Lately I have been enjoying Leinenkugel's honey weiss. It's not a great beer, but I just sorta really like it.

Listening to too much nostalgic 90's stuff. This is mitigated by the fact that I'm listening to WOXY. WOXY vintage is weird. Like, they play all of this 80's and 90's stuff, but a lot of it is remixes and b-sides and acoustic versions. So it's all the songs you remember, only slightly crappier and less satisfying.

I have a mirror near my desk, in which I can see my linux machine's monitor. While typing this I took a moment to watch my screen saver in the mirror. All of a sudden it froze up. I stared at it for a minute, then looked at my monitor, which was behaving normally. Is my mirror dropping frames?

On another note, the coolest thing about linux is that linux is cool. A linux screensaver is inherently cooler than an OS X or Windows screensaver, simply because it is on linux.

Linux is cool in exactly the same way that buddhism is cool. In exactly the same way that a classic VW bug is cool. In exactly the same way that being human is cool. I'd run ubuntu on organic hardware if I could. That I bought from a farmer's market. It is a punk rock peasant OS.

New release of chiba, the open source java xforms implementation. Lately I've had a hankering to get back into boomstick. This just reinforces that.

I think that the mark of a quality ex-S.O. is whether you miss them while sitting around drunkenly killing time at 5am.

I've generally been in a mood lately. Well, no. I've mostly been in a good mood, but I've had an edge of mood to me lately. If you're in the mood to fuck with me, this is not the time to do it. Unless you want me to fuck with you, really fuck with you, in which case go to town.

But fuck that. Let's just be happy linux-running buddhist peasants.

You bring the steak, I'll bring the beer.

I want to beat the Microsoft IE team with a hammer. I really fucking do.

My site layout works. My css is fine. It just doesn't work on IE in dumb little ways. The menu rollovers don't work. Links are inconsistently underlined. And so on. On a local copy of the code, I put together some css hacks that should give IE users some undeserved relief. The experience still won't be quite as good as on a proper browser, of course, but it's passable, and more importantly it's consistent. All is well.

I upload the code into our cms, and it immediately fails in IE. It is all I can do to keep from throwing my laptop into my monitor, using my monitor to smash my PC, and throwing the whole thing through a window.

Alright, maybe there's another way I can kludge this thing together. And, hey, gotta get ready for IE 7!

Now, of course, Microsoft is putting out version 7 of IE. IE 7 is special, because some of the css bugs have been (purportedly) fixed. This means that your site still won't render properly in IE, but now your kludges won't work, either!

So, I come across this at Microsoft's IEBlog:

We ask that you please update your pages to not use these CSS hacks. If you want to target IE or bypass IE, you can use conditional comments.

This, of course, is just before their incredibly pusillanimous request to "Please help us spread the word so it is an easier decision for us in the future to make improvements to our standards implementation (even if it means breaking customers)."

Just stop sniveling, and fix your fucking standards support. And spare me your whining about not having the resources for the job. Weren't you the company that was arguing just a few years ago that the browser was (or should be) an integral part of the operating system?

Anyway: Conditional comments. WTF? Okay, so I read about conditional comments over at Microsoft's MSDN. And what do I see?

Conditional comments have been available since Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, but their use is not restricted to Internet Explorer. Examples are given that show how conditional comments can be used to customize the content delivered to both uplevel and downlevel browsers. Conditional comments make it easy for developers to write pages that downgrade gracefully in less capable browsers, while making it easy to take advantage of the enhanced features and performance offered by Internet Explorer 5 and later versions.

And then:

uplevel browser: Internet Explorer 5 and later versions.
downlevel browser: Any browser except for Internet Explorer 5 and later versions.

This just makes me too angry for words. I'm wasting my time, rewriting my code -- which is correct, which adheres to the standards, which works in every browser that respects the standards -- to work around Microsoft's notorious lack of support for the fucking hover selector. The fucking hover selector. And here, in their developer documentation, Microsoft is officially defining as "downlevel" and "less capable" anything which isn't IE.

I just want to get ahold of the IE development team and just beat the fucking stuffing out of them with a hammer. I really just do. I want to sit on an enormous wet, bloody mound of shattered bones and meatpulp, just banging away on them with a fucking hammer, just passing day after day methodically throwing down blow after blow after blow, beating the ever-loving stuffing out of them, beating them beyond recognition, beyond hope, beyond tears.

Maybe while their mothers watch, weeping.

And then I want to get a whack at their marketing department.

You know what's awesome about java-based UIs? How FAST AND RESPONSIVE THEY ARE.




Update: It's worth mentioning that, in the time that it took me to open a browser window, type this (admittedly, two sentence-long) entry, post it, think about it for a moment, edit the post, notice a type, correct the typo, and get halfway through this sentence, the ui in question had still not updated. It has now. =P

Just went to print up a wikipedia page. I didn't know this before, but they have a little css trick so that their pages will print in a printer-friendly layout, even if you don't specifically request it. Slick.

Okay, I haven't really used LDAP for much of anything. Now it looks like I might want to: I've several java apps I'm trying to tie together and they're all LDAP-compatible (directly or via JNDIRealm), so that seems like the sanest way to consolidate user management.

So, my questions are thus:

1. Any recommendations for an LDAP server? Java on linux, either one will do.
2. Is LDAP even relevant? I'm seeing some projects that stopped development around 2001 or so. Is it possible that these projects were actually fronts for the 9/11 hijackers?