Have a question for dochawk? See answers at askdochawk!

050431: 10 second sunglasses

A few months ago I wrote about the two day television. I've topped it now.

I get headaches easily in the sun. I need polarized lenses, which used to be quite common. These days, I glance at any rack I find, and buy cheap polarized glasses if they're there—whether I currently need any or not. I don't buy the expensive kind; they only last until I lose them, sit on them, or otherwise mistreat them. So as long as I have less than a dozen stashed away, I buy when I find them.

Quality has been going down over the years, and these days I usually end up picking them up as fishing glasses in sporting goods (the polarization lets you see 40% farther into the water).

So up I reached into the console, and wrestled tehm out of the bag. Out they came, plastic loop with store tag and all.

I tugged on the tag. The frames betn.

Hmm, not the best sign. So, ignoring my motto that "If duct tape and force aren't solving your problem, you're not using enough," I took out my pocket knife to cut it off.

Even that was too much—one of the nose supports came off with it.

*sigh*

050429: John Lott on affirmative action and police

I have come across a columnt that will likely be of interest to those who appreciate the style and content of this site. I recognize John Lott's name for assorted works that he has written about gun control—particularly the overlooked defensive use of guns and their impact on crime. In his new piece, he comments on affirmative action, particularly for females, and police safety. That in itself isn't novel; arguments that lowered strength requirements for military, fire, and police endangers us all are quite common. What I find interesting is that he actuallly looks at the data, all to rare in today's world. On top of that, he notes the effect upon which males are hired—due to increased competition, the "the average strength and size of men admitted actually rises, partly offsetting the weaker strength of the newer female officers." Would that more writers admit to facts that offset their arguments. The article is at http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.22201/pub_detail.asp.

050302: IE 6 Rendering bug solved (no more hidden text!)

It's official. The problem with Internet Explorer 6 is fixed.

It came down to adding a buch of "clear:right" and the like to the float statements that create the page. There was also a missing end to the header section in a php bug that I would have thought would have stopped rendering entirely, rather that beging a bug in the finished page.

050223: Questions can now be submitted by web; still rss glitches

The "askdochawk" page has been updated to use the mane rendering engine.

While I was at it, I changed it from email to a direct submission system. You can simply type in your name, email, and a question or comment, and it will automatically be sent to me.

The page still needs some tweaking--the question entry box overlaps the picture at common page settings. This is separate from Internet Explorer's flouting of the standards.

There still seem to be a couple of glitches with the rss feeds. www.bloglines.com, for example, no longer displays an error message, but it is still pulling old entries out of the ether. They haven't responded to my email. I've put a bunch of dummy entries into the feed to try to flush this out.

Hopefully, the new column on positive and normative economics posts in a couple of hours, and the final column about the FairTax Plan at the end of the week.

I'll also be commenting soon on press coverage on the law, focusing on the atrocious reports from yesterday's ruling on the appeals court hearing on the copy flag for digital broadcast television.

050217: The rss feeds and registration work this time--really! Static feeds, too.

I seem to have been premature in announcing that the rss feeds and registration now worked. After some more tinkering, this time they really do.

Not only that, but the rss feeds all validate properly. To generate them from the same data as the pages, I had to do some translation—particularly from the html mdash to a couple of hyphens. This is because the xml used by .rss files does not use all of the same tokens as .html. (It also seems that I outsmarted myself in the translations back and forth between my database editing pages and the database, as I didn't leave any way for '&mda sh;' to ever appear without misspelling it as in this sentence.

The feeds are also now static rather then php—they get produced when I update either the columns or the blog. The left column probably gets similar treatment next, and after that I could conceivably turn the content pages static—except for the upper right, which appears differently for those who have logged in. As near as I can tell, I can't have any conditional code there without using php. Hmm, not just the upper right—loggied in users see a comment entry box at the bottom of the columns.

050212: Registration and comments enabled, site almost entirely run from database

I never ment to learn this much html or mysql . . .

But I've done it. I think that the entire site is now driven by the data base, and most of the pages are rendered by a single program. Over the next few days, most of the rest will be slurped in, and most of the behind the scene scripts will run out of a single file.

It is now possible to register and post comments on the columns. They will be limited to 1,000 characters— but they're comments, not treatises.

The ask dochawk section should become form driven within the next week or so, rather than the current email approach.

050209: Recent changes, mostly invisible

There have been several changes over the last week, but they're probably not visible to most users.

The columns are now rendered from a database, rather than individual files, The registration and login code now functions, though I haven't made them visible yet. Comments should be enabled within the next couple of days—something that does requrie the database to be functioning.

I'm still fighting the problem with rendering in IE. The best solution, of course, is to only use IE for the handful of broken sites that require it, but I won't harp on that. I'm trying to get the page to render properly under "strict" html 4.01.

050205: Improvements on html, parentheses, nonconforming browsers

I've learned a bit more about html, thanks to one of my mailing lists (which covers just about everything but a specific topic, but one of the joys of the internet is that we can come up with these random international associations, in which someone whose politics are radically different than mine is happily advising me about this website with heavily political overtones—and we remain friends despite our political differences [as the world should work {and as I thank my early educators for teaching me about nested parentheticals}]).

In any event, I'm hoping that today's adventures in html and css have left this site more legible to those reading it with Internet Explorer (though, again, I'll urge you to consider other browsers. This is anything but an anti-Microsoft agenda: just consider the alternatives that are available to you).

I'm writing this before settling down to write "Adventures in Cheddar I," which will almost certainly file under "whimsical," and is intended for Tuesday's column. I'm a long time beer-brewer, a prize-winning one at that, and I've ventured into coffee, wine, and cheese. So little time, so many things to learn . . .

I'm hoping to have comments activated within a week or so. Initially, they'll probably simply appear after the end of my column. I expect to limit them to 1,000 or so characters. As I figure out more html and mysql, they will require a login, but responses to comments will also appear directly underneath them.

050204: Initial blog entry; rss feed available; IE bug prevents proper display

While this site certainly has much in common with the blogs, it isn't really a blog. Instead, it's a series of op-ed columns, which may or may not be appearing soon in a print newspaper near you.

Nonetheless, I'm attaching a blog to it.

I was asked earlier this week about rss and atom feeds. I had no idea what they are, but I've figured out simple rss, and you can now include the rss feed in your favorite rss program or your blog.

More email informed me that there is a problem rendering the site in Internet Explorer 6. Unfortunately, this isn't a problem with the site, but rather in IE. My picture, the ad, and the other box in the mail column are "floats." Explorer renders floats in a way that flatly defies the standards. Every solution that I've found so far that would make it appear correctly in IE would break it in every other browser (because they render according to the standards), or require rewriting for every single column (currently they're placed by my template). As a sidenote, the pages that did write bad html to "optimize" for IE 5 got broken when IE 6 chose a different way to flout the standards.

The real solution, of course, is to switch to almost any other browser. I use Mozilla, while it's variant Firefox is now up to about 10% market share. Both can be downloaded for most operating systems at http://www.mozilla.org>. Other possibilities include Netscape, which is now based on Mozilla, and opera. All of these may be downloaded without cost, all have significantly less security problems than IE, and all conform far more closely to standards than IE.

Dr. Hawkins is a statistician, antitrust attorney, and Assistant Professor of Economics at the Pennsylvania State University.

Cite or link to this page as http://dochawk.org/blog,