found_drama

(this is soooooooooo via BoingBoing, BTW…) First Perdido Steet Station, then Alpha Shade and now this! (Although it’s probably more like, first The Difference Engine, then…)

Anyway… Artist Larry Blamire captures the underlying steampunk meme in a way that I must admit I haven’t really seen done well with images yet. (And this is even though this particular meme would lend itself very well to images.) I’ll admit quite readily that Steamboy is the current leading contender in this category but let’s stick to the subject. Anyway, the images on the site are bad-ass and I’d love to see this done up feature-length-ish. And while the images are drool-worthy, there’s a lot of little touches that add flavor here. E.g.:

knothead n : slang term for a novice crewman on a steam rig. Origin believed to be from the number of lumps on the head received on the first few runs, before the crewman found his “land legs”. This was often exacerbated by the initiate being given a heavy iron helmet by his helpful rigmates, for “protection”.

While I haven’t logged myself in yet, I’ve been taking note of this flickr phenomenon and have made a few notes…

• Flash viewer. Terribly interesting. Clever solution?
• Intriguing that the camera type is noted.
• RSS as a predictable and yet interesting choice.
• Funny how it crawls the comments and advertises accordingly. Not that I’m complaining.
• Descriptions seeming to carry more weight than titles.

Oh… And at the risk of sounding cheesy… P, you should have titled it “Nice Rack”

Now Playing: Frou Frou “The Dumbing Down of Love”

Grudge match to the death. <found_drama v=’4.0′ /> vs. Apple plists. I’ll be damned if I don’t lick this son of a bitch.

UPDATE: I suppose I should Google my challenges first. There’s always someone whose done it already, isn’t there?

The much predicted iPod Photo is a reality. I have but one question: Where’s the visualizer setting?

Making my usual round through the blogroll, I saw the Keynote Study article mentioned/discussed on Cult of Mac. Intrigued by the mention, I clicked through to the article itself.

My but does someone need to go back to Statistics 101.

The quote that Cult of Mac seemed to fix on was:

Apple was the lone exception, with four in ten (40%) users complaining about the site’s product comparison functionality and information.

While I find myself far more struck by:

Google (16%) was the most popular starting point, followed closely by Dell (12%).

…which (frankly) I think has SELECTION BIAS written all over it.

Some interesting numbers to look at alongside those they mentioned specifically would include:

1. What is the operating system you use most often?
2. What operating system do you use at home?
3. What browser do you use?

Weighing these questions would give us better insight into the mindset of the individuals polled. Let’s refer back to that quote: “…Google (16%) was the most popular starting point, followed closely by Dell (12%)…” What is this really saying? It’s saying that 12% of the people polled are looking for a PC right off the freakin’ bat. By preference? Habit? Ignorance? Who knows… But we have 12% of people polled by Keynote saying right off that their starting point is looking for a PC. Oh wait. Right. A Dell PC.

One of the things that I find further staggering is the assertion that “users complain[ed] about [Apple's] product comparison functionality and information.” First off, the paper doesn’t elaborate on this with specifics. Second, (and maybe this ties in with the selection bias) it seems to gloss very merrily over the fact that product comparison seems built right into the Apple store’s interface. Let’s take an easy one… Let’s look at the first click-thru for the iMac G5:

We see the three offered models side by side by side; each column’s header gives you the key salient information of each model (e.g., 20-inch 1.8 GHz) with the price right below it. The details of each’s standard configuration is then listed out line-by-comparable-line. So where’s the disconnect? Can’t compare the iMac against the PowerMac against the PowerBook? Perhaps but I hardly see how this fails to stack up against Dell’s comparison “tool”. “Good” vs. “Better” vs. “Best”? Who comes up with this stuff?

But now it sounds like we’ll be re-butting me with my selection bias, right?

To Dell’s credit, they’ve collapse some of the categories a bit — which is arguably helpful for someone that doesn’t know if they’re in the market for a value notebook computer or a really honkin’ powerful laptop. Someone in the frame of mind of “I need a laptop” might be instantly thrown off by having to make the informed first (second?) click of iBook vs. PowerBook. Still, I’m right back to criticizing those painfully uninformative, almost cloying comparison charts. Marks of “Best” the whole way across every model for “Use Microsoft Excel/Powerpoint”? Who would look at this and decide to start future purchases on this site?

