A comment by Prof. Chris Lawrence on my previous post on CSS positioning got me thinking of a couple of things. Here’s what he said:
CSS positioning gives me a massive headache. I used absolute positioning for the sidebar and floated the main body to the left (and fixed the width of it so it doesn’t flow into the sidebar). And I use percentage widths.
It seems to more-or-less work.
Not to malign his CSS skills, nor mine, but plenty of us really have a hard time getting the hang of the box model, especially when we are already in possession of a codebase that works. We know it works, we can use it, but we dont’ really understand it. It happens not just among web stylists but engineers, biologists, doctors… It isn’t so much a plague but it is important that understanding be arrived at, even if just for the sake of knowing how to do something from scratch.
One thing that I have grumbled about in the past that I only recently understood is the fact that CSS, on the surface, has no mathematical expressions built in. Superficially, we can’t have a CSS rule that says: {width: [take the width of the containing element minus a certain amount]}. Truth is, margins and padding—box model bugs notwithstanding—are the way we do CSS math.
On a different note, I have been contemplating about contributing a theme to the huge array of WordPress themes available, but my conversations with Podz have made me change my mind. Instead, in the coming days I will release a basic HTML page that uses the Shiva codebase along with notations for positioning, etc. It’s going to be ugly, but it will be something that you can download in a zip file and test on your local browser without having WordPress at all. The positioning rules I use are common usage anyway, but I guess it would be a better contribution, especially to those who actually want to understand how my shit works, than for me to give away a drop-in theme that could be replaced on a whim. I’d rather help someone come up with a design they like that would last them for as long as they want.
July 31 2005, 21:15 | Filed under: CSS and Design | 7 Comments |
As Scorpius in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars said: “John Chricton is alive.” And he happened to land in a different show.
Having watched all three parts of the Season 9′s opening episode, I can say with some certainty that it really is difficult for some actors to grow past roles that we have known them in. Cameron Mitchell’s characterization is chock full of Chricton moments that it’s hard not to expect a floating animatronic Hynerian popping up at any given moment. Caludia Black does a better job making Vala her own: the sultry, kooky, whorish former Goa’uld treasure hunter is a fresh addition to the show. She has her Aeryn Sun moments, no doubt, but they are not as pronounced as that of Browder’s.
In Farscape, Aeryn Sun was the one who was always serious; Chricton, on the other hand, tried to make light of his new life in the new galaxy full of new aggravations with every episode. He was funny, even in a nervous way. In SG-1, however, Browder’s humorous antics (his swordfight with the Ancient holographic suit of armor reminded me too much of the Farscape episode, Crackers Don’t Matter) do not belong to a Lt. Col., at least not in the frequency and degree which his character showed it. His sass doesn’t belong in the Stargate Program, it belongs in a cereal commercial.
This problem that plagues familiar faces in familiar roles isn’t exclusive to Browder either. SG-1‘s new chief doctor is played by Lexa Doig—Michael Shanks’ wife and better known as The Andromeda Ascendant in Andromeda—and watching her is like watching the Andromeda go about her business, only in a medical function.
In all fairness, it will take time for them to feel snug in their new roles, and I like the show enough to be forgiving of these weaknesses. I just hope things get better over the next few episodes.
July 31 2005, 0:25 | Filed under: TV and Film | 3 Comments |
Just when we all think that things couldn’t get any worse, they do. Great episode tongiht, BTW.
July 30 2005, 2:16 | Filed under: TV and Film | No Comments |
Senator Bill Frist’s announcement today in support of embryonic stem cell research is a step in a very rational direction towards continuing cutting edge research without going down slippery slope that a lot of folks think we’d be trapped in. Of course, there are plenty who couldn’t wrap their minds around it:
Frist told the Senate. “I am pro-life. I believe human life begins at conception. … An embryo is nascent human life.” However, Frist also said, “We should federally fund research only on embryonic stem cells derived from blastocysts [a 4-day-old human embryo] leftover from fertility therapy, which will not be implanted or adopted but instead are otherwise destined by the parents with absolute certainty to be discarded and destroyed.”
“I don’t know how to combine those two statements,” said Bob Scheidt, chairman of the ethics commission for the Christian Medical and Dental Association. “We’re shocked, because we as Christian physicians thought Frist was one of us.
People are surprised that Bill Frist—medical doctor—has a brain.
