Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Tabtitlebar – Where Apple and Google went right, wrong or M.I.A.

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This will be short.

Already, skirmishes of opinion over Apple’s interpretation of Google Chrome‘s tabtitlebar – or the positioning of the tabs in the title bar of the browser in order to utilize screen space for webpages – have erupted on various news sites and blogs. Even on OS X, the jury over Safari 4‘s user interface design is divided; on the Windows port, most who express favor with Safari 4’s user interface design are usually users of Windows Vista, so the main supposition is that those who have the most trouble with the tabtitlebar are Windows XP users; oh, and (on a cross-platform basis) people who simply like more screen real estate for pageviewing.

Of course, Google Chrome Beta (Google’s first browser, and currently Windows-only) was the first notable web browser to publicly promote the UI infusion, and it was not without its initial criticisms for that same reason (among others, including the option of sending anonymous usage and crash data to Google). Safari 4 Beta, on the other hand, marks a first for Apple in its legendary user interface history, and may also begin a user interface trend for Apple throughout its Mac OS X applications (Finder, Mac OS’s file navigation app, is hinted to have tabs in early alphas of Snow Leopard, OS X’s 6th iteration, so it may well take up Safari 4’s tabtitlebar feature).

Many have written about problems with this emerging user interface widget, which utilizes the operating system’s window manager by embedding navigation between tabs within the title bar (mostly on Windows). Personally, I think it is a good idea due to a month or so of using Google Chrome (I also find the process-per-tab idea to be a good idea), but problems still linger with both implementations as far as I’m concerned.

  • Speed: Chrome is far better in the speed department than Safari as far as opening, closing and navigating between tabs is concerned (again, maybe because of the process-per-tab idea). The Windows port of Safari 4, like its Mac port, does not allow an option (AFAIK) for using middle-click to close tabs; left-clicking to close tabs in Safari 4 on WinXP feels like chipping into brick. The responsiveness to clicking buttons to close and open tabs is horrendous on this platform.
  • Tab navigation and perception: In this area, I’ll say that Firefox 2.0+, despite its own speed and resource management issues, did a better tour-de-force at tab navigation than Opera, Chrome or Safari, by allowing one to scroll through as many tabs as one may please without the tabs being scrunched up in the tab area. All the other browsers, even Chrome and Safari, continue to maintain the metaphor of the "limited tab area", with Safari 4 doing worse by maximizing the view of the tab of the current page in view at the expense of other tabs-in-waiting.

Yes, Firefox actually did something that I’ve come to appreciate (and wish that they could extend into a much wider territory of tab navigation; getting rid of the tab-specfic close button in 3.0 remains questionable, IMO).

There is room for improvement for Safari and Chrome in this combination of two user interface metaphors. In fact, there’s room for improvement for most of Apple’s software ports to Windows, but I highly doubt that Apple is willing to consider such ideas as unscrunching the tabtitlebar for tabscrolling or giving separate processes to each tab, just as how I doubt that Microsoft will do the same with IE8 or IE9.

Styling, Scripting and SMIL: The three options in SVG animation

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I wonder when CSS animation and other WebKit niceties can be packaged into CSS frameworks for easier, less rigorous designing of web pages.

Anyway, after looking at the announcement that WebKit allows CSS animations, transitions and transforms, I wonder about the "best practices" of using such modules with SVG.

Maybe it would go like:

  • CSS for color and movement of shapes
  • SMIL for timed text (subtitles) and links
  • JS for playback control

It seems a bit more realistic for SMIL to be relegated to timed text rather than have such an actively-animating role as was accorded to it by the W3C when they first came out with the SMIL standard in the late 90s/early 2000s; SMIL’s syntax can be seen as one that is best for graphically-intensive text. Allowing for CSS to take a greater role in animation can also open up doors for web designers to easily create Flash-like animations  using a combination of normal web editors and SVG editors rather than wait for all-in-one dedicated animation editors.

