Chipping the web: December 2nd
December 3rd, 2008 6:00:07 am pst by 
Sterling Camden
- Nifty Rounded Edges Using Only CSS | Blog Oh Blog
I haven't figured out how this works yet, but it's pretty cool.
Thanks, Paul.
Tags: css rounded corners tutorials howto webdev - Doc Searls Weblog · Bailing on the bailout
I wish more people understood this.
Tags: bailout economy docsearls actionbias - What kind of weapon is a programming language?
VB => pea shooter (or maybe, "pee" shooter).
Synergy/DE => compound bow. Update of an ancient antecedent, but more accurate and effective.
Tags: programming humor languages
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“I haven’t figured out how this works yet…”
It’s only an optical illusion. He just indents a shorter line top and bottom (by 1 px). Your brain interprets this tiny staggered corner as being ’round’
Ah yes… so to achieve a larger rounding would require significantly more nested elements. Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if CSS supported some sort of corner-style attribute?
I once built a menu that way using HTML tables (back before CSS was the new black) — except that the radius of my rounded corners was something like eight pixels or so (I don’t remember exactly). I just wanted rounded corners without the extra download overhead of images. The next step would have been to write some server-side code that created rounded corners based on a radius size argument, but I never got around to doing that before CSS came on the scene and I weaned myself off tables.
I could have sworn I clicked the “Reply to this comment” above — but I guess not, since the comment didn’t end up nested. Oh, well.
re: the bailout
For some reason, Doc Searls was held up as a voice of reason when he supported the bailout — and he will be held up as such again, now that he opposes it, retroactively, when it’s too damned late to do anything about it.
Meanwhile, people who were against it from the very beginning tended to get treated like pariahs, and idiot observers in Europe used this crap as some kind of litmus test for whether the US was willing to do the right thing, pontificating on things they didn’t even begin to understand about the US economy. Now that we (who pointed out the absurdity of the bailout in the first place) are in a position to say “I told you so,” politeness tells us we shouldn’t say anything at all, and the same schmucks who made short-sighted, ignorant, snap-judgment statements about how we needed to do something get all the glory when they have the “maturity” to admit their mistakes (i.e., try to collect some positive spin while ignoring the fact that not long ago they were calling people who stood against the bailout in the first place idiots).
Argh.
*sigh*
Yes, I agree. You may recall that I also opposed the bailout from the start. We should have let this fever run its course instead of prolonging the illness with medication. Now the latest news I hear is that the government isn’t even following up on how this money is being used. It’s like the worst of both worlds: rob the people to provide state funding for the banks, then cry “laissez faire” about how they spend the money.
Yes, I do recall your position on the matter.
Just as Microsoft can’t really be blamed for its failure to “secure” its revenue streams via DRM (as I pointed out in No such thing as effective license enforcement), the gub’mint can’t really be blamed for failing to effectively oversee massive expenditures like this, spread out across a wide swath of corporations. The problem is not in the lack of effective enforcement (in the DRM case) or lack of effective oversight (in the bailout case), but in the bizarre faith people have that they can control complex systems like the economy.
That’s really what’s wrong with them both; each, in its own way, is trying to control the economy. News flash: major economies are beyond such simple control. There’s just no reasonable way to expect to account for all the many variables involved. Luckily, economies (like ecologies) seek equilibrium, and all you have to do from a managerial perspective is get the hell out of the way. Unluckily, people don’t tend to believe that simple fact.
. . . and that leads us back to Searls’ point about how the impulse to run around screaming “Somebody do something!” is usually dead wrong. His willingness to do so was dead wrong, as was that of a heck of a lot of elected and appointed officials when it came time to pass the bailout.
As Heinlein put it:
It’s not a good plan, but it’s the plan most people use. That makes it an Industry Standard — right?
An Industry Standard, just like the security models in Microsoft Windows and Symantec AntiVirus:
“Oh, we’re doing something! Look at how much we’re doing! We must be doing a lot if we eat up so much CPU time and pop up warning messages every day!”
Similarly, I think half the laws that get passed by legislators are penned in the first place only because they figure they won’t get reelected if they don’t pass more laws. It’s like the whole lines of code metric of productivity: the more lines of legislation they write that get passed into law, the more work they’re doing for their constituents.
Dijkstra was closer to being on the right course, with his statement that — if we’re going to measure lines of code — we should measure them not as lines produced, by lines spent. That goes double for legislation.
s/by lines/but lines/
oops
Amen. In the recent election, the opponents of Dave Reichert’s re-election for congress accused him of inaction because he “didn’t pass any measures”. I supported neither him nor his opponent, but I found the accusation specious. Perhaps he prevented some bad legislation, which is better than passing “good” laws any day.
[...] evening, I commented on a Chip’s Quips entry, titled Chipping the web: December 2nd. Yeah, not very descriptive. At any rate, discussion had reached the point where Chip (aka [...]