crazed monkey

Please don’t feel sorry for us. Given the post-9/11 climate, a Muslim woman who chooses to wear her hijab and participate fully in society has courage. Despite prevalent negative attitudes, she is secure in the knowledge that God strengthens those who seek divine help. And isn’t a confident woman an excellent asset for our society?

I never really thought about it that way, but Sheema Khan makes an excellent point. Like many people, I have often viewed the hijab as a religious tool of male oppression. However, given Western anti-Muslim attitudes, the hijab could be seen as a display of resistance and courage. Those interested should learn more about the hijab.

Posted on December 31st, 2002 in culture - No Comments »

Mark Pilgrim: The tag soup of a new generation. Mark spouts off on something which I have been thinking about for a while now. How will people who can barely handle HTML make proper use of XML, and all the restrictions which accompany it? Many HTML document authors barely adhere to a proper element structure, let alone ensure that they make use of the proper case, use character entities where appropriate, or enclose all attributes within quotes.

And you want to move towards replacing a WWW full of HTML documents to one full of XML documents? Are you sure? Because realistically, all you’ll manage to do is replace a morass of bloated, poorly written, invalid HTML documents with a morass of bloated, poorly written, invalid XML documents.

Let us not forget element naming, which, like any other naming, is an art. I don’t trust the same people who include <div class="bold">Heading</div> or <div class="center">Title</div> in their documents, rather than use either presentation-neutral class names or the already-provided HTML logical styles, to come up with proper names for their XML elements. I can barely come up with proper element names and I actually care. Similarly, I don’t trust those who believe one requires JavaScript to submit a simple HTML form to give enough thought to their document structure.

Like Mark, I am choosing to stick to the confines of HTML for my web documents, and, given that I have been tweaking the structure of my weblog since I started it back in July, I am still having difficulty getting it just right.

Posted on December 31st, 2002 in computers, internet - No Comments »

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released the results of its What the World Thinks in 2002 survey early this month, and it contains some interesting news for Canadians, particularly in view of the recent Maclean’s 19th Annual Year-End Poll, which evoked a nice rant from me last week.

Another area in which Canadians outstrip all the other countries polled in the Pew project is in our positive feelings about immigration. When asked if the influence of immigrants is generally good or bad, a large majority of Canadians polled (77 per cent) say immigrants have a good influence on the way things are going.

Hey, that sounds like a good pat on the back! But wait, there’s more!

Canadians rank religious and ethnic hatred as the No. 1 concern (55 per cent of us say so), followed by pollution and the environment (44 per cent). Close behind, 37 per cent of us cite the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

In a country where 44% would restrict Canada’s intake of Muslim immigrants, you’re damned right religious and ethnic hatred should be a concern! Similarly, in a country where, according to a May 2002 Leger Marketing poll, 42% own or lease either a mini-van, pick-up truck or SUV, pollution and the environment had best be one of the top concerns. Now if only Canadians would practice what they preach, we might stand a chance at properly addressing these concerns.

Posted on December 30th, 2002 in politics - No Comments »

Without fanfare I upgraded my RSS feed to RSS 2.0 last week. Admittedly my simple feed was already compliant to 2.0, and all I really added was a to each item via the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, which I later removed. I have since downgraded back to RSS 0.91 as it has a DTD, which RSS 2.0 does not. I would much rather author XML which conforms to a specified DTD. Besides, I have no immediate need for the module support within RSS 2.0.

In addition to flirting with upgrading my RSS feed, I also bit the bullet and upgraded my weblog to XHTML 1.1. This was also not much of an upgrade, but I did so in preparation for XHTML 2.0. The only change I had to make was to remove the elements with the name attribute set and move the value contained therein to an id attribute. Unfortunately, this meant prefixing the numeric ID for my weblog posts with a letter, thereby breaking any bookmarks pointing to weblog entries. This is not so bad as my entries are archived by day, so the entry is not entirely lost given an old link. This change, while small, breaks my weblog in some older browsers as well as other browsers which do not honour the id attribute. This is a good change, however, as it removes empty, superfluous elements and places the navigation within the HTML elements which contain the important data.

Posted on December 30th, 2002 in meta, site - No Comments »

I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing, like an orchid heist movie or something, changing the orchids into poppies and turning it into a movie about drug running. Why can’t there be a movie simply about flowers? It’s like I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons, or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end. The book isn’t like that and life isn’t like that.

This afternoon I finally had a chance to see Adaptation. I really enjoyed Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, so I had high hopes for this movie. In brief, Adaptation met my expectations, and exceeded them in some respects, mainly due to both Nicholas Cage and Charles Kaufman.

Nicholas Cage really surprised me, although probably because I have not seen Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won an Oscar. His portrayals of the two halves of Charles Kaufman are excellent. As Charles Kaufman, Cage is believable as a man who views his weight, baldness, and insecurities as a barrier to success. As his almost opposite in mind but not in body, Cage as Donald Kaufman demonstrates that these are barriers which can be overcome. Conversely, Donald Kaufman serves as a mirror to Charles’ worries that he is a fake, a lucky one-hit wonder who will be found out.

I enjoyed Kaufman’s use of the “movie-within-a-movie” technique, with the fresh spins: including himself in the movie but splitting the character into two halves, Kaufman starting to write the script to the movie we are watching while we are halfway through that same movie, etc. Some people may feel cheated or disappointed by the ending, but I saw it as an intentional, ironic and tongue-in-cheek twist which fit in well with the change in writing style. I especially liked how Kaufman killed off the one character he chose to kill off, for reasons which I refuse to explain here for fear of spoiling the ending. Let’s just say that I thought it tied everything up quite nicely and leave it at that.

Adaptation is one of those movies which I wouldn’t mind seeing again once it comes out on video. There are several delicious lines of dialogue, one of which is quoted above, which would be a joy to hear once more. There are very few comedies which can elicit that kind of praise from me.

Posted on December 29th, 2002 in culture, movies - No Comments »