The problem is that the WebKit team has not yet developed a publicly-documented approach to SVG animation through CSS; CSS as-is is already used in SVG and XHTML, among other flavors of XML, for styling and color, but this animation/transform/transition idea for CSS has not been publicly considered as being usable with SVG, only with XHTML as rendered by WebKit.

Thus, it remains to be seen how CSS styling as an SVG animation property will play out.

Jerusalem and Greater Israel

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 The Jabotinskyists were set on Transjordan. The Kahanists were set on the "Nile-to-the-Euphrates". 

But to me, the most likely scenario seems to be the Halakhist securing of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

At the current rate, it seems that the Religious settlements will gain a greater degree of demographic power in the West Bank within the next 60 years. The West Bank will be consolidated as Judea District and Samaria District, with an expanded Jerusalem Metropolitan District, and the Third Temple, or at least investigatory archaeological excavations within the former edifice (currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque), will be the icing on the cake.

I think that’s the best that I can see happening with Israel consolidating its borders.

But I wonder if those who support the institution of Halakhic law into the Israeli government would conflict with the Revisionists who want to cross the Jordan River or the Kahanists who want to go much, much further.

I wonder this because I think that expanding any further in terms of Israel’s borders would be an unfeasible enterprise for the religious Zionists to support, given that

  • Israel’s capital is in Jerusalem, which would make Jordan/East Bank an unwieldy territory to govern so remotely; this would necessitate a move of the capital from Jerusalem to somewhere more easterly and centric to the expanded territory.
  • Expanding so far would take the focus and emphasis from off of Jerusalem as the center of the Jewish people; as noted above, the center would move somewhere else.
  • Israel doesn’t have the adequate population to support the settlement of the territory
  • even the ancient Kingdom of the Davidic line, which had a thin tribal presence in the immediate East Bank, was almost always hemmed in by other rival kingdoms and vulnerable to attack from the semi-desert region that dominates Jordan.
  • the agriculture already sucks in Jordan; most of it takes place on the river valley, while the rest of the country is short of rainfall and prone to drought
  • Crossing over Jordan would seem less like recovering Zion and saving Jewry and the Jewish people from an antagonistic world and more like a gradual migration into the useless Arabian desert (Israel, so it seems, already has trouble with settling the Negev).
  • Agriculture in the East of Jordan would require non-Jewish labor.

This is why I don’t think that Crossing Jordan, as advocated by the Revisionists or the Kahanists (or the Christians here in the U.S.) is an ideal that most Religious Zionists would support.

At best, it is more of a secular ethnonationalist ideal. No, scratch that. Make it a secular irredentist ideal. 

It would require a long-term selling of the idea that Israel must ensure its security by retreating and entrenching further inland rather than remain a primarily coastal state prone to Arab, Sunni Muslim onslaught. Those who would support this idea might use ancient Davidic Israel as a class example on how not to define the borders of the Israeli nation-state, and would support expansion through primarily civil settlement, albeit with less (or more, if need be) religious overtones.

At the point of crossing Jordan, it becomes less about the Jewish people’s interests and more about the Israeli people’s interests. It becomes a final negation of the diaspora – and the hopes, dreams and fears which it brought back to Israel through Aliyah – and a first confirmation of the post-Aliyah state.

This state, which has restored Judaism to the land and its former edifices, will no longer be tied to the Jewish diaspora’s aliyah, but will instead see itself as an unevolved state that has not moved or matured out of the settlement mentality that brought so many of their ancestors to the state.

This Israel will envision itself as needing to establish a larger, less minute, less prone geopoltical presence in the region, one that is less concerned with religious or ethnic concerns outside its borders and more concerned with native security and stability. This Israel will seek to center itself beyond ethnic (Tel Aviv) or religious (Jerusalem) concerns, with nationalism being an exclusively government-centric ideology; the government of this Israel will become bigger as well, with a government-derived pseudo-republican nobility.

