Monthly Archives: February 2005

The Three Great Virtues

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“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.”
- Larry Wall, Programming Perl

Laziness

The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.

Impatience

The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.

Hubris

Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.

Time for another town crier moment.

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Internet Explorer is a festering pile of tainted cheese.

I decide over the weekend that I'll redesign my site, which is something that I've put off for a while. Two days later, everything works perfectly.

Unless you use a crappy browser.

I'll admit, I <em>might</em> suck at design and stuff, but I'm bloody awesome at coding. I took extra time and energy to ensure that everything is valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS (except for one tiny, tiny thing). This is good code, following all the web standards put in place by the W3C. In theory, it should display exactly the same on all CSS enabled browsers and it should give structured content to text-based browsers.

Except that Internet Explorer gives web standards the finger and vomits all over the site. First it messes up on <strong>any</strong> PNG you have. The colours are always darker than they should be. When I say #0000FF, <em>I mean I want #0000FF!!</em>. IE is the only browser that sucks at this. The other PNG problem is transparencies. I don't know what the programmers were smorking, but it must have been pretty bloody strong for them to have ignored transparencies, which is a reason why people are replacing <em>GIFs with PNGs!</em>

As if that weren't bad enough, it seems as though IE has a different definition of what a "pixel" is. Every time I try to do <em>anything</em> with the submenu to make it look good, IE just <em>can't seem to get it</em>. I try margins. Messed up. I try absolute positioning. Messed up. I try something cool with backgrounds. IT'S BLOODY MESSED UP.

So once again, IE has infuriated me to no end. And once again, I call upon my readers' support to stop using it.

In conclusion: <h1>When you open Internet Explorer, you're opening <strong>COMMUNISM</strong>.</h1>

PUAHAHAHA.

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Now my site has <strong>MULTIPLE STYLESHEETS</strong>.
If you have a non-crappy browser, you can select the stylesheet.
If you have the crappy browser, fear not, I downloaded a script and it's in the submenu there if you wish.