Rather than the philosophic tripe that I've been boring you with for the past couple days, I figured I would take a shot at some of the more prevelant (not "important") issues facing the web world today. Here goes:
Movable Type Comment Spam
I've been whining about this sort of garbage to Berta recently, but I figure you readers (one, two, and you in the back) will probably want to hear me rant, also.
This is ridiculous. I find it strange that bloggers that have no technical skill are talking about this topic incessantly. It bugs me to begin with that people with blogs are mostly self-referential to begin with. But this is crazy. It's like one bug in the software that everyone uses causes the entire world to talk about nothing but fixing that one bug.
My thought: Please allow discussion to continue on topics that might actually generate interest for people who don't use MT!
Steve Bartman
This fan was so intent on catching the foul ball that he didn't realize there was an actual player standing under him trying to do that exact thing. The picture here is worth more than anything you can say about it.
The 100 greatest novels of all time
There are a couple of web publications overseas that I don't like. The Register is one of them, with their mostly senseless Microsoft-bashing attitude. The Guardian is the other.
The Guardian has published this list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. I have read somewhere around 8 of these books, mostly because they were required reading in school. I can't imagine reading some of these books for pleasure, but as soon as I say that I note that Anna Karenina is in the list, which I picked up specifically for that purpose.
Here is my interesting bit to add to this story: Although I've only read 8 of these books (and parts of some that I'm not officially counting), I've seen movies based on 22 of them.
Powell Lies to the UN
This really isn't new, most people who read this site probably know this. But the new news is that experts on the intelligence gathered in Iraq have now said that while they watched Powell give his case for war to the UN, he must have knowingly lied.
I don't really find this stuff shocking any more. I'm just anxious to get Bush out of the White House. Put in a Democrat for all I care, just get the faith-based senile war-mongering out of my government, and give me back my $87 billion.
Firebird 0.7
Oh, here's a great story. It seems the Mozilla group has a new browser release for you to try. While I must say that it is a sure improvement over prior versions, it's still not polished enough for primetime.
Guys, I think it was Opera who started the whole tab-browsing business. Honestly, if you're not browsing in tabs, you're missing out. It's a shame IE doesn't have them (and never will). I find Firebird's tab system kind of clunky compared to Opera's. Of course, they've had more time to refine theirs. And I paid them.
And here's my biggest gripe- CSS rendering. All I hear from everyone who is supposed to know these things is that Mozilla renders CSS better than anything else. Well fine. It's really the only reason I keep downloading the darned thing. But when I look at the Asymptomatic homepage, the background gets all wonky.
But hold on... It seems that my CSS doesn't validate. Oh, my. I used two different width/height specifiers as a background anchoring value. Why isn't this legal? Ugh. Let's see if it fixes Firebird's impression of my site... Aha! The browser is simply unforgiving.
Want to know the real reason why I hate Mozilla? It's because of stupid stuff like this. The fact that I can spend 20 minutes with the software and find so many dumb little flaws... Do I have to rant about this some more?
Supercomputers!
For some reason, Wired is really interested in computing speed today. There's an article over there about this new company, ClearSpeed Technologies, that is set to release a PCI card that will house a parallel-processing, high-performance, low-power floating-point processor.
Inserting six of their standard cards could instantly propel your desktop to supercomputer status, making it capable of performing 600 gigaflops. That would put your system in the list of the 500 most powerful computers on the planet.
Or, you could just buy 1100 dual-processor Mac G5s. Whichever.
