Xah's Web Dev Blog

The Unfortunate Fate of Music MIDI File

MIDI is really a great tech, but unfortunately, it never picked up in computer.

MIDI is tiny in size, especially great for piano music. For example, a 5 minute piano piece is only 11k bytes.

10 years ago, i'd expect by now that on each computer we have high quality sampled sound library for MIDI, so that perhaps just a 100 mega bytes you'd have entire collection of piano music in history, recorded by professionals. Not so.

Today, on the web, MIDI isn't supported in html5 audio. 〔☛ HTML5 Audio Tag Example〕 〔☛ HTML5 Tags〕 And it won't play on Linux by default.

Here's entire collection of Bach's 〈Well Tempered Clavier〉, just 529k. Music: MIDI Collection of Bach 🎶

New JavaScript Toy: Literature Annotation Popup

new JavaScript toy. the Story of Cupid and Psyche. Hoover annotated words to see its annotation highlighted.

some selection of other stories and essays with annotation:

• To Build a Fire
• The Tale Of The Bull And The Ass
• Time Machine: Chapter I
• Politics and the English Language (George Orwell)
• Why I am Not a Christian (Bertrand Russell)

CSS Trick: Display Language Name in Code Snippet

first, look at this page: Python, Ruby, Perl: Print Version String from Script

The language name at bottom right are done with CSS. Like this:

pre.python:after
{content:"Python₂";
position:relative;
bottom:0ex;
right:1ex;
float:right;
color:gray; background-color:hsl(0,0%,95%)}

discovered vanilla-js.com, its use surpasses JQuery. Amazing.

via Craig Lennox

there are lots JavaScript libs and even alternative js langs. For example, CoffeeScript, Google's Dart, Microsoft's TypeScript. My recommendation is, don't use any of it. Master JavaScript+DOM fair and square.

few new articles from my Programing Blog

• Apache Rewrites History: Why is it Named “Apache”?
• Apache HTTP Server Tutorial
• nginx Tutorial

JavaScript App for Unicode

wrote a JavaScript app. Goto Unicode Emoticons, Faces 😸, hover your mouse over (or click if you are on tablet). Unicode name and char number will show.

also created the following pages.

• Unicode: Transport ＆ Map Symbols
• Unicode Animal/Insect Icons
• Unicode Office Icons
• Unicode Sports Games Icons
• Unicode Astronomy/Astrology Symbols
• Unicode Weather Symbols/Icons
• Unicode Music Symbols

Can CSS z-index be negative?

Can JavaScript var name contain hyphen?

I ranted about Web Design: Say No to Grey Text on White Background. And now discovered there's a site dedicated to this.

〔contrast rebellion 2013-01-22 By Zoltán Gócza, Richard Gazdik. @ contrastrebellion.com…〕

(thx to Mikay Gao)

btw, i remember reading more than one blog, by supposedly design gurus, who tell us that we should use low-contrast, because, they say, in nature nothing is in high-contrast. LOL.

this is like, Hacker Fads ＆ Fashions: Is XML Syntax the Stupid Brother of Lisp? Hey, Check Out Their Young Sister HTML5!

Unicode Icons for Food and Drink

Unicode Icons: Food, Drink

On my Microsoft Windows 7 machine, only Firefox display them well (missing just 2 characters).

All other browsers, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 9, got nothing.

I do have Unicode 6 fonts installed (Symbola, Segoe UI Symbol). Somehow these browsers are not picking it up. 〔☛ Best Unicode Fonts for Programing〕 〔☛ Unicode 6 Emoticons and Supporting Fonts〕

On Linux, default setup of Ubuntu 12.04, none of them shows up in Firefox.

What's your experience? (tell me your OS, browser, their versions, and whether you have installed special fonts yourself.)

Google AdSense Ban

Google is banning me left and right. Now, this page 〈GNAA Weev Troll Song (Kesha — TiK ToK)〉 http://xahlee.org/music/gnaa_weev_song.html , they say is violating their AdSense rules.