I see this happening in Israel’s future.

My birthday

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 Yesterday was my birthday. I’m 22, and still an auto insurance risk for the next two years.

And I was going to post a full-fledged diatribe on why it is silly for so-called anti-Zionists to poise Zionism as an internationalist Marxist conspiracy, but the browser locked up on me at the last minute, I had to shut the process off manually, and I wasn’t logged in.

Maybe I’ll do a reconceived post on the subject later.

Raising the mandatory minimum secondary education graduation age

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 I just wrote the article on the minimum dropout age.

I’ve also contemplated upon the age of graduation from high school as opposed to the minimum age of dropout (without parental consent) from high school.

If states such as South Dakota and New Hampshire have raised the minimum dropout age to 18 (primarily for socioeconomic reasons), then doesn’t it make sense to raise the minimum graduation age to higher ages or grades?

I think the graduation age should be raised to at least 21 and the curriculum of community colleges integrated into the secondary education institution. I mean, it’s not like community colleges are not already perceived as the "13th grade" (for negative reasons, I perceive); most of the education that is provided by community and technical colleges should have been taught on a mandatory basis as such skills are now seen as barely bedrock-level for consideration by employers in multiple sectors. Plus, every century is signified by the raising of expectations by the most attractive and important employers, which is why these states have raised the minimum dropout age to 16 in the early 1900s, 18 in the early 2000s, etc.

EDIT: Oh, it seems that there’s already a movement that’s aiming in this direction: the K-16 movement.

420, furry, film and still art

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 I just had a thought that occurred to me after I looked in fchan’s 420/drug thread (in the alternative[hard] section, most of which I don’t peruse; /m, /a and /dis are my most frequent destinations) last night:

Generally, sexual acts and displays look more appealing to me in still art (anything that is drawn or modeled for unipositional display, usually in .jpg and .png) than they do in moving art (video, animation, .flv/.swf, .mov, etc.); however, displays of acts which involve drugs, particularly the smoking of cannabis/weed, usually look more appealing to me in moving art than they do in still art.

I think I have this position about multimedia because while sex is something that is 1) easier to draw and 2) usually depicted in artistic form during the short orgasmic climax and only to engender that sort of climax in the viewer, cannabis intake is something that is meant to result in a long, drawn out high, one which is then explored and exploited by the smoker to as much of an extent as possible.

Plus, the orgasm, which is the point in time most depicted in erotic still art, is short and unsatisfying, follows a very long build-up of sweat and strenuous, blood-rushing activity, and usually only leaves such sweat and sore organs in its wake as its only evidence of presence; the high from cannabis, on the other hand, usually comes from the sudden intake from a bong, followed by the ensuing headache and choking, but actually lasts longer than the orgasm and gives a few minutes of distorted cognitive perspective to the smoker.

Thus, when the high comes, time is afforded to the smoker to see the world around the smoker distorted and "wierded out", even though the smoker’s own perception of the world is wierded out and depresses the smoker’s own reaction to the world. This means that things go on around the smoker during the high, and the smoker sees their occurences; compare this to the orgasm that only lasts for mere seconds.

Thus, what sentiments and perceptions that still depictions of cannabis intake cannot afford due to their brevity, the moving depiction of the same can and have: the high, what the smoker sees during the high, how the smoker sees such things during the high, what the smoker does during the high, etc.

So I look forward to a future subfandom around furry stoner animations and films, ones in which the anthropomorphic stoner’s very fictional species is created around the fact that she is a stoner and an avid weedhead or LSD fan or shroom conoisseur.

Plus, I have to think of prototype terms that can be used within, and are endemic to this subfandom of furry drugging, similar to how the term "yiff" is mostly synonymous with furry sex.

Queer as filk

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I’m sure that only those who’ve gone to fan conventions have heard of filk music, a (meta-)genre that uses instruments in a folk-ish manner to provide music that lyrically celebrates the exploits of fictional characters which are also celebrated by the overall theme of the fan convention (science fiction, fantasy, furry).

