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VT100 CSS Fix
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/* Submissions */
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.data .status0 a {color:#080 !important;}
.data .status0 a:visited {color:#0A0 !important;}
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How to make "mobile-friendly" web pages
I finally got the full texts of Nobots and Mars, Ho! to display well on a phone. My thanks to Google for showing me how, even if the way they present the information is more like trial and error, but it's actually easy once you jump through all their hoops. I'll make it easy.
First, you need to make sure it will fit on a phone's screen. I've been preaching for years that it's stupid to use absolute values, except with images; if you don't tell the browser the image size and you are using style sheets, your visitors will be playing that annoying "click the link before it moves again" game.
Some of you folks who studied this in college should demand your tuition be refunded, because they obviously didn't teach this.
Giving tables, divs, and such absolute values almost assures that some of your visitors will have that incredibly annoying and unprofessional horizontal scroll (*cough* slashdot *cough*).
None of the elements (images, divs, etc) can be more than 320 pixels wide, and you need to tell the browser to make it fit on a screen. To do this, add this meta tag to your page's head:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
Next, you need to make sure the text is large enough to read without double tapping. The <p> tag does this:
<p {min-height: 16px}>
This needs to be placed after the <body> tag and before anything having to do with text.
To test it, just pull the page up on your phone. If it scrolls sideways, you need to work on it.
If you're worried about your Google pagerank, Google has a "mobile friendly test" here. If you flunk, well, when Google says "jump"...
My main index page fails their test. To make it pass the test I would have to ruin the desktop/tablet design. As it is now, the text is readably large on a phone but it has a sideways scroll, which is tiny if you hold the phone sideways, and I added a link at the very start of the page to a version that will pass Google's test, looks fine on a phone, not bad on a tablet but looks like excrement on a computer. The main index works fine on a tablet, since I've made it as "mobile-friendly" as possible.
I'd have it redirect if it saw Android or iOS, but it's been fifteen years since I've done that and I've forgotten how.
Sorry I haven't written...
I have two new stories nearly finished, but I've decided to see if I can sell first publication rights to a magazine. If everyone rejects them, I'll post them then. If one is accepted, it will likely be quite a while before I can post.
With three books in the works I've been really busy. Hell, I've been working harder since I retired than I did when I worked! I got the index pages to my three published books and the "coming soon" page for Yesterday's Tomorrows "mobile-friendly". I don't know why I'm bothering; almost nobody surfs in on a phone or from Google. But at any rate, I got the book Triplanetary and the first two chapters of Mars, Ho "mobile friendly" as well. The Time Machine is next; the epub versions of my books are better than the HTML versions, on a phone, anyway. Twain, Dickens, and God are going to be mobile-hostile for quite a while because of all the artwork in them.
I couldn't make the main index "mobile friendly" without making it look like crap on a computer screen, so I made a copy "mobile friendly", posted it as mobile.html and added a link from the main index.
Site stats say Google has spidered, so I tried to find Mars, Ho!" by googling on the phone. Nothing but Marsho Medical Group, Andy Weir's The Martian, and a facebook page for someone named Mars Ho. Googling "Mars, Ho! novel" did bring up Amazon's e'book copy halfway through the page.
"Mars, Ho! mcgrew" brought up Amazon's e'book first, followed by the mobile-hostile main index, THEN the actual Mars, Ho! index which IS "mobile friendly" (it passed their test). And I thought "mobile friendly" was supposed to raise your ranks? What's up, Google?
The second copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows came yesterday. I didn't expect until the day after tomorrow. I went through it twice yesterday and it's almost ready; there is still a little work before it's published, but it won't be long.
It's a really nice book, with stories by Isaac Asimov, John W Campbell, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Neil R Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, A. E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Phillip K Dick, Frank Herbert, James Blish, Lester del Rey, and Jerome Bixby. Covers of the magazines they appeared in are shown, with short biographies and photos of the authors. It's also well-illustrated with illustrations from the original magazines.
Random Scribblings: Junk I've littered the internet with for two decades will probably be next year.
Oh, how do you like my new shirt?
SoylentNews, Unicode, UTF-8, and HTML
NOTE: This is a work-in-progress; read at your own risk/confusion. It is an attempt to gather together bookmarks, tabs, and information pertaining to Unicode, UTF-8, HTML, and 'characters'.
