Slashdot's greatest knave should spring into action to defend Her Majesty against the latest tidbit:

Instapundit notes: "THEN SHE STOOD NEXT TO THE COFFINS OF THE DEAD AND LIED" also "they locked up a filmmaker for a year, just to support their cover story. Nice people."

I realize it's more of a difference of degree than kind between her and any other megalomaniac running. However, I think that after eight years of electro shock therapy from #OccupyResoluteDesk, Her Majesty has the potential to turn an economic hangover into a full-on coma.

I'm reading Learning Java, which i recently purchased, and was typing in the examples from the book. As the book is a monster to hold, i ended up upgrading the ebook for $4.95. Dual screens with one for the PDF and the other for the IDE make it oh so much easier to type in. I also have been reading it on the macbook while in the tub. Nothing like cozying up with a language manual, eh? :)

It's hard enough to learn Java itself. I remember it from the 90s when it was slow, clunky, crashed browsers, and promised way too much. But, it's matured, and for better or worse, it's out there. So, i'm now learning it despite my own prejudice, and now an then mentally mumble, "oh, how stupid."

The stupidities seem to have more to do with preference, and by no means is it language specific. For example, calling an offset an index, leading to the 0/1 bugs that foil so many, camelCasing, and repeating context inside the name. I'm likely to do my own thing for my own code, to keep it enjoyable. I'm even tempted to declare all arrays with one extra element and just starting from 1. Though, some array methods start from 0 regardless, so, i may not be able to hold onto that fantasy for very long.

This is also my first language where i'm learning proper inheritance. One rule that i wondered about is, if class B is a subtype of class A, a variable of class A can refer to an instance of class B, but not vice-versa. I thought that was backwards because B is A plus other stuff. The box isn't bug enough! If anything, i thought, it should be exactly the opposite. A variable of type B should be able to point to an instance of type A, because it fits, though there may be some defaults required.

But now, i finally got to an explanation from the book, albeit about casting, "Casts in Java affect only the treatment of references; they never change the form of the actual object. This is an important rule to keep in mind. You never change the object pointed to by a reference by casting it; you change only the compiler's (or runtime system's) notion of it." Aha! The reason a variable of type A can hold an instance of type B is that from a usage standpoint, B has everything A has, so who cares about the rest. Conversely, a variable of type B cannot hold an instance of type A because it does not have everything required. To use MBTI terminology, Java is for Ps, i am a J. (I just wish they keep away from databases, which is clearly J territory.) I almost feel enlightened. And from Java, no less.

Now to continue reading. I've been successful int trying to do one chapter a(n office) day. Currently in chapter 6.

I'm surprised this wasn't on the front page. I noticed today in the bottom right corner

And was left to wonder if the Slashdot parent company was bought out. Apparently they just changed their name for better branding. I'm sure this can only lead to good things for this site, right?

There are an awful lot of pages on my web site, and I've been busy making them all "mobile-friendly". Most of them are little or no problem making them look good on all platforms, but there are three that are especially problematic.

I jumped this hurdle (well, sort of stumbled past it) by making two of each of the pages with a link to the mobile page from the index.

Ideally, I could just check to see if it was a phone or not and redirect phones to the mobile page, but there's no way to make this 100% successful*. Each brand of phone has a different user agent, there are a lot of installable phone browsers. On top of that, is it an Android phone or an Android tablet? With the minimum typeface size and viewport set, those pages are fine on the PC version but the phone version looks like crap.

Apple should have thought of this when they made the first iPhone, and Google should have thought of this when developing Android. The answer is simple, but it can only be implimented by browser makers and perhaps the W3C.

From the beginning of the World Wide Web, browsers looked for index.html, the default front page in any directory. This worked fine before smart phones, but no longer.

Phone browsers should look first for mobile.html, and if it exists display that, and display index.html if it isn't there. Tablets and computers would behave as they always have.

It doesn't have to be mobile.html, it could be any name as long as everyone agreed that it was the standard, like they did with index.html.

Maintaining a web site would be much easier if they did this. What do you guys think?

* A reader tipped me to the Apache Mobile Filter. It looks promising, especially since my host uses Apache. I'm looking into it.

Chrome's new bookmark manager is definitely a poster child for "half-ass it then push it to the masses". It seems to be working hard to almost replicate the Windows 8.0 Metro interface that everyone loved down to the "checkmark a tile to open the menu".

Tips:

If you want to make a new folder, go to the folder you want it to be in and press the NEW button on the left outside of the folders, there's no button for it on the right inside the folder (but there is a button to delete the entire folder from inside the folder).

If you want to drag items into your new folder, drop them quick. If you hesitate Chrome decides that you are re-ordering the items and you want the bookmark to go before the folder even though your mouse is directly over the tile.

If you have nested folders, opening a subfolder seems to randomly display all the elements in the center of the screen where you can't click on anything because its all on top of each other. Sometimes. There's no tree view of nested folders. Top level folders are on the left, after that you have to drill down individually.

No right clicking. Haven't you heard that there's no way to right click on a tablet?

When you checkmark a folder you don't get the option to edit its name or description. You have to open the folder then rename it from the inside.

