Everybody still having fun with APK? I notice that damned near every post I made last week has been responded to, questioning my educational bona fides. The hysterical thing is that some AC responded to his inquiries. Now, to about half of those, he responded, accusing me of being the AC. The really hysterical thing: I haven't visited /. since very early on Wednesday morning.

So APK spent a day or two running around and accusing people of sockpuppetry who had forgotten his existence hours before APK posted. Classic. How long until he goes all Hans Reiser?

FAIL! :(

Why the hell do I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of my journal page to find a button to post new content? But guess what? I have to do it fast, because the oh so helpful AJAX auto loads the next page of entries if I scroll down, so that means I have to scroll down and quick click the post button or else I have to keep scrolling down. WTF were they thinking?

Have they never seen any other social media site? That sort of basic functionality needs to be front and center at the top so you can... you know.... use the site.

I've returned to occasional /. use due to no longer working from home, and dang my user ID is low compared to a lot of the account comments I'm seeing. Did /. experience a mass exit recently and are only newbies and fresh troll accounts posting?

Anyone have any preferences for a b/g/n router? I'd like one so that I can put my nice, modern Apple stuff on the N side of things, and the shitty, legacy crap over on the b/g side. Already have an older Time Capsule that isn't full, so I'm not going that route. (Oh, and I'll probably not give my brother access to the N, cause he pisses me off too much).

Thinking to bridge the connection from that to the Time Capsule, and let the Time Capsule handle the rest of it.

I don't care about off the wall firmware. That doesn't interest me in any way, shape or form. Unless I have to deal with that kind of malarkey to get either my Time Capsule or my tons of BT stuff to work nicely.

The adjective form of Jupiter is Jovian. Does Saturn have an adjective form?

Is it safe to use the pattern that arises from the planets I know for the ones I don't? That would be:

• Mercury - Mercurial
• Venus - Venusian
• Terra - Terran
• Mars - Martian
• Jupiter - Jovian
• Saturn - Saturnian?
• Uranus - Uranian?
• Neptune - Neptunian?

Well, after no response for many months, I emailed the Red Cross again. To my surprise and joy, I got a response on the same day! Here are some clarifications I got from them.

First, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not one of the African countries which are high risk for Group O. The "Congo" they are concerned about is the Republic of the Congo (notice the lack of the "Democratic" prefix). So, suddenly I am able to donate blood.

They do anticipate having a screening test that can detect 100% of group O carrying blood as soon as the FDA approves one that matches their screening methods. The only currently FDA approved group O antibody test does not use the right kind of technology for their screening process.

Ever build an apparatus to study subatomic particles out of stuff sitting around your house? Well my friend did and this video is the result of our replication (sort of) of the Wilson Cloud Chamber. We used the updated diffusion cloud chamber design from Andy Folannd with a bit of info from Cosmicrays.org.

The apparatus is a bit finicky and prone to getting too cold, but it worked. We observed several dozen alpha particles zipping through the room interacting with the alcohol vapor. Unfortunately, no muon decays or scattering was observed. It would be interesting to try this again with a different chamber shape / height, a different temperature differential (measuring it next time), and possibly with a magnet to observe the magnetic field affects of the paths on the charged particles.

Observation notes: It greatly aided the observation to have the live video feed piped via s-video to nearby TV, so more than one person could observe the interactions. Only close proximity ~12" makes in person observation possible due to breath condensation and freezing on the cold chamber wall.

We are looking for other experiments that can be performed at home with out significant investments / highly specialized materials that exhibit the ordinarily invisible elements of our universe that also show well on video (or can be made to so so with appropriate pre-planning). Any suggestions?

Notes on the video: shot with GL2 on Matthews tripod at F1.8, 1/60th, WB to sunlight (led light source ~5400K), 0dB gain (except opening scene which had some gain) and MF locked. No specialized color / exposure profile used, no post WB. Opening text plain with background fractal keyframed movement. "Highlight" effect applied to duplicate additive track placed above source with exclusion mask applied to select sections of the video. Video trimmed to exclude empty segments. Cinescore Soundtrack. Rendered as 3Mbps Peak VBR single pass WMV.

I need to help someone get a crash course in QA work on an OSS stack, as opposed to their previous few years of QA work on a Win32 stack. We will be installing Ubuntu tomorrow for a quick and easy workstation. Then we need to find or write a series of tasks to learn the skills to help said person get a crash course in working in / with the LAMP OSS environment.

