Noteworthy links

Today a friend sent me The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project. And last night I finished tweaking this page of images.

Joe Bob says check it out.

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Quantum Entanglement Reminds Me of Douglas Adams' Fairy Cake Idea

According to the NYT, quantum computers, still in their early development, have reached the ten qubit milestone. To give you some perspective, a forty qubit quantum computer can perform ten trillion calculations, ten teraops, simultaneously. Forty atoms sitting in a nuclear magnetic resonance rig can rival the power of the largest supercomputers. A thousand atoms would solve problems currently considered intractable by conventional machines.

I’m still a little fuzzy on the theory behind quantum computers, and I consider myself very well informed, but I found this page that demystified things a bit.

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By Popular Request, Unnecessary Nano Links

Some folks–well, one at any rate–have expressed surprise that I don’t have more links and rants about nanotechnology on my site. So to address that issue:

Just to give a little perspective, I first heard about nano back in 1987 when a friend told me about it. I read Engines of Creation in 1988. In other words, it’s old hat to me. That’s probably why I haven’t gone nuts and plastered my site with nano stuff. To me it’s a foregone conclusion–nano is coming and the world will change beyond recognition. That’s both good and bad.

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Two Truisms

  1. Miscommunication and ambiguity will never be reduced to zero. People get sloppy in communicating and get sloppy in understanding. Also many times they aren’t entirely sure what they want.
  2. Ideals must always be compromised. There are few rules without exceptions but this appears one of those few.
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Just coined some slang!

You know those wireless gadgets with the little thumb keyboards that people use to send e-mail and chat with? I’ve decided to call those “mbiras.” An mbira is an African musical instrument, most commonly found in Zimbabwe, that is held in the hands and plucked with the thumbs. Seeing a friend use one these things reminded me of an mbira player so the name stuck in my mind.

Please feel free to use my coinage.

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My own aphorisms someone told me to write down

  • The Programmer’s Lament: “The world is built upon endless, essential yet trivial detail.”
  • Another one: “Everyone wants to be special but has to settle for being unique.”
  • In order for the world to be interesting there must be error. In fact, this may be a defining characteristic of reality: Error only exists in reality.
  • The existence of error, implies the existence of the extremely complex phenomena of evil.
  • Smarter people than me, state my opinions better than I can.
  • Taking a stand, means risking error. People mistake my lack of confrontation as a gentle nature. In truth, I just hate being or guessing wrong.
  • In my favored endeavors, there will always be someone who knows more about them and does better at them than me. Luckily, I know things that they might not know, so it balances out in the end.
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Midnight Philosophy

Gödel proved that mathematics will remain forever incomplete.

The implication is that the mathematics is infinitely rich. Another implication is that all science, being ultimately based on mathematics and logic, is infinitely rich and will never be a finished thing.

This further implies that attempts to create a theory of everything in physics are doomed to an infinite regress of new mysteries and new problems to solve. In unifying the 4 known forces of the universe, we will discover a whole new set of problems to experiment with and solve and so on and so on.

In some ways this strikes me as very Taoist–the more we try and box the truth, the more it slips though our fingers. It is also very Taoist to say that every contradiction or paradox hides new truths. The Aristotlian law of the excluded middle forbids contradictory statements like “A and not A.” But fuzzy logic not only allows for them but creates a whole new set of tools and problems to solve. And so it goes.

This is a first class universe to live in, eh?

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Undocumented facts about the ACCESSKEY attribute

In my endeavor to make this site a useful place for web developers to visit, I offer some obscure information about the accesskey attribute in XHTML and HTML 4. As I gather more information, I will add to this entry. I may even move it to my developer section.

First off, at least in the implementations that I’ve seen, it’s widely assumed that you shouldn’t assign accesskey values to links or form controls that conflict with the menu shortcuts of Internet Explorer 4+, Mozilla and Navigator 6+.

This is not strictly true on Windows systems (I haven’t yet tested this Linux or Mac so I don’t know if it applies to other systems. If you know, please mail me with some answers.) because of a extremely subtle way of differentiating the keystrokes of the menu item or the element in a web page.

Here is the subtle difference: if you press and hold the ALT key and then press the assigned character, then Mozilla, Netscape 6+ and IE 4+ on Windows systems will activate the accesskey. If you press and release the ALT key and then press the assigned character, the aforementioned browsers on the aforementioned system will activate the item on the menu bar associated with that character value.

While we are on the subject, I am rather annoyed with the implementation of system selection and focus in Mozilla. Actually they’ve done a good job about following the expected behavior of accesskey but some of that new functionality is diminished because of the way system focus is handled in Mozilla, and I assume Netscape. Let me explain.

If I set a link to point to a web document fragment, more commonly known as a bookmark or section anchor (the part of the URL that follows a pound character.), and then invoke that link, Internet Explorer, in both Mac (since IE 5) and Windows (since IE 3), shift system selection focus to any links or form elements that follow that document fragment. This means I can bypass elements that might otherwise take focus between the link that points to the fragment and the elements that follow that fragment. Netscape 6 and Mozilla, despite many excellent improvements in terms of accessibility and standards support, still don’t do this. This means that accesskey looses some potential in those browsers because I can’t use it to shift system focus and therefore hop around in the same document as well as IE.Yes, I’ve filed a bug on this. Additional (6-14-02): I have just discovered that Mozilla 1 and Netscape 7 have fixed this bug. Nevermind.

Jukka Korpela provides a good tutorial on how to use accesskey effectively.

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The Obligatory Design and Usability Guru Links

Extra power to Jake and Jeff–two well known guys who battle daily for honesty on the Web. But more power still to Vince, one of the oft forgetten pioneers for good Web design. Besides he’s much funnier than the other two.

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Making Custom Bookmark Icons for Your Site

I’ve set things so that I have a customized icon if people decide to add this site there favorites list in IE 5+. I don’t think this will work in IE 5 for the Mac but, let me know if it does. What’s a customized favorites icon?

Added (June 12th, 2001): I’ve discovered that this icon idea also works if a visitor bookmarks my site in Konqueror too. So the trick is becoming more cross-platform.

There is also free Java tool that can help you design and build your icons for your sites.

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