Here's other moral-sensitive songs. 〈Sensitive Songs Index〉 http://xahlee.org/music/music_index_sensitive.html

I started to put Google ads in 2005. Within one month, they ban'd me, probably because i say f�ck George Bush in front page. See: 〈Google AdSense Ban on XahLee.org〉 http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/tr/google_adsense_ban.html

So, since 2005 to 2011, i did not run any ads.

In 2012 July, i separated out my articles to different domains, so that all my none-controversial articles (which is about 95%) can benefit from ads.

Then, Google ban'd my xaharts.org for ads. See 〈Google AdSense Ban on Ancient Asian Goddess Sculpture Page〉 http://xahlee.info/w/Google_AdSense_ban_on_ancient_sculpture_2012-09-02.html and now is warning me about that troll song.

the moral here is, if you wanna make money, stay in line! Or, be one of those unscrupulous ad-ridden SEO site or a spammer!

Browser Stat 2012

for my site ergoemacs.org (on emacs):

• Chrome → 45%
• Firefox → 35%
• Safari → 8%
• Internet Explorer → 4%
• Opera → 1%

For xahlee.info (programing and math), Internet Explorer is higher:

• Chrome → 44%
• Firefox → 31%
• Internet Explorer → 12%
• Safari → 7%
• Opera → 2%

For non-technical sites { xahlee.org ◇ wordyenglish.com ◇ xaharts.org ◇ xahmusic.org ◇ xahsl.org ◇ … }, Internet Explorer is higher still:

• Chrome → 37%
• Firefox → 23%
• Internet Explorer → 17%
• Safari → 13%

Auto-Resize Image, Progressive JPEG, CSS Window Size Trick

There's this hurricane site with interesting tech: 〔Hurricane Sandy Bears Down on East Coast 2012-10-29 @ nation.time.com…〕

here's a few interesting things:

• They seem to be using progressive jpeg. (the photo fills area then gradually gets clearer; as opposed to loading pixels line by line)
• With JavaScript on, if you resize window, the image size changes dynamically.
• With JavaScript off, if you resize window, the right panel would disappear entirely when your window is small.

what JavaScript trick, lib, or CSS trick are used to achieve these? Can you create a simple HTML page example with these features?

Started to use Chinese micro-blog Sina Weibo. In 2 days, i already got 2 spams. This one is funny:

There are spam selling followers on Twitter, Facebook, G+. The Chinese ain't falling behind on this.

China's Sina Weibo vs Twitter GUI Fight

China's Sina Weibo's UI is much better than twitter. You can list all replies to you, or all your replies to others, list mutual follower, and list private chat that also act as INSTANT chat, and pic upload that works, faster too despite lots ads. It's somewhat more like Facebook than Twitter.

+1 for China. Thumbs down on tweeter.

According to Wikipedia, Sina Weibo has 3M users, while Twitter has 5M. Sina Weibo has 1M posts per day, while Twitter 3.4M.

My account on weibo is http://www.weibo.com/xahlee/. 求关注! 求粉丝! 😸

The Pain of Ampersand in HTML

Tip: whenever you want to write the ampersand symbol in HTML/XML, don't use &, use FULLWIDTH AMPERSAND ＆ instead. For example:

AT&t
vs
AT＆T

Here's how your browser renders it: AT&T vs AT＆T

You can set up in emacs to easily type it, or setup a key layout in any of {Windows, Mac, Linux}. See:

• Creating Keyboard Layout and Keybinding in Mac OS X
• Linux: Keyboard Layout, Keymapping, Keybinding, Tools
• Keyboard Layout ＆ Key Macro tools for Windows
• How to Create a APL or Math Symbols Keyboard Layout

See also: Semantic of Symbols: HTML Entities, Ampersand, Unicode.

If you are using Opera browser, here's 2 special config. Type them in the URL bar.

opera:gpu

opera:config

How Much You'd Make from Google AdSense

This is my estimate of how much you get from Google AdSense, based on my experience and some web research. Note that the figure could vary a lot.

From search, 1k visits ≈ $2. If from sites like Reddit, 10k ≈ $1.

