is Microsoft now the underdog? (WordPress is annoying)

I think I’ve about had it with Wordpiss.  Their comment approval process is fine for rejecting dozens of spam comments, but it’s terrible for approving a valid comment where you have to actually READ it before you’re sure it’s good.  The only way to read the whole comment to the end, as far as I could see, was to edit it!  I could not find any option for viewing the comment as it would appear if approved.  And then, when I try to follow any links to the post it’s a comment to, they’re links for editing it, not reading it.  This is stupid.

I have a sneaking feeling that Blogger is much easier to work with.  But I don’t want to move yet more of my life on to Google’s servers.  I think they’ve now officially crossed the line into being the new Microsoft — the big dominant choice that anyone who doesn’t like monopolies ought to look for alternatives to.  Since Windows 8 came out, Microsoft might actually now qualify as an underdog.  If not now, then they will soon.

IBM has been an underdog for a while now.  If they achieve the ability to answer natural-language questions before Google does, as they well might, I’ll be rooting for them, even though they were once the bad guy.  But I won’t go so far as to root for Microsoft… the memories of their ways when they were on top are a bit too fresh.

As for blogging platforms… what I really miss is Livejournal.  Why are today’s social networking sites so good for connecting people but so terrible for longer-form writing?  LJ was the one and only time that I saw thoughtful blogging combined with strong social networking in a way where both were able to work to their fullest.

pictures on top

It was bugging me that the text along the right hand side of this blog would be rendered on top of my lovely pictures. So I experimented, and it turns out that WordPress is perfectly happy to let you add this little adjustment to your <img> tags:

style="position:relative;left:0;top:0;z-index:9999;"

Artificial Intelligence — what’s coming

The term “Artificial Intelligence” means a computer or robot programmed to be smart like a person.  It’s a pipe dream so far, but a lot of people think it makes sense that it can happen eventually, and the idea is a staple of science fiction, in which it’s often taken for granted that a hundred years from now, our machines will be as smart as a lot of us are, and might even be considered citizens with the same rights as people.

Is this notion realistic?  Is it possible?  Is it likely?  If it happens, what form will it take?  I think I may be able to help clarify these questions a bit.

the end of Windows hegemony?

Are we finally seeing the first signs of the end of Windows?  Can the vast decaying empire of the Windows desktop finally be about to fall?

instant volume control

Let’s say you’re at work and listening to MP3s in your headphones.  And someone comes up and needs to talk.  You have to stop the music… and in the past I’ve found I’m always fumbling to open up the player GUI and hit Pause, and it takes several seconds, during which you’re not looking very professional.

And if you use the taskbar icon to adjust the volume, it makes a loud blatt in your ear as soon as you let go of it.  That’s not much good either.

I decided I wanted a quick keyboard-shortcut way to go play/pause, and to increase or decrease the volume.  Only problem was, at work I’m not allowed to install any outside software.  So it had to be done with nothing but a script.  Turns out the Windows Script Host can emulate the special media-player keys on a multimedia keyboard, like so:

European vs Indian state names

Some states have names of purely European derivation, such as New Hampshire or Georgia.  Others have names of native origin, such as Massachusetts or Hawaii.  Which category has more states in it?  Turns out, this question is not all that easy to answer.

First, let’s list the states whose names have definite unambiguous European origins.

California
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Montana
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia

That’s 21 names. Now, the ones with names of definite native origin:

Alabama
Alaska
Arkansas
Connecticut
Hawaii
Illinois
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Nebraska
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Wisconsin
Wyoming

That’s 24 names.  This list is ahead… but it doesn’t have a clear majority.  To settle the question, we have to look at the five remaining states.

Arizona
Idaho
Indiana
New Mexico
Oregon

Turns out, all of these five are debatable.  What about the name Indiana?  It’s from a term used in European languages, but the term refers to the native people.  How do you count it?  That’s a philosophical question.

What about New Mexico?  The name “México” is of native origin, but the state is named after a country with a European-derived language and culture.  Do you count it as native?

