Satya's blog - 2004/07/

Cassini, the Saturn probe, says this looks like the Death Star but is actually Mimas: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA05423.jpg

Iapetus apparently has a dark and a light hemisphere, just like in 2001.

How to annotate an image from the command line:

convert -density 100 -pointsize 12 -background '#00000066' -fill white label:"text goes here" miff:-| composite -gravity northwest - infile.jpg outfile.jpg

as in http://www.thesatya.com/albums/models/aircraft/p51balsa/dscn1434.html

Last updated: Jan 22 2006 09:08

Yay, my site's all fixed. New pictures of the P51 I'm building: http://www.thesatya.com/albums/models/aircraft/p51balsa/

I'm fixing all the HTML errors on my website. Hopefully I'll get every single web page to validate against XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

And then after a year or two I can do it all over again for XHTML 2.0 Strict.

I'm also streamlining and throwing out obsolete stuff, plus putting dates on web pages. I've moved to using HTML::Tenmplate to do the templates instead of my obsolete home-grown system, so I get an automatic Last-modified from the file system, but that doesn't cut it because simply touching the file meses it up. So I'm adding things like "Dated: pre-1999" in various places, especially on the pages with really old and sometimes embarrassing stuff. (Embarrassing in the sense that "I didn't know what I was doing/I was too young".)

You can't do this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css1.css" title="default">
<link rel="stylesheet bar" type="text/css" href="css2.css" title="whatever">

Using title="default" makes it ignore the second stylesheet.

Drag this link to your browser's shortcut bar, or add it as a bookmark: Validate

Next time you're looking at a page and want to validate it, hit the button. Inspired by http://bfs.itlab.musc.edu/table_export/buttons.html. CSS Validator -- equivalent for CSS.

Woohoo! http://www.itlab.musc.edu/mySiteMaker/ is standards compliant -- validates with W3C's XHTML and CSS validators and seems to work with Mozilla and MSIE. It even looks the same on both of them. It breaks completely on Netscape 4.7 but works on 4.8. Sorry, but I can't do anything if N4.7 decides to obey the CSS color command and ignore the background.

Thunderstorm passed over us today. We were out on the highwya heading home, but we had a headwind and fairly heavy rain. Visibility was down to less than 20 feet with zero visibility at times, so I pulled over for a while but started again during a lull. Slowly made it back.

Coming into downtown, I thought the street outside my house would be flooded, and it was. Rammed the car through the outer edge of the flood but I was still worried about water in the engine. Made it out, drove around a bit, found several streets flooded so detoured around them, taking U-turns at times.

Came back home an hour later, the water level had dropped so rammed the car through the water. Steamed a bit but seems okay now.

I'm reading L.M. Bujold's Cetagandans, in which some of the "Cetagandans" have painted faces. A certain character is described as having the Emperor's colors of red and black on white. This is suspiciously similar to Darth Maul's face paint in Star Wars Episode I.

I'm watching Jackie Chan's Operation Condor, Armour of God II. Or something like that. It just struck me that Jackie has a great resemblence to Rajnikant. Substitute chewing gum for a cigarette, and he has a very similar stunt style. Umm. You can't appreciate this unless you've seen both Jackie and Rajni. I suppose the intersection is very small.

I am reading Clarke's Ghost from the Grand Banks .

Sometimes I get reports from people about a problem with one of my programs or scripts. When reporting problems, there are two types of information:

Negative information: what didn't happen
Positive information: what you did, what you expected, what happened

We prefer to get positive information. It's like saying "My car won't go" versus "I got in, turned the key, and it made some noise like [noise] and then nothing happened." or "The engine started, I moved into first, bumped into a wall, and it won't go any further."