45 minute interview went ok. I said my goodbyes to my interviewers, and promptly left, to merge with the rest of the Friday afternoon traffic, of the 101 freeway, to make our way home. Just as we left the city limits of San Louis Obispo I noticed that my mom began to veer off into the left soft shoulder of the 101 freeway. I softly spoke, “mom did you notice you just veered into the soft shoulder on your left.” Which startled her causing to over correct by yanking the steering wheel all the way to the right, causing her car to cross the entire 101 freeway and then to flip.
To do this day I still don’t know how many times the car flipped as we both blacked out for a minute, and when we awoke we where both upside down, faces smashed into the mud of the soft shoulder on the far right side of the 101 freeway. By The grace of God he directed our car so that no other car hit us as we traveled from one side of the freeway to the other side and then kept our car from flipping until we arrived on the soft shoulder that was muddy, due to the rain from the last week or so. Had we flipped while on the freeway or had it not been raining the week before so that the soft shoulder was hard ground we would have surely died or at the very least been paralyzed from the neck down. On top of that there was an EMT that had just gotten off duty that witnessed the accident and help me out of the car as we waited for the paramedics to arrive; to get my mom out of the car, who was still trapped under the car, and take us to the emergency room.
Here are some pictures of what my mom’s car looked like after the accident:
About 2 1/2 years ago my CRT monitor died (went up in a puff of smoke), and so I decided it was time to finally upgrade to a nice 19 inch LCD. Unfortunately, my video editing machine would no longer boot into windows 2000 (except safe mode), because the last g550 matrox driver release, for windows 2000, doesn’t support LCD monitors. Thus, my only option to get support was to upgrade to windows XP which I didn’t have the money to do.
So I figured I would research to see if GNU/Linux could be a viable video editing platform. But everything I read at the time said no. So I just let the machine sit there for the last two years. About a couple of weeks ago I finally decided to take the plunge and installed Ubuntu on it, so I could at least backup the data that was there and then start clean. Luckily in this time frame GNU/Linux has gain the ability to mount NTFS drives, so I didn’t have to reformat my drives and thus was able to use GNU/Linux to backup the data that was there.
While I was backing up my data I discovered a folder on one of the NTFS drives I had never seen before called “RECYLER”. So I started poking around in the newly discovered folder to see what was in there. And low and behold I found a gold mine. I found the master print of my Camp Attitude video (ogg) I did 5 years ago, which I thought I had forever lost due to me accidentally deleting the wrong file, and not noticing until a year later. I can’t tell you how jubilated I am, this is the find of the century, as I thought I would never be able to make a DVD of this video, so I can show the video to friends and family on a TV instead of a poorly encoded postage stamp QuickTime video on my computer. Which, up to this point was my last remaining copy. So in celebration I’ve made a copy of the master in ogg theora, so you can view the Camp Attitude video (in ogg), here on the website.
Even though I’ve switched my party affiliation to the Libertarian recently, I was put on the trail of 2008 Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul by a co-worker of mine, saying he ran a few years back as the Libertarian presidential candidate. As far as I can tell it seems he has always been a Republican except for the year he ran as a Libertarian president. Despite being a Republican from what I have gathered thus far he votes in line with libertarian ideals consistently. Anyways, the reason for this post is I was hoping someone out there knew where I can find the official voting records our Representatives, so I can confirm what I read so far at Wikipedia and his website.
But I was thinking you know what I should use that resource to look at every Representative, so I’m better informed on who is really telling the truth at campaign time. As words mean nothing my book. but actions do.
On the same token it would be nice to have the bills cross referenced with the bill it self so I can read and attempt to understand the implications and confirm that what the summary states, matches what is written in the bill.
While debugging some code on a site I work on. I discovered a new double class bug in IE7. The weird thing about it is the code that causes the double class bug to appear is not even related to it. Sample Test case:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>IE7 Uncle Double Class Selector Bug</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
p {
color: red;
}
.class1.class2 p {
color: green;
}
.foo + p { }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="class1 class2">
<p>I’m Green</p>
<p>I’m Green Too</p>
</div>
<p>I’m red</p>
</body>
</html>
I’ve set all paragraphs to default to the color red. However, due to the double class selector changing its children’s paragraphs to green, and also creating a select any element that has the class foo, whose siblings are paragraphs (doesn’t matter if you set styles or not in that selector, or if the .foo is changed to * or to an element selector that is the same element as the parent with the double class selector [e.g. * + p {}, or div + {}]) it will cause IE7 to create a symbiotic relationship between “.class1.class2 p:last-child” and “.class1.class2 + p:first-of-type”. Thus, if you set styles on “.class1.class2 + p:first-of-type” it will cause “.class1.class2 p:last-child” to get those same styles (and visa versa). Luckily there are a couple work a rounds (ordered by effectiveness).
