Being Mr. Kenny

First we had HTML. Then XML came along and we got XHTML. Then no-one really adopted it. Then XHTML2 started to be written. Then everyone complained because the W3C stopped doing anything useful. Then a break away group formed, and HTML5 was announced. Then the W3C decided to make their own version of HTML5.

1. HTML
2. XHTML
3. XHTML2
4. HTML5
5. HTML5, the official version

Will it ever end?

This from the PHP manual:

The function names __sleep and __wakeup are magical in PHP classes. You cannot have functions with these names in any of your classes unless you want the magic functionality associated with them. See below for more information.

Magical! Programming is full of this sort of thing. Another example is something called a ‘sanity check’: apparently these are quite standard fare.

You can also say that something is fscked and it’s not in the slightest bit rude.

Take extra care when messing around with your partitions on your hard drive. And be sure to make backups. Ye gods, be sure to make backups!

I’ve just spent the last 7 hours recovering files from my hard drive as a result of messing around to try and get Windows and Linux to read from the same damn partition. The partitioner threw a cheerful error of the type, “Hello, something has gone wrong, buggered if I know what” and helpfully informed me that the sky might be about to fall on my head. “Good bye! Thanks for using me to royally screw up your hard drive! Have a nice day!”

The best part is that I’m not even close to finishing yet.

For a while now I have been harbouring a terrible, shameful secret.

It’s so terrible, I’m just going to come out and say it. I, Mark Kenny, am completely addicted to Arial, Microsoft’s rip-off copy of the Helvetica typeface. Any typographic designer worth his salt will eagerly tell you how the bowls, tails and x-heights have been changed — but only very slightly — to allow Microsoft to use the typeface without having to pay royalties. This change is widely regarded, from what I can tell, as plagiarism on Microsoft’s part, but I don’t really care.

The truth is that everybody has Arial installed on their systems, which means that you can trust that web-pages written in the font will show up correctly.

This is true in most cases. However, I recently re-installed Kubuntu Linux, and though it has rapidly become my OS of choice, I have not found the default font, ‘DejaVu’, quite so attractive. For one thing, my website doesn’t show up in lovely, graceful, super-legible Arial when I’m viewing it in Konqueror (rock on KHTML!).

To rectify this, I have committed the most terrible sacrilege. I installed nasty, appropriated, proprietary Arial on my otherwise pristine, pure, open source system. I’m still waiting for the sky to fall in on me, or worse, a virus to exploit the numerous security holes that inevitably riddle any file created by Microsoft. (This last clause is my desperate attempt to make me sound like a good little Linux user.)

I wonder if there is anything I can do about my problem. I have tried using Garuda, which looks remarkably similar to Arial, but it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. I’ve even looked at samples of Helvetica (since you can only get the real thing at a cost) in the hopes that its inherent beauty will make me repentent, but you know what — and this is when the typographical secret police start knocking at my door — I actually prefer Microsoft’s cheap knock-off replacement.

Related ramblings: Akzidenz Grotesk, the forefather of Helvetica and therefore Arial, was first created in 1898. I found it quite surprising that such an informal, modern-looking typeface could have been designed over 100 years ago.

Have I been living in a cave at the bottom of the ocean for the past year? I certainly don’t recall having lived in a cave at the bottom of the ocean, but that would explain how I completely missed the fact that Macromedia is now part of Adobe.

Seriously, this happened a year ago, according to Wikipedia, but I had absolutely no idea until I got a prompt saying, “You need Adobe Flash Player to view this site” a few days ago.

Everybody, and by that I mean everybody in the entire universe, hates wireless networks. Even if you love them completely and want to marry them, you actually hate them even more than people who say they hate them. What’s happening is that your brain is protecting itself from the increased levels of hatred. The second law of thermodynamics used to state:

Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body.

It now reads:

Everybody hates wireless networking to death.

The original second and third laws have been displaced by this new universal constant.

Wireless networks are just disgraceful. They promise to set you free from having to lay cables all around your house to get the internet wherever you want. And, in fact, they accomplish that. What they don’t tell you is that you have to put the laptop as close to the router as possible, make sure there’s nothing metallic in the way (like a wall, your dog or some air) and always ensure that your laptop is at 90° to the floor at all times.

I hate wireless networking. I wish it was dead. Except for in public places, that’s ok.

Anyway, the other thing you’ve got to watch out for is people stealing your connection. Pretty much all laptops these days come with wireless adaptor cards, which means they automatically detect any wireless network in the area and try to connect to it. You can set the network up so that only computers you want to allow can access it, but if you’re not tech-savvy this can be difficult. This means that it’s reasonably likely that your neighbour will be able to use your internet connection without paying you a single penny!

As I said, you can prevent this, but I just came across this little gem. I actually think it’s hilarious. He set it up so that anyone who uses his wireless connection without permission gets upside-down images when they try to access the web. That’s true genius: the man ought to be knighted. I might write to the Queen and put his name forward. She could outlaw wireless networking while she was at it, actually.

Read it: Upside-Down-Ternet »

Via Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky is also a genius).

If you search Google for Mark Kenny, my site appears in the top couple of results. Sometimes I’m first, sometimes I slip to second or even fifth. This used to really bother me, since part of the whole “making websites” culture is being top of Google for a particular search term. In my case I’d kinda like to be top for my own name.

It used to bother me until I realised that I’ve really made hardly any effort at SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and yet I’m still amongst the first search results. The other guys are marketing people, as far as I can tell, so will be actively clamouring to get to the top. I sit there already without any real hard work on my part except for adding content to this site. Hooray!