It would seem to be a simple enough question to answer, but things are not always as they seem:
What characters should SoylentNews support?
Motivation: as many of you are aware, one of the early improvements that SoylentNews made to its base source code was to support Unicode characters. (Thanks to the heroic efforts of The Mighty Buzzard.) The underlying code only supported ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters. Which was just fine for as far as it went. It just didn't go far enough for us...
I took on the task of testing our implementation of UTF-8 support. Little did I know what I was getting into! It has been a fascinating journey, indeed!
What is Unicode?
This is taken from What is Unicode?:
Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.
These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption.
Unicode is changing all that!
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystems, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends.
Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia's entry for Unicode:
Unicode has the explicit aim of transcending the limitations of traditional character encodings, such as those defined by the ISO 8859 standard, which find wide usage in various countries of the world but remain largely incompatible with each other. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing (usually using Latin characters and the local script), but not multilingual computer processing (computer processing of arbitrary scripts mixed with each other).
Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. ...
In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, not a glyph—for each character. In other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering (size, shape, font, or style) to other software, such as a web browser or word processor.
A little more background: There are certain code points in Unicode that are of questionable value in the context of a web page; further, there are code points which are defined to be invalid! And then, just to make things even more interesting, I found a list of invalid characters in an HTML document:
Illegal characters
HTML forbids[6] the use of the characters with Universal Character Set/Unicode code points (in decimal form, preceded by x in hexadecimal form)
- 0 to 31, except 9, 10, and 13 (C0 control characters)
- 127 (DEL character)
- 128 to 159 (x80 – x9F, C1 control characters)
- 55296 to 57343 (xD800 – xDFFF, the UTF-16 surrogate halves)
The Unicode standard also forbids:
- 65534 and 65535 (xFFFE – xFFFF), non-characters, related to xFEFF, the byte order mark.
UTF-8; Unicode Transfer Format - 8-bit
Though there are several means by which Unicode characters can be transmitted between contexts, one of the most popular is UTF-8, which is what was chosen for use in SoylentNews.
SoylentNews:
What you see from our site mostly comes via a browser (though we also support Gopher and NNTP; you can have stories e-mailed to you; and we also have an RSS/Atom feeds... wow!)
Our site currently formats web pages as HTML 4.01; here's a representative DOCTYPE:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
At some point in the future we may want to directly support HTML5; ideally nothing should preclude or complicate that effort.
See also:
- What is Unicode?,
- Unicode,
- Unicode and HTML,
- C0 and C1 control codes,
- [20] SGML Declaration of HTML 4,
- Characters not Suitable for Use With Markup,
- HTML, XHTML, XML and Control Codes (Updated 2003-09-06 15:10) Answers the question: How do I handle control codes (ie. the 'C0' U+0000-U+001F and 'C1' U+007F-U+009F ranges) in XML, XHTML and HTML?
- About the Unicode Character Database,
- Unicode Character Database,
- Index of /Public/UCD/latest/ucd,
- http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ReadMe.txt,
- Unicode 7.0.0 (Released: 2014 June 16),
- Articles, best practices & tutorials,
- Serving HTML & XHTML
Obviously, we need not support the invalid code points. (Enumerate them here).
Unicode and UTF-8
So Unicode is a collection of mappings of code-points (numbers) to 'characters'; UTF-8 is a Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit, used to transmit/encode Unicode code points.
To be continued...
Soylent Memes: Our contribution to Galactic Literacy
I have been long impressed with Soylentils. We have forked the beast, beat the dead horse, spanked the monkey, and did something to llamas. So now it think it would be a good time to keep track of our contributions to internet culture. As some are aware, these are usually referred to as memes. I believe the term derives from Mimesis, an ability to copy. As such, many things on Soylent news are copies of earlier Slashdotisms.
Here are some examples:
In soviet russia
I, for one, welcome . . . . overlords!
Frost Piss!
(and this one needs to die)
What I am looking for are memes unique to Soylent News, such as that we are made of people, or referring to members as Soylentils, which just sounds so nutritious and healthy. One other example I am aware of the the term "soyled" as a replacement for "slashdotted". Not sure if we actually have this ability, but it is something worth pursuing. Any other memes, trends, recurring expressions, whatever, that are unique to Soylent News? Soylent minds want to know!
