Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in cfajohnson's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
12:41 pm	Illegal handgun wanted? I was a little disconcerted to see the following posted to a Usenet newsgroup I read regularly: Is there anybody on RAM who knows a lot about handguns? I'm here at home with a sick child, and on orders not to go out for 48 hours in case I've got it too and infect somebody before the antibiotics kick in, so I figure I'd work, but it turns out that nobody who lives with me knows the first thing about handguns. Rifles, yes. Military ordinance, yes. Handguns, no. I need something small enough to be handled successfully by a middle aged women not used to handling guns of any kind, that might be sold illegally. As soon as I saw who had posted the article, my concerns vanished and I realized the reason for the query. The newgroup in question was rec.arts.mystery (the RAM in the text), and the poster was Jane Haddam, a writer of mystery novels and frequent poster to the newsgroup. Jane has written 23 novels about retired FBI agent Gregor Demarkian. I have only read two of them (so far; I plan to get the rest), Not A Creature Was Stirring and Precious Blood. Jane's web site is http://www.janehaddam.com/. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 2nd, 2006
6:01 pm	Spotted on Usenet The Hazards of Al-gebra NEW YORK — A public school teacher was arrested today at John F.Kennedy International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction. "Al-gebra is a problem for us," Gonzales said."They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'There are 3 sides to every triangle'." When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes." White House aides told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by the president. (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
7:18 am	Just finished reading Flying Finish by Dick Francis Francis's fifth novel features amateur jockey, semi-professional pilot, and in-flight horse-transport supervisor, Henry Grey. The heir to an earldom, Grey is a cold fish until he meets Francesca at Milan's Malpensa airport. Grey uncovers two illegal operations, is nearly killed, and fulfils the book's title when he is left piloting a 4-engine airliner, having never flown larger than a 2-engine plane before. There is less racing in this book than in any of Francis's previous ones, and much less than either of those where the hero is a jockey. The book ranks around the middle of the Dick Francis collection, its biggest flaw being the threads left hanging at the end. (Comment on this)
Monday, August 21st, 2006
7:14 pm	Holding my 2-month-old grandson, Jacob Daniel Johnson. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006
12:14 pm	Just finished reading: Odds Against, by Dick Francis Odds Against (1965) is Dick Francis's fourth novel, and the first of three to feature Sid Halley, champion steeplechase jockey turned investigator. (The others are Whip Hand (1979), and Come to Grief (1995).) It is Francis's first novel in which the protagonist is a professional investigator, although Sid is only just warming to the job. Forced to give up steeplechasing after a racing accident left him with a mangled and useless left hand, Halley was invited to join Hunt Radnor Associates, a private investigation firm with a special interest in racing matters. "Jobs are quite often given in that way to top jockeys when they retire. No one expects them to do much, it's just their name that's useful for a while. When their news value has gone, they get the sack." For two years, he did little or nothing at the agency -- except that, without realizing it, he learned the trade. On the first page, Halley wakes up in a private room in a hospital ("for which I got a whacking great bill a few days later"), having been shot in the abdomen in a trap-gone-wrong. After leaving hosptial, he convalesces at his father-in-law's house, where he is inveigled into trying to save a racecourse from being taken over and sold to developers. It becomes clear that the run of bad luck at Seabury is not accidental, and Halley works to prevent further sabotage, and keep the racecourse solvent. The book is about Halley's awakening from two years of apathy and finding that he is "someone who's been to the top of one profession and has the time in years to get to the top of another." He finds an enthusiasm for the work, loses what's left of his left hand, and ends up in hospital again. Although there is a murder near the beginning of the book, this isn't a 'whodunit'. The petty crook who shot Halley is found shot to death. Halley supplies the evidence to have the murderer charged, but only because the investigation during which he was shot was linked to the attempted takeover of the Seabury Racecourse. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
5:16 pm	People never read the fine print! Let's face it, people don't like to read small print. That's why they have to be told to read it before signing a document. That's why it's in small print in the first place. So why do so many web sites use small fonts for their main text? If the surfer doesn't like small type (or can't read it), you've just lost a reader. How about surfers who do like small type? Presumably, their browsers are adjusted accordingly, and the type on your page is now too small for comfortable reading. You've just lost more readers. What about that growing segment of the population, the elderly (and even not-so-elderly) whose vision is not what it was? What about those with old, small, poor quality, badly adjusted, or dying monitors? So why do they do it? Because the designer likes it? Your site should be designed for its viewers, not its designer. Get a new designer! In order to encourage viewers to use a text browser? Hardly a good idea after investing a lot of time or money in graphics for the site. A browser's default size is intended for normal reading, and users set their browsers so that their defaults are comfortable. Make them uncomfortable, and you lose them. If I really want to read a site with small type, I can, by changing the browser's font size or my screen resolution (an annoyance; few sites are worth the effort) or by using Lynx (a very useful, fast text browser; you lose the graphics, but that's can be a bonus. Unfortunately, some sites do not display well in Lynx). (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006
