Wikipedia has interesting commentary on BushJr's "Axis of Evil" term. Apparently, Teresa Kerry came up with the term "Asses of Evil" to describe BushJr, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. It also pointed me back at a parody I saw once, and it was amusing to read it again. "Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Sometimes Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick." Anoter interesting link from there is the Axis of Medieval..

The glass front, the place we used to despise, to kick, to laugh at, now I work in that shop, old and wrinkled, and I look out, eyes sad, at the modern versions of my youth...

The marble temple, I pay another visit... imagining the fresh feel of wind on my cheeks, the quietness I have embued with the Parthenon... I wait for it to load... and frown..

Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (146) in /www/htdocs/vr/php/parthenon.inc on line 73 Database error: pconnect(localhost, nobody, $Password) failed. MySQL Error: () Session halted.

My moment of Zen, denied because of a database error... I guess I'll go somewhere else...

Yeah.. some more explorations of emotions, thoughts, realities, etc.

Note that this is partly a restatement of things I've talked about before.. Some thoughts.. there's a fundamental difference between four general styles of web development I'm now aware of. The first style is content-focused, laying out the content fairly minimally with one's HTML tags, with an eye to maintenance, cleanliness, and simplicity. Any nod to appearance is generally slight, and pages like this generally have a spartan look. My webpage currently looks like this. If you view the source to my pages, you'll find that it's a really good way to learn HTML. It does, however, have a kind of spartan (minimalistic) look. Webpages that do this tend to look the same in all browsers. The second style focuses on presentation, using blank images of varying sizes to force the browser to render it with very precise looks. Sites designed this way tend to look professional, but they're also fragile, giving birth to the notion of webpages that only display well on one browser, and with certain browser widths. Their code is also usually horrible to look at. MTV is, or at least was, the canonical example of this kind of site. The third style, and one which I only recently have become aware of, is the CSS-centric style. CSS is a language that allows for fairly precise specification of the properties of elements of a page. It's possible to use it for small things, keeping one of the above styles. However, it's also possible to make it central to page design. It's possible to tell a webpage that really is in the style, as it tends to use the DIV tag (which is kind of a generic blocking tag that's not really useful without CSS) for almost everything, avoiding TABLEs, FRAMEs, and often avoiding even bolding, underlining, and similar in HTML. The advantage? CSS is object oriented, and in the CSS section of a document, you can set all the properties for a CSS class or unique object (including precise positioning, subelements, etc), leaving in the code just the object and its content. This flexibility lets the page essentially be a list of objects and properties, allowing the content of a page to easily be shaped by CSS from a different document (with CGI or similar, it might even vary as per the user, allowing more powerful themes than most sophisticated database- driven sites). The fourth style, which can be mixed to a degree with any of the first three, focuses on an application server/database/deep CGIs to generate its content. It in theory offers complete flexibility as to the content delivered to the user, but each bit of flexibility implemented this way has a high complexity cost. Some ways to do the fourth style are more complex than others, however, and things such as Jakarta/Tomcat's custom tag libraries can complement or replace several parts of CSS, on the server side instead of the client. The division between the client and the server in web languages is as deep and interesting as that between compile-time and run-time information in programming, and the distinction greatly shapes the discussion.

This is hellishly cool. You can also check to see what your neighbors/friends/family have been up to on the funding front.

Finally, I learned about the -t flag to strace today. Nice.