Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, November 8, 2002

-- Comment()
Leading scientists seek action over biological weapons: "World's top science experts call for end to spread of biological weapons." [Guardian Unlimited]

-- Comment()
Someone else also likes Chimera... Chimera Continues To Challenge IE On Mac OS X: "One of the most delightful projects to come out of the Mozilla effort is the Chimera browser." (O'Reilly Network via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

-- Comment()
Trying Mac-Like Look To Windows: "As I played with this software, it made me realize just how much work Apple put into the interface for OS X." (San Jose Mercury News via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

-- Comment()
Mac Product Reviews: Where's The Trust?: "Both print magazines and Web sites will often subject a product to some sort of lab test, but it's not an absolute science, and the choices made in figuring out what to test and how can influence the outcome." (Mac Night Owl via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

Experiences of switching to a new Radio weblog theme -- Comment()
Matt Croydon::postneo answered my question about how easy applying the new theme was:

The transition went pretty well. I had also tweaked my old theme, adding links and blogrolls down the side. I saved my home page template so that I could keep these tweaks.

The next step was to turn upstreaming off in Radio. I didn't want things to go live until they were ready. I had to remove every reference of Veranda and Garamond from the movable type CSS file after applying the theme. I'm an Airal guy. It's clean.

After removing a few things like smaller fonts on links and adding a new section on the sidebar with my blogroll, I turned on upstreaming.

I opened Radio, and ran Tools -> Publish -> Entire website. A good backup of your www folder should be done beforehand.

Overall I'm pleased with the result. It didn't take a whole lot of time and was definately worth it.

Thanks for the answer! I think I'll have to look at my style definitions to make the new theme a bit more readable. But this is a good start, I believe. I also used the following hint on Centralized CSS in Radio:

If you would like to centralize your Radio CSS you can simple save your Style sheet as "#cascadingStyleSheet.txt" then place it in your "www" folder. Then simply add the <%cascadingStyleSheet%> macro to your template. Your CSS will be included where you included your macro.

-- Comment()
eWeek: "Adobe's PDF document-distribution format may seem entrenched among computing consumers, but that isn't stopping Microsoft from trying to throw its weight behind a competing publishing venture." [Scripting News]

-- Comment()
Healthy Skepticism To Greet Microsoft's Tablet PC Launch: "Microsoft is planning a splashy launch event Thursday to introduce the long-touted Tablet PC, but a lean marketplace crowded with doubtful and tight-fisted IT buyers awaits the new device." [Google Technology News]

-- Comment()
The new weblog template looks a bit different in OmniWeb and Chimera. I should probably try to validate the HTML code, because I made so many changes to the style files so rapidly. But everything works now ok, so perhaps I'll let this be for a while, and then try to do some polishing and checking.

New weblog template in use -- Comment()
I made extensive modifications to this Radio weblog theme, encouraged by the example of Matt Croydon::postneo. There is a lot to change, but I'm starting to like the template already. And it loads much faster than the previous version.

-- Comment()
I just remembered that I have an article (in Finnish) about the Fortran 200x standard available in PDF format. Of course, also our textbook on Fortran 90/95 (in Finnish) has an appendix on the new standard.

-- Comment()
Is Mac OS X Slow?: "Having the fortune of using a Titanium Powerbook for over a month, I don't find Mac OS X that slow at all, however, there are some things that do take a little longer than I am used to, but I think these things are application-specific." [News Is Free: Popular Items]

-- Comment()
Research Unravels Mystery of Martian Meteorites: "Analysis of the Martian rocks indicated that they were ejected by six or seven separate impact events. Previous tests had predicted that a collision with an asteroid large enough to leave a crater 12-kilometers wide would be needed to send the meteorites to Earth. Because such huge impacts are extremely rare, it was unlikely that enough of them could have occurred to explain our planet's Martian meteorite collection. Now the higher-resolution models developed by James N. Head of the University of Arizona and his colleagues show that collisions that cause craters only three kilometers across can launch 10 million fragments, each about 10 centimeters across, into space. This distribution would be sufficient to expect some of them to show up on Earth, the scientists report." [News Is Free: Popular Items]

-- Comment()
It seems that the book Tieto ja tekniikka - Missä on nainen? (Information and Technology - Where is the Woman?) has generated some interest. (See my posting.)I have already referrals from Google search on these keywords. I hope this book motivates discussion about the lack of women entering the engineering profession, especially in the IT and telecommunications sectors.

Weblog Redesign -- Comment()
Matt Croydon::postneo writes: "I've been sick and tired of the radio theme that I had been using for quite some time. It had too many graphics and did not focus on the important part: the content. I've switched over to one of Radio's movable type themes. It's CSS (not tables like before), much lighter weight, and will be easy to customize. Right now font sizes are a little hardcoded, but I'll hopefully get things relative pretty soon."

Nice change! I sent the following e-mail to Matt:

I like your new theme, it is clean and light. I have also been thinking of moving to a CSS-based theme from the Radio "transmitter" theme.
How did the move to the new theme work out in practice? I have made quite a lot of (small) modifications to my theme, and would like to preserve some of them. I have copied some of these modifications to a text file for insertion into a new theme, but is there an easier way of doing this?

-- Comment()
I looked at the referral log of Universal Rule. Here are typical Google searches which point vistors here:

Thus, the reviews of Matlab and Mathematica have quite many visitors.

Resources on mathematics -- Comment()
Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics is a freely avaible resource on mathematics with "10,875 entries (more than one myriad), 96,394 cross-references, 4,894 figures, 183 animated graphics, 982 live Java applets, and counting..."

Another nice resource is Wikipedia, which has a section on mathematics: "Mathematics (from Greek mathema: science, knowledge, learning; mathematikos: fond of learning) is the study of patterns of quantity, structure, change and space. In the modern view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures using formal logic as the common framework. The specific structures investigated often have their origin in the natural sciences, most commonly in physics, but mathematicians also define and investigate structures for reasons purely internal to mathematics, for instance because they realize that the structure provides a unifying generalization for several subfields or a helpful tool in common calculations."

-- Comment()
Microsoft calls 'foul' on OS vulnerability data: "The data indicated that the Macintosh operating system and certain varieties of Unix are less vulnerable to attack than the more popular Windows and Linux." [Computerworld News]

-- Comment()
MIT's Superarchive: "In September the Institute launched DSpace, a Web-based institutional repository where faculty and researchers can save their intellectual output and share it with their colleagues around the world and for centuries to come. The result of a two-year collaboration of the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard, DSpace is built on open-source software and is available to anyone free of charge. But it[base ']s even more important to note that many believe this groundbreaking effort will fundamentally change the way scholars disseminate their research findings." [Privacy Digest]