Oft times such things are inadvertent. Just yesterday we had a Fine Article that ended up saying that failure to vaccinate dogs lead to many of them parishing from global worming. OK, that may not stick.
Personalities? We have our own ---I will not name names, but everyone knows who they are. The most nortorious gewg_, the slightly less nortorius and more whining _Anti_gewg_!! And of course. . . no, I said I would not name names, and I only named these two because they are not names, only names posted under AC posts, which could be, and probably are, only me.
So chip in! The sooner we identify memes. the sooner they die! Wait, that is not my intent! I want them to live! Live like quotes from "The Princess Bride" or references to "Firefly" or "Serentity", or anything Monty Pythonesque, and possibly mandatorially XKCD. This is what culture is made of, this is what we are, and we need some way to bring the less culturally sophisticated up to speed, besides ridicule and mod-bombing (if such a thing actually exists). What are the uniquely Soylentilish turns of phrase, a Soylent reference, a Soylental dismissal? I will try to keep a record, so that in the distant future, they will know that we were Soylent, and we were mighty!
Finally jumped into the MMO snake pit
Sigh, with it becoming harder and harder to find decent single player games, as i am not part of the "dudebro" demographic and therefor do not care for your "Medal Of Dooky: Halo Of Killzone Gears Edition" style of games I decided to jump in and try one that looked the least "dude bro"ish and that game is....War Thunder.
I have to give the designers of the game credit, as nearly ever other "FTP" game I've ever played is either so grindtastic its insane or so badly pay to win its not funny but at least in these early tier 1 games? Its really not, hell you can take the default tank (that you get free repairs on forever so you can be as nutty as you like with it, nice) and actually start getting kills in the first few minutes of the first game, its really all about keeping your head on a swivel and remembering to watch your reload times. Nothing will give you a smile quicker than somebody coming to strafe the tank formation you are in and you blow its wing off with the 20mm of your Panzer II lol.
So if any of you are getting sick of the usual fare and want something a little different? Do NOT be put off by the fact its planes and tanks (and soon to be ships) as its beyond easy to drive with a standard keyboard and mouse. If you can play an FPS? You can play War Thunder. Maybe if a few guys here give it a spin and like it we can get a team together, having :"Team Soybeans" roll the tanks while "Run To The Hills" by Iron Maiden plays? That would be a blast.
Product Review: Seagate Personal Cloud
Around the first of the year all three working computers were just about stuffed full, so I thought of sticking a spare drive in the Linux box, when the Linux box died from a hardware problem. It's too old to spend time and money on, so its drive is going in the XP box (which is, of course, not on the network; except sneakernet). I decided to break down and buy an external hard drive. I found what I was looking for in the "Seagate Personal Cloud". And here I thought the definition of "the cloud" was someone else's server!
I ordered it the beginning of January, not noticing that it was a preorder; it wasn't released until late March. I got it right before April.
I was annoyed with its lack of documentation -- it had a tiny pamphlet full of pictures and icons and very few words. Whoever put that pamphlet together must beleive the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words". Tell me, if a picture is worth a thousand words, convey that thought in pictures. I don't think it can be done.
I did find a good manual on the internet. For what I wanted, I really didn't need a manual, but since I'm a nerd I wanted to understand everything about the thing. Before looking for a manual I plugged it all up, and Windows 7 had no problem connecting with it. It takes a few minutes to boot; it isn't really simply a drive, it must have an operating system and network software, because it looks to the W7 notebook to be another file server. Its only connections are a jack for the power cord and a network jack.
The model I got has three terrabytes. I moved all the data from the two working computers (using a thumb drive to move data from XP) and the "cloud" was still empty. Streaming audio and video from it is flawless; I'm completely satisfied with it, it's a fine piece of hardware.
However, it WON'T do what is advertised to do, which is to be able to get to your data from anywhere. In order to do that, Seagate has a "software as a service" thing where you can connect to a computer from anywhere, but only the computer and its internal drives, NOT the "personal cloud". And they want ten bucks a month for it.
I downloaded the Android app, and I could see and copy files that were on my notebook to my phone, but I couldn't play music stored there on it. I uninstalled the crap. "Software as a service" is IMO evil in the first place, but to carge a monthly fee to use a piece of crap software like this is an insult. Barnum must have been right.
