Cassowaries Rant

Citing online.

While I’m sure some people (like Tim) have more of a right to rant about citing and footnoting (because they get to use APA-, Harvard-, and Footnote-style citations all at once, what joy), I’m going to do it anyway (when did inappropriateness stop me from ranting about something?).

I’m doing this on the web, and hence it’s about stuff in online formats. APA/Harvard-style citations are good enough for print given the limitations of the medium, and so I’ll not complain about them.

Given my interest in computers, I’ve read quite a few documents referring to computers with citations to other things. One thing I notice is that unlike Psychology, there is absolutely no consistency. Everyone thinks they’re using APA/Harvard-style even when they aren’t, so you get uglinesses like:

For example, [BKV] points out that experts … can differ by a factor of 5 [sic] on performance estimates of C constructs. (Anderson, 1994 p. 2)

Where quite clearly the [BKV] is a footnote-style, but it’s being run in with the text. As the file is distributed as a Postscript document, the paper citation format is acceptible; however, a footnote—anything in brackets or set off by dashes—is not text; one should be able to skip them without the sentence becoming ungrammatical (this is sometimes hard to do, and you can often see mistakes, but that’s clearly been done on purpose). If they wanted to keep to the footnote style, perhaps because that’s what their used to, or because BibTeX handles that better, or because their editors ask him to, well, then it’s okay to use footnotes. But then the sentence should’ve been recast; either of:

For example, it has been shown that experts … can differ by a factor of 5 on performance estimates of C constructs [BKV].

or

For example, Bentley, Kernighan, and Van Wyk [BKV] point out that experts … can differ by a factor of 5 on performance estimates of C constructs.

flow much better than the original (note also the plural pronoun for a plural subject).

However, I said I was discussing the web, and discuss the web I shall. It seems that many free software advocates have a desire to use the footnoting style on the web. While one can see the attraction for non-marked-up plain text emails, that someone would use it in HTML baffles me. Being able to avoid those ugly line breaks you can get by shoving a long, unbreakable hunk of text is desireable. Most online forums, however, provide access to the <a> tag; those that don’t generally have something like a [url] tag. And yet it is in these mediums that you see it most frequently! And it is not that these people don’t know HTML; on some occasions, you can see the footnote with the title of the page as a link! The better—indeed, only acceptable—way to provide a link to a webpage in marked up mediums such as HTML is the use of links.

Furthermore, the method isn’t all its cracked up to be on emails. In general, footnotes aren’t the best of ideas, especially when the content in them is the important thing. Footnotes are a way of preventing less important information from distracting the reader; they are even more skippable than bracketed text in that you should be able to skip them without missing any important information. Putting the links in footnotes, especially when the link is the prime reason for the existence of the email, is utterly, completely, totally and unforgiveably absurd. Keep the link with the text! (For disambiguation between it and punctuation marks, you may surround it with <angle brackets>. Angle brackets are more like quotation marks than brackets in use, and are perhaps misnamed.) The way that the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter provides llinks is stupid beyond belief. They’ll have lists of hundreds upon hundreds of packages, each ending with a number in square brackets. Then, after all of them, they’ll have a list of hundreds of upon hundreds of urls, each preceeded by a number. Anyone ever tempted to do it this way should be shot before they’re born.

The formatting of link text is also something of an issue. You should definitely make the link text readable on its own, unambiguously describing the destination (and hence not needing to use text like ’click here’—which is pretty bad anyway, considering that blind users might provide an instruction to follow the link without using any device capable of clicking). Slashdot and Kuro5hin both provide a list of related links automatically generated from links in the article. Opera has a ’link-only’ mode. I have heard a reasonable argument in favor of providing links like as: Cassowaries Rant (blog); however, almost all its advantages could be realised by providing a link such as the Cassowaries Rant blog or Tristan’s blog, Cassowaries Rant; the only one it doesn’t solve is the long tracts of unreadable ugly blue underlined text one, but this can easily be solved by the reader choosing to use a color other than blue for the link to be in.

I doubt, however, that even if I try till the end of time will I get these people to change their ways…

Footnotes

free software advocates

I say free software rather than Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) because typically these people are hard-line Debianers: this means of quotation appears to have started in the Debian Weekly News newsletter whence it spread to many Debian hardliners, as well as the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter.

(I may extend this at some stage.)

• Anderson, K. R. (1994). Courage in Profiles. Performance Retrieved 29 September 2003.

I think I'm scaring myself

I think I’m scaring myself… My ability to get words right, I think, has gone downhill. I would sometimes forget someone’s name, occasionally forget the name of a thing. This year, I think I’ve been doing that more frequently (but that could just be because this year I started going to a Uni that only one of my friends went to). But more recently, I’ve been getting names and such wrong. Without noticing. Calling Trevor ’Kelvin’, or Chris ’Trevor’, or Matt ’Kelvin’ or other things like that. Having total and absolute memory blanks when it comes to regular words, not even just tip-of-the-tongue phen­om­onon–type forgetting, complete and utter inability to call up the right word…

Further, this year, my ability to distinguish homophones worsened, so I’ll regularly spell ’write’ as <right> or ’they’re’ as <their>. I don’t think I used to do that as much…

While I can attribute it to the drinking the night before, I was incredibly funny yesterday, too

And I had a nightmare which scared me the week before last, at least I know it was a nightmare…

Annoying is...

Annoying is when you hear a good piece of music but the only related information you know is that the Melburnian artists released an album called ’Bestseller’. I think.

Site changed

At the bidding of one Alex, I’ve made the top bit of this here website scroll. I imagine that it probably works better with IE now, too.

