I have a small tirade that I have used at least one time in the past. It is my goal to use it here to make a point with a nice sharp blade. You see, I’ve been working with computer software over the past two weeks and I’ve come across the shortcomings of the technology that I am using. My own shortcomings are bad enough.

Do you think that Satan is actually going to face you? He is going to stand beside you in a dark room and whisper bad ideas into your ear. He’s going to make them sound good, but he is not going to take credit for them. When you turn your head, you will be alone as far as your mortal eyes can see. Satan knows how far you will ride a bad idea when you are convinced both of its glory and that it is your stroke of genius.

What I am getting at is the ideas that drive technology. Some things look good on a drawing board; however, they need more than just a second look in practice. There comes a time when it is better to drop an idea than to keep trying to make it work. Not all ideas will ever be useful and some will be detrimental.

To edit some html code, I loaded it into a web browser and set the result as editable. So far so good. This is not unlike the technology used behind the scenes at Secrets of the Universe. The ability to enter formatted text into Internet forms is appealing. We no longer live in a plain text world.

Unfortunately, the browser saw some tags in the code that it did not like the look of. The last time that I read the standard, a web browser is to ignore any tag in a web page that it does not understand. That wasn’t good enough for my modern browser. My browser was going to fix the problem. It was going to fix a problem that it could not begin to understand.

The end result was html so badly deformed that the page showed up blank. My browser did not have a clue what it was doing. Even the code that I entered into the page was reformatted by the browser. Incidentally, I seem to remember XML not allowing tags to be capitalized and my browser decided that all the tags had to be capitalized. You cannot imagine how many hours I have wasted trying to work around ideas that looked good on paper.

Blame is not going to get us anywhere. Unpaid hours drive down the value of my paid hours. If I can accomplish anything as a stand up philosopher, then I would like it to be spreading a little uncommon sense around the world that we all share. Please, listen to what the people around you are saying. On the Internet, it is hard to keep us quiet.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under Eightballs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.