If you're just looking for an external hard drive, like I was, it's a good solution. If you want what they're advertising, you ain't gettin' it. The Seagate Personal Cloud's name is a lie, as is its advertising.
Impediments to superhuman AI
Lots of very smart people think that superhuman AI is just a matter of time. They say, once we get our foot in the door, the ability to have an intelligence that can learn more quickly.
1. There are barriers to making a given strategy for intelligence scale arbitrarily.
If you make intelligence denser, i.e. if you put more computation capacity in a smaller space, you increase heat dissipation problems and you decrease the ratio of I/O speed to processing speed. This is because these things are related to surface area and you have a surface area vs body mass type problem where the optimal size of a given design ends up being determined by how much surface area is needed to service the needs of a given amount of body mass.
On the other hand if you make your intelligence more diffuse, i.e. you use a network of agents which individually have a small amount of intelligence but collectively have a larger amount of intelligence, you run into coordination, synchronization, and communications overhead problems as well as a lack of traction on problems that are inherently serial. Your nodes may spend more time talking to each other than they spend on the problem you want to solve or different regions of the network may be taking different tacks on the problem when a single coordinated approach is better.
There are, obviously, ways of working around these issues. Human brains are made up of diffuse nodes with some coordinating structures and the brain has a high surface area with key information processing being performed close to the surface. Humans in turn organize themselves into groups which are in turn part of a society. There are tradeoffs between individual autonomy and pursuit of one's own problem solving agenda and social organization toward a common problem solving agenda.
Improvement in problem solving capability is possible by hill climbing along some of those trade offs, however, local maxima are frequently encountered resulting in a lack of an overall progression towards a global maximum, only ongoing negotiation between changing circumstances and newly developed opportunities.
2. Some social problems can't be resolved because the data needed to come to an objective resolution can't be collected or can be collected but is too readily polluted by a combination of subjective methodology decisions or the data can only be collected as it is generated by natural and human processes which operate on a timescale which is slower than the time pscale on which a decision is needed. As a result of these problems people settle into stable equilibria of interpretations on the data and methodologies that they view as credible because having a bad strategy for dealing with incomplete data tends to outperform making no decisions whatsoever.
We call these stable equilibria political beliefs. Just because an intelligence settles into one of these stable equilibria does not mean that the decisions that are consistent with those beliefs are right, it just means that they are one of a number of reasonable strategies for reducing the inconsistencies in the body of data and interpretations on that data. If a superintelligence disagrees with you politically, is that because its right and you're wrong, or is it just simething that it got stuck on because of its upbringing?
3. Lots of real world problems have upper bounds on their margin for improvement.
There are plenty of problems that as currently framed are bounded by thermodynamic or material resource based limits or where optimal solutions are not computationally tractable and where only approximations are possible. Reframing problems to relax these constraints may impose new constraints in other problems and this metaproblem is likely to be more difficult than the individual problems.
4. Awareness of cognitive fallacies does not necessarily make one immune to those fallacies.
Many highly intelligent individuals are in many ways unreliable and in some cases turn their intelligence towards rationalizing and propagating things a majority of society sees as errors. This point may be a consequence of items 1-3.
Altogether, these issues mean that while AI holds great possibilities for improving society, it's more likely to be a tool in our arsenal (and potentially a new type of individual in our society) but it's unlikely to be a victory condition for society. This leads me toward an expectation of an ongoing coevolution of humans and the intelligence embedded in our technology rather than reaching a point where the embedded intelligence hits some critical mass and runs off on its own.
April 1st, 2015
A day that will live in e-fame-y.
Irritable Duncan Syndrome
Irritable Duncan "Trust-me-I-know-what-I'm doing" Syndrome reckons that, when he and the rest of the Conservative Party are re-elected in this May's General Election, he'll make £12 billion (US$17.8 billion) of welfare cuts but he won't tell us before the election what these cuts will be, Allegedly, it's "Not relevant."
There aren't that many poor, sick, disabled and needy left un-kicked, but it's highly amusing that thousands of people in one of the world's most highly-developed countries are having to resort to food banks.
Goodness only knows how much worse it will get if the loony right UKIP get some seats. Anyone but an imbecile can see that they'd vote with the Conservatives on many issues or even form a coalition.
So hurry up and vote Tory to keep the hopeless, sneering socialists down.
God save the Queen etc.
