john robert boynton: RadioRadio

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 16:31:18 GMT

Ha ha. licentious radio is the first site in Google search results for "licentious". We're proud, mighty proud. We'd like to thank all the *little* people who made this possible. We never expected this honor. We only try to do our best. If we can cause one smile, we feel like we've accomplished something. We'll use any notoriety from this honor to promote world peace and save the animals.

Sat, 03 May 2003 17:59:49 GMT

Random Rant on the font tag.... Putting a font tag in every freaking table cell was pretty silly. On the other hand, it worked. "Worked" in the sense of letting users pick the default text size, and reliably scaling the text size from there across platforms. The fact that some designers picked the typically unreadable "font size=1" for body text was not the fault of the font tag. CSS has a way to do essentially the same thing, but Microsoft broke it by picking different relative sizes than the rest of the world. That is, the CSS equivalent of size=2 is one step different on Windows IE than on most other browsers. Then there's a Windows IE bug for sizing text with em units in CSS -- some users will see .9em as unreadably small. I'm sure Billionaire Bill's heart breaks when he hears about these bugs that make it vastly more difficult to create websites that look OK on both Windows IE and other browsers.

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 19:31:54 GMT

A little problem with the tabs at the Google search engine.... Problem: mouse cursor changes over the tabs, but only the text is clickable. This is actually *very* bad usability... needlessly tricking people. (This affects Gecko -- Netscape/Mozilla...-- browsers, and at least IE 5 -- windows and Mac.) Solution: Add to the .q styles (the 'a' tags in the tabs): width: 100%; display: block With the width at 100% of the table cell, the entire tab is clickable. Gecko browsers need "display:block", though IE5win doesn't. When the entire tab is clickable, you don't need the cursor style in 'td' tag for each tab: style=cursor:pointer;cursor:hand; That way you even save a few bytes. (Even if you don't add the CSS for the "q" class, you should take out the cursor styles.) You could also add "width: 100%; display: block" to the style for tabs on the news page (.d).

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 04:39:08 GMT

Google queries that led people to licentious radio today:

george bush 11 september speech
what do you think of bush's radio address on iraq
/usr/lib/ipkg/info/opie-irdaapplet.postinst configure' failed
republican voter fraud
greenspan interest rate
Neil Bush
linux for ipaq 3800
Israel halliburton
ipaq install network card
humor radio
emil ruder
CSS div absolute table cell
"ordered list" stylesheet
Interest rate - greenspan
madplay radio
hitler breaking treaties
ipaq radio
George Bush press conference, transcript
ipaq and radio
typography golden section
12 iraqis surrendered march 2003
neil bush
interest rate greenspan
neil bush
"I'm the person who gets to decide, not you."
"download microsoft fonts"
graphics kind of peace
Schwarzkopf france deer hunt"
"zapping electronics"
squeeze breast
usability humor

On a good day, a few people find answers to technical questions, and a few people find entertainment. We're on the second page of results for "Neil Bush". You can tell Neil is in stealth mode (after nearly getting Reagan whacked, and stealing A FREAKING BILLION DOLLARS from American taxpayers, and having Corrupt Brother Jeb shovel money down his throat). Every now and then somebody takes the time to say 'hi' or asks a question.

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 15:38:12 GMT

If Google ads are so tied to the search query, why did "mozilla html object tag" give me an ad for: "GirlSummer Academic Camps"?

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 02:59:45 GMT

Dave Winer [userland.com]: "Here's what Google can do for weblogs that would be a service to the weblog community -- classify and group them. Give me an accurate list of all the librarian weblogs, and all the lawyer weblogs, and all the weblogs of people who have implemented an XML-RPC stack. You get the idea. They have been able to do this with news stories, it seems they should also be able to do it with weblogs. This is the biggest unsolved problem I see in this world, and I don't know how to solve it, it's not what I do. Postscript: Tom Matrullo wants this too." My suggestion is use the Open Directory categories -- maybe enhance them -- and let weblog writers self-select. There's no reason to restrict this to weblogs, of course. It would let you establish a context for your search phrase. Search for "mustang" under horses, or under cars. Google's trick of categorizing news articles is slightly different from categorizing weblogs and websites: Google has a very small number of categories for news, and most news articles are about one topic. If the software isn't sure about one article, it can just leave it off the front page. If it ever guesses wrong about an article, the article disappears off the front page in a matter of hours.

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 21:43:06 GMT

The case for Google for Big Brother of the Year award. We just mention this Google stuff, we're not necessarily complaining about Google ourselves.

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 01:35:37 GMT

Googlicide: linking to a Google-censored page, thereby black-holing your blog at Google until the link scrolls off the main page?

