A Monologue

I like sections because they help organize thoughts; hence, an experimental layout with CSS today.

I add a dandy feature to fetch motivational quotes every day on every individual post (to fill the void after the comment section). As usual, IE does a poor rendering job, making my post even more hollow. It baffles me that most people still use the clumsy IE when a superior alternative is freely available. For one thing, I remain annoyed that IE can't consistently display the cool icon of my blog in the address bar.

• I should have noticed this recent article on a rising China much earlier. Its provocative introduction is particularly thoughtful.
• Here's a novel comparison of America and Europe through the eyes of an economist. I never thought of juxtaposing California and Germany, respectively the largest economy of its domain.
• Here's a product review geared toward the general audience. Though I cannot comment the technical merits (because I haven't had the need for a desktop search tool yet), I like the writing style: accessible, casual, lucid, thorough, and witty. Reading it feels like having an interesting conversation.

I wish that Blogger were powered by Wordpress. In particular, I'd love to try these great features. My No. 1 request to Blogger: instant publishing with no rebuilding.

Below the Radar

What is the morale of this story? Marry well for divorce?!

Here's an interesting website well versed in "what weblogs are talking about". Trendy (no pun intended) sociologists can really use a constantly up-to-date zeitgeist.

I suppose that the wide use of keyboards might have played a detrimental role in this sensational headline. Alas, fountain pens are just so passé nowadays.

There's real hope for the artistically inclined in SoHo: meet high finance on Wall Street. This marvelous idea also reconfirms my faith that anything is possible in the Big Apple.

Thunderbird Soaring

It's Good Friday in Western Christianity. Guess who is Tenacious, Introspective, Ambitious, and Neat?

Here're some well-written tutorials on how to circumvent the center tag using CSS. The practical tips helped me make the sleek "About me" sidebar.

A friend asked me this morning to compare Thunderbird with Outlook Express. For a homo economicus, both cost nothing: TB is open-source while OE is included in Windows (note that OE is very different from its expensive cousin Outlook). Neither email client pretends to be a full-fledged PIM (however, I look forward to the natural integration of TB with the Mozilla calendar product Sunbird in the near future so that TB can compete with Outlook on an equal footing).

So why should an average user ditch OE to favor TB? TB is my default email application because of all these features which OE lacks. OE is only availabe on the Windows platform while TB has been ported to all major platforms; TB stores my emails in plain text format for maximal portability; TB lets me apply flexible templates for different recipients; TB has better search functions than OE … I can go on and on but this old news story really hit the bull's eye: TB will appeal to any user who's fed up with spam. An adaptive algorithm powers TB to effectively filter out most of junk emails before they can pollute my Inbox. So soar with Thunderbird!

The Eclectic Intelligencer

I notice that few readers of my blog have upgraded to the latest Firefox 1.0.2 (released a few days ago). What's more astonishing is that less than 20% of all visits worldwide come from non-IE browsers. So I decide to prominently place a Firefox logo on my blog as a public service.

I stumbled across more tips for the Scribe template. Beautiful!

Today marked the 15th anniversary of An Wang's death. The founder of Wang Laboratories inspired generations of Chinese students to pursue the American dream. I remember that my high school received a few 王安电脑 as gifts (which were immediately monopolized by the geeks) in the 1980s, though I never programmed on a Wang, nor have I ever seen one in the US.

Maundy Thursday

Today is holy in Western Christianity; hence, a snowy greeting from above before dawn and a fitting movie from below after dusk for the occasion:

The Awesome Scripting Universe

I read a nice survey (sponsored by Microsoft?) of scripting languages. However, I find it rather odd, briller par son absence, that two popular languages—JavaScript and Visual Basic—are not covered. Five illuminati of the open-source literati each give eye-popping demonstrations of what's possible (in Tcl, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby respectively). Inspired, I'm going to study the RAD capabilities of Perl and Python.

