I broke down and ordered Python in a Nutshell by the Python guru Alex Martelli as well as The Python Cookbook, edited by Alex Martelli and David Ascher. Amazon UK will now proceed to bend my credit card even further, but that’s okay. It’s really flexible. EET VILL INCREEEZE MY PYTHON POWERS 10-FOLD, UND ZEN I VILL TAKE OVER DE WORLD!
Where are the frikking WMDs?
Yes, where are those Weapons of Mass Destruction that the US was warning everybody about? Those same WMDs that were used as some of the primary excuses for violating Iraq have not popped up yet, it seems. Funny… In related news, this article reports that there was a certain pressure by the US administration on the intelligence services to generate reports that would help to convince the public that attacking Iraq was urgent business.
Standards Schmandards
According to the new VESA CVT (Coordinated Video Timing) system for describing display pixel formats, the display on my laptop has magically turned into a 1.47M3. SXGA+ is now officially passé.
The Microsoft and I
I’m reading some more juicy bits from the Microsoft Windows Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers. This section details the specific layout of controls in windows and dialog boxes. At least now the dialogs I design are more or less consistent with some standard. :)
The American Propaganda Machine
Most of us outside the borders of the USA know this, but nothing we do or say will probably have any kind of effect on the status quo: The American government is supported by an extremely efficient propaganda machine that ensures that the majority of its citizens will support it in its most barbaric of ventures. The big problem is that this propaganda machine consists primarily, contrarily to tradition, of “independent” media entities.
Where should that dang button go?
So, here we have the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines (i.e. the MacOS-X user interface guidelines), the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, the KDE User Interface Guidelines and of course the Microsoft Windows Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers (I came back in January of 2018 to fix this link — also interesting is the section on margins and spacing).
Apple says that “The default button for dismissing a dialog should go in the lower-right corner. If there’s a Cancel button, it should be to the left of the default button.”. Gnome seems to imply that the default button should be on the bottom right, with other buttons to its left, which is more or less consistent with the Apple guidelines.
Microsoft says: “Lay out the major command buttons either stacked along the upper right border of the dialog box or lined up across the bottom of the dialog box. Position the most important button — typically the default command — as the first button in the set.” The KDE User Interface Guidelines don’t seem to set specific constraints on this kind of button placement, but judging by many of the standard KDE 3.1 applications, the dialogs seem to follow the Windows convention.
Het boek, de pen.
Jeroen sent me links to two interesting web pages dealing with the important question of the relationship between the gender and article of Dutch nouns. Enlighten yourself by going here and here. Thanks Jeroen!
Cygwin CVS EOL problem solution
At this very moment, you might be wondering why, if CVS is such a wonderful piece of version control software that even offers to soothe your cross-platform end of line woes (*ix: eol = lf, macos: eol = cr, windows: eol = crlf), it’s suddenly breaking the end of line checkouts on the *ix side since you’ve been committing your ports on the windows side with CVS from Cygwin. The answer is fortunately far shorter and simpler that the previous sentence.
An eventful weekend
Much happened this weekend. Because many readers have fantastically short attention spans, I’ll break my report up into clearly marked sections. Is my laptop hard drive defective? My laptop has done this once before: after the laptop is switched on, the hard drive refuses to start. It’s usually very quiet, but definitely audible at startup. This weekend before we left for Belgium (more on this later) the laptop decided it was time for the “the hard drive can’t be bothered to start up” trick again.