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The Best Imitation in the Universe

Published 2012-06-02 00:54 by Abscissa in General

Many people[1] have asked me, in response to my previous post, "I'm a drooling moron and I still don't understand how your 'Makes Sense / Doesn't Fucking Make Sense' game is played." Of course, that's not even a question, dipshit, which gives you an idea of just how stupid hypothetical people are.

Lack of actual question aside, here's how the game is played:

Right before I win, I say awesome techno-like stuff that shows the honeys[2] just how gigantic my technology-dick is. They writhe in ecstasy imagining it, and then BAM! It gets smacked in their face. The immense force of my crotch log moving at mach 4 cracks their skull, and then they orgasm just because that's so damn manly. Then I win because, as I said, this all happens right before I win.

This, of course, is nothing but a cheap and inferior Maddox rip-off. Fortunately, pointing that out myself makes it not cheap, but totally ok. Awesome!

0 people say a shameless Maddox ripoff is incomplete without a counter that makes a witty (and awesome) remark about the visitors

[1] Nobody.

[2] To be clear, "honeys" is a euphemism for "those little plastic bears at the grocery store with delicious honey inside, yum". Not "women". Yes, it makes more sense this way. Because I said so.

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My Awesome Web Development Game

Published 2012-06-02 00:27 by Abscissa in Software/Device Development and Design

UPDATE (2012-06-05): Played one more round!

Let's play a game based on web development trends. This game is called:

Makes Sense / Doesn't Fucking Make Sense


This is great game, you'll see in a minute why it kicks so much ass. Ready? Let's get started:

Round 1

Makes Sense:

Speeding up your blog by making the articles pre-baked HTML so they won't have to be generated on-the-fly for each request.

Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:

Make the pre-baking optimization possible by switching from a server-based comment system to a JavaScript-driven one. Make sure this involves round-trips to at least one domain and server that's completely separate from your own. Don't forget to toss in twenty JS-driven social networking and link sharing widgets.

Verdict: I win.

Awesome game, isn't it? Let's have another round:

Round 2

Makes Sense:

Only reload the parts of a page that need to change.

Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:

Perform AJAX requests during, or immediately after, the initial page load. After all, why make your page retrievable in one HTTP request when you vomit out the same exact page with multiple round-tips?

Additionally, completely overlook the fact that the cost of transferring a few extra kilobytes of HTML is completely overshadowed by the cost of performing an HTTP request or interpreting JS, especially a giant JS library hosted externally. Hooray for pessimizing a non-fucking-bottleneck, dipshit!

During your quest to slow down your website, completely break things like bookmarking, forward/back buttons, and JS-disabled browsing. After all, nobody would ever want to disable their browser's "Make the web slower and more obnoxious" feature.

Verdict: I win again!

Maybe this isn't fair. Let's switch the theme away from speed...

Round 3

Makes Sense:

Include "Bold" and "Italicize" buttons on a text edit control.

Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:

Behind-the-scenes, replace user's explicit intent of "bold" and "italic" with the semantically superior "emphasis", so you can use CSS to change the vague <em> (or better yet, <span>) back into the user's original intent of "bold" or "italic" all over again.

Roundabout things like that are what we call "coder masturbation good design" and they enable you to do incredibly common and useful things like: Find the "emphasized" passages on a page in order to...uhhh...ummm...no, wait, I'll think of something...umm...errrr...change the style of "emphasized" text to accidentally make the bold/italic buttons result in something other than bold/italic.

Well, ok, we can prevent such an accident by using a CSS class named "bold" (or something else that effectively means "bold" so we can pretend we're not really calling it "bold"), which clearly doesn't amount to reinventing the <b> tag at all. After all, a passage bolded with <b> or italicized with <i> can never be assumed to imply...emphasis!

Verdict: Hot damn! I still win!

Alright, one more round. All or nothing...

Bonus Round!

Makes Sense:

Zip together a group of files for smaller, more convenient downloads.

Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:

Zip up one file that's already in a compressed format (mp3, avi, self-extracting installer, etc.), thus shaving an enormous 743 bytes off a 50MB file just so the user can have the fun of extracting the one already-compressed file from your useless archive.

Verdict: Well fuck me sideways with a sledgehammer! I'm on a winning streak!

As you can clearly see, this is nothing short of the greatest fucking game ever.

