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musings of mark since 2001

Looks like it’s not exactly officially recognized but according to the Associated Press some of us bloggers have the potential to be terrorists through the magic of propaganda. Going to be along time before they ever let me into the USA again, it’s been about 15 years since they kicked me out, being critical of the Bush administration pretty much seals the deal. Which is a good thing really, down there people are known to follow through on death threats, and they have a lot of guns and ammo to do it with.

Of course government sanctioned propaganda that promotes killing 100,000 Iraqi people doesn’t count. First, use a reliable source such as Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and articles it has published in the highly regarded The Lancet to find out the unbiased facts.

Excluding information from Falluja, researchers estimate that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. Eighty-four percent of the violent deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery.

Air strikes and artillery - death from the sky that knows not whom it kills, real people with real lives and loves and dreams and hopes are dead and they did nothing to deserve having their life cut short - 45% of those were children under the age of 15.

There’s a bit of a buzz out there now that MSFT is announcing it’s rival to RIM’s Blackberry. Been meaning to, but haven’t got around to it stage of doing the commercial bits of this web site in WML decks myself. It’s just another mark-up language and a fairly simple one at that, and there’s lots of tutorials out there for creating dynamic content with the language, so no real excuse for not doing it, other than never seeing a request for a .wml file in the server logs.

Wish they wouldn’t put food commercials on TV, it’s all yummy looking stuff that isn’t available here and it doesn’t help being reminded of how thin I’ve become. One of these days though there’s bound to be a fridge of my own and a stove again, and a bathtub or a shower, now that would be something!

The tally on the file sizes comparing the example page and our finished sample.htm of my CSS and XHTML tutorial show improvements in file sizes as expected and also on the number of files, which translates to fewer requests to the server, further lessening download times for your web site visitors. The table-based example needed 36 files downloaded to render the page, the css-based sample takes 12 files, plus the two gifs we added for those that don’t have Flash® to make 14. The css file and images are cached on the visitor’s computer after the first visit to the page and are downloaded only once; and the divs, headers, lists, and paragraphs of our xhtml file itself is 4KB compared to a 9.8KB download for our table-based layout.

A few weeks have passed since installing and getting to know Fedora, and am now totally impressed. When I go to use something, it works. Every tool that a web developer could ever want is on this thing now, and haven’t got any where trying them all. It was a bit of a pain getting used to a new editor, but now I have two to choose from and haven’t quite yet decided. I used Bluefish for the last week every day, worked pretty good and didn’t take long to customize it to the way I work and it’s nice looking. Think I’ll head on over to one already installed though called “Kate”. It has the usual stuff like search and replace etc. but leaves Bluefish in the dust with the ability to fold code. Over time, that seems to be the feature that saves me a lot of back and forth, and when you’re putting something together, it’s nice to take a long complicated function and turn it into a one-liner when you’re done.

What is surprising is how well Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 run on Fedora with a Wine layer, program start up and running Gaussian blurs and other effects are faster, don’t know how they do that but it’s pretty cool. Google Earth is running now too, the side panels are a little funny but you can fly around and zoom in, so that’s okay for now. Haven’t got any Macromedia software to run yet, have some from before they were bought out by Adobe, such as Studio 8 that would be nice to get running somewhere.

Found some files I thought I lost when I added my old C: drive as hda1 to the /etc/fstab file too. After changing over and getting things the way they should be, it was a search through stacks of CD’s for that missing back-up that was right in front of me on the same drive in another partition all the time, doh!