March, 23, 2001 archives

who is wfp2.almaden.ibm.com and what is webfountain? looks like an aggressive robot.

this is a long string of emails to the editor of brill's content's all-star newspaper site. quite funny.

william hanna (of hanna-barbera) passed away. that sucks. i really like the hanna-barbera style (which may be why my favorite current cartoons are ones like dexter's lab and the powerpuff girls, which owe huge debts to that style). in fact, as classic as the whole warner bros. looney tunes and merrie melodies shorts are, the cartoons i like to see again tend to be hanna-barbera and jay ward stuff. i think i burned out on the whole bugs/daffy/etc thing.

glenn wins points for his repo man reference. the full quote: "say you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. suddenly someone says plate, or shrimp, or plate of shrimp. out of the blue. no use looking for one either. it's part of the lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything." (followed by a shot including a restaurant with a "plate of shrimp" sign in the window.)

the full quote is courtesy imdb's memorable quotes page for the movie, which is unfortunately missing "i called bullshit on that," one of the most quotable lines in the movie (that i'm probably getting wrong in some way).

so seamus blackley claims the xbox won't be late and won't suck. keep in mind this is the wanker that headed up the trespasser team at dreamworks interactive, a game that was overpromised and then underdelivered late. and it sucked. hard.

i know i've read this article from dack.com about best practices for ecommerce interfaces, but i'm dropping the link here so i'll see it again.

the register is one of my favorite news sources, these days. internet and technology news with a real sense of humor (mostly manifested through the catty brit tabloid style). get the feed here. (their own rss feed frequently has unencoded html that may cause stricter xml parsers to choke. in fact, i'm scraping the html now, instead of using their feed.)

the masses have spoken so i fixed the store page to look somewhat acceptable in internet explorer. for some reason, you can't apply styles to table cells using css in internet explorer. i'll have to experiment more to figure out what is really going on, but in any case, it looks a little less sucky with internet explorer now. (it still needs work overall, but at least its not just a bunch of text floating in an open sea of whitespace.)

i figured out what was wrong with the store page. i was using <link rel="stylesheet" src="/style.css" type="text/css"> instead of <link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css" type="text/css">. for some reason netscape handles both forms. this also means that the news page should look okay to internet explorer users now.