Mark's Musings

A long time ago, I remember watching a film about the ubiquity of television. I saw it some time in the 80′s but, thinking back on it now, it must have been made in the 70′s or 60′s. The part I remember of it was short, but it showed a family in their house, and no matter which way the family members looked, there was a television screen. No matter which way they turned, they could still follow the show they were watching without missing an interlaced frame of it.

Back then, of course, the video portion of the television was implemented using something called a “cathode ray tube”, which is big and bulky. And they had this weird 4:3 aspect ratio. Strange, right? Anyway, what sticks most in my mind is a short portion of this film: the homemaker wife in the kitchen being able to see the television show even when she’s putting a food tray in the oven to bake because the baking tray had a small CRT built into it.

I remember thinking how ridiculous this was and how much it made it sink home to a know-it-all teenager how bad a television addiction can be. Especially when it becomes culturally accepted. That’ll never happen, I thought to myself. Nobody could become that addicted to TV that they need to see it wherever they turn. I wish I could see it again, but it’s kind of hard to just use Google to find it, you know? I bet I’d be able to find it on YouTube if I knew what it was called or what the film was trying to promote.

What made me remember was this commercial I saw recently on TV: 2010 FIFA World Cup: Fan’s Point of View. And, what do you know, it’s now apparently culturally acceptable to watch TV everywhere you go.

Just don’t throw your iPhone in the oven by accident.

[EDIT: as Jonah points out in the comments below, you can now skip over this tedium by holding down the "0" (zero) key for a second or two, and a popup will allow you to choose the degree symbol. That seems to answer the question about whether or not it was an oversight.]

It seems like a huge oversight, especially as it’s easy enough to type the degree symbol (“°”) on a Mac keyboard (shift-option-8, if you’re curious), but the iPhone seems to have no way of entering it. Or does it? Allow me to describe the very convoluted way I discovered.
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Via Geoff Arnold I learned of a series of YouTube videos (no ‘series of tubes’ jokes, please) about how PDP-11 computers were programmed.

The writing is really bad, and there is acting to match (not to mention the blocking), but the information is great.

Jay Penney gives us a good write-up as to why web browsing can sometimes be a frustrating experience for those of us who don’t use some flavor of Internet Explorer. My primary browser is Firefox, both at work and at home. It’s mostly ok, but on occasion I’ll hit those sites that render poorly or not at all.

Part of the problem, of course, is that there’s no governing body that ensures web pages are standards-compliant before they’re published on the web. One of the great things about the web, of course, is that anyone (and, it certainly seems, everyone) can publish something. And it’s one of the great drawbacks as well. Someone will inevitably end up accidentally taking advantage of a bug or two in a popular browser, and then poof, you’ve got a bug that’s become part of the standard. They euphemistically call it “quirks” mode, but we all know it’s “render this as though you’re a buggy browser” mode.

The fix would probably have to be something along the lines of an html validator that gives pages a certificate indicating they’re compliant or not. Existing non-compliant pages would get a non-compliance cert, but they’d be grandfathered in to allow them to render. No new non-compliance certs would be given out. Browsers would refuse to render pages without certs (with some mechanism for design and development pages being allowed anyway).

Also, I want a million billion dollars.

If so, can I have it?

If you have any interest at all in performance monitoring and debugging tools, please watch this Google TechTalk done by Bryan Cantrill on DTrace.

If you haven’t used dtrace before, this is a good introduction. If you have used dtrace, but haven’t seen Bryan’s unique brand of public speaking (or heard his anecdotes) before, this captures him fairly well. If you’re a regular dtrace user, and you’ve heard Bryan’s stories a million times, then skip to the end where he answers the “when will dtrace be ported to Linux?” question.