July 29 2005, 20:50 | Filed under: Politics | No Comments |
I’m sure I’m not the first person to observe the way email attachments behave within our mail applications,be it Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, or even GMail: each attachment is included in a message as a new copy of the file being attached. If we forward a message with an attachment, another copy of the attached file gets saved with the message. We all know it’s a waste of space, and having the expansive hard drives that we do now or the huge space limits that webmail providers give is no excuse for such waste.
Why can’t a mail application have a virtual drive, complete with folders that would let us upload our files once, send multiple times and have the sent copies link to the files instead of having multiple copies of the same file per message? Then, should we decide to delete the files from this said virtual drive, we could be prompted about messages on record that still link to them. Sure, saving an email on our hard drives outside of the application would be quite different, but, it’s just a thought.
July 26 2005, 15:42 | Filed under: Tech | 3 Comments |
My stepdad and I have a huge point of contention when it comes to this administration; one in fact that I think will never be resolved but is still fun to play games with.
When does a person… LIE? And, yes, dear friends, this relates to the whole WMD issue but that specifically is not the thrust of the discussion. Let’s focus on the question instead. This is what I think, and please tell me if I am wrong.
John says “A.”
He knows that A is false.
Therefore, he is lying.
John says “not A.”
He knows that A is true.
Therefore, he is lying.
In both cases, knowing that A is true or false and issuing a contradiction is what makes it a lie.
Now, let’s look at case B.
Jill says “A.”
A is later found to be false, but she did not know it to be false when she said A.
Therefore, she did not lie, she was only wrong.
Am I right so far?
When it comes to making distinctions on lying and making mistakes, I think that Dean Esmay has done a very good job at drawing the line between each case. If people were so bad that they were lying everytime something they said weren’t true—whether there was malicious intent or not—we’d be in a hell of a lot more accusatory world now, ya?
July 25 2005, 17:42 | Filed under: Politics | 2 Comments |
You know, I never really got around to pimping out one of my finer weblog designs: Log Cabin California. I made this around last month but never got around to blogging about it because of a tight—and fulfilling—personal schedule. I’ve only had time to blog today because I’m basically off.
I would like to thank BFT for getting my foot in the door with this remarkable creative outlet. It has been the gift that has kept on giving; and it is a remarkable testament to his satisfaction over what I have done that he has not changed the general look and feel of his site ever since I made it for him.
July 25 2005, 16:54 | Filed under: Living fine | No Comments |
Most sites that use a two-column layout—one like mine, for example—use the float property to move one section to a side and have the flow push the next to the other. Here’s a quick and dirty mockup of what I am talking about:
Now, the Classic WP layout used a relative an absolute positioning for its sidebar. When I was developing Shiva I tried to use the Stopdesign method of absolute positioning something inside a relatively positioned box, but my colossal sidebar did something like the next mockup:
Now, the question at hand would be, could the same layout on this site, without running into overflow problems, be achieved using relative positioning for all three boxes? (Red, black and blue.) Like so:
By what I know, I don’t think so, but if it could, it could solve my problems with floated elements.
UPDATE: For one thing, if I DIDN’T use a floated box anywhere in my content, and I posted an image that was too wide for either box the layout wouldn’t break. It would just run on past the box.
UPDATE 2: Just so we’re clear on the order of the document structure itself, the black box is a containing div which wraps both Blue and Red, in that order. I don’t do my sidebars early in the document.
July 25 2005, 14:14 | Filed under: CSS and Design | 4 Comments |
We’re all aware that stubbornly holding to an ideal despite the fact that doing so may not solve a problem at hand is in itself problematic. However, has anyone wondered whether finding a pragmatic solution for the sake of pragmatism can actually leave us with solutions that are made for the sake of making a problem go away instead of finding the best solution for it?
July 25 2005, 14:05 | Filed under: General | 2 Comments |
EDSBS—Everyday Should Be Saturday—is the newest blog I’ve designed. Its based off of the current theme this site carries, but I think I’ve done quite the bang-up job of customizing it to their needs, producing something all its own.
Give them a visit; Orson Swindle—what a handle—has a great way with words:
Oh, soo sexxxyyy…Yes, it’s the new EDSBS, courtesy of One Fine Jay, who sanded down our cheekbones, vacuumed the fat from our ass, and put our old fat ass in a gym for six months of steriod abuse and weight lifting in order to get us our new, spanking hot firm ass . For that we thank him profusely-the check’s in the mail!
For one, I haven’t read someone use the word “ass” so much and not come off gay until now.
July 25 2005, 12:35 | Filed under: Living fine | 2 Comments |
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