my life

Diana,

Nicely done, circling back to The Last Samurai like that. Nicely done indeed. It seems almost as if you didn’t plan it, that it just sort of happened in a Zen sort of way.

I’ve never encountered an email bombing myself, but I’ve heard of them. You haven’t, say, lobbied the FCC to ban all religious programming, have you? That old chestnut gets trotted out on the ‘Net every now and then to get the fundamentalists riled up so they start emailing the FCC and their Congressional representatives and end up looking like idiots. (Snopes tells it better: http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/fcc.asp)

Double space: please explain to my son’s 5th grade teacher how proportional spacing works. She instructs the kids to double space after a period or comma in all typed papers, including word-processed ones.

And mowing the grass already. We talked about this last year, didn’t we? (Grin)

Dave

G’morning Dave.

Yeah…I’ve seen the old chestnut about religious programming before. A few times. It’s living proof that some people will always believe just anything.

Your son is typing papers in the fifth grade? That makes sense, it does, but it was still a bit of a shock to me. At what age do children learn to type these days?

I was right about the single space convention but wrong about kerning being the reason (that’ll teach me to always make sure I have more than one source before I blurt something out, won’t it?). Apparently, kerning is not applied by default and most people don’t turn it on. It’s been standard in the publishing industry for decades, apparently, and computers don’t render the double-space correctly, among other things. Wikipedia has a good bit about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_(punctuation)#Spacing_after_full_stop

I recall reading a while back that web designers won’t use a double space because they advocate not wasting any space at all.

I’m afraid this will be like trying to talk a teacher in the old days into accepting that ending a sentence with a preposition is not, in fact, grammatically incorrect in English and never has been (it’s an artificially derived rule from Latin, because someone way back when decided that English should copy classical structure). Your son’s teacher is prescribing type rules, and he will just have to suck it up, because I doubt his teacher will say, “Oh! Really? Well then…one space after sentences it is.”

d

Diana,

About fifteen years ago that FCC rumor surfaced and a friend was up in arms over it. He showed it to me trying to enlist my support in a letter-writing campaign. I pointed out that the FCC document number referenced in the story was “HR-1234″ (or something similar). FCC doesn’t use HR documents, the House of Representatives does. Besides, I don’t think FCC can unilaterally “ban” any type of programming unless it violates Federal law. A ban on religious programming would take an act of Congress. And then there’s that pesky First Amendment to contend with.

My son started getting computer instruction in third grade. He’s not really learned to “type” in the traditional sense. (For that matter, neither have I.) I don’t think the teacher enforces the two space rule, because when I had him single-space a paper she didn’t complain.

That wiki article packs a lot of information in a small space. The part about double spacing stretching inordinately in full justification is right, but they don’t quite say why.

In the old days (after type cases but before the electronic age) the typesetting machine of choice was the Linotype. It had a keyboard that would place slugs bearing each character’s image into a frame. The space was represented by a wedge that was below the line of characters, pointing up. When a line was complete the machine would push the wedges up into it, forcing the words apart by an equal amount until the line was the correct width for the page. Then the machine would squirt molten lead over the line, casting a type slug that was the entire line of text. On a sparse line the spaces could be quite wide, so a double space would be huge. I don’t know how a Linotype machine would deal with two adjacent wedges - it might not work properly.

I knew Web browsers ignore additional spaces, but I never knew why. Maybe it’s to keep the rabble from loading up a file with blanks to format a page instead of using the official HTML formatting statements.

Your remark about somebody trying to make English match Latin rules reminds me of a saying in my business: “A Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.” (Shortly after the book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche came out an article appeared titled “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal.” Linked above.)

Dave

Whee! A geek question; right up my alley…

HTML ignores whitespace for a number of reasons. Because of this, double-spaces after periods (and indeed multiple-spaces anywhere) are ignored and treated as one space. This is helpful as linewrapping in the HTML source may be done for a variety of reasons. It may be the case that the author, source editor or script generating the HTML breaks lines for whatever reason. As long as text is within the bounding tags it’s treated as one big text block, and all of the multiple-spaces are treated as one. Even tabs and line breaks inside a tag are treated as whitespace, and ultimately condensed to one space between words (or whatever).

If one wants to force multiple spaces there’s the “&nbsp” (ampersand nbsp) tag, which means “non-breaking space.” Putting a few of them in a row will insert actual spaces.

And I liked Pascal, in its day… :)

–and I have trouble with just plain english–

Thanks, Jeff. I’ve been wondering about that for years. I used to override the one space default by going back in after the html tags were in place and manually inserting them, because it just looked strange to me without them. Of course, it only looked strange on stuff I typed; as noted, professional typesetters have done this for years, so I’ve probably read, oh, dozens of books with a single space after the period which seemed perfectly natural to me.

