Pelanne.Com

I Love Onion News Network

One guy with five television remotes and no interest in soccer, walking around a city gripped with soccer fever. What can go wrong?

This math does not apply to cookies. Or pizza. Because they’re extremely tasty and math isn’t.

0.999… is the same as 1. Not just very close, but precisely identical:

a = 0.999…
10a = 9.999…
10a - a = 9.999… - 0.999…
9a = 9
a = 1

I’m a sucker for any use of the future perfect.

Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster

I’m talkin’ Office Creed.

First of all, I never knew Creed’s real name was Creed. Second of all, I didn’t know he was in a popular band during the late sixities - the Grass Roots. They put out about a dozen radio hits in their time.

Some interesting Creed-Of-The-Present and Creed-Of-Yore facts from Wikipedia:

“In a scene that never aired from the episode “Booze Cruise,” Bratton’s boss, Michael, borrowed the guitar from a cruise ship’s band and plays it poorly. Bratton then takes the guitar from Michael and proceeds to surprise the rest of the passengers with his excellent playing.

The scene then cuts to a confessional, where Bratton talks of his time with The Grass Roots, complete with pictures of the actual band and references to actual tours.

In another deleted scene from the episode “Product Recall,” a fictional Scranton Times writer notices Bratton was a member of The Grass Roots.”

He’s the guy with the sweater on the left.

One man’s frivolous pastime is another man’s epic battle:

In the beginning, there was an inky blackness. The “dynamic” web consisted primarily of a series of badly designed forms posting to a server which would process the inputs, and return a rush of badly designed HTML to be displayed in the browser.

Those were the bad ole days.

Javascript formed in that insipid primordeal soup, a brainchild of Netscape Communications (and later embraced and extended in the Microsoft way via the ECMAscript standard). In it’s early incarnation, while a relatively full-featured and innovative language, it was primarily used for kludgy things like dynamic backround colors and popup menus and form validation.

Loading content asynchronously into a page after loadtime was done via a variety of methods that would certainly make today’s design purists slightly ill.

These means had strange names like Iframes and Layers. Sometimes, Sun’s Java language was leveraged through embedded applets, small standalone programs that would run in your web page. You may still have bad memories of grey boxes and two minute page loads as your creaky Java virtual machine fired up.

Doing their part, the Browser Wars cast a fog of uncertainty over everything. One never knew when a current site implementation would break or portions of it would cease to be supported. Cross-browser support was accomplished via lucky hacks and the occasional burnt offering.

Ah, but then things started getting a bit better.

Flash, which loaded swiftly and was getting more ubiquitous by the day, began letting you load content into the page from remote CSV files or the soon-to-be finalized XML format.

With the advent of IE 5, the XMLHttpRequest object was implemented, and suddenly there was a consistent way to load remote content client-side, regardless of your browser. Manipulated via Javascript, AJAX was born (though it wasn’t named until some years later). Along with new browser versions, DOM support improved - which let developers target their code like never before. CSS and XHTML provided consistency to pages where once you were more likely to find unmatched font tags.

Loosely-coupled applications became tightly-coupled asynchronous goodness. Most of the time, load times decreased. People soon realized that the X in AJAX wasn’t always necessary, and began using delimited formats and JSON objects to pass data, which saved further time and client-side processing.

Javascript frameworks popped up like so many floating divs, ready to do the heavy browser-side lifting for you.

All this novelty had it’s ugly side too - as with any new online technological trend, there were fine examples of unnecessary use, and for some reason, a perceived need to make any AJAX-infused application look like it was fashioned of rounded translucent plastic.

Implemented correctly, however, and utilized not just for the sake of exercise, these dollops of asynchronicity were a positive overall trend. Developers certainly had more options and tools at their disposal than ever before.

And so here we are, maybe slightly disheveled. We’ve got better standards, sweet editors, and the ever changing web before us.

Now if only Frontpage would go away. Until then, I’m still considering us to be at Web 1.9.

This is aptly timed - I’m cookin’ brisket all day tomorrow…