I don’t agree with SOPA and would be shocked if it actually passed, considering Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, and everyone else is blacking out their sites in protest. I made the foreboding-yet-snazzy banner above for my own site. If Congress muscles this bad bill through, then they have completely lost touch with us. It’ll be interesting to see who votes for this in Congress in the end. I recommend making a list…

Learn more about why SOPA/PIPA is bad, and then contact your Congress reps.

As of today, I’ve been blogging at SanBeiJi.com for eight years. Happy birthday, blog!

The original blog was a hand-rolled PHP/MySQL app, before Michael insisted that I upgrade to WordPress. It was actually a fun little SQL mapping exercise to get my old posts integrated into WordPress’ format, and I’m amazed it worked as well as it did, all things considered.

If you’re wondering what San Bei Ji means, there’s a fine article about it on Wikipedia.

三杯雞好吃!

Alton Thompson has a post on Typhoon Morakot disaster relief information. I highly recommend anyone looking for information on how to help to check out this post.

Typhoon Morakot has really hammered Taiwan and at least one entire village appears to have been completely submerged in mud. Apparently the response has been slow so far.

I experienced low-grade Typhoon Kalmaegi last summer in Taiwan and it was an awesome sight – here’s a photo (best viewed large to get an idea of how much water is coming down). Whole fields and neighborhoods were flooded and people were using boats to get around, rivers were swollen beyond their banks, and there were cars stuck in water everywhere. I rode the high speed rail during the tail end of the storm and got a good look of everything from Kaohsiung to Taoyuan, and it looked like the flooding was nearly complete for the entire distance of the trip! For this past typhoon, it was the most precipitation they had in 50 years, and parts of Taiwan received an entire year’s worth of rainfall in two days. It rains a lot in Taiwan already, so imagine all the rain in a semi-tropical Pacific island location just dumping over the course of 48 hours. It’s hard to imagine how much worse this one was compared to the little sprinkle I experienced last year. Might as well put the place underneath a waterfall. I hope the affected areas can recover quickly…

Good friend Matt has started a blog for his poetry, called Quarkonium, and it is an instant hit. WordPress.com has it listed as the featured blog tagged with “poetry.” Congrats to Matt for getting this off the ground finally!

There was a time when I would enthusiastically write poetry, but that has been beaten out of me over the years. I still like to read though. Bukowski is probably my favorite.

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

– William Butler Yeats

I had to change web hosts. The old one was down way too often. Unfortunately, this one seems to be not without their own set of issues. Still trying to find out why Unicode characters didn’t import right into the database and why .htaccess configurations continue to fail. Hmmm…

Oh and for some reason the old theme doesn’t like the new server. It was time to go anyway. Thanks for all the fish! I’ll figure something out as we go along.

Check out this headline:

China says it opposes threatening Iran with war

Now check this out:

China renews Taiwan threat of war

Or this:

China Threatens War Escalation Over Bush Handshake

Or this:

China Threatens War With Taiwan by 2008

Maybe if China backs off on saber-rattling Taiwan then we can talk about your Iran concerns…

UPDATE: It never ends… China warns U.N. Taiwan independence moves “gravely endangering” peace

Applying CSS to an XML file is easy, well supported in modern browsers, and can be quite handy at times. For instance, slap some lipstick on that RSS feed. Sick of the tag soup of HTML-land? Make the switch to pure XML web pages with xml-stylesheet!

And now a quick tip for simplifying your venture into xml-stylesheet for TextMate users…

You can create a Bundle Item in TextMate that works just like the CSS Drag Command. Here’s what to do:

1. In TextMate, choose Bundles > Bundle Editor > Show Bundle Editor.
2. Click on the “plus” button at the bottom right of the Bundle Editor window and choose New Drag Command…
3. Name it something like Insert xml-stylesheet.
4. Enter css in the File Types field.
5. Now for the money shot – in the Commands textarea, enter the following code:

   echo "< ?xml-stylesheet type=\"text/css\"
   href=\"$TM_DROPPED_FILE\" media=\"screen\"
   title=\"no title\" charset=\"utf-8\"$TM_XHTML ?>"

6. In the Scope Selector field, enter text.xml
7. Close the Bundle Editor and choose Bundles > Bundle Editor > Reload Bundles

Now you may simply drag your CSS file from the TextMate file drawer into your XML document and a link to the CSS file will be generated by xml-stylesheet. Fill out the rest of the properties as needed.

As you can see, the prototype for linking a CSS file in XML is strikingly similar to regular HTML. It accepts the same properties. Type and href are required, the rest are optional.

One pitfall in XML CSS: Many browsers do not grok .foo syntax in your css file. Instead you may use *[class="foo"]. Be sure to declare your IDs in your DOCTYPE, such as:

< !ELEMENT foobar (#PCDATA)>
< !ATTLIST foobar id ID #REQUIRED>