Categories
Technology

The Banana Test

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

From Chip’s Quips a test to see your programming language preference:

Here’s a quick and easy test to determine what programming language best suits your personality.

There’s a very tall palm tree, and four animals happen to pass by: a chimpanzee, a lion, a giraffe, and a squirrel.

They decide to have a competition to see who is the fastest one to get a banana off the tree.

Which one won? Think of your answer before you read on…

Actually, what you don’t see in the animal lineup that Sterling has provided, is a rhinoceros heading straight for the tree at full ramming speed. It skewers the lion with its horn, steps on and squishes the squirrel, pushes aside the giraffe, and knocks the chimp from the tree when it hits—the force of which also knocks the banana down.

Except that the rhino decided, right in the middle of its headlong run, that it really doesn’t like bananas. However, it had built up too much momentum to be able to stop in time to save the lion, the chimp, the squirrel, the giraffe, the banana, and the tree. Poor tree.

And that makes me JavaScript ECMAScript.

Categories
Places

Johnson’s Shut-Ins 2008

Johnson's Shut-Ins 2008

I visited Johnson’s Shut-Ins last week, before it closed for the season on the 24th. I hadn’t visited since 2006, and was very pleased to see how much progress has been made. The water quality is much improved, and most of the small particulate debris is gone. The Shut-Ins aren’t completely healed— you don’t heal from such a devastating flood in a couple of years— but both the DNR and Ameren have made significant inroads in correcting the damage.

The fens look nicely restored, and I could barely recognize the flood path, the green growth has done much to help it blend into the mountainside.

It does look like some of the boulders will be left in the restored park, which I think is a good thing. They won’t impact on the area, but will serve as a reminder, as well as historical marking.

I thought about doing a before/after/after slideshow, but I think I’ll wait on this until after the park is officially open, hopefully next May.

Categories
SVG

Planet SVG

I was asked for links to SVG resources, and my immediate thought was to look for a Planet SVG. Though I found a planetsvg.com, there’s no entry at the site, and I couldn’t find any elsewhere. I then decided to create a new Planet SVG, using Sam Ruby’s Venus adaption of the Planet software.

Of course, I use SVG in the background of the page, though I imagine most people would only be interested in the Atom-based syndication feed. I’ll play around with the design when I have more time, but for now, I just grabbed an old one that seemed to work.

I’ve populated the Planet with a few URLs, but I need more. Though there are quite a few people interested in SVG, I’m finding that most don’t seem to have a weblog. Or if they do, I can’t find it.

There is a weblog for the SVG Open conference next week, but the weblog doesn’t have any syndication feed I could find.

If you write about SVG, or have a weblogging category devoted to SVG, or vector graphics, or even the Canvas element, please email me your feed URL, or drop it into comments.

Categories
Graphics/CSS JavaScript SVG

Cross-browser JavaScript vector graphics library

Speaking of SVG, Lachlan Hardy pointed out the Raphaël JavaScript library to me, and I wanted to pass it along.

This library provides cross-browser dynamic vector graphics that generates VML for IE, and SVG for the rest of the world. Among the graphical elements you can create are paths, eclipses, rectangles, circles, and text, and be able to apply a number of transformations.

Included in the library web site is a playground where you can try the code out.

Categories
Stuff

Consumers new best friend: Stop the Cap!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Stop the Cap! is a web site and weblog dedicated to the fight against broadband caps. From the Mission Statement:

We feel the current usage caps being considered by broadband providers are unreasonable, some moreso than others. Those below 10GB per month are outrageous. Others which may run above 100GB a month also represent a concern because of the future direction of the Internet. Consumers who exceed those caps may face immediate service termination or greatly overpriced “overage” charges for additional bandwidth, which we oppose. The industry’s marketing campaigns have always emphasized that among the benefits of subscribing is fast access to streaming video and audio, gaming, downloading songs and video, and other bandwidth intensive services. It should come as no surprise that customers have used their service exactly as their marketing intended.

From the Talking Points page:

Most cable systems plan to exempt customers from accessing content they own or control through their online portals. This represents an end run around Net Neutrality – a plan to allow big corporations to control the infrastructure and discriminating against the traffic they don’t own or control. Independent producers and businesses not affiliating with a cable company will have a hard time selling a business plan in a world where bandwidth caps make accessing those independent products and services prohibitively expensive.

There’s considerably more at the site. Excellent. (via DSL Reports)