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 18:16:11 GMT

Weird Google-glitch yesterday. If you searched for various combinations of: "George W. Bush State of the Union address, 2003", licentious radio's (not very funny) satirical transcript was the *second* hit. Presumably because the title of the licentious page includes "2003". The page got forty or fifty hits yesterday, versus approximately none in the previous week. Today, it's gone from Google, altogether. The most interesting thing is the question of why it suddenly got a high ranking. But we're pleased and proud that even if *China* doesn't censor licentious radio, Google *does*. (This isn't the first case.) There's also a rather interesting question as to how exactly Google chooses which pages to censor. Surely there's no one reporting our lame satire to a censor desk, but surely "boob job" isn't enough to get you whacked, either. Maybe there's a special "be polite to Mad King George" filter? That'd be some clever code. Bottom line is what Ari said: people should watch what they say.

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 15:09:27 GMT

From the SF Chronicle today: "About 108 venture funds raised $6.9 billion during 2002, compared with 331 funds that raised $40.7 billion in 2001.... Because 26 firms gave $5 billion in uninvested money back to their limited partners, the net amount of new capital was just $1.9 billion last year -- a 95 percent drop from 2001.... In 2000, nearly $107 billion was raised by 653 funds."

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 21:34:26 GMT

test

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 18:31:09 GMT

Rating links [technorati.com] to Shirky's article on weblogs. Top links right now: Scripting News 1490, Boing Boing Blog 1085, Instapundit.com 609. Megnut is #6 with 267. licentious radio is #21 with 16. (That's the number of "inbound blogs".) We presume licentious radio's rank will fall as more websites link to the article. It's interesting how easy it is to find evidence of Shirky's point.

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 15:07:39 GMT

DaveNet Dave points to Shirkey on weblogs. I don't quite get Dave's point. Shirky says weblog readership is a "power law" deal, where very few weblogs get huge readership, and almost all weblogs get very little readership, with many weblogs in between. I guess Dave is saying that weblogs are more niche-oriented. But I thought that's what Shirky was saying, too.

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 14:41:11 GMT

Interesting claim on the Opera/MSN story.... They suggest MSN tweaked a stylesheet to work better with Opera 6. When Opera 7 came out, the tweaked stylesheet broke the layout, because of changes in the browser. I haven't tested this, but it sounds plausible (slashdot comment). First, make your browser follow the standards. Second, when browser-sniffing, be aware that new versions will come out eventually, and the new versions will be specifically *different* than the current version. So limit your targeting to known versions. When Opera 7 comes out, give it some generic stylesheet until you take the time to figure out what you need to do to support it.

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 14:12:33 GMT

I guess that makes it official, then. I am the Anti-zeldman [google.com]. (ha ha)

Sat, 25 Jan 2003 17:27:43 GMT

LaunchDaveWiner.org spokesperson Leonard Nimoy announced partial victory today: "There turned out to be some problems with sending Dave into orbit. The cost was one -- we raised a total of $83.68, somewhat short of the $40 million needed. But we *have* managed to send Dave to Harvard. It's still pretty far away, and he'll be there a lot longer, so we believe our four contributors will all be pleased."

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 20:08:26 GMT

Underlining links was a *seriously* primitive choice for html. Underlining reduces readability, even if it adds emphasis. So your eye is attracted to the spot, but the text is difficult to read. CSS provides more options. Try: border-bottom: 1px; text-decoration: none. That also lets you get away from coloring the link text. You might want to add emphasis to a link by coloring it, but a lot of times there's no need. You can leave the text color alone, and just color the bottom border. If you add pretty good line-height to make your text more readable, then you can afford a little padding, so there's some whitespace between the bottom of descenders ("gpqy") and the border. If you choose a border color that is lighter than the text, you probably have less need of extra padding. If you're worried that the border by itself doesn't add enough emphasis, try making it two pixels. I've been playing with this for a couple of days. Today I ran across this site, with a pleasant gray background, and a darker gray border for links.

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 19:51:07 GMT

One of the worst CSS tricks: set body text-align: center, and then a width for the content div. Anyone whose browser window isn't as wide as your div won't be able to see the whole page, won't even be able to scroll to read the part hidden *to the left* of the viewable area. (In Mozilla, at least.) Don't *do* this!