Especially when there’s such a mind-blowing typo as:

Microsoft®  Windows XP Operng Systems Ready for Word Processing, E-mail and Internet

Tap-tap-tap of the keyboard. Hammering away on my project, finally making some major headway. When:

BAM!

lights flicker

And a silver Audi A4 materializes outside my house. Having slipped out of P (or something along those lines…) and careened back-end first into the corner of my house. Missing A’s car by inches. (BLOODY INCHES!!) Fortunately (?) the garbage can seems to have broken its fall. Enough that it didn’t DESTROY my house anyway.

/sigh

We’ll see what happens. At least I’m not, you know… Flooded again.

You’re a Post-Punk. You know 70s punk was cool, but
it was mostly just a stepping stone for the
greater intellectualism of what would come
after. The 80s were amazing. You quite possibly
have huge hair, and may wear lots of black.
Snare drums need reverb. Lots and lots of
reverb.

You Know Yer Indie. Let’s Sub-Categorize.
brought to you by Quizilla

Now Playing: Jeff Bennett “Involvation”

For amy and mike and all the other BBS geeks from waaaaay back… This post is for you: 7 hour BBS Documentary Nearly Ready

Making a big push to take my work-related XML projects to the next level. Why? Let’s just say that management is boring and tedious, lacking in the mental rewards that the problem-solving of programming-type ish offers. That being said, renewing my efforts on the ‘procdoc’ and ‘-faq’ projects for work seem a happy compromise.

So why <rant />?

Because I’m brickwalling again.

The biggest part of the big push is to ditch as much/many of these <[CDATA[*]]> sections as possible and standardize what goes into the file. Theoretically, by managing the input via DTD-declared elements/entities, it’s good long-term b/c it’ll keep “weird stuff” out. So whereas before we might have had something like:

<axn><[CDATA[Here is some text with <a href="/">html ish</a> mixed in practically <i>willy-nilly</i>]]></axn>

…my goal is to replace the input/XML file with something more structured, such as:

<axn>Here is some text with <link href=”/”>html ish</link> mixed in but in a way that <impt>makes sense</impt></axn>

…while still generating the same, beautified XHTML output.

This is the part where the audience asks: But if it ain’t broke, why try to fix it??? And I refer them back to the above statement re: standardizing it for any number of reasons. Call me a data-Nazi, but regularity and predictability in your data is a good rather than bad thing last I checked. And the implicity problem with the CDATA sections mixed into otherwise well-formed elements is that you open the door to all kinds of non-standard, potentially malformed code etc. etc. etc. And that’s just a starting point. As is, you can’t query the XML (for example) for any/all links mentioned in a particular document. You could grep them maybe but let’s stick to the subject.

Anyway, tonight’s frustration was a series of “almost there” statements in as much as the main XSL stylesheet for the ‘procdoc’ project goes. As alluded to above, I’ve been trying to extend the capabilities of this DTD in a few ways and figured that some sort of <link /> element was the best place to start. The way I see it, this is the type of element that’d get mixed in all over the place with what is otherwise text/cdata sections. So I made a quick change to the DTD to have this element included as a potential child node of the note element and I was off and running…

Only the changes required in the XSL seem to be much more tricky. I found this one article that seemed to suggest a “less is more” type of “keep it simple stupid” approach to the problem. Which I happily tried. But this seemed to be a failure in as much as I kept getting elements that duplicated in the output or else wouldn’t output at all. And in all kinds of weird combinations as well. And so we (“we” = “I”) went ahead and tried a scenario-appropriate variation on the “clunky” approach described by the article’s author — only to wind up with an EVEN WORSE output file than before.

/le sigh

There were some interesting tricks learned and let’s be honest, it’s always fun to experiment with some new techniques but it is teh suck to conclude the night’s session by reverting back to the file with which we started. The take-home message seemed to be that while the “clunky” approach gave us the worst output of all, there’s a happy medium waiting to be discovered for the particular sub-set of problems with which we are still faced. The limited “happy” results I got were encouraging and all seemed to shed a little light on the right path. Now if I can just get the damn sodium lamp up and running…