I’m concentrating all future improv’d daily’s—Uruban, PLBRS, ELZR, Domburi, NotReality—, scant though they certainly are, in this post. Let’s begin:

A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is pure sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.

Espanhol llano es espanhol escrito sin acentos, ñ (que se suele sustituir por nh, nn o simplemente n), dieresis o signos de puntuacion iniciales (¿¡).

Perfectamente inteligible para hablantes del dialecto ortografico dominante, el espanhol llano entra en auge a la par que el teclado, cuya dificultad intrinseca para escribir caracteres especiales se vuelve el argumento original a su favor. Hoy en dia las razones para usarlo son enormemente variadas.

Which is in itself quite wonderful news (artificial languages need all the help they can get), but the Globe and Mail article is also one of the best introductions to the language I’ve seen, so do check it out—web version or print scan—if you’re interested in Toki Pona (and if you speak Spanish, don’t forget to check out my Spanish manual on it).

Web pages are written in HTML^WP but as they have become more and more complex, they now tend to be written, clientside, through Javascript^WP, which can manipulate and insert HTML. Google Images, for instance, uses Javascript to write the HTML that displays your image results.

Yes, it’s roundabout, but it’s due to the nature of the languages: Javascript does stuff, HTML displays stuff. When you want the browser to do things (instead of merely displaying dumbly what it receives) and when these things themselves involve a lot of displaying, you end up writing HTML through Javascript.

It’s a little like writing French through English (André went to Marie and said: ”Bonjour! Ça va, ma chérie?”) and just as frustrating, particularly because you sometimes have to narrate whole scenes in French (pidgin tends to be painfully verbose) and your English self is left completely in the dark—so you end up naming things in both French and English and it gets as ugly as you can imagine.

HyperScript is a bizarre and quixotic attempt to write French in English; that is, HTML in Javascript. Basically, you do what went on in the Norman conquest of England^WP: you anglicize as many French words as you can; that is, you turn into Javascript as many HTML words as you can.

The lark itself takes gratefully (and rather surpisingly) only 16 paltry lines of Javascript code (highlighting thanks to Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones.):

function each(a, f) { for(var i=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) };
each('a big blockquote br b center code div em form h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 hr img iframe input i li ol option pre p script select small span strong style sub sup table tbody td textarea tr ul u'.split(' '),
    function(label){
        window[label]=function(){
            var tag=document.createElement(label);
            each(arguments, function(arg){ 
                if(arg.nodeType)                                         tag.appendChild(arg);
                else if(typeof arg=='string' || typeof arg=='number')    tag.innerHTML+=arg;
                else for(var attr in arg){
                        if(attr=='style') for(var sty in arg[attr]) tag[attr][sty]=arg[attr][sty];
                        else tag[attr]=arg[attr];
                };
            });
            return tag;
        };
    });

and you can play with it right here, right now:

Instead of

now it’s,

And so on.

HTML in a Javascript syntax. Enjoy!

Fascinating Economist article on the music industry’s new developments. Very reminiscent of Dyson’s thoughts on intellectual property:

“[...it] is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”

“If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.”

I’ve always hated, with a passion, moral-indignation ads against piracy—not only because they’re manipulative but because they’re stupid. And the best defense for piracy may be how hard it is to make an argument against it that doesn’t stink of moral indignation—if maudlin pleas are the best you can do, you’re probably rotten. (On a related sidenote, I found it mighty interesting when The Economist circuitously referred to Kazaa as “a file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it”—as much as ads want to make us believe pirating is stealing, there are crucial differences, which is why such circumlocutions are essential.)

To solve intellectual property’s malaise I’ve long sought for grand economic solutions (new innovative schemes or perhaps even a new concept of property rights) rather than grand political ones (which are just, ugh, imposed moral rules). While there has been plenty of both, I’m starting to see these days that maybe the solution will be simply to move on. Piracy is just another (admittedly extreme) form of commodification^WP. You don’t fight commodification by outlawing it, you take the next thing that hasn’t been commodified yet, you offer value however you can, you move on.

