J. King Log

//  remove lightboxen
//  See http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/ for list.
//  Script handles all as of 2008-09-06 except Prototype Window and Control Window
window.opera.addEventListener('BeforeExternalScript', function(ev)
 {if(ev.element.src.match(/((light|slim|grey|thick|lite|awesome|face|fancy|float|image|lyte|milk|moo?dal|multi|roe|shadow|smooth|swf|tiny|talci|weeb|i)box|enlargeit|fancyzoom(html)?|highslide|light(view|window)|(sub|nyro)modal|prettyphoto)([\.\-_](new|plus|[\d\.]*\d)|\+\+)?([\.\-_](uncompressed|compressed|pack))?\.js\b/i))
   ev.preventDefault();
 }, false);

Rush have for many long been the definition of Canadian rock music. In my case, though, I had not heard Rush until a couple of years ago, when my brother played 2112 for me. I was instantly blown away. From the eerie and titillating opening instrumental; to the loud, warbling priests; to the bright-eyed man's first experiments on his new-found treasure; all the way to the ominous ending, the album's title track was an amazingly bountiful feast for a science-fiction fan like myself. This, coupled with the other excellent offerings on the disc prompted me to find more Rush and embrace their excellence as if it were my patriotic duty.

Since, I have purchased many albums from the 1970s, and a few from the 1980s. Although I enjoyed Rush's 80s sound (especially on Grace Under Pressure), I preferred the 1970s segment of their body of work, perhaps in large because they had many over-long songs like the aforementioned 2112 and Xanadu from A Farewell to Kings (just to name two). Today I may have to revise my opinion.

Earlier I started listening to Hold Your Fire. Although this had not been my first time listening to it, it was my first time listening from beginning to end. I can easily say that each track on the album is at least good; many are excellent. The last two tracks, Tai Shan and (especially) High Water lift my spirits as little has been able to do these days; they alone are worth the modest purchase price of the album.

I wouldn't say that I prefer 1980s Rush necessarily, but I can safely affirm that it no longer plays second fiddle to its earlier kin. If you're someone who is not afraid of a few synthesizers, I would definitely recommend getting Hold Your Fire. You shall not be disappointed.

SVG is curious technology. In simple terms it was designed to drawn various shapes, especially useful if one aims to draw a diagram or chart. Most of the basic shapes are trivial to "draw" by hand, writing the appropriate markup in a text editor rather than using a drawing program. These same basic shapes also have fairly intuitive presentational attributes that can alter the appearance of the shape in question, all of which can be written without too much difficulty. However, there are several subtle problems which end up making hand-authoring of SVG a largely intractable option:

First of all, while drawing shapes is trivial, positioning shapes on the canvas and aligning them relative to each other is at best tedious, mostly quite difficult, and often practically impossible. Because the different kinds of shapes in SVG are drawn in different ways, it's often difficult to tell what is exactly where. Circles are drawn using a centre point and a radius; rectangles are drawn using an upper-left corner and a width and height; text is drawn using a point for the first character's baseline; other shapes are usually drawn by specifying a series of absolute points.

All these disparate drawing methods mean that it's often difficult to tell just how much space a given component of your drawing is going to take up, or even where on the canvas it happens to be! Considerable mental gymnastics are required to keep track of all the numbers required to position just a handful of elements; the mathematics required for even a vaguely complex drawing are too much for me to even imagine.

To make matters worse, aligning text is made that much more difficult when font substitution takes place, or if by some chance a user-agent sets a minimum or maximum font size, or if the drawing's font style is otherwise changed in some way. The textArea element helps somewhat in this regard, but that's just more numbers to keep track of.

At this point one might be tempted to cry out "Just use an editor!" or (if one is feeling particularly helpful but also a touch irate) "Download Inkscape and shut up, you fucking whack-job!". Aye, I would feel quite tempted to utter such phrases myself if I had no concern for the byte-for-byte size of my SVG drawings. That's a whole other can of worms, though:

I've tried a handful of vector-drawing programs, from Adobe's heavy yet featureful Ilustrator, to the clunky yet focused Inkscape, to more obscure pieces of software that merely export SVG, locking my source drawings into proprietary formats. Without exception, the drawings they produce are fat, fragile monstrosities that mix and match different requirements, hindering interoperability. Indeed, a long-standing habit of Illustrator involved defining namespace URIs as character entities, which are often not parsed by XML processors. Some ditors also thoroughly enjoy silently embedding bitmap thumbnails of the drawing itself, or references to hidden or previously removed shapes or images. An SVG drawing produced by Inkscape, even when saved as "plain" SVG, can easily be twice the size of the same drawing produced by hand.

In the end, I think SVG needs facilities for positioning shapes using more than one method for each kind of shape. It would help if I could position a rectangle using a center point; easily draw a line using a single point, a direction and a length; or plot an arbitrary point solely for the purposes of giving it an ID.

Probably, though, I'll just have to put up with fat SVGs. Either that, or I'll have to spend the rest of my life writing a gargantuanly complex post-processor to clean SVGs up. I think we can all guess which route I will take.