Police confirm sniper's 11th victim

in

Globe and Mail: Police confirm sniper's 11th victim

George Bush is quoted as saying "The idea of moms taking their kids to school and sheltering them from a potential sniper attack is not the America that I know"

I did some quick statistical research after I read this.

In the U.S., there were 28,874 deaths related to firearms in 1999 (crude rate of 10.59) and 30,708 deaths in 1998. The population was 272,690,813 and 270,248,003 respectively. That also means in 1999 there were on average 79 related firearms deaths per day. Source - CDC Website

In Canada we had 1037 firearms related deaths in 1997 with a population of 29,987,200 (crude rate of 3.5). An average of 3 firearms related deaths a day. Source - Canadian Firearms Centre

Magnetic Personality

in

I know that consumer technology isn't always built to be durable but I've lost another device due to failure and I'm getting rather suspicious of myself now. Is there a way to measure one's magnetic field in relation to the average?

My latest to go is a Palm III. I had a Palm IIIx that went just over a year ago and got a Palm III that was available but hardly used. Now when I turn it on the screen is dead. If I hit reset the backlight comes on with a barley audible whining noise. Scratch another.

So far over the past three years the damage is,

1 Palm IIIx

1 Palm III

1 Gateway Laptop

3 Brand name hard drives (Maxtor and Fujitsu)

1 Logitech Joystick

3 Vtech cordless phones (going on four)

1 3Comm Ethernet hub (sill works but damaged capacitor whine hurts my ears, or so I'm told that's what that sound is)

Now perhaps I'm rather adept at picking brands the die easily, but these are not cheap no-name brands. I buy them for the name. I don't know why I bother though, it doesn't seem to matter. I'm now sold on extended warrenties.

New Software Quietly Diverts Sales Commissions

in

Some P2P software developers are bundling "parasite-ware" into their products that intercepts certain web transactions such as Amazon referals and diverts the referral fees to their own company to pay for software development according to this New York Times article.

Products include LimWire, Morpheus, Kazaa, and Bearshare. I use BearShare that uses the SaveNow program by WhenU which, I deleted from the Windows registry. To remove SaveNow and.doxdesk.com provides removal instructions.

Web Standards Sites

in

After meeting with Jay Goldman of Inflection Design and having some in depth discussions about web standards I'm deciding to venture forth and begin to embrace CSS 2.0 on all my sites. Jay also provided some helpful sites to make the transition smoother and account for older browsers like Navigator 4x. Thanks Jay.

The Web Standards Project, HTML Help by The Web Design Group, and W3Schools Online Web Tutorials.

The Simpson's Generation

in

I finally read The Simpson's Generation by Chris Turner in the 10th anniversary issue of Shift on the train ride home last night from Burlington.

"We were being told - in emphatic terms - that the thing we were defending and the way to defend it were one and the same; we were the great globalized Republic of Buying Stuff, and so we should bravely go on buying stuff to protect our right - our most basic, most cherished right - to buy more stuff."

New Glenn Group Site

in

I launched my father's new pharmaceutical consulting site, The Glenn Group, today. It uses the same content management system that my own site uses and employs the new Flash text editor, has industry news feeds, and a client document management area. The technology was a perfect fit to make editing posts easier. I'll be adding new features such as a calendar and hopefully smoothing the graphical look in the next few weeks.

The Smaller Picture

in

Typophile is running an interesting collaborative experiment in which users collectively participate in building a bitmap font by choosing one bit at a time, black or white. The Smaller Picture

At first I thought that it would only be a matter of time before the letters and numbers were formed albeit, slightly deformed. However, this is assuming that the group all share the same goal. If a significant percentage or participants have the goal of not creating a readable font, the project will never succeed.

I also noticed that there are measures in place to prevent you from trying to manipulate a single glyph. The system keeps track and only allows so many alterations over a given period. I assume clearing your cookies would defeat this though.

Replacing Textarea

in

One of the things I do is create dynamic content interfaces for web sites. But standard web forms are limiting for text editing. I had originally tried to implement additional textarea functionality using Javascript but was limited by cross browser functionality due to DOM not being well supported in Netscape 4 if not at all and an annoying bug in Mozilla.

I would have thought that a DOM HTML bug would have been fixed before 1.0 or even 1.1 but in the open source world priorities are not always based on important bugs but rather what programmers feel like fixing. Not like I can complain much, I know how to program but haven't tried to fix these bugs myself. Too much of a pain to get into C++ and learn the intricacies of Mozilla code. Bug I'm rambling.

So, I thought, why not do it in Flash? Turns out there are two good starts on this. Josh Dura has a Flash text editor and so does Stuart Schoneveld although Stuart's is not available to download and therefore tweak and use. It's too bad since Stuart's has a link option that Josh's doesn't yet have.

So I'll have to stretch my limited Flash muscles to plug in a link bar into Josh's editor and solve some issues I noticed. First, the text field in the editor seems to only update it's associated variable with formatting information after more data is entered. So just calling setTextFormat won't apply it to the variable right away. The second thing is that the HTML stored in the variable has the tag <textarea%gt; which last time I checked is not standard HTML. Small details to fix.

Timothy Appnel had some good ideas on Flash based editors.