i am ready

and

i am unprepared

Миром правят идеи. Они, словно вирусы, заражают мышление. В одной из своих лекций американский философ когнитивист Дэниел Деннет сравнил идеи с паразитами: когда паразитический гриб кордицепс однобокий попадает в организм муравья, то заставляет насекомое подниматься на самую верхушку травинки и висеть на ней в ожидании нового хозяина, попутно распространяя грибные споры.

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As someone who's been completely socially isolated for close to four years, I've become adept at navigating the experiences which the rest of the world is only just beginning to explore.

If you're having trouble coping with the thoughts and feelings that accompany such a sudden transition in your life, and you would like to talk to someone who's been doing this for a really long time, you have an open invitation to reach out.

I live to serve my Brothers and Sisters of Mother Earth. #HumanTribe

I received four $25 restaurant.com gift certificates earlier this year and rediscovered that I had them today. I decided to start using them while they're still valid, as they seem to expire in two months. I found a restaurant I would like to use them at and called them to verify I could combine multiple certificates there before redeeming all four. The person on the phone said I could.

I then decided to redeem two of my four certificates for this particular restaurant (Mt. Vernon in Somerville, MA). After going through the redemption process for one, I noticed the following in the GIFT CERTIFICATES TERMS & CONDITIONS on the printed certificate:

* Limit one (1) redemption per party, per month, per restaurant.
* Limit one (1) gift certificate per redemption. Only one gift certificate can be used per party, even if the party is seated at separate tables and/or receives more than one check.

Given these two limitations, I've realized that it would be impossible to use all four of these certificates before they're scheduled to expire.

My questions for restaurant.com:

* Why am I not allowed to redeem multiple gift certificates in one month? This restriction alone will make it impossible to redeem all of my gift certificates.
* Why would restaurant.com set these limitations in place knowing that their customers would potentially throw money away with expired certificates?
* Is it possible to extend the expiration of the certificates, so I would be able to use all four?
* Why am I not allowed to combine multiple certificates on an order? Any other restaurant that offers certificates directly would let me pay for the entire bill in gift certificates. I started the redemption process expecting to be able to treat restaurant.com gift certificates just as any other restaurant gift certificate. Considering the current financial crisis, I do not have extra money to spend on dining out. I am only able to use one $25 gift certificate at a restaurant that has a minimum order of $35. That's $10 that I just don't have that I'm now stuck paying if I want to use this gift certificate.

Considering the above points, if these concerns remain unresolved, I consider the value that restaurant.com provides to be poor. In this case, it's not just "the thought that counts". I will be recommending against the purchase of restaurant.com gift certificates to anyone I know thinking of doing business with restaurant.com.

I just posted the following comment on Boston Metro's Q&A section for the MBTA's general manager Dan Grabauskas:

I recently had a heated debate with a coworker about a new interest group our employer announced this morning. I discovered that I get extremely worked up over situations like this, and I thought I would share my thoughts with others.

This morning, my employer announced a Latino-specific advocacy group, run by employees and supported by some of the higher-ups in the company. The purpose of the group is to teach others about Hispanic heritage and to aid the needy, with a focus on Hispanics and immigrants. While I feel the group itself is a good idea and that the cause of the group is just, as I assume it's run by people of Latino/Hispanic heritage, I feel that the company's decision to sponsor it is an implicit way of saying they value Hispanic/Latino heritage and people over others. My view is that by choosing to celebrate the heritage of only one racial group, the firm is also choosing to not celebrate the heritage of every other racial group. If the firm's intention is to sponsor groups like this for other racial groups in the future, or if the firm is open to similar groups for other ethnic groups, it should have stated so. Otherwise, I make the assumption that the firm values Latino/Hispanic heritage over, say, Germanic heritage, especially when part of the group's purpose is to provide financial assistance to Hispanic/Latino people/immigrants before those of other races/ethnic groups.

Is my reasoning really all that off-base? If this group existed on its own, I wouldn't have a problem with it (except for the preferential treatment toward Hispanics/Latinos by offering aid to them before anyone else). A Hispanic heritage group run by Hispanic people? Sure. That's cool. It's a community of people who share a common background getting together to celebrate their shared history and their culture. I don't have a problem with Irish American clubs, why would I have a problem with a Hispanic/Latino equivalent to them? However, just as I would feel an Irish special interest group would be inappropriate in a workplace setting, I also feel a Latino/Hispanic one is inappropriate, and sends messages of racial preference on behalf of the company. If the company wanted to celebrate racial/cultural diversity, it should have done so by supporting a multicultural group, instead of a group that gives one specific racial group representation.

And for the record, I am part Irish and part German, and I would be just as upset if it were an Irish or a German special interest group, instead.

I'm interested in others' opinions. What are your thoughts on the subject? If you disagree, why? I'd like to get others' opinions on the matter in order to compare my views with those of a larger group of people. I don't think my argument is extremist, but I've been wrong before.

