Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Unusability
Searching for tickets on Orbitz I get this error message:
"Flexible date" searching is available for destinations in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Please enter a new destination or change to "dates not flexible" search.Firstly, why the hell didn't they say that on the previous screen? Secondly, do they really think that I might say “Oh, there’s no flexible search option for flights to London? I’ll just have to go to Chicago instead.”
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Resopmoc Allizom
It's definitely good news that the standalone version of Mozilla Composer will have configurable toolbars, as seen on this screenshot.
It removes at a stroke all the excuses previously used by iso-8859-1-centric fanatics for not fixing the bug that there is no toolbar button to set the paragraph direction.
Friday, October 10, 2003
Reason to Disbelieve?
I have noticed before how intelligent people will throw logic to the four winds when discussing their religion. It’s interesting to see atheists doing it too.
I’m quite sure that Hixie would not come within a thousand miles of perpetrating a multiple non sequitur like this in connection to any other topic.
Not that I think that the position of the Catholic Church as represented in the quoted article is reasonable, but where is the genocide? And, even if we agree for the sake of argument that this is the position of the whole institution, from the Pope downwards, how do we get from there to “the concept of religion”? Not “the Church”; not “religious fanatics”; the whole friggin’ concept.
Even if you argue that there is a positive correlation between holding religious beliefs and being dangerously irrational about other issues, which seems to be what Ian is saying (and much the same as what I said in my own opening sentence), how did we get to the concept of religion?
I’m not a great fan of arguments by analogy, but I can’t resist this one in this context: many of the forums where web standards are discussed are infested by a high proportion of annoying and opinionated berks. Is this a reason to reject the concept of web standards?
Sunday, October 05, 2003
Anatomy lessons urgently required.
Since Daniel frustrated me yet again by writing a blog entry in a strange Gallic language, and since my knowledge of the aforementioned Gallic language is good enough to read Asterix and Tintin, and good enough to see that the aforementioned blog entry was probably interesting to me; but nevertheless bad enough that I didn't really know what it was saying, and bad enough that I make embarassing errors like offering to baiser respectable women on IRC goodnight, I decided to try Babelfish again and see how much it has improved since the last time I used it, rather than ploughing through the text with the dictionary. Also, there is something about Glazou’s tone which makes me suspect he is using words and idioms that I won’t find in the dictionary anyway.
Not that this last point works in favour of using Babelfish. Its dictionary seems to be even smaller than mine, and its grasp of idiom is so minimal that it makes the impression that it isn’t even trying. I don't know what calottes chantantes are, for example, but I don’t somehow think that “singing caps” is the right English equivalent.
But the funniest thing in the translation was an idiom that Babelfish knew an English equivalent for. Ladies and gentleman, the English for vieux cons is “schmucks”.
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