Now, wait: the fruit of Progress is an impenetrable thicket of legislation/regulation produced by the clerisy. Of course it's rigged. You can't stab capitalism in the heart and then bemoan the rise of the nomenklatura. Or maybe the entire article is just a refined Progressive troll.

Bloomberg View says it is unlikely.

...

...

Read the full monty here. Damning? Why, yes: yes, it is.
http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/b9c746caccb2aa718aed0e0e67ae14be.pdf
To the liars spreading this ruse: we've known you're false for some time. But by all means, roll out ManBearPig for another round of drollery.

Just a short note. I picked up an Air Dock back when their Indigogo campaign was under way. I have now had this thing for a little over a year.

In general it works fine and does exactly what it says. I use the CD-mount, which has a nice picture down on this page.

The one flaw with that mount is the bolt and nut used to tighten it are fairly large, and extend beneath the mount. On DIN I sized radios, with the CD slot on top of the unit, the nut blocks the view of the display.

The one other thing I have discovered is that after a year of use, it has magnetized my phone! The Nexus 5 comes with small metal plates built in to the back to allow for the native use of devices like this. After all this time they have become magnetized, and that totally screws up the internal compass.

Now any time I start the compass app it complains the magnetic field strength is way too strong and it doesn't give accurate readings.

To be clear, this happens when the device is undocked and I'm walking around.

My next dock will be non-magnetic, as I do sometimes use the compass.

Texas 2, ISIS 0

Nice shooting, Officer.

And considering (statistically) people with CHL's are even better shots than police, and that there's over 2 million CHL holders in Texas....

The old saying is true: Don't Mess With Texas

Safe gun storage does not include leaving your loaded and unlocked weapon rolled up in the sheets of the bed where your two year old is playing .

And, as usual:

I finally got the full texts of Nobots and Mars, Ho! to display well on a phone. My thanks to Google for showing me how, even if the way they present the information is more like trial and error, but it's actually easy once you jump through all their hoops. I'll make it easy.

First, you need to make sure it will fit on a phone's screen. I've been preaching for years that it's stupid to use absolute values, except with images; if you don't tell the browser the image size and you are using style sheets, your visitors will be playing that annoying "click the link before it moves again" game.

Some of you folks who studied this in college should demand your tuition be refunded, because they obviously didn't teach this.

Giving tables, divs, and such absolute values almost assures that some of your visitors will have that incredibly annoying and unprofessional horizontal scroll (*cough* slashdot *cough*).

None of the elements (images, divs, etc) can be more than 320 pixels wide, and you need to tell the browser to make it fit on a screen. To do this, add this meta tag to your page's head:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Next, you need to make sure the text is large enough to read without double tapping. The <p> tag does this:

<p {min-height: 16px}>

This needs to be placed after the <body> tag and before anything having to do with text.

To test it, just pull the page up on your phone. If it scrolls sideways, you need to work on it.

If you're worried about your Google pagerank, Google has a "mobile friendly test" here. If you flunk, well, when Google says "jump"...

My main index page fails their test. To make it pass the test I would have to ruin the desktop/tablet design. As it is now, the text is readably large on a phone but it has a sideways scroll, which is tiny if you hold the phone sideways, and I added a link at the very start of the page to a version that will pass Google's test, looks fine on a phone, not bad on a tablet but looks like excrement on a computer. The main index works fine on a tablet, since I've made it as "mobile-friendly" as possible.

I'd have it redirect if it saw Android or iOS, but it's been fifteen years since I've done that and I've forgotten how.

IowaHawk:
WH: historically cold winter to blame for weak GDP
WH: we're having hottest year in history

I'm not really ashamed of my country, but #OccupyResoluteDesk is a total piece of work. To say nothing of his sycophants littering this site.
The real question is whether President Jarrett can submarine Her Majesty enough to allow running Michelle, so that President Jarrett can hold power for another 8 years.

After last year's Sample Sale i was very excited to go to this year's. It was $10 promptly asked for at the door, and no real $1 table.

I got:

• Linberg Hot Canary T which seem to sell for about $100.
• Kyosho Radio Controlled Mini-Z Racer MR-02 MM (not cup) Ford GT. A similar item (RM instead of MM) seems to go for about $130.
• NKOK Raging Racers Radio Controlled Ford F-150 SVT Raptor A similar item go for ~$34. ebay has similar vehicles, perhaps only different in color, for ~$25.
• Toy State Road Rippers R/C Ford F150 Raptor (no music, sound, or lights). Similar items seem to go for $25-$30.
• Greenlight Hollywood Series 1 Car Collector Case. Which goes for $55.
• A Hoodie
• A bag.

The canary was $20, the bag $5, All the rest went for $10 each. Had i realized what these were, i would have skipped the Toystate wired(!!) car, and just bought more of the Kyoshos. I really did not give the boxes the attention they deserved.

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"Plain Old Text" doesn't seem to like HTML anymore. </LI> elements are being treated like new <LI> elements. A blank line after <OL> is treated the same way. The new guys just like breaking stuff, don't they.

We recently had a school shooting in Washington state where the (student) shooter was stopped after firing but before hurting anyone. He was indeed stopped by a teacher from that school.

Did the teacher draw a weapon and send lead flying down the hallway? No. The teacher tackled the boy to disarm him. The school principal also helped to hold down the student until police arrived.