The IQ speed bump

From a friend observing a chat session:

Some people should not be allowed on the internet! Observe:

dftpnkezln:

For all of you reporting a score more than 100 as you iq lol @ you. How can you possibly score more than 100%?

dftpnkezln:

I'm very happy with my score of 89.

LOL

From http://xkcd.com/c221.html -- made me genuinely LOL:
:-D

Ripoff software Unicode support

We're currently upgrading from v3 to v4 of a well-known application for authoring, scheduling, delivering and reporting online assessments, namely Perception.

v4 supports Unicode.

Yay! :-)

v4 has 2 licenses, one supporting less than one-tenth of one percent of the Unicode gamut, and the other supporting all of it.

Boo! :-(

This seems a little strange because if you support ASCII and your browser supports Unicode then you can do Unicode for free with ASCII by using HTML entities!

OK, you might think: I'll just use ASCII and HTML entities and at least I can see what the additional expense gets me -- built-in Unicode, so I'm happy to struggle along with entities until such time as it becomes worth the expense. (So for instance, I wanted an em-dash "—", which is — in any modern browser.)

Enter the ripoff: Their software's editor permits you to enter HTML entities directly (yay!) but as soon as you exit "raw HTML mode" it parses them into Unicode characters (vaguely sensible if you support Unicode, I suppose.) However the kicker is that you cannot then publish an assessment item containing the character that started life as an ASCII-encoded HTML entity unless you buy the expensive Unicode-complete license! ARGH! ... and my bet is that the difference in cost between licenses is not trivial :-(

(Disclaimer: This is just my opinion, does not reflect the opinion of my employer and could easily have been written by terrifying space monkeys ... YMMV!)

Comments & criticism: Woo-hoo! or Uh-oh?

I've just noticed a comment on a post I made about accessibility where I criticised a web site for its mark-up (<span> and <div> galore; no meaningful HTML elements except <a>) and I was sooo excited & responded straightaway...

Now I'm nervous: The commenter identified himself as "Steve Bailey" and a quick Google for "steve bailey hyfinity" highlights a potential link -- is the person posting the comment "chief e-business architect" at the company whose web site I was critical of?

So perhaps now is a good time to give a caveat: Anything appearing on this blog is my opinion and is in no way associated with my employer!

I'm not retracting anything -- what I said in Feb. 2005 was correct then & it's correct now: Building a page out of meaningless span and div elements with meaningful class names is not the right way to do it! Screen readers, mobile browser (who may lose CSS), anyone in text mode or not getting the visual emphasis derived from such classitis can't see information conveyed visually by lists, paragraphs and headings unless they're marked-up as such with the correct HTML elements.

Maths terrorism

This is going around the email humour circuit & I just had to share it as I'm a maths (& computing) lecturer:

London 16th August:

A public school teacher was arrested today at Gatwick Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Home Secretary John Reid said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement.

He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the Met Police with carrying weapons of maths instruction.

"Al-gebra is a problem for us," Reid said.

"They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute values.

They use secret code names like x and y and refer to themselves as unknowns, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with co-ordinates in every country.

As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle".

When asked to comment on the arrest, Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking from his holiday resort before the planes stopped flying, said, "If God had wanted us to have better Weapons of Maths Instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

<grin>

iTunes 7: Stay away!

I'm afraid I, like many people (see Apple's new iTunes version branded a lemon) have upgraded to iTunes version 7 only to find playback from my iPod all of a sudden pops and skips when CPU load is significant ... and, hey, I'm participating in climateprediction.net and mersenne.org (GIMPS) so that sucks!!! My advice: Stay away unless you need the damn new features...

Pilot Error and Space Invaders

Here's some fun research into human behaviour & mistakes using Space Invaders as a research tool: cs4fn: Pilot Error and Space Invaders. I've mentioned it because a similar approach to this was adopted by an M.Sc. by Research student here in 2002/3: He created a random web crawler where the crawler derived its random sample from users of a Flash-based front-end Space Invaders game where the invaders represented web pages to be crawled when killed (as described in this publication).

Banana Stew: Deconstructing Blogger Beta HTML Template Editing

Great guide for the technically-minded to Blogger beta's templating language: Banana Stew: Deconstructing Blogger Beta HTML Template Editing. However until I can figure out post title links I'll be sticking with this blog (not my beta version 2).

Flickr & Yahoo maps

OK, so it's probably not that exciting but this portion of Flickr Maps caught my eye -- a jet pictured flying over the Thames near Gunnersbury in west London.

How to cheat good

I love this because it just proves (along with the comments) that it's not just us (me) in the UK who have to deal with dumbass idiots who are so lazy that they won't even apply the intelligence they undoubtedly have to the problem of "I can't be bothered to work hard on the assignment. How can I get a decent grade?"

From the comments section:

Many of the worst cases of plagiarism are executed so poorly that they reveal the incompetence, ignorance and stupidity of the writer. So perhaps teachers should just fail such students for incompetence and ignorance, instead of trying to convict them...

Sadly, where I work we are not allowed to fail someone whose work satisfies the requirements (I teach computing and maths, both subjects that tend to favour well-defined requirements) as (I feel) we're not trusted to exercise judgement; it's a full-blown plagiarism hearing or nothing!