Archive: Page 3

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.

Banner of the Stars was extremely good, continuing the high level of quality I enjoyed in Crest of the Stars. Epic plot with real sci-fi, superb characters and acting, and a very classy soundtrack. I don't know why this series is so underappreciated, but I'm definitely looking forward to watching Banner of the Stars II. And what's this I hear about a fourth series? As long as they don't screw it up royally, I will be most pleased.

Just in case you were thinking of teaching English in Japan, watch out for the kancho assassins.

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.

Democracy doesn't scale. It works fairly well for governing things like cities and towns, but on a scale like that of the United States' federal government it just doesn't work. The evidence of this is all around us, from low voter turnout to the stranglehold the two-party system has on the federal government, even as both sides converge more and more. This problem is a form of the free rider problem, caused by a kind of prisoner's dilemma.

Why do all-way stop signs look identical to two-way stop signs? Those tiny rectangles below the sign don't count since they're so hard to see, and they're not even there most of the time. Why don't we make two-way stop signs visually distinct from all-way stop signs?

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.

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.