This page is a collection of links to various bits and pieces of
text that I found interesting. I don't think there's any grand
scheme here, unless it is the study of what I find interesting.
Some of the documents may have imperfect formatting; they may
have been saved from a web site, but saved without external
image files or style files needed to complete their appearance.
Web testing
- char-ref
- A simple test of using character reference codes
(#DDD;) for represting non-ASCII characters in HTML.
- favicon
- I'd like to learn how browsers treat favicon. This is part
of unfinished research into the topic.
- Dealing with flash
- This is a document describing how to suppress Flash in
Mozilla (and Firefox).
- font tests
- A nuisance of the web is that fonts are not portable across
platforms. (A secondary nuisance is that Microsoft keeps
releasing new fonts for Windows, which half the world adopts, and
then shrugs at you when you report that their pages look bad.
e.g: first Arial, then Verdana/Tahoma.)
This page tests the appearance of some fonts.
- Harrison Bergeron
- Vonnegut wrote a good story called "Harrison Bergeron". I
use it here as part of a test of curly-quotes and cascading style
sheets.
- Monitor gamma information
- Information about monitor gamma, which can affect why web
page images sometimes look brighter or darker as you switch
machines. Not my text—this is copied from the web.
- Finding your monitor's gamma
- Another chart that you can use to estimate your monitor's
gamma setting. Not my text—this is copied from the web.
- Greek Alphabet
- The magic of Unicode
lets you make web pages that contain true Greek text, instead of
containing English text that is displayed with the Symbol font.
These characters are hard to type on an American keyboard, so I
have a web page that allows me to copy them from the page and
paste them into documents where I need them. As a bonus, I can
look at their appearance in various fonts.
- ISO 8601 dates
- Dates written in the format "NN/NN/NN" (for example,
"01/02/03") are ambiguous, because different countries have
different interpretations about the meaning of each of the N's.
ISO 8601 dates avoid this problem by writing dates in an
unambiguous fashion.
- Unfriendly JavaScript and email
- In 2001 I got upset about web pages that could send email to
a site, based only the fact that I had visited a web page. This
exposed your email address to that company, which led to extra
spam.
The battle against spam is lost, and the spammers have won, and
I don't think I've worried about this issue for a while.
- RealPlayer
- Old-time computer fans have a love-hate-hate relationship
with Real, the company that makes the RealPlayer video and
audio players. In early 2004, the radio show
Car Talk dumped RealPlayer
for Microsoft Windows Media Player, because of their poor
experience with Real. I empathize, and wrote a small blurb.
- server-side includes
- MIT's web servers now support server-side includes.
- TeX in HTML
- If the question is "can you type a nice TeX logo in HTML?",
the answer is "it depends".
- WebEQ
- Typesetting math on the web is tough. One way that was
invented to do it used a Java applet as a helper. I have an older page testing this method, and
also a slightly newer page.
Sadly, bit rot appears to be setting in.
- Palatino fonts
- Ick. Most computers have a Palatino font (or equivalent),
and it is one of the core fonts for Postscript printers.
However, on Unix using FontConfig, Palatino looks
wretched.
- Web-safe fonts
- This document is incomplete, but I'm testing web fonts to see
what recommended practice is for using web fonts that work on
various viewing platforms.
- A List Apart (CSS)
- I found an article on ALA that described setting up lists
using CSS, and I thought it was interesting enough to try to keep
it around.
- xhtml, and why not to use it
- Mark Pilgrim is a big fan of standards... and he's decided that
xhtml isn't worth working with. After flirting with it (twice), he
converted his site back to
html 4.01. These articles show some of his reasoning.
Calvin and Hobbes
- Watterson (of Calvin&Hobbes)
commencement speech
- A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio,
to the 1990 graduating class.
Voting
Sometime March 2000, I read an article about voting methods in
which the author argued that simple voting techniques do a poor
job of choosing winners that the majority of the voters are
really happy with. I thought it was interesting, and wrote a small blurb about it.
Since then, I've become less convinved that there is a magic
bullet. There is a website at condorcet.org that
advocates other methods of voting, but in doing so give a good
summary of the problems that can be encountered in traditional
voting. If you're interested in this type of thing, you're
probably already heard of Instand Runoff Voting (IRV), Approval
Voting, Borda's method, and other terms.
Shopping
When I was shopping for computers for myself and for my lab, I
put together a list of advice
to myself. The advice is from 1997, and is dated by now.
Knuth
In 1999, Don Knuth gave some lectures at MIT. I wrote a small page, recording session titles,
and linking to some lecture archives. Links on the web decay
over time, so I'm not sure how many of the page's links still work.
During Knuth's talk, he mentioned an odd parable by Smullyan. I'm not
sure I agree with it.
Legal: Wen Ho Lee
Wen Ho Lee of Los Alamos was accused of espionage. The
government appears to have overplayed its hand, and was accused
of being desperate to find a scapegoat in order to please public
opinion. In the end, Lee was convicted of not following proper
procedures when handling classified data, and all other charges
were dismissed. The judge made the remarkable step of
apologizing to Lee for the behavior of the government. Here is
the transcript of the final
hearing of the case.
Classwork
A parallel computing class I took at MIT required that we do a
final project. Part of my project involved learning how to use a
program that would process three-dimensional data and turn it
into images. My writeup is here.