Monday - 7 Aug 2000
Intel Celeron 766MHz. Intel introduces two new Celerons today. A 766MHz and a 733MHz. Prices are set at $170 and $112 US each, in volume quantities. Time will tell if these CPUs will be able to hold off the AMD challenge.
Do they know something you don't? The morning paper reports executives from companies such as the Limited's Leslie Wexner to Microsoft's Bill Gates are selling their companies shares at the fastest pace in two years.
Speaking of Clued-In. Dana Blankenhorn has a few tips (see them here) on how to survive the fast approaching recession (fueled by sky rocketing energy costs). Recession? What recession? The one that the above guys know about and are preparing for. Some of Blankenhorn's ideas are rather blood thirsty, but if you look at life as being a competition for limited resources, I guess what he says on this subject has some merit.
The main point is the recession is coming. What you do to prepare now may determine how well you do in the next few years. So get started. YMMV.
I have a lot of things to do for a five-minute presentation for tomorrow night's class so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Tuesday - 1 August 2000
Caldera Linux. I see on Tom's and Brian's sites that they are just about done with their book on Linux. It apparently is general enough to use with more than one distribution (i.e., Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4) so that is good.
On the other hand, since I use eDesktop, this will be a *BIG* help for me. Believe me when I say I will have the first copy on this island as soon as it is available. Even though I haven't read it yet, if you are just getting into Linux, I'm sure it will be of immense help to you also. Here's to hoping that the book does well. Good luck guys.
XHTML 1, Dan 0. In my spare time [don't you have 25 hour days? - Ed.], I've just started learning XHTML 1.0. At this point, I'm barely able to get a simple page up. It did not help that neither IE 5 nor Opera (nor even Amaya) were able to display the examples given in the W3C recommendation (www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126) nor the examples found in HTML & XHTML, the Definitive Guide (ISBN: 0-596-00026-X) published by O'Reilly.
Can you spot the problem the parsers are having?:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xml:lang="en"
lang="en">
Hint, it's in the first line. It appears the character set does not jive with the language [this is just a wild guess on Dan's part - Ed.]. In fact, changing the encoding to the following cleared the error:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
It's kind of discouraging to someone just trying to learn how to use XHTL when the basic "Hello World" types of pages won't even display. Sigh. I don't know where the problem is. Maybe it's the parsers. Maybe it's something else. I don't know, anyone who can shed some light on this would be appreciated. And it sure would be nice to have everyone on the same page!
Well, that's it for me. I still have to work on my presentation tonight so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Hump Day Wednesday - 2 August 2000
Svenson 1, XHTML 0. Thank you to fellow Daynoter for the following:
From: Jan Swijsen
To: Dan Seto
Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2000 4:48 AM
Subject: xmlYou know the BTDT (been there, done that) type of thing. I will not say that. In my case it is BTBHBT (been there, been hit by that) <G>
I have been kicking the XML beast for some weeks now as you know. The problem is down to the parsers. Most simply don't know what UTF-xx is. The MS parser knows what it is but doesn't actually support it well (yet).
We are going to use UTF-8 at OCE but this is not yet ready for a production environment so we are sticking with Latin-1 (iso-8859-1)
Check out some ref.s :
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/utfencodingforms/index.html?dwzone=unicode
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/codepages.html
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html (thats for Li- and U-nix)
--
Svenson.
Thanks for the information. I will also list below a couple of the many differences between HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 from the W3C document noted in my Tuesday post:
Empty Elements - Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements, e.g. <br />, <hr /> and <img src="foo.jpg" alt="bar" />. Except given an empty instance of an element whose content model is not EMPTY (for an example, an empty title or paragraph) do not use the minimized form (e.g. use <p> </p> and not <p />).
Cascading Style Sheets (and XHTML) - CSS style sheets should use lower case element and attribute names.
And then later, this came in:
From: Jan Swijsen
To: Dan Seto
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:12:20 +0000
Subject: Re: xmlI can see a good reason for the changes.
Most of the changes boil down to stricter validation. (ever heard about 'well-formed XML' ? <g> What we have in HTML is really a Wild West situation where everyone writes whatever he or she likes and if the browser doesn't display it correctly, hiding all the errors, then shoot the browser.
For example you can define a <table> without </table>. According to Microsoft (MSIE) that is fine, it will close the table itself (sometimes even at the correct place). Opera will put all the remaining stuff in the table and close the table at the end of the page, doesn't look good but everything is there. Netscape will drop the whole table and everything behind it.
According to [snip to protect the guilty], Netscape and Opera are at fault in such a case. He does like to shoot in Wild West fashion <g>
XML and XHTML demand a correct syntax. That should ultimately lead to documents and data that is handled identically regardless of browser make or model.