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 16:24:24 GMT

One of the interesting questions in the current drive to using "structure" in html, is what we use structure *for*. Tantek Celik now makes each weblog post a list item. It's true that a weblog is an ordered list of posts, as a book is an ordered list of chapters, a chapter is an ordered list of sections, and a section is an ordered list of paragraphs. It's also true that a paragraph is an ordered list of sentences, which are lists of words, which are lists of letters. Some structure may be useful to non-visual readers and robots -- using heading tags instead of visual-only markup is an example. Some structure is useful for transformations. If you aren't editing the same sequence of bytes that your readers see, you can do more interesting things. You could create a weblog xml language, so that when you write and edit, you are looking at (or generating) semantically meaningful tags. For example: <xblog> <blogitem date="" time="">text here</blogitem> </xblog>. From that, your weblog software would build all the necessary links and anchors, and translate down to html so that any old browser could read it. You could add even more structure, of course. The problem with making up xml languages seems to be that the standard validation technology doesn't easily support mixing two document types. Eventually, that will be less of a problem. But when you think of using more structure, why? The standard reason is to make maintenance easier by using transformations to generate the final version. If you don't use automated transformations, using more structure might still make maintenance easier. But is it *really* much of an advantage to use list tags with classes, rather than div tags with classes? Tantek is doing a few tricky things. Rather than using class names in lists, the nesting of the lists implicitly holds the meaning. An <ol> for the month contains <li>s for the days, which contain an <ol> for the day's items. Then he puts the date and time into the value attribute of the list tags. Since the dates are in an ordered list, browsers should display the date as the number of the list item. The times are in an unordered list, so he has to repeat the time with a heading tag. All of this seems like a useful exploration, but I wonder who benefits. You probably save a few styles in CSS. It seems like it would be easier to create with a wysiwyg html editor, but you would still have to specify a couple of class attributes or copy/paste. If someone extracted a block of the source to use in a different setting, is there any benefit, or would it just be harder to understand? The fundamental issue seems to be that html was designed to indicate sections with heading tags at the start, but DOM (and XML) are desperate to wrap anything meaningful within a tag. Tantek's stylesheet then uses the nested structure to apply styles:

ol.month li { clear:left; list-style:none }
ol.month li { text-align:left;margin-top:2em }
ol.month ol li { margin:0;margin-bottom:1em }
ol.month ol ul li { margin:0 }
ol.month ol ul ul,ol.month ol ul ol { margin:1em 0 1em 2em }
ol.month ol ul ul li,ol.month ol ul ol li { margin:0 }
ol.month ol ul ul li { list-style:disc }
ol.month ol ul ol li { list-style:decimal }

*That* is the shape of things to come.

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:55:36 GMT

Sigh. Have you patched Windows today? Bad guys can own your XP computer if you download an mp3, or if IE even *looks* at a hacked website: "if the user browses to a malicious web site with Internet Explorer directly, the attack will work regardless of the Internet Explorer security settings." Say somebody hacks into a popular website running Microsoft's webserver, sneaks in an iframe tag to another compromised computer -- anywhere on the web. Now before the popular website's people even notice, thousands or hundreds of thousands of computers are under the bad-guy's control. Brought to you by "trustworthy computing". Note this is a bug in a feature that is part of Microsoft's long-term strategy of adding every conceivable feature in order to defeat the competition, no matter what the impact on security. You would think that Gates could set aside a billion dollars or so to train his people in the need for security. Think "safety first". But the Microsofties all know how they kill the competition, and they aren't likely to change their ways because Gates has to mumble in public about security. Better to put the money into PR campaigns that 802.11 is unsafe, for example.

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 00:16:38 GMT

Follow-up on chronologically-ordered weblogs.... Here's a example of using client-side javascript and cookies to hide previously-viewed posts [new window]. Why are blogs in reverse order? Partly because we don't want the server to remember which items each viewer has already seen. We also don't want the server to do the work of delivering only unseen items for each user. That would get expensive, compared to Radio, that generates static pages. The script uses client-side memory and processing power, which is scalable. That is, if a million people hit your weblog, the server doesn't have to do any extra work. The example assumes the server doesn't help by providing variables like the ids of the first and last items on the page. Slightly cooperative weblog software would reduce the complexity of the Javascript code.

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 16:43:34 GMT

Re-ordering weblogs is easy. Give it a separate page. Maybe restrict it to a shorter timespan. Use Javascript and DOM: 1) use Javascript to write a cookie with the id of the last-viewed entry. 2) use Javascript to set "display: none" for the items that have already been read. This will work in fancy new browsers like IE5+, Mozilla, and NS6+. For old and primitive browsers, be sure to include a link to the (current) standard reverse-order page. 3) add a link to display the hidden items. Not having done this yet, I presume the Javascript won't be entirely straightforward. Ideally, the weblog server software would give you access to variables for the last id, and the ids would have to be numerically ordered. Radio's ids will work. Of course the server software would have to give you the option. I don't know if any do, but it certainly wouldn't be hard. Dave Winer provoked this outburst by linking to Ken Hirsch.

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 17:02:49 GMT

Great virus coming soon to a computer near you: this one exploits one of those Microsoft destroy-the-competition features, emails itself to everyone in your email archive, and then erases your hard disk. Brought to you by trustworthy computing. I gotta say, a few really destructive viruses might just be in order to force Microsoft to change its ways in a hurry, not just cover their incompetence with PR spin. New worm, Winevar, packs a punch [infoworld.com].

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 04:15:18 GMT

I find it rather depressing that licentious radio is #1 on Google for "smiling naked women". Even worse, there are only six hits for the search.

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 21:37:38 GMT

More fun with licentious Google: we're #3 at Google for beef subsidy [google.com]. (Points to: Beef subsidy terrorists threatened with nukes.)