Mail Archive

Whatever items of interest are too good to lose!

Favicons:

[Mike] Re missing files: I see a reference to 'favicon.ico' and vaguely remember this as some user-supplied icon that comes up in Favourites with your entry. Do you know how this is derived, and where do you put it?

[John] You know, funny you should ask that. I was doing some poking around with that issue earlier this week... The best tutorial on it that I've seen is at http://www.global-positioning.com/favicon/, although there are also a couple of others... http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/favicon.shtml http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol3/server_no1.htm

If you've got access to the server root, and you're the only one serving off that server (or, it seems, if you've got a virtual root, which it seems you might), all you've got to do is upload it. IE does the rest. If, like me, you're just stuck in a folder off a root, it looks like I've got to add a line to every freaking file to get it to work... Now, to see if it does... ;-) Wow - If you look at http://vulcan.spaceports.com/~jdominik/portal.html, I've got an icon - I've got to work on it a bit, but it's got promise! Neat! (sometimes I scare myself - I have to keep telling myself "this stuff is SUPPOSED to work the first time out, don't be surprised when it does work!" I've been putzing with this stuff too long).

[Mike] Nope, just tried it, and IE didn't pick up the icon when I bookmarked. I've done one for me: a capital I in red, should be here when you next peek.

Date Conventions

[Mike's Daynotes]... <rant warning> For a change, it showed the digits the right way round, instead of that idiot convention [imposed by Americans] that the month digit should come first. Along with archaic measures [discarded by the rest of the world] such as pounds, and Fahrenheit, and gallons, and inches - and paper sized as letter, not A4, so that Microsoft can impose its defaults upon us willy-nilly. I can tell you, that date thing causes untold hassle for genealogists who work internationally: "Is that date 4/6/2000 actually 4th June, or is it supposed to be April 6th?" </rant>

Dominik: Oh, I hate that digit stuff! Either Day Month Year, or (my preference) Year Month Day - everything four-or-two-digit, zero filled. No problems with sorting or anything, there. I once fouled up a whole project working with a large client - we'd had just about exactly what you noted - the due date for a particular portion was noted on their forms as 2-3-1993, and I assumed that was March second. They had multiple groups, multiple people involved, and this memo was from someone who worked in the division that used the DDMMYYYY convention. Of course, his boss, who sent him the memo, used MMDDYYYY. At that point we all agreed to long-form dates. Grrrrrrrrr.........

Graphics for the Web

From keith.r :

Can you answer this question for me please, you said in your journal on Friday that you massaged your photos down to web size and resolution. Could you please tell me what that was? Santa bought me a scanner for Christmas and I want to put up some photos on my site and your advice/help would be appreciated on this.

Mike: The pix come out of the digital camera on normal resolution as .jpg files at a file size of about 400kb. I whip the likely shots into Photoshop where they expand to 1600 x 1200 pixels at 72 dpi. I correct the balance if necessary, then alter the long dimension to 300 pixels. Photoshop 6 is closely integrated with Image Ready, and there is a file menu item Save for Web. This prepares a four-paned window with the original, and three progressively compressed jpg. I look for a file size of about 15-18k and alter the compression to suit.

Now, for your scanner output, scan the print at about 300 ppi. It's much easier to work on a higher resolution than you're going to actually need. I don't know what photo massaging software you have, Photoshop is industrial strength and a shocking price. IrfanView is freeware and readily available; will resize and do minor alterations to colour balance, contrast etc. a most useful program. I use it for quickly checking through the avalanche of digital photos to find some to use.

To see how it copes, I just now opened one of my holiday pix, altered the contrast, resized to 300 pixels, saved as a .jpg with 40% compression to produce a file size of 8.1k -- could have gone higher = better quality. The main difference IrfanView <-> Photoshop for this purpose is that Photoshop gave me a preview of the image and finished file size before I saved the file.

Education Standards

[quotes from Bruce Edwards daynotes]

What is going on in America? It seems hard to believe and, indeed, Jerry Pournelle credits incompetence not intent, but there very well could be an organized plan to not educate the citizens of the United States in the public schools. That is, there are many who support the notion that during the last century and especially the last forty years, there have been specific plans to "educate" the citizens to a very minimal level and condition them for menial jobs and tasks.
One can look at the average product of our school systems without disagreeing that this is all the average high school graduate is fit for - unfortunately. But, is it really a vast conspiracy to control the world population by a bunch of self-appointed elites? That could be too much conspiracy theory

In 1990, Dr. M. Donald Thomas outlined the new education system in an article that appeared in The Effective School Report entitled "Education 90: A Framework for the Future."
"From Washington to modern times, literacy has meant the ability to read and write, the ability to understand numbers, and the capacity to appreciate factual material. The world, however, has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. The introduction of technology in information processing, the compression of the world into a single economic system, and the revolution in political organizations are influences never imagined to be possible in our lifetime.
Dr. Thomas provided the blueprint for today's education system that is designed to:
* De-emphasize academic knowledge;
* Establish the one-world agenda with the United Nations as its center, moving students away from a belief in national sovereignty, i.e., patriotism;
* Replace individual achievement with collectivist group-think ideology;
* And invade the family authority with an "It takes a village"mind-set.
These ideas permeate every federal program, every national standard, every textbook and every moment of your child's school day. It explains why today's children hasn't any time to actually learn the fundamentals we call the Three R's.
Tom DeWeese, the author, references a book that supports his views, apparently with well documented fact. The book is called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America - A Chronological Paper Trail and was written by Charlotte Iserbyt.

New Zealand schools are no different in this regard. There is constant pressure on teachers to ensure that pupils don't feel any better than the others. Fortunately, most primary schools are encouraging bright pupils with extra work, and the intermediate schools (Junior High) are streaming them into "high achiever" classes. These get far more work to do, and much more is expected of the kids in a topic than a lower stream e.g. these may have to do an essay on a visit to a forest. The high achievers would have to do a full project, with research and images -- in the same time frame. My granddaughter last year really had her butt worked off -- and it did her the world of good. My own two children were very bright -- but were often held back by lower achievers in their class who took up most of the teacher's time. I used to call my kids "intellectually handicapped" because of this.

The education system is also mostly now committed to internal assessment of exams. We did have formal external exams at middle and senior high school -- but that's now gone. Some of the high-level private schools are substituting external exams from the UK, which are called O- and A-levels. This trend is another manifestation of dumbing down education so that an under-achieving child is not supposed to get feelings of inferiority. So what — the kid *is* inferior, and the sooner it finds out and gets an incentive to improve, the better it will end up.

But there is still a de-emphasis on the 3 Rs -- and the teachers themselves are not terribly good at spelling, either. I am constantly bitching about typos appearing in print everywhere -- I even noticed a hand-written notice board outside a cafe yesterday that told me (in two different places) they have "sconces" instead of scones. Maybe it's because I do so much text work, and proofread brochures etc for Don, that I am so conscious of what I consider inexcusable lapses of spelling and grammar.

In rebuttal, the educators insist that it's content that matters, and as long as people can figure out what the meaning is, there's no problem. But to me, it's a failure in communication to ignore the rules that have been built up over centuries of trial and error. The current fashion of minimalising punctuation in text infuriates me. Try reading the average newspaper story ALOUD, then count the number of times you have to pause, figure out the phrasing to get the meaning, then continue. Don't these dummies know that punctuation originally was developed by priests for this very reason, to assist them in delivering their sermons?

I'll stop ranting now — because I'm just a voice in the wilderness.

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