It turns out Apple’s in the web browser game, too, with a piece of software called Safari.

So far it looks OK, and doesn’t exhibit random Unicode problems.

It’s based on the open-source Konqueror browser, which makes my geeky heart happy. It lacks a little in the Javascript department, but hopefully that has more to do with being public beta than to do with incomplete Javascript in Konqueror.

Since the Xanga .net move-over, I’ve been noticing a lot of Chinese characters interspersed within what should be English-language ‘blogs.

This is only in Chimera, which is odd, since it should be the same as Mozilla. Mozilla doesn’t show these errant Chinese characters, however.

I’d seen it only once or twice in the past few days, so I thought it was some kind of one-off error, but now I see it all over the place.

I can only assume that it’s related to the fact that Xanga doesn’t let the browser know what language the page uses, so the browser has to make something up. For some reason Chimera is assuming I want to see Chinese.

Chimera doesn’t let you set the default encoding, even in user.js. Sigh.

On a lighter heavier note, I remember being a little tiny kid and eating white bread with lots of butter on it.

Well, I just recreated that bygone experience and now know why old people don’t compuslively eat white bread with lots of butter, the way little kids do.

Some things you have to grow up to learn.

And, a propos of the last few blogs, I’d like to say that:

There will be a war in Iraq in the next few months, and the US will start it, and it will be unjust and unprovoked. And this makes me more ashamed than many of my fellow Americans seem able to understand.

And if you’re an American, and you’re not ashamed, then you are part of the problem.

I just wanted to mention one of my favorite movies of all time yet again.

The Thin Red Line

I was reading Alice’s blog, and the Emerson she quotes reminded me of scenes from this movie.

There are scenes narrated by the various soldiers, and their narration is poetry. You see these young men living through hell, and the narration will be asking, “Why does nature vie with itself?” or “Maybe all men are one. One man, searching for all its parts.”

It got me to thinking. I don’t really know the origin of those monologues. I had always assumed they were somewhere in the novel the movie is based upon, but maybe not.

Maybe Terence Malick, the film’s director, was laying some Emerson on us.

I Suck

The best thing he can say to me is that I suck
he doesn’t know what else to say
We have differences, and differences
are fine
really
but all he knows how to say to me is
that I suck

He says I’m evil. I don’t think
he thinks
that I’m evil, but he says so
because it’s all he knows
to say

He says I’m ignorant, that I’m
willfully ruining his good
thing,
that I’m endangering the country
by saying the things I say

He doesn’t believe any of it
except maybe the part about his
good thing,
but he says it all anyway.

It’s all he knows.



I tell him:

You could change your story
and I’d respond like a fellow
human on this crowded planet
where your ire and spittle
are transformed by mere proximity
into a rushing torrent that dwarfs
everything, dwarfs the Columbia
river, dwarfs the anger and fear in
your heart.

That’s its true purpose. Dwarfing
the fear in your heart.

Don’t be afraid of me. Unless you
give me a reason to fight back.



And the best thing he can say to me
is that I suck. He wants to lose
this battle with fear.

As an update…

Monsur, Xanga-deity-deluxe, has made it so that Xanga’s CSS now validates! Woo!

We’re still missing DOCTYPE and encoding specification in HTML, but we’ll go one step at a time..

In the midst of my ranting discourse on the proper application of CSS definitions (har), Deevaa asks if I’m feeling OK.

And yes, I’m on the mend, thanks for asking. I drove down the street to the hot dog place today, and I made it about a half hour in the grocery store with my mom. “Mom, I need to, uh, go outside now…” What fun under flourescent lighting.

A quick lesson in CSS for any Xanga deities who happen to be reading…

Here’s part of the CSS I get for my site:

table.header { width: 100%; background-color: #FFFFFF; border: 2px solid #6666CC; }

table.header TH {font-family:Verdana; color: #000000; font-size: x-large; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; background-color: ; border: none; background-image: ; }

table.header TD {font-family:Verdana; color: #000000; font-size: x-small; text-decoration: none; background-color: ; border: none; background-image: ; }

What you’ll note is that table.header is set to a white background in the first definition. That’s what I want.

In the subsequent definitions, however, the background color is set to undefined. This means, literally, that it’s completely up to the browser to determine what color to use. A browser that uses a black background would be as correct as one that uses a white background. If the TH and TD definitions didn’t set the background color to undefined, they would inherit the white background color of the enclosing table.

This may seem pedantic, but it’s a problem for me, as I pointed out as in the beta test report that you asked for a few months back. OmniWeb renders the header table in black on black.

The solution is to not specify parameters you don’t wish to change in cascading definitions. Not only is this the right way to do things, it’ll reduce the CSS data sent per page, meaning less bandwidth use, and I’ll be able to use OmniWeb for Xanga, as I do from time to time.

Anyway. Don’t take my word for it… See what w3c’s CSS validator
has to say about it.

The vertiginous fun continues. I haven’t left the house in 48 hours. The term ‘head rush’ has taken on a new meaning. I’ve seen more TV in the past few days than I really want to admit. And I’ve been posting to usenet more than usual (which is a lot).

I go to the doc on Monday. I’m counting the seconds.