Jinn of Quality and Risk

Hacking Mozilla is like dating a beautiful but crazy woman. Sure she is hot, and sure the sex is great, but the constant attention she demands and the way she freaks out at a seemingly ordinary request just get old after a while. Right. Don't forget the broken promises and an obsession with appearance. [Kevin Burton via The Desktop Fishbowl] 

Warning: due to a bug in Radio UserLand, this search form will not work properly within your news aggregator. But it works beautifully on my weblog hosted at radio.weblogs.com. I wish I had a similar search field to search through my RU entries and stories (i.e. on my local machine) — sometimes I'd like to find older entries on a given subject I'm discussing.

How I did it: Google search can be restricted to a given website with a hidden search parameter (as_sitesearch); an extra, hidden query can require (+) some special string, e.g. one's Radio UserLand userid (+0103811 in my case). Voilà! Add to your template the HTML code shown below — remember to adjust your userid (search opens in a new window; remove "target" attribute of "form" tag if you don't want it). It would have been easier if Google accepted a URL prefix instead of a site name as the hidden search parameter.

It's worse than it looks. The lines below are text-only that display correctly in my weblog but incorrectly in the Radio UserLand news aggregator (HTML entities are translated before the browser sees them!?).

<form action="http://www.google.com/search" target="_blank">
<input name="as_q" type="text" />
<input class="go" type="submit" name="submit" value=" go " />
<input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="radio.weblogs.com" />
<input type="hidden" name="as_q" value="+0103811" />
</form>

 

The price seems right. The Roomba intelligent floor vacuum -- a household robot. $199. [via John Robb] Warning: slow site, heavy use of Flash. 

In 490 BC, King Darius led his Persian army in a second attempt at revenge on the Athenians and the Eretrians, Greeks who had previously backed the Ionian revolt against Persian rule. In the first attempt, two years earlier, a providential storm had destroyed the Persian fleet. The new Persian fleet arrived on Greek soil at Marathon Bay, 35 kilometers north-east of Athens, on September 9, 490 BC.

For eight days, the two armies stood confronting each other. Despite the fact that the Persians were the striking army, their fighting style was defensive. The Athenian hoplites favored offense and close combat battle formations (Athens lacked both cavalry and bows). The Persians had a massive infantry and cavalry which included 48,000 men, outnumbering the Athenians four to one. On the ninth day, the Persians started an advance, forcing the Athenians into the attack.

When the Persians saw the Athenians coming down on them without cavalry or archers and scanty in numbers, they thought them as an army of madmen running toward their certain destruction, according to Herodotus. The Persians were thoroughly defeated, the battle resulting in only 192 Athenian casualties and 6,400 Persian deaths.

Miltiades, commander of the Athenian army, realised that the Persian fleet could still sail and attack Athens. He called upon Phidippides to run to Athens to bring the news of victory and a warning of the approaching Persian ships. Phidippides' 42-kilometer run from Marathon to Athens was completed in about three hours, but he died from exhaustion. The Athenians were warned and prepared to defend the city. When they saw the defended city, the Persian fleet turned and sailed back to Persia in defeat.

Again, Greek civilisation had been saved. Ten years later, in 480, three hundred Spartan heroes would famously fight the Persians and die at Thermopylae (the gates of fire); they delayed the army of Xerxes and allowed the Athenians to organise themselves and win at Salamis. And so Ancient Greece survived multiple assaults, and paved the road to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Western world. 

The engineering problem is now to master the Casimir force and direct its effects in the service of our needs: powering nanomachines, powering electronic devices, counter-acting the gravitational field, etc. Basically we've found physical configurations where force is automatically exerted, a bit like finding mountains with abundant waters streaming down — one may want to build watermills, then hydro-electric dams. Who will build the first casimir mills, and when? The attractive force between two surfaces in a vacuum - first predicted by Hendrik Casimir over 50 years ago - could affect everything from micromachines to unified theories of nature. What happens if you take two [tiny] mirrors and arrange them so that they are facing each other in empty space? ... In fact, both mirrors are mutually attracted to each other by the simple presence of the vacuum. This startling phenomenon was first predicted in 1948 by the Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrik Casimir... For many years the Casimir effect was little more than a theoretical curiosity. But interest in the phenomenon has blossomed in recent years. Experimental physicists have realized that the Casimir force affects the workings of micromachined devices, while advances in instrumentation have enabled the force to be measured with ever-greater accuracy. [PhysicsWeb] 

All through the summer of 1787, State delegates debated and drafted the articles of a new Constitution. The result was signed by the delegates on September 17, to be submitted for ratification by the States. This Constitution, including The Bill of Rights, is the best protection of freedom man has ever had, the embodiment of the principles motivating the Declaration of Independence. While it is not perfect, it is so good one finds it hard to believe! Especially when one compares it to the constitutions of all other countries on Earth. The US Constitution is a magnificent achievement and a major milestone in the history of mankind. 

Seven new books focused on weblogs are being published this year:

• We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan (Wiley)
• The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)
• We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture edited by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)
• Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone (New Riders)
• Running Weblogs with Slash by Chromatic, Brian Aker, David Krieger (O'Reilly)
• Essential Blogging by Shelley Powers, Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena Trott, Ben Trott, Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly)
• Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs by Todd Stauffer (Osborne McGraw-Hill)

[via Universal Rule via Radio Free Blogistan]