6:50 am	Broken by Design Can anyone tell me why a web designer would add styling rules that don't affect the look of a page when viewed at what is perceived to be the most common window size, but that break the page when it is viewed in a larger, higher resolution window with larger font-sizes? More than a third of my browser window is taken up with ... nothing! One of the great features of HTML (and the browsers that render it) is its adaptability. View it with a browser, whether it be Lynx, Links, Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, Safari, Opera, or even Internet Explorer, and the lines adjust themselves to your browser's window. (My comments apply to visual media, and, from here on, specifically to graphical Web browsers.) Change the size of the window, and the lines reformat themselves to fit the new size. Expand the window or contract it, and, within reason, the page will adjust itself to fit. Zoom in on the text, or specify a different default size for text in your browser — all is automatically and appropriately adjusted. For me, this is great. My monitor is set at a higher resolution than most (1280 x 960 pixels), so I need a larger font size. I sit further back from the monitor than most people do, so I want the text even larger. I need new glasses, so a little larger still, please. That's my default setting. At the end of a long day, when my eyes are tired or itching from allergies, I crank the size up even more. Unlike other file formats, such as PDF, HTML documents will fill the screen (with ample margins, if the design is good), but not exceed its width. If I zoom in a PDF document, to make the text large enough to read, the lines are often too wide for my screen. That's why I love HTML; it works no matter what my preferences are! So why, in Sir TB-L's name, do I see so many pages on the World-Wide Web looking like this: Click on image for full-size view How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways! First, let me say that I'm really not picking on the BBC site; there are many, many worse pages on the Web. This one just happened to be in front of me when I was formulating this article in my mind, and it turned out to be a good example, not only of the problems, but also of how easy it is to fix them. The first problem with the page is the big empty space down the right-hand side. More than a third of my browser window is taken up with ... nothing! If left to its own devices, HTML will fill the width of the page. Here, everything has been forced into an 800-pixel-wide column. Not only does it look amateurish in my browser, it will be too wide for those with very low resolution screens or small browser windows. Only the graduated bar across the top escaped the so-called designer's notice and behaves as it should. The links across the top should be in a single line. Here, at least, they wrap gracefully. On many pages, they would be half obscured because their height would be immutable at the minuscule default size. Finally, the text in the left-hand column overflows its bounds and overwrites some of the body of the article. This is one of the most common problems with badly written stylesheets, and on many pages (on other sites, not the Beeb's), entire blocks of text are superimposed over each other. That actually wasn't so bad was it? What bugs me the most is that all of it is so unnecessary. It takes more work to screw up the page than it does to make it work properly. What did the page contain that messed it up? To find out, I turned off the stylesheet, to let my browser to render the HTML by itself. Click on image for full-size view The same page with stylesheets turned off! Leave Off the Agony in Stylesheets Well, look at that! Without the stylesheet, the problems have all gone away. The layout is done with tables, which, though deprecated for that purpose, are still the simplest way to create a fluid three-column layout. By applying a few styles to this page, you could have a good looking page in no time. That's a bit of an exaggeration, considering that the stylesheets for the page are longer than the HTML file. I don't know how much of it is necessary. I downloaded the HTML file and the style sheets and set to work. I spent about 15 minutes going through the 700+ lines in the stylesheets, and came up with this: Click on image for full-size view Why, why, why, oh styler? This version needs some tweaking, but it is almost certainly much closer to what the designer intended. It will work with any window size (though if the window is very small there could be problems). What's the difference between this version and the original? The only changes I made were to remove fixed-width specifications. Where they were on their own lines, I commented them out. For example: /* width:131px;*/ /* width:424px; */ /* width:136px; */ /* width:760px; */ /* width:625px; */ /* width:760px; */ When the rule was on the same line as other style specifications, I deleted it: .f{margin-left:131px;width:629px;margin-bottom:10px;font-size:13px;} became .f{margin-left:131px;margin-bottom:10px;font-size:13px;} There are other changes I would make if it were my page, but that's all it took to fix the problems. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 6th, 2006