Popular Pirate Video Sites in China

Here's two most popular sites in China, of pirated movies and TV shows. You'll find latest Batman etc there.

• http://www.pps.tv/ Alexa ranking 1028. Within China: 177.
• http://www.funshion.com/ Alexa ranking 1922. Within China: 293.

Apache Rewrite Problem

a very strange apache rewrite problem.

i'm moving parts of my site at 〔xahlee.org〕 to 〔wordyenglish.com〕. I have this in 〔.htaccess〕:

…
RewriteRule ^PageTwo_dir/Vocabulary_dir/(.*)$ http://wordyenglish.com/words/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^lit/(.*)$ http://wordyenglish.com/lit/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^lojban/(.*)$ http://wordyenglish.com/lojban/$1 [R=301,L]
…

everything works, except the dir starting at 〔lit/〕. The error is a 404 on the original domain.

no other lines contains “lit/”. There's no “lit” dir in the original domain now.

Turning on rewrite log:

RewriteLog "logs/xx-RewriteLog.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9

doesn't seem allowed or doesn't work with my web hosting environment. When these lines are present, browser returns a server error.

the problem occurs only with that one particular dir. Seems there's some magic with “lit/”.

Solution

the problem went away with this:

• • create a dir “lit”, create a file under it.
• • now, the redirect suddenly works.

Not sure exactly what's the problem. Other dirs that are removed didn't have this problem. Just this dir.

Also, Ansari gave this tip: “the rewrite log rules must go in httpd.conf or your vhost configuration, not in .htaccess”.

http://serverfault.com/questions/408326/apache-modrewrite-fail-on-one-directory/

RIP RSS (1999 〜 2012)

Safari 6 is released, but no more Windows version. Also, RSS reading feature is removed.

The fact that Apple removed RSS reader feature in Safari probably means that they've done market research and not many people are using it. I myself never used any RSS reader in browsers.

Popular RSS aggregate sites all went dead a year or two ago. The only one left and won't go away is Google Reader. Technorati seems still alive, though i haven't heard about it in gossips for years.

HTML5 Group Split with W3C

LOL. The WTF group split with W3C. So now there'd be 2 HTML5.

[whatwg] Administrivia: Update on the relationship between the WHATWG HTML living standard and the W3C HTML5 specification 2012-07-19 By Ian Hickson. @ lists.w3.org…

Welcome back 1999.

If i want a living standard, i can just subscribe to Vogue. I no need Google and Apple telling me what's correct thru their front group.

CSS protocol-relative URL Format

In CSS, sometime you want to do this:

/* adding a pdf icon to pdf file links */
a[href$=".pdf"] {background:url(http://example.org/img/pdf_icon-s.png) no-repeat left center;padding-left:20px}

However, if user is accessing your site using https, then the browser will warn about mixed insecure content «This Page Contains Both Secure and Non-Secure Items».

What you want, is that if user is using https, then fetch using https. You can do that with what's called protocol-relative URL, by omitting the protocol all-together, like this:

a[href$=".pdf"] {background:url(//example.org/img/pdf_icon-s.png) no-repeat left center;padding-left:20px}

See also: Google HTML/CSS Style Guide.

JavaScript: Exclamation Before function

I come across JavaScript code like this today:

!function(d,s,id){…}(…);

What does that !function mean?

Turns out, it is equivalent to this:

(function(d,s,id){…})(…);

The exclamation makes the function a expression. (it's the boolean “not” operator.) People do this hack to save one character worth of source code file size. Silly.

Microsoft Classified FSF Donation site as Gambling

There's this piece of news going around:

In summery, a Microsoft security site “Microsoft Reputation Services” classified Free Software Foundation's donation site 〔https://donate.fsf.org/〕 as in the “gambling” category. (but also {Technical Information, Shareware/Freeware})

This means, corporations using Microsoft's services will automatically block visiting such site. More about this is has been written by FSF:

• Dear Microsoft: fsf.org is not a “gambling site” 2012-06-22 By Posted John Sullivan. @ www.fsf.org…

I was curious about what Microsoft thought of my website.

my website xahlee.org is classified by Microsoft as {Pornography, Blogs/Wiki, Shareware/Freeware}. See: https://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/mrs/default.aspx. LOL. It appears, their service is quite off.

