I'm reading a technical manual right now (php|architect's Zend PHP 5 Certification Guide), and am getting quite annoyed by the author. Aside from the mistakes he makes regularly (the word errata never occurs in the manual—I checked the PDF version), he also uses some odd words, such as octothorpe:
By convention, the forward slash is used for this purpose—although, for example, another character like the octothorpe is sometimes used when dealing with pathnames or URLs.
(This quote is in reference to the delimiters around a regular expression).
No explanation comes along with this odd word. I had to look it up. Turns out an octothorpe is a #. The author could have tucked that gem in next to the word like this:
another character like the octothorpe (#) is sometimes…
without changing his page count, and it would have made him seem a bit less pretentious.
My advice? If you use an odd word like octothorpe, let people know what you're talking about. Especially when there seems to be a lot of different ideas about the etymology of the word (and even its spelling) in the first place.
Well, I finished working on the trouble parts of my new Invader Zim sound page, all searches and requests are processed via AJAX and returned JSON-encoded. I believe I have the Internet's only AJAX Invader Zim sound page. Probably not much of a claim to fame, but it's all I got…
Not much on graphics (I never have been terribly good at them), but the workings are great. Plus it's way faster than the old page ever was.