Checksum Arcanius

I went with Dan to see I, Robot today. It was better than expected – and although it had its funny-stupid and funny-dumb action moments, it was a pretty solid movie by itself. Sure, it strayed far, far away from anything Asimov ever wrote, but the three laws were there (of course), and some character names (although not accurately represented) and even some plot elements pulled out of some of Asimov’s books, amazingly enough. And because of that last bit, and the fact that it didn’t suck much in any other way, this movie won me over as something worth seeing, even if you were terribly disappointed by what you saw in the trailers (as was I).

In fact, I was so disappointed that I didn’t pay for this movie. I paid instead for the 4:05 showing of The Notebook, and went to the 4:00 showing of I, Robot. Were I to do it again, I would have actually paid for the movie, even though the real story is that the screenplay that this movie came from was rewritten to include elements of Asimov’s Robot books, as opposed to caring even for a second about the original works. Oh well, it came out pretty well despite all it had going against it.

Today’s schedule:

1. 11:45 – Wake up
2. 12:30 – Meet at IS Parking lot to carpool to…
3. FIRST Robotics Team Forum, 1:00pm, Cleveland High School (4 hours)
4. 6:00 – 9:00: Soccer at 60 acres park
5. 10:oo or 12:00 sleep, 6:00-7:00 alarm time

Today, I recieved from the University of Washington, the little letter, dated the 14th of July, 2004. It read:

Dear Mr. McElroy:

Thank you for applying to the University of Washington. We have reviewed your application and regret that we are unableto offer you admission for autumn quarter 2004. Due to limited space, admission for autumn quarter was extremely competitive.

If you decide to reapply for a later quarter, you will need to sumbit a new application application fee, and personal statement. We will keep for one year the academic credentialsthat are currently in your application file. However, you must include updated transcripts with your new application if you compelted additional course work at any time after these records were submitted.

We appreciate your interest in the University of Washington and wish you every success in pursuing your baccalaureate education.

Sincerely,

(signed by Xerox)
Philip Ballinger, Ph.D.
Director of Admissions

TA: Aut 04

If my life were a computer program (note the correct use of the subjunctive form), I think it would be fair to say there was a sporadic bug in the sleep routine. Last night, I became immensely tired about ten o’clock and fell sound asleep. For some reason, about an hour and a half later, I woke up and wasn’t able to get back to sleep, at all. I rested most of the time, but sleep did not come. Needless to say, I was a bit of a wreck at work today and I called it quits early, even though I was only really tired for the first few hours.

If this were Java, or PHP 5, I would have my sleep routine throw an Exception at times like these. The exception might get caught by something useful; say, a call to a workout routine (might as well if I’m not sleeping, right?), but instead it seems to go into some sort of endless while loop where nothing gets accomplished.

Ok, I think I’ve been programming a little too much recently…

I so much time laughing that I couldn’t make a longer entry. Click Here to see what I’m talking about.

When I ran in to a CSS/Table conundrum at work, I decided to see what Bernie thought. The links have been achored, and the text prettied, but otherwise the conversation is real.

One of the recurring themes I run into while visiting sites about CSS is how sinful it is to use tables for layout. I tried to take this to heart, but for the life of me I can’t figure out a better way than tables to align items that, to look good and make sense, must be lined up properly both vertically and horizontally.

Here is the page with a table
And my utterly failed attempt to replicate with css

Am I missing something fundamental, or are tables really the better choice in this case?

And while I’m on the line with a CSS guru, what makes it so that the elements with the position: absolute propety set conform to their parent element instead of the browser page as a whole? Is it when I set the position on the parent element that this works? If so, thats kinda dumb, imho…

Having fun with CSS I see ;) One of the things you’ll quickly learn (and seem to be learning already) is that while CSS design can prove to be very rewarding (e.g. bandwidth) it can also prove to be very, very stressful. If you’re trying to make your design look good in more than one browser it gets even more stressful :) Often times you’ll run into situations where you know you could do something in a matter of seconds using a table, or some other non-standard HTML
approach.

I try my darnedest to stay away from tables whenever possible, but as you’ve pointed out, sometimes they are the only option. As far as the sites recommending you avoid tables at all costs go, take that advice with a grain of salt. Tables are still a perfectly valid construct in XHTML 1.0 and 1.1. A lot of the presentational information has just been moved into CSS whereas in HTML 3 you could define most of your table properties in the table tag itself.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, but I wrote something on my site about “tableless tables,” and it seems like an approach you might be able to use for what you are doing. Take a look at this before you decide to go the table route. What I wrote was more a proof of concept than anything else, so it would be cool to see it put to real use.

While I’m not afraid to use tables when they’re absolutely called for, I do try to avoid absolute positioning like the plague. I’ve seen too many problems with page flow when using that type of positioning in my CSS. However, if you’re dead set on it (there are certainly situations where it’s a necessity) give this a look. I believe they answer your question in the first paragraph. There seems to be a good deal of information there, so hopefully that will help.

Good luck, and try not to pull any hair out ;)

I was very impressed with your tableless tables, and I pursued making them work in my situation as well, but I ran into problems. (Correct me if I’m wrong, again…) The biggest deficiency of tableless tables is that in oder for alignment to be maintained vertically, the cells
have to have preset widths that are the same (in your case, 23% did the trick). In other words, there is an inability of cells that are supposed to be stacked veritically to resize together fit the largest content in the column. If you don’t force the “columns” to be certain size, they choose to be whatever is inside of them, and any semblance of tablehood is lost. It seems to me that in this case, CSS does not degrade very well, and tables are indeed the better answer for me at
this time, especially since they are so well supported by so many browsers.

On another note, I had some glimpses of CSS3 today, and all I have to say is that whenever it starts to get seriously supported, designing pages should be quite a bit of fun, especially with the pseudo-selectors like nth-child(2n+1) and all that :-)

It sounds like tables are the way to go for what you’re trying to achieve. If it was me, I’d spend some more time trying to figure out a way to do it in CSS, but that’s just because I like torturing myself ;) I can think of a few options, but like you said, we might as well wait until CSS3 when things become so much easier (like this).

There are plenty of movies where the characters, and sometimes even you as a watcher, don’t know who is who. Like in Mission Impossible with Ethan and his masks. It makes for interesting film, but I’ve never had to deal with the situation in real-life – until recently. The issue involves AOL Instant Messanger and a particular person who doesn’t seem to realize her friends are sneaky mischiefmakers. Several times over the past few weeks, I have come to the startlng revalation that I’m not talking to who I think I’m talking to, and its atually somewhat disturbing, to say the least. Its not like I’ve said anything I’m embarassed about, but, well, do people get off doing this or what?