Again, not a SW dev, or admin, just a QA guy, so tasks, reference material, etc need not be super low level. I have the perl trifecta (learning Perl, Perl Cookbook, and Reg Ex with Perl), but everything else I have relating to Linux is +5yrs old.

Modpoints for sale. If you have a good one tomorrow (TT) that isn't getting the love, let me know.

...so, I was grumbling to myself about IE not supporting certain CSS3 capabilities (selectors, box-shadows, text-shadows, etc), when I decided to go ahead and write a letter on the IE8 blog site:

Hi there.

I'm a web app developer and long-time [x]html/css hacker, and I'm curious about the timeline for IE8 supporting at least *some* of the useful new stuff in the CSS3 spec.

find it immensely aggravating that I can easily do rounded corners, drop-shadows, custom checkboxes/radio buttons, and opacity in Firefox, Safari, etc (but not in IE) using nothing more than CSS3-compliant stylesheets.

I always keep graceful degradation in mind when coding, but that doesn't mean I *want* pages to be either ugly in IE or uneccesarily complicated and verbose just because of browser compatibility issues.

When will I be able to rely on IE supporting CSS3 fully? It would help a lot in terms of lowering bandwidth, and simplifying development while ensuring a cross-browser experience that doesn't leave IE users with a dumbed-down view of a web app.

Shortly thereafter, I got a note back from Eric Lawrence on the subject:

The final version of IE8 was completed in March; in general, it does not (and thus will not) support CSS 3.

Planning for the next version of IE has started, and we have a large number of requests for support of various CSS3 modules.

-Eric

I'm fine with that, but it misses the crux of my question (namely "when will IE be doing the stuff that other browsers have been doing for a year or more with CSS3?"), so I asked another question:

Thanks, Eric...

Does that mean that the next version of IE will support *some* CSS modules when it ships, or that it will support the CSS3 spec in its entirety?

When will we see some blogging on the subject?

...and got a reply...

It's important to note that thus far, only 5 of the CSS3 modules have reached Candidate Recommendation stage: http://www.css3.info/modules/. Some modules are still in working draft stage, and it appears that at least one isn't even at Draft stage yet.

We will discuss our IE9 plans as they solidify. At this point, we're primarily listening to feedback from developers.

Thanks for identifying some of your top requests.

-Eric

I get it. I do, really. I *know* that CSS3 is unfinished. What I *don't* get is why 8 years after the initial working draft, the spec isn't close to being finalized, and why the parts that are simple or relatively stable have not been implemented by all browser vendors.

I make web-based applications for a living. I use a variety of tricks to make them more attractive, and I prefer omitting eye-candy or specific layout details to adding ugly CSS hacks, javascript workarounds, or conditional code just because some browser vendors are more willing than others to provide preemptive support for future standards.

I'm not sure what the primary issue is...politics, money, over-cautiousness...all I know is that the situation makes it harder than it needs to be for me to create simple things that just work in all browsers (a newspaper-style multi-column layout...a drop-shadow on a box or text...alternate images for checkboxes or radio buttons...text displayed at a 45-degree angle).

But hey, what do I know...I'm not coding browsers or part of the CSS working group.

+$1100 on the day including a 5 of 6 on the pick six, holy shit

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that "What's the meaning of life?" is precisely the same question as "What's the meaning of fire?".

In case anyone is wondering why I think a legislator creating a legislation against X is not proof that X is real, I present this interesting news item from Utah. Utah County Republicans reject 'Satanic' resolution. Here are some selections from the article:

Utah County Republicans defeated a resolution opposing well-heeled groups that a delegate claims are pushing a satanic plan to encourage illegitimate births and illegal immigration

Don Larsen, a Springville delegate, offered the resolution, titled "Resolution opposing the Hate America anti-Christian Open Borders cabal," warning delegates that an "invisible government" comprised of left-wing foundations was pumping money into the Democratic Party to push for looser immigration laws and anti-family legislation.

"Satan's ultimate goal is to destroy the family," Larsen said, "and these people are playing a leading part in it."

Larsen's resolution contained quotes from the New Testament on the battle between good and evil. The copy of the resolution handed to delegates stated it "fulfills scriptural prophecies about our times."

"We are not going to be the majority party if we keep pushing the Latinos out," Wright said.

But Cameron Sevy, a Provo delegate, said the GOP shouldn't be ashamed to say that America is a Christian nation

Turns out legislators can be nuttier than slashdot tinfoil hatters.

It's been a while since I posted frequently enough for this to happen, but I'm pretty sure I just got a comment modded troll for the first time ever.

Is this really surprising? (Score:0, Troll)