Genial la mas reciente portada de Proceso. Todo un logro de diseño grafico en su simplicidad.

Watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth^WP a couple of days ago. Besides being astonished by the quality of the presentation that is the core of the documentary, he did manage to intrigue me, if not convince me, about global warming—I’m definitely reading Skeptical Environmentalist^{AM, E} soon.

At any rate, what surprised me most was Gore’s evident hubris and mocking towards skeptics. I thought of a question for him then,

And it hit me that it was too good a question not to ask ourselves.

That’s the game I’m proposing today. It’s like when they asked you in high school to take the other side of a debate only this time it’s not about arguments, it’s about reasons—the difference here being that a reason is a fact you yourself are forced to accept while an argument is a verbal tool you use to to try to convince others. This is not about others, posing or fighting, this is about you and truth.

You know there have to be reasons for both sides, don’t you? Anything of more than trivial complexity is inherently ambiguous. If you can’t find them it’s probably because your knowledge of the subject is, well, trivial and superficial.

So take one of your most entrenched beliefs—say, in my case, that government is evil or that there is no god—and find a reason—a reason you can do nothing but accept—for disbelieving it. It is not about you abandoning that belief, it’s about letting doubt back inside your cramped head.

Personally, I’m losing so far. It’s incredibly easy to come up with plausible, convincing arguments that would be good weapons and yet you personally know are ultimately flawed and phony. But to come with true reasons—well, it’s much, much harder than I thought…

Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)

Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows End^{WP, AM}.

Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!

Hope you like these two and please do tell me your first impressions-what works, what doesn’t? are these things at all helpful to you?

Thanks.

22 and 23/jun/07

Bad time management. Sorry. :)

24/jun/07

1. Better Definition Structure. Definitions are now grouped visually under grammatical category (like, say, all the definitions of the word as a noun, and then all those of it as an adverb). They’re already grouped sequentially in the original dictionary but it’s all very redundant and clumsy (every definition has the grammatical category indicated at the beginning). This is a big improvement. Try it out by searching for “correr” in both plbrs and DRAE.
2. Expanded Abbreviations. Most abbreviations are now automatically expanded, which works wonderfully in most cases though there are still several fringe cases like “usado o usada o usadas o usados”, which will be corrected tomorrow.
3. Improved the simple design. Added a “definir” button, a neat magnifying glass icon, made topbar type smaller, and chose slightly better color combinations. Moved slogan below and added a small explanatory sentence. Added Improv’dDaily and NotReality icons.
4. Improved status reporting. Now besides the loading image a message appears saying that your query is being searched. If multiple queries are being currently searched all of them appear in the message.
5. Improved Not Found message. The query you were looking for now appears on the message (duh!)—thanks chemito! Message trimmed. Added fallback link to a Google search for your query.

1. Much new content! 8 new places added, together with photos and descriptions. It’s all terribly paltry and sketchy but it’s a beginning.
2. Improved design. Gave the website a blue-green color scheme and generally beautified the whole thing. Added Improv’d Daily link.
3. New copy. “Enciclopedia Local” is the new main slogan, “Haciendo que la Web Local No Apeste” the subslogan.

Herbal Essences has always been one of the prettiest shampoos out there but their new color me happy line is something else. Not only is the industrial (blobjecty^WP) and graphic (modern art noveau) design stunning, their personified, casual copy is like nothing I’ve seen before. Fascinating.

Have I mentioned how much I love wet, crisp, brisk mornings?

Flickr AutoPagination has got to be the coolest Greasemonkey script I’ve seen yet, and, to judge by its code, a really intricate labor of love. It works flawlessly and does exactly what you’d guess: it makes every Flickr page (where it would make sense) “infinitely scrollable”. A cool, handy, and surprisingly stable script.

Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la Maitena^{WP, IY}) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.

No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatía, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^