My browser name sniffer, updated for Google Chrome.

The highlighted section accommodates for the structure of Google Chrome's userAgent string, otherwise Chrome would be detected as Safari:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13

var browserName = navigator.appName;

if (browserName != "Microsoft Internet Explorer" || typeof document.all == "undefined")
{
	if (browserName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer")
		browserName = "your browser"; // for user agent switching capability
	else if (browserName != "Netscape" || navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Netscape") != -1)
		browserName = navigator.appName;
	else
	{
		if ((/\([^)]*\)[^(]*\([^)]*\)[ ]([\w]+?)[\/\s][\d]+?[^;()]+?$/.test(navigator.userAgent))
		 || (/[ ]([\w]+?)[\/\s][\d\.]+?$/.test(navigator.userAgent))
		 || (/[ ]([\w]+?)[\/\s][\d]+?[^;()]+?$/.test(navigator.userAgent))
		 || (/^([\w]+)[\/\s][\d]+.+/.test(navigator.userAgent)))
			browserName = RegExp.$1;
		else
			browserName = navigator.appName;
	}
}

I've had to make the following changes in Dojo Release 1.1.1 in order to get Dojo to work in both IE and Firefox:

/dojox/data/dom.js:

Line 37:

	/* CCP: Bugfix: mimetype of "text/xml; charset=UTF-8" set by the server causes DOMParser.parseFromString to fail with the following error:
		uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED) [nsIDOMParser.parseFromString]"  nsresult: "0x80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED)"  location: "JS frame :: http://www.example.com/scripts/dojo111/dojo/dojo.js.uncompressed.js :: anonymous :: line 495"  data: no]
		
		Line 0
	*/
	if(!mimetype){ mimetype = "text/xml"; }
	else if (mimetype.indexOf(';') != -1) { mimetype = mimetype.substring(0, mimetype.indexOf(';')); }

/dojox/io/proxy/xip.js:

Line 63:

		var url = this.xipClientUrl + ""; // CCP: Bugfix: url is not a string in original version, so url.split fails.

Line 388:

	// CCP: Bugfix: iframeProxyUrl: "../xip_server.html" does not work in original version.
	//Make xip_server a full URL.
	var colonIndex = ifpServerUrl.indexOf(":");
	var slashIndex = ifpServerUrl.indexOf("/");
	if(colonIndex == -1 || slashIndex < colonIndex){
		//No colon or we are starting with a / before a colon, so we need to make a full URL.
		var loc = window.location.href;
		if(slashIndex == 0){
			//Have a full path, just need the domain.
			ifpServerUrl = loc.substring(0, loc.indexOf("/", 9)) + ifpServerUrl; //Using 9 to get past http(s)://
		}else{
			ifpServerUrl = loc.substring(0, (loc.lastIndexOf("/") + 1)) + ifpServerUrl;
		}
	}

/dojo/dojo.js.uncompressed.js:

Line 152:

		if(typeof console[tn] == "undefined"){

Line 7432:

			dfd.cancel(e);

My favorite Dojo source comment quote: "IE 6 is a steaming pile," Line 7408, dojo.js.uncompressed.js. Amen.

Kon'nichi wa. Watashi wa Kurisutofaa Paakaa desu. Hajimemashite. Doozo yoroshiku. Watashi wa Amerika-jin desu. Nihongo o manabu no desu.

Watashi no burogu desu.

Ja mata-ne.

NOTE: This code has been updated.

I recently came across a need to sniff a user's browser name with JavaScript. I could just use navigator.appName, but many browsers report Netscape even when that's not really the case (e.g.: Firefox). I've seem some rather inelegant browser name scripts out there. So, I decided to write my own:

var browserName = navigator.appName;

if (browserName != "Microsoft Internet Explorer" || typeof document.all == "undefined")
{
	if (browserName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer")
		browserName = "your browser"; // for user agent switching capability
	else if (browserName != "Netscape" || navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Netscape") != -1)
		browserName = navigator.appName;
	else
	{
		if ((/[ ]([\w]+?)[\/\s][\d\.]+?$/.test(navigator.userAgent))
		 || (/[ ]([\w]+?)[\/\s][\d]+?[^;()]+?$/.test(navigator.userAgent))
		 || (/^([\w]+)[\/\s][\d]+.+/.test(navigator.userAgent)))
			browserName = RegExp.$1;
		else
			browserName = navigator.appName;
	}
}

So far, this has worked most of the time during brief testing. One case where it didn't report the exact name is with Netscape 4.8, which is reported as Mozilla. I'm using Firefox's User Agent Switcher extension to do my testing, and the default Netscape entry that comes with User Agent Switcher is Netscape 4.8, which doesn't contain "Netscape" anywhere in navigator.userAgent.