New Netherland

I just learned some trivia from a JEOPARDY! clue about the last Dutch governor of colonia New York who first brought tea to America (this Chinese connection thus made the monumental Boston Tea Party possible for the British Crown a century later). In the past, I wondered what's Stuyvesant all about whenever I drove by the Stuyvesant Plaza near the Crossgates Mall in Albany. Aha, it's named after the Honorable Mr. Peter Stuyvesant who ceded to the English (the Duke of York) in 1664 (and New Netherland thence became New York). Now I have a better appreciation of the strong Dutch heritage in the capital district—with county names like Rensselaer and town names like Amsterdam. There's so much rich history hidden in an address/name. Cool!

Nota Bene

I signed this petition in memory of the forgotton holocaust.

It's reported that faster XML is currently under study. Though not a cognoscenti of standards, I think it a classic case of reductio ad absurdum. The motivation to ditch the plain old text format is that a binary format will improve software performance (at the prohibitive expense of potential incompatibilities). However, the most fundamental tenet in computing is that deficiencies in software can always be expiated by advances in hardware. One of my first programs (coded in BASIC) used a loop to add 100 consecutive integers; it took a few minutes to compute the result on my state-of-the-art Apple IIe circa 1984. The same program immediately displayed the answer on a lab Mac IIsi in 1990, completely masking its inferior algorithm (the injudicious use of a costly loop). Therefore, I'm convinced that the Moore's law, not some fancy format, will guide the future of XML.

大麦吟

I first came upon the following poem by Sara(h) Teasdale in high school. At the time, I was privileged enough to read English books sent from abroad (which Dad used to borrow regularly from his university library for me). One slim volume was an anthology of poetry (I don't remember its title now) that included this poignant poem. It made a lasting impression on me not only because of its simple vocabulary but also because of its powerful theme of resilience. Unfortunately, I was too dumb to take note of its attribution then. Of course, I became unable to recite its lines soon. Later, when I asked my (American) classmates in college whether they heard of a poem about bending barley, everyone dismissed me as a lunatic. So, thanks to the internet, I am truly delighted to have rediscovered it after so many years.

Like barley bending In low fields by the sea, Singing in hard wind Ceaselessly; Like barley bending And rising again, So would I, unbroken, Rise from pain; So would I softly, Day long, night long, Change my sorrow Into song.

After reading her biography, I feel enormously sad that the poet, unlike barley bending, succumbed young due to her frail health.

Ça s'arrose!

Today I upgraded Thunderbird from 1.0 to 1.0.2. I'm curious what happened to Version 1.0.1, which was never announced (as an official release).

Procrastinating no more (I should have done it years ago!), I also removed a bunch of unused fonts (~25M) but failed to delete the Gulim font. Anyway, CJK is now reduced to CK on my PC.

Citation du Jour

《老子•道德经》第三十三章

知人者智，自知者明。胜人者有力，自胜者强。知足者富。强行者有志。不失其所者久。死而不亡者寿。

Phyllis McGinley

To practise my knowledge of CSS, I implemented a poetry class in my bloated template to honor the Oregonian poet, who was born today a century ago.

The Adversary in A Certain Age (1960)
A Mother’s hardest to forgive. Life is the fruit she longs to hand you, Ripe on a plate. And while you live, Relentlessly she understands you.

Commercial-Free

No more ads in the sidebar! Google (falsely) alleges that I generated invalid clicks and (rudely) disabled my AdSense account today. To add salt to the wound, Google then spammed me with a mandatory announcement of their new "Ad Links" feature. Ouch…

Anyway, I've found through a fortnight's experiment with the Google program that the ads delivered were mostly ridiculous and irrevelant to my content. Of course, one immediate upside of AdSense-less is faster page loading. Cheers!

First Day of Spring

I learned more META elements this morning. XHTML is really neat and necessary.

Here's an amusing list of engineering marvels. I'd also include the indispensable multimeter and venerable pencil sharpener.

Today I long for Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi:

The stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze.