Simply Jonathan

Archive for April 2008

CSS Variables 

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Very interesting, and probably a useful addition to CSS.

I see, however, a problem with section 3.2, which states:

The definition of variables crosses @import boundaries. That means that the definition of a variable contained in a stylesheet B imported from a stylesheet A applies to all rules directly contained or imported into stylesheet A.

This would potentially create a problem in which variables are overwritten. Given the structure of CSS, though, and @import in particular (it must come before any style declarations), this might be acceptable.

Queen – Great King Rat

Don’t believe all you read in the Bible.

Great free software 

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It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.

But there’s something else going on here, too: the free software alternatives keep getting better every year.

And that is the power and greatness of open source. Collaborative efforts to improve software.

My wife^H^H^H^H girlfriend hates my beard 

Although I do not have such an… impressive beard at this time, I get a lot of complaints for it still.

Abstractions and what to do when you cannot 

Always try to learn whatever you can about your language of choice.

We just wanted to let you know…

… We do not trust you, you might decide to hack your gift label:

White gift label on blue wrapping paper reading "Til Jonathan Fra Mia" plus the html encoded version of < followed by 3

I bought my girlfriend a present from Amazon, and thought I would make use of their gift wrapping service. For the note I settled on the conservative “To … From …” but added my own personal touch, “<3” (how is that for creativity?). Amazon, however, decided they did not like that, so they turned < into the corresponding HTML entity. You have to give it to them, though; they take security very seriously.

Dilbert minus Dilbert 

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Obvious, yet wonderful idea by Leonard Richardson.

The immediacy of PHP 

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David Heinemeier Hansson:

That platform has really received an unfair reputation.

I remember seeing a video of DHH some years ago, where he gave a presentation at Roskilde University. In that, he spent quite a large portion of his time mocking PHP, contributing to this exact reputation it has got.

I personally use PHP a bit at work, but as rarely as possible in my spare time. But I will give it this: it gets the job done. Whenever I do something that I actually need to deploy, I resort to PHP, because it works for the platforms I would deploy it to. Mostly, this is due to Django being difficult to deploy, thus PHP being an easier option.

But I do not agree on it having an unfair reputation. It is well-known, and appropriately admired, for being deployable, but that really is one of the only good things I can say about it. And I maintain a site called php hacker — I am not a hater.

Python-by-example 

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More great Python documentation.

On the Captioning Sucks–homepage design 

We think the Captioning Sucks homepage may be the only viable usage of Comic Sans on the entire Web.

I agree. And I believe Captioning Sucks is an important project.

This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.

Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.