New version of Gnome-Blog

This is being posted with the new, standalone version of gnome blog. It’s nicer than the old version. One fewer reason to be running gnome-panel, I’ll replace the top one with a rox-panel in short order.

Thankyou Seth!

Agnosticism, perhaps

This was originally a post made to Kuro5hin. I have not edited it other than a tiny little bit of reformatting for my site, so you probably want to go to the source for some context.

I think that by the article’s definition, I’m an agnostic (but then, I have no idea of the scale of the universe in multiverse terms—nor if a multiverse exists, except that to me its existence is probably irrelevant—so for all I know we the universe could be the size of a mushroom, and may be exactly that, so the creator was the mushroom’s parent).

I would think that the difference is that if there is a god, I’ve done less to offend him then someone else because I haven’t made a relative assessment on the worth of the god.

Not that that’s my main reason for being an agnostic. To get to that, we have to consider for a moment whether the ends justify the means. To consider an agnostic and an atheist as one in the same, you would (because their lives are much the same). But if we consider the reasons for a position, we see some divergence.

Consider for a moment the question of whether it matters if a god exists. Right now. Obviously I can’t satisfy all gods, and if a god exists, the chances of me worshiping it are zero because of all the possible gods that exist—the god may even have created a religion but may be waiting for us to spontaneously start worshiping them. As such, I might as well do what’s simplest, which is live in a way I deem appropriate and good; it’s simpler to sleep in on Sundays than to go to Mass, and if I was awake, it’d be better because when I go to Mass I get bored, but I can just stay home and entertain myself (which relies on a bordom-is-bad).

So, does it matter right now if a god exists?

Well, if a god exists, then the universe is as it is, and all is well in the world. I might be offending it, but it might judge my desire to live well good enough, or it might not give a damn about me and just require the worship of a dozen people to satisfy it. I certainly can’t prove the existence of this god. I can’t even say if it’s likely. Another form of life on a planet some distance away might be having a revolution right now.

On the other hand, if a god doesn’t exist, then the universe is as it is, and all is well in the world. No god exists: when I die, all that will happen is that a bunch of chemical and electrical process will stop or change; some other freaks of nature will (hopefully) suffer simple bereavement; my body will be buried and degrade or burnt. There’s no way in hell I could disprove the existence of a god. Another form of life on a planet some distance away might not exist.

So how does it matter which is right? Seeing as the definition of a god does not necessarily allow for the proof of its existence, or for it to exist in the same way that anything we know of to exist, there’s no way that I can see that I can say ’this god exists’ or ’it is unlikely that any god exists’ or ’no god exists’. If the definition of something expressly states that we cannot use any method known or unknown to determine it’s existence, how can I say whether or not it exists?

I hope this helps in your comprehension of agnosticism. Personally, I don’t see how one can use Occam’s razor to say god’s unlikely when so many believers say that god is outside our realm and hence nothing we know can work on god.

I agree with these

I agree with these comments about web useability. Website designers, design websites properly.

And avoid tables for layout whenever you can! They’re inflexible! *sigh*

Comparsion of Debian and Gentoo

I will mirror my comparison of Debian and Gentoo here tomorrow in an updated and better formatted manner.

I'm wondering whether or not

I’m wondering whether or not I like my new desktop. I’m thinking perhaps not. (Includes gratuitous shots of gnome-blog 0.5 and my hacked version of MusicBox 0.7, both of which are out of date. OTOH, the screenshot in the browserwindow in the screenshot includes a CVS version of ROX-Filer, which makes it the opposite of out-of-date.)

I'm yet to see

I’m yet to see what’s so bad about not having browsers seemlessly run plugins. How many flash-based ads will this kill? Half the time I delete my plugins rather than have them run automatically.

~/Downloads/CVS/closure % fortune You

You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy.

A pity that it’s totally undeserved.

Closure, a [the] Common

Closure, a [the] Common Lisp web browser, still doesn’t compile, even on Debian. *sigh*. Not that it’s all that important. I only care because it’s the thought that counts.

A website about Australian

A website about Australian elections and politics and the like. Cited in an Age opinionative piece today.

Real Life Comics and

Real Life Comics and Toj both brought up the incredibly funny because it’s incredibly stupid Badger Flash Thing. Why is it that you never hear of these Flash things one-and-a-time, but everyone brings them up together?

This is a test blog

This is a test blog entry made using Seth’s gnome-blog gnome-panel applet. It has buttons that allow for bold and italicised text. It’s keyboard support seems somewhat limited, however.

I’m going to have to port it to ROX, I think. Hopefull won’t be too hard. Why oh why don’t ROX and Gnome use a similar API for applets?

Australian Linguistics

Some stuff about Australian language, both indigenous and imported.

I don’t agree entirely with the Australian English analysis—while I guess it makes sense for the /eə/ → /eː/, after then, it makes more sense to add in a short::long::diphthong distinction. They also forget about everyone’s favorite vowel, /ɔː/ as in ’gone’ and the now-definitely-phonemic /æː/.

My New Blog

This is my new blog. My intention is to put in mostly interesting links that I find on the web here. Where ’interesting’ is defined in terms of my own interests, not yours. Occasionally, longer ramblings will be included on any topic from why Gentoo is better than Debian to why Debian is better than Gentoo, including but not limited to my Conlangs, my Psychology essays and why the amount of marks we get from them is incredibly unrelated to the amount of work we have to put in, or why you should give me a job.

• Gentoo is better than Debian because it mostly works. You can compile programs without going round in circles and discovering that even though you appear to have every dev thing there you need, something’s missing. Programs often seem to work better, unless you get that weird and odd problem I had when Gnome apps would crash as a matter of course.
• Debian is better than Gentoo because it’s a lot faster to install programs.