So what if one could infuse filk music with LGBT-oriented lyrics and sentiments? Or, for that matter, what about general erotic content in filk lyrics?

I mean, with the plethora of yaoi-themed "’ships" and fanfics on the web, why can’t fandom music also take advantage of erotic and LGBT-oriented lyrics (and the accompanying liberties)?

I would call it "gayfilk" or "queerfilk", or something like that.

Plus, I ‘m sure that the filk offered at furry conventions could use such interesting interpserings of lyrical liberties as well.

Issue: Creating an Anti-Zionism template

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I created the Zionism template on Wikipedia, and it was rather easy to do: everything placed inside was linked in some way to Zionism’s development as an ideology, from the Revisionist to the Anti- to the Post- to Kahanism, etc. I then "revived" on Sunday the Religious Zionism template as well, and that went well.

But in light of the recent air raid on Gaza which everyone’s going nuts over, I was thinking about creating an anti-Zionism template, and started by using the articles in the anti-Zionism category. Then I stopped, and realized that this was not going anywhere.

Like many, I’m not sure about how to exactly delineate between Anti-Zionism (against the state of Israel’s existence), anti-Judaism (against the religion’s existence) and anti-Semitism (against the ethnicity’s existence), or at least other editors, including those who added the Anti-Zionism category, are just as lacking in such details. Anti-Zionism is usually seen as a little-removed extension of anti-Semitism, an ideology that is hardly evolved far from such roots; unless you’re listening to someone of Jewish religious ancestry, expressions of anti-Semitism by the right-wing are usually accompanied by expressions of anti-Zionism, while expressions of anti-Zionism by the left-wing are often accompanied by smidgens of anti-Semitism.

The fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are both conflated with each other (with the occasional conflation with anti-Judaism) by the opposing groups (a "self-fulfilling proof", as I call it) makes the delineation difficult to surmise outside of the Jewish circle; if one only accounts for the anti-Zionism that is exhibited by Jewish and/or Israeli groups (both religious and secular), then it is probably more easy to separate and examine anti-Zionism further from anti-Semitism.

To complicate matters, I think that out of anti-Zionism has arisen yet another "anti-" ideology: "anti-Israelism". It may already exist in that you can possibly have criticisms of the Israeli state’s actions which only judge Israel as just another nation-state, not as a "Zionist entity" as it is called by supremacists like Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, and Haniyeh who:

  • simply judge the state as a fledgling exercise of Zionism-as-an-ideology and not as a fully-realized nation-state that was simply born from that ideology
  • simply judge the people as mere Jews and not as native Israelis (or "Sabras", if you will) who, like it or not, were born and raised in the state
  • simply judge the religion as an imported, foreign religion and not as an entrenched cultural trait of the state and the demographic majority.

If anti-Israelism is defined as being against or denying the effect of actions and structure of the Israeli government’s instruments (i.e., the military, the Chief Rabbinate, etc.), then I think that Israel’s Religious Zionists and settlers may already be on such a path, as they are flatly aligned against the pragmatist goals of the Israeli government (the unilateral pullout was a watershed moment for them) and are in favor of gaining the entirety of the West Bank and Jerusalem (which I think will happen within the next four decades); they also regularly come into conflict with the Israeli secularists who would not want any recent reinstitutionalization of a modern Sanhedrin (which I think is intended to replace the Knesset).

Anti-Israelism from non-Israelis and/or non-Jews, on the other hand, can be easily seen and construed as anti-Zionism, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. But it, I think, is the more predominant "in"-ideology among the anti-authoritarians and anarchists; for that same reason, it may also be the more potent worry of Israel’s national government, which tends to view anti-authoritarians and anarchists as merely vulnerable patsies of anti-Zionists, anti-Judaists and anti-Semites. 