Especially for XML the strictness is important because XML is used for transmitting data. The transmission should never alter the data so both ends must interpret the data in the same way.
The problem for browsers is of course that they must still display 'legacy pages'.
Storm Warnings. More and more analysts are indicating coming economic problems. Some even mention the "R" word. See the latest here from the Los Angeles Times.
Speaking of Grid Lock. The Senate is close to being evenly split. One race, in Washington state, is yet to be decided. If it goes to the Democrat, the Senate will split down the middle. But even if it goes Republican, the Senate is so divided that it difficult to imagine how much, if anything will get done. Some people would say this is a Good Thing. But a divided house, or Senate in this case, usually falls. So I do not see good things coming of this. See the article from the New York Times here.
JHR's Mail Problems. I see that JHR is having problems with email, so I figured I'd post this one I sent to him yesterday:
From: Dan Seto
To: JHR
Subject: True-Believing Democrat
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 11:02:50 -1000 JHR,re: True-Believing Democrat
Well, you have to believe in something! Before I say anything else, let me say that I don't care whether people call themselves a Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, or no party at all. Those are just convenient labels. The most important things are what values and principles these people hold and act on. Some people put the emphasis on the individual, while others place it on the community.
And let's be honest with ourselves, if the tables were turned, the Republicans would be doing exactly what the Democrats are, and vice versa.
On the other hand, remember I said last week Wednesday (http://seto.org/diary/2000/j20001110.shtml#wednesday) that the election should go to Bush. I mean, he stole it fair and square <G>. So let's just move on already. To do otherwise does violence to the Office of the Presidency, which is more important, and more enduring, than either Bush or Gore. And in the end, whomever "wins", will be a one-term wonder and this will start all over again. Tomorrow <SEG>.
Our Public Administration class will be meeting on Saturday. This kicks off a new module. The subject? Politics. Joy. Just the subject I want to spend my Saturday on. I gotta go - Aloha!
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Thursday - 3 August 2000
Unequal Access. Tried to check my email this morning but the process timed out. Oh oh. So I tried telneting. Nope. No web access either. Oh well, when I can post this you'll be able to read it. Whenever that is. Sigh.
Linux 1, Dan 1. Last week, I decided to do yet another Linux install so I could get to a known working state. I then patched the kernel to get from the default 2.2.14 kernel to 2.2.17. When I compiled, I of course enabled token-ring support. I then installed the DHCP client and got on the Internet to download most of the 27 security patches Caldera has for OpenLinux eDesk 2.4. Finally, I added StarOffice 5.1a. So I now have a stable platform which I will not add to. Yes, this means I'm still using KDE 1 but while KDE 2.0 is very slick, and I think the browser is heads and shoulders above Netscape, there are still too many bugs to be fixed.
Bugs? In Linux! Yes, Virginia, there are bugs in Linux applications. Lots of them. Hundreds even. So while I love the look and feel of KDE 2.0, I think I'll wait for version 2.1 [getting conservative in his old age - Ed.].
Giving Testimony. Part of our Public Administration class on Saturday will be writing testimony on a bill that was introduced two years ago. H.B. 705, Relating to Native Hawai'ian Cultural Impact Statements. From what I understand, our sub-group will split into two with one side taking the pro and the other the con. Each side will then give a presentation to the class.
On a first pass through the bill, it looks like it would amend the current environmental impact statements by adding a cultural impact. The cons appear to be two-fold. First, it mentions a Hawai'ian religion. Assuming there is an accepted definition, it may run afoul of Constitutional prohibitions against promoting one religion over another. The second problem is that it expands an already costly, litigation friendly, and time consuming process.
The pro side appears to be an acknowledgment that this is a special place. With a special history. And this bill would be a way of preserving some of that history and culture. The parts that people from all over the world come to see. Otherwise, they would all be going to Orange County. Or some such.
I have some spread sheets to do at work and some research on the bill so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Aloha Friday - 4 August 2000
It's Friday!
As yesterday, Internet access is like sucking dead long-eared dust bunnies through very small straws. I can't get to most places (other than our intranet) so this will be posted when it gets posted.
Beatles 27, Everyone 27 million. Beatles 1, a collection of 27 singles that made it to the top of the charts over the years, released Tuesday, is expected to become the top selling CD/album of all time. Capitol Records expects the CD to pass the current number one and two top selling CD/albums (the Eagles' Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 at 27 million copies and Michael Jackson's Thriller at 26 million) in about 10 years.
I have a couple of chapters to read for tomorrow's class so I gotta go - Have a Great Weekend Everyone!
© 2000 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved.