I've been trying to switch over completely from AIM to Jabber, a difficult task since very few people I know use Jabber. Recently, though, GTalk started interoperating with Jabber; "Hallelujah!", I thought. Such optimism was premature, it seems.
Why is is that every single game website I visit has to be based on Flash? I don't want to wait while their bloated excuse for a website loads and then get assaulted by low-quality looped music while wrestling with 'cute' navigation schemes. That is, if I could even get Flash working consistently in FreeBSD. Most of the time, all I want is a blasted wallpaper! Couldn't they at least provide a bare-bones HTML version? Grr.
Perhaps I'm the last kid on the block to come up with this, but I thought I'd share a neat little CSS trick I stumbled upon. In various parts of this site I use padding to make sure that, for example, text inside a box is separated by half an em from the border of the box. Putting a margin on the inside element doesn't work as well because you've got to anticipate every kind of element that might go in your container and give each one its own margin. The thing about padding, though, is that it doesn't collapse like margin does, nor do padding and margin collapse with each other.
Let me begin with a definition: by "intellectual property" or "IP" I mean things covered by copyrights and patents (I exclude trademarks for the sake of brevity). More generally, I mean ideas and information that are covered by laws that grant their creators certain exclusive rights, such as the right to produce or sell instances of the IP in question. The U.S. Constitution, for example, grants its Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In other words, the stated purpose of intellectual property in the United States is to benefit society as a whole by providing incentives for the creation of ideas.
Welcome! This is the personal website and weblog of me, Michael Gardner. I hope you'll enjoy the site, but I make no excuses for my choice of topics, since I will post only what is interesting to me. At the moment there are only three sections: blog, articles and links. Most of the content of this site will be in the articles for now, where I will write treatises on various and sundry. The blog section is simply anything personal or otherwise unfit for article treatment that I want to post, and the links section is self-explanatory. Feel free to poke around, and please don't mind the frequent shifting of page styles, as another major purpose of this site is for me to test and improve my XHTML and CSS skills.
The Finder in versions of Mac OS prior to OS X, sometimes referred to as the "spatial Finder," was a direct, simple interface for managing files: the Finder represented each folder on the hard drive with exactly one window, and remembered that window's size and position on the screen. This was part of the illusion of direct manipulation of files and folders— users would feel as if they were manipulating the files themselves, not representations or abstractions thereof. In fact, many users didn't even think of the Finder as an application at all; to them, it was the computer.