Perette's Journal

Big f'ing heads-up on X-UA-Compatible

perette@barella.org (Perette Barella) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:41:00 -0400

The X-UA-Compatible setting for IE behaves strange when you request IE=8 or IE-8=edge. You would think requesting 8 & up would imply standards mode. In reality it may or may not, instead switching to quirks mode based on the DOCTYPE as follows:

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 strict, it uses the standard mode rendering engine.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
                          "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 transitional, and the DOCTYPE is present in full,
    unabridged form, it will also use the standard mode rendering engine.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
			  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 transitional but abridged, it will use quirks mode.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

So what the hell was the point of X-UA-Compatible if it's ignored sometime? Don't ask me, it's Microsoft.

Reason, Intuition, and Religious Tolerance

perette@barella.org (Perette Barella) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:59:00 -0400

A friend acused me of being intolerant, which got me to thinking, and like I often do I started writing and thinking to sort out my feelings. It took a good chunk of a month and a lot of thinking, but I finally finished Reason, Intuition, and Religious Tolerance. Sorry for the length, but there were a lot of intertwined and related thoughts.

Also, I haven't received any good reason to stay with Facebook, so I'll be ditching that RSN. Those really bent on keeping up with me can read my journal, which has an RSS feed available, or on LJ.

To Facebook, or not to Facebook (RFC)

perette@barella.org (Perette Barella) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:04:00 -0400

As many of y'all know, I'm not real keen on Facebook. It's a privacy nightmare from hell. I've long been iffy about FB: it keeps finding me a lot of people I've lost touch with, but does it really put me in touch? FB now demands I land on the News Feed, where I can see all sorts of useless trivia about what people are up to. And I've got to ask myself: is this making my life better?

And recently, Facebook has some stupid new application that people can make comments about me in, but I can only read them if I'm willing to grant whatever disreputable app access to all my data. If I did, would it make my life better?

As I've mentioned before, Facebook is the Roach Motel of social networking: it collects data, then only gives it out when I'm at Facebook. It doesn't export an RSS feed or something that allows me to participate in interactions in my own way. Is there some way I'm not seeing that this makes my life better?

And it's only getting worse: you know those little "Like" buttons that have recently appeared on web sites that allow you to show your approval on FB? Well, they're little iFrames, or at least some of them are, which most of you probably don't care about. Except that it means not only is the web site you're visiting tracking you, but FaceBook is tracking you. Every site with a "Like" or other FaceBook interface, all around the web. So when you visit my client Flex Gym and Aerobics, not only can I track what you do there but now FaceBook can too. And they implement the FaceBook interface in a way that they can expand on it if they come up with better ways of tracking you. Is all this tracking making my life better?

(And people used to think it was bad that Google has access to all those search keywords I enter, and search results I click on. Ha!)

In whatever period I've been a member on Facebook, it's only achieved one cool thing that I can think of: I got together with a couple of the cool people from my high school class.

Other than the one instance, the answer I keep coming back to, is that no, Facebook and its useless apps and trivial "friendships" don't make my life better.

I'm therefore tentatively looking at axing my account in September. One other advantage I can see is that doing so would mean no longer giving the pretense that I use Facebook, or having to think about approving new acquaintances as friends. It would release the associated "web site handle", the little chunk of resources that are stay occupied by my continued presence on FB. (This probably seems trivial to others, but I like simplicity and when you start looking at the number of sites I'm on-- FB, FetLife, a couple of Yahoo groups, a Google Group, f'ing LinkedIn (which also gets on my tits), 4 fetish forums for stuff I'm into, and a handful of fetish forums related to some of my modeling, they add up to a sort of "mental clutter". And for the record, FB isn't the only one being considered for eviction from my life; there's a Big Pruning in the works.)

FB is a big enough fish, though, I'm questioning whether it I'd just find myself "out in the cold" or something. So I'm open to discussion or debate on the matter. Comments can be sent to me via mail, or made in response to this article on Facebook or on LiveJournal.