Double standards.

d

That explains why British books still have periods and commas outside the quotation marks. Thanks for clearing that up. :)

Update on my spam problem: it just stopped. At 5:30pm, 8 Mar, it ceased abruptly. I got only three the next day. I’m back down to the trickle of junk that goes straight to my spam folder. Just like that. I don’t get it. In a little over 12 days, I got over 165,000 spams. Now…nothing. Whatupwiddat?!

Not that I want it back, you understand, but…I don’t understand. If it was personal, doesn’t my attacker still hate me? I don’t recall making nice with anyone in the last week….

d

Diana,

Maybe whoever did it got bored and moved on. It might not have been personal, just pseudo-random vandalism. Or if it was personal, your attacker may feel he’s drawn “first blood” and is satisfied that he’s made his point.

Whether you even got the point is immaterial.

Dave

Considering the diversity of the incoming email, I fail to understand how a single person could have sent it all. I do see how a single person could have precipitated it, though. It’s even more baffling to me how anyone could simply END it, though. Short of having an entire network of professional spammers at your beck and call who will remove your victim at your behest, I don’t see how it could be managed.

It has occurred to me that there may be something in each account that is designed to automatically block the vast majority of incoming spam, and that something was turned off on my account for some reason, then eventually spotted and turned back on. Dunno, though. I really don’t know enough about how these things work to even speculate intelligently. Maybe Jeff’ll pop in and tell us how to do it. :)

d

Incidentally, Dave. I keep getting an “invalid form submission” on your blog. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything I say.

d

“I also fail to understand why people would want to pay for a house of their own then buy one so close to their neighbor that they know what their neighbors have for breakfast. I just don’t get it.”

Diana, it’s because you have, like me, grown up on a continent (and in the era) where we’ve had the luxury of all that empty space. Only our biggist cities have had population densities anywhere near what urban Europeans and Asians have lived with for generations. While we still have lots of empty space, people keep moving to (bigger and bigger) cities, while still wanting things like minimal commutes. Infills may not be pretty, but they do make sense from a land-use point of view. I’ll omit my standard rant about the trend to build ever-bigger houses.

Kathy in the peanut gallery

Diana,

“Short of having an entire network of professional spammers at your beck and call who will remove your victim at your behest, I don’t see how it could be managed.”

There are a number of viruses that can infect computers all over the world and make them into just this kind of network. They sit quietly in infected computers all over the world, waiting for a message from their master system to begin an attack. They could halt an attack just as easily. The denial of service attacks that hit Yahoo and other popular sites a few years ago were from such zombies.

I don’t know if it was a zombie network that was mail bombing you, but it could have been. The technology is certainly available, and would allow a single person to turn the spam on and off very suddenly. A network of human spammers would be harder to control. Humans aren’t the most cooperative of slaves.

I’ve checked the maintenance reports at Live Journal, who hosts my blog, and they’re addressing some problems with visitor comment entry. You haven’t done anything to cause the problem. Right now the only people who can enter comments are logged-in Live Journal users. I can’t even enter something as an anonymous visitor. To my knowledge they’re not using content-triggered blocks. Or if they are, it’s pretty open.

If you click the “Friends” link at the top of my blog you can usually find the most recent report from the lj_maintenance team, which might have some clues about system status. (Although at the moment it says they’ve completed the update. That was late last night.)

Dave

Good morning, Kathy. :)

I think I understand, thanks. I’ve thought about the “we have plenty of space” angle, but not in context of everyone wanting to be close to all the amenities. Or…closer, anyway. It’s the house version of finding a parking space at the grocery store; there are about forty open and free for the taking at the back of the lot, but none up front, and people will still sit there and wait for someone to exit a space that’s closer to the door. It’s perhaps the Great American Laziness at its best.

It occurs to me that people feel safer living in clusters, too–to a degree. Plus, when they live really close together, they get the advantages of a house but don’t have to be bothered to mow a lawn, to speak of. Of course, at that point, the “advantages” of living in a house begin to look an awful lot like the “advantages” of living in a condo, which is where I get confused….

d

Diana,

The commute time that Kathy mentions is one reason I’d consider taking a house with little or no yard. Right now I drive about 35 minutes each way to and from work. That doesn’t seem bad compared to the 50 to 75 minutes I used to drive. But as I get older and busier, the time I’m spending in the car looks more and more like a waste. Especially when I have to make the trip twice in a day, like if I have a doctor’s appointment.

Being a professional computer nerd I’ve tried telecommuting but with limited success. Home isn’t the most efficient place to work, and the kind of work I do really needs an electronics lab.

Dave

P.S. Commenting seems to be working at Live Journal now. D.

Geez, So many comments on spaces. “Music is the silence beteen the notes". But ,….Hey. Do these people have troo much time on their hands?:

BTW. Be sure to email me with any new contact info.

Love Rog