infundibulum

I have the Firefox DOM Inspector doohickey (which you should have too if you do any significant amount of web design), and also a plugin called “Inspect Element.”

One cool trick you can do once you have all this set up is to highlight some text, click “Inspect element” in the context menu, and then select “Computed Style” from the dropdown in the right-hand pane of the DOM Inspector. Then you can go and look at font-family and see just what fonts are specified for the text you selected.

So, here’s my question:

It must be possible to access this info from Javascript. Then, I could make a one-click bookmarklet so I could select some text and have the font-family value pop up.

That would be fly. So… anyone know how to do it?

Bueller? Bueller?

One time I was talking in one of the Linux IRC channels.

Generally I can only handle doing that for about five minutes because it seems to be an important shared goal to make people feel dumb.

*cries*

But I remember back in the day there was a weird extension to the Konqueror web browser that let you open up a shell in the bottom half of the screen, almost as though it were a web page.

And I thought that was kind of neat, because you could hack on web pages textually and see how they looked, all right in the same application. So I started thinking about, for instance, Javascript and bookmarklets and how the address bar was almost becoming a command line of sorts.

So I meekly suggested to the Linux geniuses that some day maybe the browser and the shell would merge. And in fact, the more I think about it. the more I’m convinced that this will be the case. In fact, I’ll just say how I really feel: I suspect that the distinction (as far as most users are concerned) between the operating system and the browser will just go away.

But all I said to the people in this channel was that I thought it would eventually be possible to run a shell from the browser. And they went BERZERK. They actually said stuff like “I will spend my life working to prevent it.” And I was like buh?

Well anyway, leave it to the ever-avant-garde _why to bring us one step closer: try ruby! (in your browser)

Wow, ever since I started a responsible blog, this one is free for immature whining!

Awesome!

I hate it when people put phrases like this in their blogs:

Read the whole article.

Or:

Read the whole thing.

I mean it’s like they’re saying:

Do what I tell you because I told you.

*shakes fist*

Neat: Odeo: BBC’s Documentary Archive . There are like 50-something of them.

Just started listening to this one, about my favorite tiny South American country where everyone speaks Spanish:
Odeo: Brazil: The Gentle Giant Awakes

*ducks*

Using voice chat + a VNC to develop software is an amazingly productive way to work.

I spent a few hours trying to get my head around the news coming out of France, including trying to plow my way through some articles in French.

But I think this post sums up the situation in the most balanced terms I’ve seen:

Dangereuse trilingue: The unrest here in France.

One particular idea that stood out in the French stuff I read was the claim that blogs were being used as a means of “organizing” the rioting. Here is an article to that effect:

Libération : Les blogs éclosent autour de «Clichy-sur-Jungle»

There is some pretty exotic French quoted from blogs in that article as well… I certainly couldn’t make it all out.

Now there’s a useful word:

Mojibake is a Japanese loanword which refers to the incorrect, unreadable characters shown when a piece of computer software fails to render a text correctly according to its character encoding.

Mojibake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It’s easy to spend on marketing and PR, since that just takes cash, but it’s hard to spend on software development, because that actually takes time and talent.

Joel on Software

Except, not really.

Since when does throwing cash at anything get you anywhere? I can understand the fact that programmers sometimes get frustrated by marketers. I’ve been there. But that doesn’t mean that “talent” has nothing to do with successfully promoting technology.

And I agree that Live.com doesn’t whelm even a little, and that start.com is only slightly better. Also, Netvibes is better than either.