Here's a correction i submitted to their site:

hi, your service classified my site xahlee.org as Pornography, Blogs/Wiki, Shareware/Freeware. I think the porn and shareware/ware labels are quite inaccurate.

My site has 5 thousand pages. There are about maybe 10 pages that features explicit images of sex, and is accompanied by social commentary. There are about 20 pages featuring nudity or swimsuit, they are collections of a cultural phenomenon of wearing flags as underwear. And maybe 20 more pages about human sexuality. All in all, less that 100 page has anything to do with sex. Also, my site doesn't host any shareware/freeware. The rest 4 thousand nine hundred pages are about mathematics, computer programing, classical english literature, arts (gallery, some nudity), architecture (gallery), linguistics, as references, tutorials, or essays/blogs.

It's more correct to be: {Education/Reference, Blogs/Wiki, Nudity, Technical Information}.

Thanks for looking at this.

The complete list of their categories and definitions is: http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/mrs/categories/MRS_Categories.en-us.htm (local mirror)

holy cow. Wikipedia's style sheet is 63 kilobytes. They also embed image files (icons, etc) as base64 strings. Like this:

a.feedlink{background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAwAAAAMCAYAAABWdVznAAAABmJLR0QA…) …}

Popular JavaScript Books 2012

• JavaScript ＆ jQuery: The Missing Manual 2011-10-28 By David Sawyer Mcfarland. @ amazon
• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide 2011-05-10 By David Flanagan. @ amazon
• JavaScript: The Good Parts 2008-05-30 By Douglas Crockford. @ amazon
• Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming 2011-02-03 By Marijn Haverbeke. @ amazon
• Professional JavaScript for Web Developers 2012-01-18 By Nicholas C Zakas. @ amazon

Daily Mail Stealing Images

There are lots of scumbags on the web. Spammers, content farms, and Daily Mail is one of them.

If you don't have time, check out the first 2 articles:

• Daily Mail Used My Photos Without Permission and Without Payment 2012-04-07 By Michael At Gakuranman. @ gakuranman.com…
• The Daily Mail knowingly and commercially used my photos despite my denying them permission. 2011-08-16 By Alice Taylor. @ www.wonderlandblog.com…
• Daily Mail accused of lifting Flickr image [new update] 2011-04-18 By Olivier Laurent. @ www.bjp-online.com…
• Daily Mail sued for copyright infringement [update 2] 2010-12-13 By Olivier Laurent. @ www.bjp-online.com…

Buy Twitter Followers!

As i wrote a blog about spammer that sell twitter follower, another spammer commented right there peddling their selling of followers. See: Spamlicious: Buy Twitter, Facebook Followers, and YouTube Views.

If You Meet a Designer, Whack His Head

if you meet a guy who's a designer and is going over the fine points of design, whack their heads immediately and walk out.

designers in general are the type of guy that's the charlatan types. Language design, website design, architecture, even movie director (⁖ Quentin Tarantino), and verging into the general wishy-washy arts department.

⁖ Larry Wall f���head about language and English. Paul Graham about language design (arc) and “hackers”, and painters! Gazillion website design “lectures” or “guides” all over the web, whose recommendations change with weather. Then UI design hubbub hubbub. Then the writing guilds on style. The entirety of typography idiots who ado about nothing (⁖ Knuth, greatest idiot of this arena among computer scientists who fell for it). Then, art of photography, haute couture, fashion design, …. Then, at the edge of the universe, there comes the real artsy folks who lectured on music composition that doesn't contain a single note, or splash of paint as finest art, in museums all over the world.

Sure, design exists, is necessary, and there's good ones and bad ones, with some science based principles. But, more often than not, designers are just a bunch of losers who have too high a opinion of themselves. The successful ones, sell snake-oil.

Google Blogger Dynamic UI Need Your Cookies!

Google Search Now (2012-04-12) Requires JavaScript