Angle Grinder Man!

Car Owners' Hero Dresses for the Job

LONDON, Oct. 2 — As is so often the case, the trickiest part came when he had to explain himself to his family.

"I got kind of a lukewarm response," said the masked Englishman who calls himself Angle-Grinder Man and who has been trawling London for four months dressed in a homemade superhero outfit, complete with gold lamé underpants and cape, removing the security boots from people's illegally parked cars.

"Any parent who gets a phone call from his son saying, `Oh, you might see me in the newspaper; I'm a superhero wheel clamp vigilante' — it might take them a little while to formulate their views," he said in an interview.

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Angle-Grinder Man has a website though it appears to have been /.'d.

Gender Genie

The Gender Genie purports to analyze text that you paste in and determine the gender of the author. So far it's 3-0 on my blog entries.

An open letter to "tableless" recoders

I came across this paranoidfish.org/notes/ : An open letter to "tableless" recoders thorugh diveintomark.org. CSS has been around for years but its utility has yet to be fully realized. Part of the problem is that there are no CSS compliant browsers. What? Sure, MSIE, Opera, Netscape, Safari each interpret CSS and most modern browsers get a good chunk of CSS right, but none of them fully implement the CSS standards. CSS isn't like HTML, it's specified pretty clearly (though I still get tripped up by some cascading issues). But as I've tried to design this site (or my work site), I've run into glaring inconsistencies in browsers as compared to each other or to the expected results from the CSS standards. Instead of coding JavaScript hacks or server side negotiation to run around HTML problems, you end up doing CSS "hiding" tricks or specifying alternate style sheets on a browser by browser basis.

I'm having none of that. I've written my stylesheets based on the CSS2 spec. Where I find bugs in browsers (most recently Safari) I report to the developers, but I don't intend to code around the browser bugs. Content developers, designers, etc should not have to make up for the crap that software developers put out. There is a CSS spec, there are multiple test suites, there is no legitimate reason to code alternative style sheets to get around browser inconsistencies.