Arizona.  The origin of the name is said to be a Spanish corruption of an Aztec word.  Should you count that as native?  But others say it’s a Spanish corruption of an O’odham name, still others say it comes from Basque, and finally, it might just be short for “árida zona”, meaning dry zone, though you’d expect the adjective in that phrase to be placed after the noun.  So the fact is, no one actually knows whether the name is native or not.

The case of Oregon is even worse.  The name came into use long before there was a United States of America, among people who knew almost nothing about the area, and nobody knows where it came from at all.  There are various theories but they’re basically all guessing and hoping.

Idaho may be the one case where a land speculator just went and made a name up.  He at first claimed it was a Shoshone name, then that he just invented to sound Indianish, but then later someone argued that he got it from the Comanche term for “enemy”, because that’s how they saw the people who lived in that direction.  Again, no one actually knows.

So the odds are that there are probably more state names of native origin than of European or colonial origin, since if you count only two of these five as native that gives them the majority… but we can’t say for certain.

What we probably can do is link the cases of Indiana and New Mexico, since whatever principle you use to decide one of them will tend to place the other on the opposite side.  If you count New Mexico as native then Indiana looks colonial.  So that would make the balance 25 to 22 for the native side, giving them at least a tie, and they have the majority if any one of the three unknowns is actually native.  But it still isn’t settled.

Java vs Silverlight: which has the worse developer install experience?

So which has the worse installation experience for developers — Java, or Silverlight?  Let’s see the contestants in action…

the square-cube law: “All animals jump the same height”?

It was a school-age best friend’s dad — a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator — who proposed the hypothesis “All animals jump the same height”.  Now this did not of course mean that a hippo can jump the same height as a gazelle… what it means is “It seems like the ability to do a standing leap to a given height is fairly independent of the size of an animal’s body.”  Humans and cats leap a similar upward distance, and so do grasshoppers.

So the question is, if you apply the square-cube law and the like to the issue of jumping, does scale cancel out?  Or does it only approximately do so?  Is size an advantage in jumping ability, or a disadvantage, or neither?

IIS Express

An addendum about the little web app I made: how to serve local web pages on your home system with IIS Express. It’s much lighter weight than real IIS, and is meant to serve only a single user, so you don’t have to worry all that much about securing yourself against outside access to your system via browser.

my phonebook app… CSS+JavaScript for multicolumn layout

I used to have a little Access database of contacts — people’s addresses and phone numbers and the like.  I had a little Access data entry form, and designed a report that listed the important names in tiny print that I could fold up and carry in my wallet.

When I got my current computer, “Knuckles”, I didn’t have MS Office on it. I tried to make do with Open Office.  The Word and Excel replacements work pretty well (except for file format issues), but the Access substitute, “Base”, is hopeless.  After endless struggling I was never able to load my phonebook and edit it, let alone replace the report layout I had.

But recently I installed Visual Stupido 2010, in case I had to take work-at-home jobs to get any employment.  And to re-familiarize myself with my slightly rusty asp.net skills, I made a little web app which accesses that phonebook.  Copying the data into Sql Server Express was way easier than trying to get it into OOo Base.  It didn’t take long to make a web form that let me modify records, and I even made a page that, with stringent CSS, lays out the small-print report for wallet-sized printing.

Now this report layout requires the items to flow in multiple columns like a newspaper article.  This is notoriously not well supported in HTML.  But I got it to happen… it turns out that CSS 3 includes column-flow features, and both Firefox and Chrome now have provisional support for it in place.

But IE doesn’t.  Nor do most out-of-date browser versions.

Fortunately, a guy named Cédric Savarese found a way to do it in JavaScript.  So I downloaded his big ol’ script and tried it.  Disaster — he’d never tested anything remotely like the case I was using. His script made a hopeless mess.

So I fixed it, and added features.  Here it is.  And here is his original page about how it works.  This code is redistributable under LGPL.

So thanks to Cédric and I, if you want to have newspaper-like flowing columns on your website, now you can.