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HTML Fragment Linking Is Stupid - Here's The Fix

Published 2012-06-01 00:58 by Abscissa in Software/Device Development and Design

Link to...HERE!!1
(click to enlarge)

Sure, the concept is all good, but the way it works is completely fucking ass-backwards. If I weren't such a curmudgeon about web "technologies", I'd be astonished that it still hasn't been fixed, two decades later (!), with modern HTML5.

Here's how linking works: You see something, you want to link to it, and...you make a link to it. Duh.

Ie, it's all on the linker's initiative. It doesn't have a thing to do with the linkee. The person making a link decides what they want to link to. Obviously.

So why the shit is it up to the person being linked to to set the possible link targets (via id= or name=)? They're not the one doing the fucking linking!

What's needed are enhanced URL fragments capable of accepting not just an id or name, but a proper CSS selector. Why the hell isn't this already in at least some version of the HTML standard?

When I started writing this, I did a quick sanity check to see if, hopefully, I might have been mistaken and such a thing already existed in the standards. It doesn't. However, it seems other people do have the same good sense.

I like that guy's proposal. It's simple, no bullshit, it would work, and there's even a few browser extensions implementing it. It works like this:

http://example.com/lorem.html#css(.content:nth-child(2))

Or:

http://example.com/lorem.html#css(.content:nth-child(2))css(#alternate1)css(.alt2)

There. Done. It's easy. It would work. There's (small) precedent. And it's something we should have had ages ago. Only problem is, it will never gain traction as a mere non-standard browser extension.

It's time to pressure W3C to get off their lazy red-tape-bondaged asses and put this into the spec.

You know what? Fuck the W3C. Go pressure browser vendors directly to put this shit in, natively - standards or not.

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We Need Browsers With Built-In "Share On Site X"

Published 2012-05-31 23:07 by Abscissa in Software/Device Development and Design

No, I didn't bump my head and mistake today for April 1st. And no, I haven't "seen the light" on social networking and link-sharing sites. I still have no interest in using any of them. But I want browsers with built-in "Share on Twitface, Digg, Reddit, Links-Up-My-Hipster-Ass, and every other such site in the universe. I want all that shit crammed into every damn browser everywhere. And I want it prominent, like bookmarking or searching.

The reason is simple: If this shit's built into the browser, then the internet hipster assholes don't have to clutter every damn page on the web with their "Share on..." bullshit, not to mention the JavaScript bloat that inevitably comes with.

Note this isn't a "great new idea". It is a fucking great idea of course, but the basic premise is well-trodden ground: Remember what an enormous improvement it was when hardware drivers became part of the operating system so software developers didn't have to pack their own (often shitty) drivers in with every fucking app? (Yes iPhonies, "app" is indeed a very old word.) Of course you don't remember: That's because the internet has the memory of a gnat's dick.

So let's get that social linking garbage into all the browsers already! Hop to it!

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Great Show, Make It So!

Published 2012-05-31 21:01 by Abscissa in General

Klingon cooking show
(click to enlarge)

I want to see a Klingon cooking show.

I really do. That would be hilarious.

Paramount: Make it so!

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This Week: Straight/Curved is the New "Fuck You"

Published 2012-05-29 04:54 by Abscissa in Software/Device Development and Design

I have a lot of posts criticizing post-XP Windows already. But I found myself writing this, and well, in true Web 2.0 tradition, it would be wrong of me to deny the world a perfectly good trolling. So here it is...

See spot. See spot design the Win8 UI.

Oh, so it's that time of the week again already? Time for MS to change their minds once again on which is cool and uncool: straight vs curved?

Egads, it's like they're spinning their wheels just for the sake of spinning them. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The computer industry has become the goddamn fashion industry.

Win3: Rounded edges! Couldn't have those before!

95: Rounded is so old. Straight-edged (*cough* like Win1&2 *cough*) is classy!

XP: Straight edges and flat colors are sooo old-fashioned! Roundness, curves and gradients are in! ("Yea, whatever...Luna: Off, Classic: On")

Vista: Transparency is hip and modern! More curves! More shading!

Win8: Transparency, curves, gradients and shading are sooo old-fashioned! Straight edges and flat colors are in!

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!

It's all just change for the sake of fucking change. Why most of the world seems to be so chronically blind to it is beyond me.

And then there's MS's "between-OS" styles-of-the-week, like in the late 90's when MS decided all their non-OS releases for one year should use black menu bars instead of system-default.

Make up your fucking mind, MS.

(As a side note: Am I the only one who thinks the new Metro-styled windows are just as ugly as Luna?)

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