At least, that’s what I took of the explanation of Israel’s 2004 expulsion of British journalist and human rights activist Ewa Jasiewicz, who talked to a CNN journalist in Hong Kong last night concerning the effects of the Gaza incursion. She was put out due to accusations that her journalism was biased towards coverage of Palestinian victims of bombings in comparison to Israeli victims of bombings, and that she was vulnerable to influence and exploitation by pro-Palestinian groups due to her convictions; she protested this accusation, but she is probably an example of the Israeli state’s mistrust of individuals who may not be particularly or openly fawning over any state, ethnicity, or religion (even their own) that may be for or against Israel’s existence, but are merely anti-repression and anti-violence to a fault.

In other words, they don’t like bleeding-heart anarchists.

Preliminary assessment: IQ tests, race and Neurodiversity

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I’ll be straight with this: I think that intelligence assessments and quotients have the potential to be geared against a great plurality of the wide breadth of neurodiversity.

Humanity and human culture already have a long-standing bigotry against those humans who are born with or gradually develop conditions which pull us away from long-accepted (and long-shifted) norms and typicalities of neural processing and projection. The most vocabulary-laden languages, especially English, possess multiple words which describe those people or things which are not up to the intellectual or behavioral snuff of the beholding individual, and most such words are most commonly used in a highly-pejorative manner.

Furthermore, there’s the long-standing controversy about past scholastic and medical correlations between race/ethnicity and intelligence, including controversy about the origins of IQ tests and the controversy about eugenics. I think that the fact that such correlations between race/ethnicity and intelligence occurred or were given such credence in favor or protest in rejection at all is a "big red sign" that points more to our historic fears and hang-ups of alteration of stereotypical mental or behavioral standards which are expected from every human individual than our fears and hang-ups of alteration of ethnoracial (or even ethnoreligious) statuses quo; otherwise, the Germans and Americans would not have enforced the Jewish quotas on college entries (and restrict what the Germans called "Jewish science") nor would the Americans (and South Africans) have enforced segregation laws against people of African ancestry to such extents as they did. In human society (especially Western society), intelligence = money = power = respect, and to be an ethnoracial or ethnoreligious minority with stereotypically too much or too little of "intelligence" makes you a target of a manipulated majority.

What if such hang-ups over intellectual, mental or behavioral assessments have an effect on how we assess the full breadth of neurodiversity? Should hang-ups over past correlations between race and intelligence affect how we assess such a breadth, or should those who advocate for neurodiverse equality and recognition before the law and the market also work to empower those who may be at a disadvantage due to the standard neurotypical bias against them?

Even if the concept of neurodiversity can be expanded to include all of the WHO’s ICD-9 codes for mental and behavioral disorders rather than just the particular subset of pervasive psychological/developmental disorders (in which you’ll find autism, Rett’s syndrome and Asperger’s syndrome), I don’t think that we should discard race or ethnicity from such-dependent mental or behavioral assessments, but I do think that being assessed within this range should be a source of shame for anyone, either.

Fairware

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Wikibin, a data dump for discarded Wikipedia articles, defines "fairware" as software released and distributed for a "symbolic (fair) price.." or "any software of which the cost is marginal in comparison to the benefit"; among the examples that it offers are Internet sites which market "software for one dollar" and Wishapp.com. 

However, wouldn’t fairware be a good replacement for the term freeware, since "freeware" is usually defined as software that is distributed without any demand for payment from the user but only allows the user the right to apply the software according to the stipulations and constraints of an accompanying EULA, while withholding both the ability to access or manipulate the source code and resell the software?

At best, the restrictions of freeware are most comparable with the legal concept of "fair use" rather than "free" use; hence "fairware". Furthermore, even the fairware definition provided by Daniel and Rubenstein would also fit the "fair use" definition if such-defined software did not come with the ability of "free use" that comes within the traditional definitions of "free software" and "free content".