i’ve been in irc the first time for… hmm… let me think. maybe four years? or five? well, anyway, a really long time. joined a few channels. some didn’t exist anymore. some do. lots of nicks which sound familiar, some which i have met once in real life, some even remember me. some people died. lots are still alife, and around. memories coming up… old feelings, long time hidden in some corners…
posts about www. (page 1.)
… my blog really has 100% valid xhtml 1.0 transitional code.
until now, there were some exceptions:
- a wordpress bug which generated invalid xhtml code if you have more than one blogroll category (which will be fixed in the next version; i wrote a quick hack to fix the one i’m using);
- the youtube code snippet was quite a mess, i fixed it using some hints from the w3c validator page and by some tipps by kornel, as wordpress tended to screw up my code by inserting tags and, thus, rendering it invalid; i fixed that by using installing a plugin which allows to format specific posts completely yourself;
- certain small bugs in my posts which were completely my faults (these will probably show up from time to time, but i’m trying to eliminate them asap).
maybe i’ll once try to force wordpress to generate xhtml 1.0 strict code, but that’s probably too much work; probably i can hack something together myself in less time which fits better to my needs and which generates such code :)
…take a look here.
is there a reason why a variable in javascript shouldn’t be called “name”? i thought, “no”, and simply used that name. well, until i found out that this breaks safari… while it works perfectly fine under firefox. took me an hour to figure that out… thank you whoever is responsible for this, i really love wasting my time with such things…
every time i plan to start a new project, let it be a web project, a programming job, a latex document (or a combination of those), i’m thinking hard on whether to use something already existing as a base or whether to do everything myself, from the scratch. for latex documents, i usually reuse macros i’ve written myself. for programs, i use libraries like opengl and zlib (two random names coming to my mind, there are of course a lot more), i reuse my own code, and write the rest from scratch. for this blog, i used wordpress, for usage statistics i use phpopentracker. and, of course, i use php and mysql as backends. even though i could implement the whole stuff myself. if i just would have enough time… but i don’t, and so i have to cope with all the restrictions, specialities, whatever these programs and libraries are throwing at me.
the reason why i’m thinking about this at the moment is a new project of mine i’m thinking about, which i’m planning to code more or less from the scratch (using, of course, some backend stuff like php, mysql, phpopentracker, you name it). i just started drawing some sketches, like its logical structure with hints on the physical implementation. sometimes i wonder whether i should spend more time on such things. despite there probably already exists a system which does exactly what i want, making one yourself is way more fun. although its also way more work.
let’s see if i manage to pull this one through… wish me luck.
yesterday i started reading the xkcd archives (maybe you’ve already noticed that yesterday). if you don’t know xkcd, it’s a webcomic “of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. here are the ones i found particularly interesting, funny, or whatever:
- pi equals. reminds me of the classic “help, i’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory!” joke.
- what if.
- barrel – part 3. i wouldn’t say “wow!” in that situation, though.
- fourier. poor cat.
- secrets.
- useless. standard approachs suck for love.
- su doku. even i can solve these.
- national language.
- binary heart. if you check the parity of the read ones in every column, you’ll notice most of them are even. is this a coincidence? (and don’t ask why i stumbled about that…)
- laser scope. sometimes the primitive word jokes are the best.
- riemann-zeta. about love & primes. this one is not only for number theorists.
- nihilism. squirrels! cool!
- alice and bob. the real story of eve.
- matrix transform. if i’d ever had to solve linear algebra exercises again, i’d try to turn this one in.
- valentine’s day. nothing to add.
- cat proximity. yay, how true. meow!
- code talkers. another one on cryptography.
- fixed width. nerd talk on irc. i don’t know what scares me more, laughing about this one or thinking that i’m probably knowing people who would really do this.
- exploits of a mom. well. if you don’t know what an sql injection attack is, read about it here.
i’ve always thought that mathml is a great idea, allowing you to write formulae in html which look good afterwards. or so i thought. then, today, i saw this. at least in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.6), i have the feeling that word by default produces nicer formulae than this. then, i started searching the web for other examples, maybe it is possible to produce better output. but then, even when looking at (seemingly) standard examples as this and this (the latter supposed to display that 44.997 is an element of the reals), i’m shocked how bad this looks, if it works after all (the first did, more or less, and the latter didn’t). i mean, i know that it might be illusive to expect that the formulae look as good as in latex, but i would have at least expected them to be rendered correctly…
well, i’d guess the only way is to stick to rendering formulae with latex and including them as images, as it is standard practice on basically all sites displaying good looking formulae on the web, as wikipedia, matroids matheplanet, matheraum, etc.
or simply don’t use any formulae in html files, as i’m doing so far. too bad.
obviously, it works.