- Don’t use any sibling selectors in your styles
- Add any type of DOM node between .class1.class2 and it’s sibling p, so long as it’s not a plain text node (e.g. you can use a comment tag or empty element node with style set to display: none;).
- Add an inline style declaration on the effected element that overrides the style set on the “.class1.class2 p” selector.
- Change the “.class3 + p” selector to be an element + p selector, so long as the element to the left of the + is not the same element type that would get selected by the double class selector. In other words with the test case above you can use any element + p combination except for div + p
- Change the “.foo + p” selector to ” #foo + p” selector
- Change the double class selector to a single class selector (e.g. change “.class1.class2 p” to “.class2 p” or “.class1 p” (this solution only works so long as you don’t have any * + p selectors).
- 10. I went to a seafood disco last week… and pulled a mussel.
- 09. Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn’t much, but the reception was great.
- 08. A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I’ll serve you, but don’t start anything.”
- 07. An invisible man marries an invisible woman. The kids were nothing to look at either.
- 06. Patient: “I can’t stop singing ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home.’”
Doctor: “That sounds like Tom Jones Syndrome.”
Patient: “Is it common?”
Doctor: “It’s Not Unusual.”
- 05. Two cows are standing next to each other in a field. Daisy says to Dolly, “I was artificially inseminated this morning.” “I don’t believe you”, says Dolly. “It’s true, no bull!” exclaims Daisy.
- 04. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. It sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
- 03. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. “But why,” they asked, as they moved off. “Because”, he said, “I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
- 02. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him….. A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
And #1 Top Ten Worst Puns for the week is…
- 01. And finally, there was a person who sent 10 different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least 1 of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
The question remains can the technique I showed in Fix for IE’s lack of application/xhtml+xml mean we can now embed other XML based formats inside the XHTML, as XML promises? The answer is, absolutely!
Here is a XHTML, SVG, MathML example page, that shows MathML and SVG embedded right along side an XHTML document. To properly view the page you will need to download these MathML Fonts, and these SVG and MathML plugins if viewing in IE.
What do we need to change to make this work?
- Modify the doctype to the XHTML file
- Modify the html tag to add the additional name-spaces
- Add object tags to head to inform IE to use plugins to render SVG/MathML
- Modify the xsl:stylesheet tag to include the additional name-spaces
Example of doctype, html and head tag modifcations
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="svgMathMlXhtml.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xhtml-math-svg/xhtml-math-svg.dtd"[
<!ENTITY % MATHML.prefixed "INCLUDE" >
<!ENTITY % MATHML.prefix "math" >
<!ENTITY % SVG.prefixed "INCLUDE" >
<!ENTITY % SVG.prefix "svg" >
]>
<html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>Advanced Example</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
<object id="AdobeSVG" classid="clsid:78156a80-c6a1-4bbf-8e6a-3cd390eeb4e2"></object>
<?import namespace="svg" implementation="#AdobeSVG"?>
<object id="MathPlayer" classid="clsid:32F66A20-7614-11D4-BD11-00104BD3F987"></object>
<?import namespace="math" implementation="#MathPlayer"?>
</head>
Example of xsl:stylesheet modifications
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Have you ever tried sending a 100% strictly compliant xhtml to IE, so that IE would use It’s xml engine to render the page? If so, you know that IE borks on it and forces you to download the xhtml file. I’m here to tell you that I’ve found a work around, that is standards compliant and gets around that limitation and forces IE to use the XML rendering engine. Two steps are required for it to work:
- Configure web server to send xhtml files with the mime type of application/xml
- Then attach a XSL sheet to each xhtml file you serve to IE
Exmple File
Example xhtml code
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="fixMe.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Simple Example < /title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- xhtml code here -->
<body>
</html>
Required fixMe.xsl code
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Why does this work?
As far as IE is concerned you sent it a XML file, with an XSLT sheet applied to it. It’s XML rendering engine then applies the XSLT sheet which converts the XML page into an XHTML page. Without the XSLT sheet applied IE would have just showed us the source code to the page.
How did you ever figure this out?
I discovered this when I was developing this website, to teach myself XSLT. And knowing what I know about mime-types I figured it should work if I just changed the mime-type for XHTML from application/xhtml+xml to it’s alternate compliant mime-type of application/xml1, seeing as IE wasn’t having any issues displaying XML files sent as application/xml.
Additional Notes
Update: To see an example with SVG and MathML mixed in with the XHTML read So now that IE unerstands pure XHTML…
