Really Nifty Corners

This technique, Nifty Corners: rounded corners without images, is, well, nifty.

Combining Nifty Corners with Dashboard? Waaay past nifty, and on to really f'in cool. There's five billion rounded corner images that don't need to be created.

Me and who?

According to this page, this blog (the one you're reading now) is run by a couple named "Dori + Brian".

That would be, I'd guess, my Backup Brian.

<rimshot>

Another master writer gone

RIP: Science Fiction Author Andre Norton Dies. I remember reading many of her (her original name was Alice Norton) SF novels with great fondness as a kid. I especially like her final wishes:

Norton requested before her death that she not have a funeral service, but instead asked to be cremated along with a copy of her first and last novels.

Her publisher rushed a copy of her last novel to print so that she could hold it in her hands last Friday.

(Via Paul Music.)

13 things that do not make sense

From the New Scientist, it's 13 things that do not make sense: placebos, homeopathy, dark matter, cold fusion, and more.

Mmmmmm.... That's Cheesy!

There was another VH1 show we recorded a month or so ago, and since they play these things forever, it's worth adding it to your TiVO or ReplayTV lineup to catch it when they run it again: The Greatest 100 Cheesetastic Video Tricks Exposed.

She's still preoccupied with 1985

One of my guilty pleasures (which I blame on the era in which I grew up) is power ballads. Tom, knowing this, recorded VH1's The 25 Greatest Power Ballads for me, which we watched last night.

Their top 25 list can be found here, but I have to say that, imo, they are just so wrong. They put in Lenny Kravitz and Journey, but left off Warrant and Extreme? And November Rain, but not Sweet Child o' Mine? And I won't even say what I think about including Creed (shudder).

JavaScript, son of JavaScript

From SxSW, Molly writes about The Return of JavaScript:

…one conversation that keeps coming up among many of my colleagues is the question as to whether the timing is right to re-examine the importance of the DOM and scripting, and how it fits (or doesn't fit) into standards-based design.

I've never been a JavaScript person, largely due to the fact becuase it's never felt as approachable to me as markup and style and in many ways I found that intimidating. However, there is no question that the more I understand about well-structured, semantic markup and the way that presentation is effectively integrated with the document tree via CSS, I've become increasingly more interested in learning more about how the DOM and JavaScript can work in the context of Web standards.

This isn't the first time that I've felt like Molly's reverse image, but it may be the strongest. I spent most of 1997 writing the code for what turned out to be the 2nd edition of JavaScript for the WWW: VQS, and when the Web Standards Project came along in 1998, I was completely behind it, because I'd fought all the battles due to the lack of JavaScript standards support. Now that those battles have been fought and mostly won, we're just now getting to be able to depend on what we need to be out there. This is the fun part, so welcome!

Or, as I see it, Molly came to see JavaScript as useful due to her background in standards, and I came to see standards as useful due to my experience in JavaScript.

And hey, Molly, if you want a book that teaches JavaScript to non-geeks and promotes standards at the same time, drop me a line!

Give me a break

Dave Winer, panties in a bunch, says

I wish women would pick up some of the load and write about new stuff that interests Scripting News readers. I feel victimized by having to always point to men. We do all the work and they do all the complaining. Women, how about doing your fair share, i.e. half, of the work? What a trip. We're doing most of the work and they've got us feeling guilty.

That's followed with a "heh" and a smiley face, so we're supposed to know that he doesn't really mean it, but it makes one thing obvious: he doesn't read enough women's blogs to know whether or not they're commenting "about new stuff that interests Scripting News readers."

As just one example, he pointed to a woman who, today, agreed with the judge in the Apple case. Huh. Just think; if Dave read this blog, he could have pointed to a woman who said the same thing last week, back when it really was new.

Tiger shipping sometime in 2nd quarter

This eWeek article, Apple Preps Release of Mac OS X 'Tiger', appears to be based solely on rumor sites. Okay, based on the legal cases going on, what's to stop Apple from saying, "Let's show how inaccurate the rumor sites are — we'll ship on June 1 instead?"

As I see it, it's a two-fer for Apple: they get to spend a little more time fixing bugs, and they get to make the rumor sites look bad. What's the downside?

The New SAT

The first reviews of the new SAT (first given yesterday) are in: Students' Verdict on New SAT: It's Long. The test went from 3 hours to 3 hours and 45 minutes with the addition of the new essay section.

What's scariest, though (and not mentioned in this piece) is that yesterday's test was really the short version. The long version, then and now, is the SAT + 3 hours of the SAT II. So it's really gone from 6:00 to 6:45, all in one day.

I have to wonder how much kids can really do with all that pressure on one day's work. Sean's meeting with destiny is May 7; please think good thoughts for him. He'll be taking the SAT + Math Level 2 + Biology-M + US History.

Later note: yes, that's on top of taking two AP tests: US History on May 6 and Biology on May 9. That's going to be a nasty four days.

Another later note: thanks to the commenter who told me that I had some of the above wrong — thanks! This is what drives me up the wall; we don't get a "Here's how to get through the pre-college process" booklet or something. Replace what I said above about the SAT and SAT II on the same day with "SAT on May 7, SAT II Subject Tests on June 4."