Welcome! This is the personal blog of Ryan Ernst. For more information, see the about page. Identica/Twitter post summaries are in the sidebar. For the blog, read on...

Overheard on the CRA Phone Lines....
By rernst on 2011/04/30 - 11:55am in categories: Language, Usability

"...or, press the star key to the left of the zero"

Out of the blue, that struck me as odd. ...to the left of the...., I puzzled.

I guess that you could say the pound/hash/number sign looks like a star pattern. Might be cultural differences: I don't know for certain. A bilingual government sometimes does strange things.

For you trivia buffs: it has many different names, including...

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Building the Modern Website: Part 3 -- The Fusion of Design and Technology
By rernst on 2011/04/11 - 11:54pm in categories:

Website Anatomy 101: The Guts

Find the 'view source' function of your web browser. Hit it, and see the underlying stuff that makes this website what it is. You're looking at HTML, Javascript, and CSS. This is what makes a website a website.

The exact arrangements of elements determines how your web browser will display the page. It determines whether some text will be bold, other text will be really big...

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Trivializing Watson: Envy, Fear, and Lack of Foresight as Anti-Intellectualism
By rernst on 2011/02/17 - 8:20pm in categories: Computer Hardware, Language, Programming, Software, Technology

I was waiting at the Honda dealership the other day, and reluctantly picked up the copy of the Metro News there after having read the other papers. Several pages in, there's a column by a fellow named Paul Sullivan called A massive effort to create a giant nerd.

In true cheap-rag fashion (there's a reason this 'newspaper...

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Usage-Based Billing: Links Roundup
By rernst on 2011/02/10 - 9:12am in categories: Life, The Web

This post is a compilation of links I've been reading, with my responses.

There have been remarkably few car analogies in what I've been reading. Shocking, I know.

  • The Public is Right to Be Cynical of Internet Usage Regulators [ Globe and Mail ]

    Winning quote:

    Who are you calling a hog...

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    Internet Access: Caps, Regulation, and All that Crap
    By rernst on 2011/02/08 - 8:01pm in categories: Life, Technology, The Web

    A bandwidth-meter program I have installed on this PC tells me that in one hour I used 128MB of traffic having an ssh session open to do development on a web app, and load webpages relating to that app. That's an entire gigabyte of traffic within 8 hours. Face it: mere web traffic takes more transfer nowadays than it did in the days of yore. The 'main' page of facebook is half a megabyte of CSS, images,...

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