2:14 pm	Books recently read Pepita by Vita Sackville-West I have no idea how long it has been sitting on the bookshelf. I don't know how it got there: Did I pick it out of a box of give-aways on a garden wall? Did it arrive with my daughter when she moved in? 25 cents in a yard sale? However it arrived, wherever it came from, I pulled it off the shelf a few days ago and started reading. I skipped by the Contents and the List of Principal Characters, and dove into PART I Pepita 1830-1872 While I had heard of the author, I had never read anything of hers before, and had no idea of what the book was about. I started reading it in bed, and put it down quite soon afterwards. The first chapter didn't register; at least, I didn't remember what was in its second part when I picked up the book again a couple of days later. (I had read another book in the meantime — The Cat Who Tailed a Thief, by Lilian Jackson Braun) I was still expecting a novel. It didn't take long before it became obvious that it wasn't, but who was Pepita? It wasn't until part four of Chapter III, when Pepita's liaison with the young English diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West was revealed, that it started to click. A quick flip back to the list of principal characters showed me: LIONEL SACKVILLE-WEST, ... Referred to as "my grandfather." VICTORIA JOSEFA, eldest daughter of Pepita and Lionel Sackville-West, ... Referred to as "my mother." .. another LIONEL SACKVILLE-WEST, ... Referred to as "my father" The book is described on encyclopedia.com as "her charming fictional portrait of her grandmother, Pepita", even though, in the first chapter (which I went back and re-read when I started writing this review), the author states that "nothing in the following pages is either invented or even embellished." The book is, in fact, two portraits, the first being of the author's grandmother, Pepita, the second of her mother, Pepita's daughter, Victoria. Of the two, I preferred the second. The character is more vividly drawn. In the first part, most of the material is drawn from depositions acquired by LS-W's solicitors in Spain, where they interviewed everyone they could find who knew Pepita, her family and their acquaintances. I wondered about all this "testimony", as many quotations were identified as such. Was it leading to a climactic trial later in the book? The trial did materialize, but it was far from climactic, and therefore a bit of a let down. Not that Sackville-West is to blame: it was explained in the first chapter, which I read as I was falling asleep. PART II Pepita's Daughter 1862-1936 Whether Pepita's daughter (also called Pepita, but used the name Victoria after going to England) was really that much more of a character than her mother, or whether she comes across that way because of the author's proximity to her, both personally and temporally, I cannot tell. Perhaps her sudden blossoming helped. After spending several years, from age 11 to 18, in a convent in France, Victoria was sent to England, expecting to get a position as a governess. However, she was packed off to Washington, D.C., where her father had been apppointed Ambassador. An illegitimate daughter, speaking little English, she was thrust into the rôle of hostess at the embassy, a position of social eminence. She was inundated with proposals of marriage, the first coming from President Chester A. Arthur, a widower. When her father inherited title and estate from his brother, Pepita's daughter became the mistress of the family home, Knole House. Knole House (365 rooms) She married her cousin, who inherited when her father died. Unfortunately, the book tails off rather weakly, and Chapter VI, The Last Years, skips through time without it being noted; dates are scarce, and Lady Sackville became old before I realized it. A fascinating book, but not altogther satisfying, it is worth reading for the characters and the depiction of lifestyles. Review in Time, December, 1937 Victoria, Lady Sackville Pepita at Amazon.com. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 22nd, 2006
7:30 pm	My First Computer My First Computer I bought my first programmable computer in June of 1983. It was a second-hand pocket computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 PC-1 (manufactured by Sharp and also sold by them as the PC-1211). The first programmable pocket computer, it sported a single line, 24-character LCD display, a qwerty keyboard, and a stripped down BASIC interpreter. On this machine, with only 1.5KB of memory, I learnt to write computer programs. Despite the limited amount of memory, I wrote some useful code, including a program for producing crossword puzzle grids on the Compugraphic MCS typesetter I used at work. The PC-1 produced the codes; I had to type them into the typesetter. Before long, I found myself wanting a more capable computer: the BASIC language on the PC-1 was very limited, especially in string manipulation, and the display was adequate only for the simplest output. Multi-line output was only possible by pausing the ouput after each (short) line and waiting for the user to press a key. By September of that year, I had made the move to a desktop machine with a colour monitor. See the next instalment, coming soon.... (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
2:09 pm	I hope this journal will encourage me to write more. I expect to cover the gamut of my interests, from computer programs to chess to cryptic crosswords. The entries here may be the seeds of longer works for my web page or other publications.