Thursday, April 24, 2014

Warhol Amiga Commodore


BBC : "Warhol works recovered from old Amiga disks"

Someone should tell Carl Sassenrath before he empties his basement !

REBOL ~ rebol3 ~ Red Programming Language #Red #Rebol



Tuesday, April 22, 2014

quantum stew first step ( for any "Mr. Nobody" sequel )


If a sufficient number of photons travel through a double-slit to trigger a latch controlled by a detector such that either food is added to the trough of a crowded rabbit hutch or one rabbit is allowed to escape that hutch — well in either event we may be excused for thinking that the universe may not so much have split as merely to have answered a possible question as to whether we should have brought a shotgun with the gunny sack.




Sunday, April 20, 2014

New Brunswick Tourism web page annotation folly


The NB tour-us page at http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/
offers which text characters to select (not to copy, but that also would be reasonable given that HTML is hyperTEXT ?)

Characters as Text to select is how browser annotation of web pages is done usually. Displaying a URL is optional in most browsers now. So … how to make a note about visiting NB and keep that note linked to that page with one click ? ANSWER: select text characters at ?

Tip : my annotation tool uses CTRL-F12 as the note hotkey when text is selected. OneNote would make a pointless image-copy if there were no text to select. Perhaps the staff programmers do not even know that the Tx icon means "remove text formatting" — or why some browsers offer "copy as plain text."




Friday, April 18, 2014

NRC less-than-smart astro web page


My nomination for the least "smart" web page from a science organization is the solar emphemeris page ( in this case merely sunrise and sunset times ) of Canada's National Research Council.

Not only can this page not divine my location in Canada, it cannot set DST in Canada.

And it does not know today's date, let allowing a click for tomorrow's instead.

Elegant minimalism ?  Or just not very smart ?

Yes there's dumber to be found : public agency home pages with no text to select for annotation/clipping (only images, Flash, QuickTime.)  When the copyright and contact link are images without ALT text, you know we have reached the illiterate web.

HTML is text ? Wadda concept.

You mean you can set the style of the h1 element ? Cool !




Monday, April 7, 2014

Anne Hébert Anne Frank


Did Anne Hébert, the poet, ever read an unexpurgated Anne Frank diary ?

Surely she would have been astounded by the candour, given her own slightly veiled exstases.

v. http://www.usherbrooke.ca/centreanne-hebert/recherche/

see :
The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (2003)

Anne Frank  (Author), Arnold J. Pomerans (Translator), B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (Translator), Susan Massotty (Translator), Harry Paape (Introduction), Gerrold van der Stroom (Introduction), David Barnouw (Introduction), H. J. J. Hardy (Collaborator)