Archive.
Saturday, June 30, 2001 Link
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An observation. You never really appreciate how much you use your groin until it hurts and you attempt to do something simple like sit down or stand up or move.
Friday, June 29, 2001 Link
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Strut, don't saunter.
Thursday, June 28, 2001 Link
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If you have even a tiny bit of disposal income left over from that dot-com layoff package, The Scooter Wish Foundation needs your help. Please give generously.
More proof that I probably should go out and find a real job. Daniel was kind enough to oblige my whim to produce and edit another fusion for his site. Well, here's the result, in all of its pixelated (or should that be pixilated?) glory: the lost weekend. Thanks for kicking in, people.
Tuesday, June 26, 2001 Link
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The Smart Tags Weblog
"Coordinating work to keep the Web safe from Microsoft." Discussion, information, and outright frothing about the latest steaming pile of crap pinched out of Redmond. Read up and make the web a better place to live once again. Via Scripting News
Monday, June 25, 2001 Link
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Some of you are probably wondering what the heck I do to fill up my day. I mean, besides the cool Dad stuff like sitting in my daughter's classroom listening to her read self-authored stories. Well, friends and neighbors, here's a fine example of the value I add to society. I cranked out a new version of the Newton Glossary today. Whee!
In yet another display of fundamentally asinine online marketing, I received not one, but two bulk mailed messages asking me to add a link to The Sherlock Holmes Museum from my site. Why? Probably because some shareware spider sent out by the aforementioned morons found all the links I have to sites pertaining to Apple's Sherlock software. Dumb shits.
Sunday, June 24, 2001 Link
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See what happens when you don't pay attention? First, you're uploading local file references in your page code, and then you realize that Google has had an image search mode for gosh knows how long and you didn't know about it. Naturally, it beats the content-filtered pants off of anything Altavista has to offer, speed-wise. Cripes.
HTML 101: Local file references don't work very well after your pages are uploaded to the server. Stupid git.
Friday, June 22, 2001 Link
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Damn.
My mom turns 65 tomorrow. Happy birthday mom.
And yes, because I know you'll ask, that is a genuine c. 1940 CCM two wheeler.
Caution. Unattended rambling ahead.
Some days, all sorts of disparate things seem to glom together into a big ball of wax. A good ball of wax, but a ball of wax nevertheless. I finally caved in and registered an ICQ account so I can chitty-chat with a photographer friend in Vancouver. He's atrociously lax at responding to email, yet abnormally perky-eared when it comes to instant messaging. In some way, that figures. If our online discourses end up involving even a fraction of the thematic tangents that our telephone conversations do, I'm definitely going to need to beef up my hand-eye (or more precisely, monitor-keyboard) coordination. What's the instant messaging equivalent of attention deficit disorder? Whatever it is, he's stupid with it. Speaking of signing up for new ventures, I just happened to lock in an account over at dyndns.org today as well. Why, you may well ask, does the boy need to hook up with a third-party when he has his own name server humming away in the basement? Suppressing the clever retort which would normally follow such a question, the boy answers simply. You see, there is this Newton-related site that is about to lose its current hosting. Not wanting to see the Newted Community slip into the mist, a small group of like-minded, green-bleeding individuals leapt into the fray and decided to purchase the server from the admin and move it to a new hosting location. Since the site currently uses the dyndns.org system for its primary domain, somebody needs to maintain it. That somebody be the boy. What else is going on today? Hmmm. I dug out the Epson Stylus Pro XL large format printer from the hardware pile, only to realize that the black ink cartridge is dry and the colour one has seen better days. The printer was free, so I'm not at liberty to complain. Well, I'm off to buy some ink... wish me luck.
Thursday, June 21, 2001 Link
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Did someone say Macintosh trivia? say, I may be able to put all of those ephemeral nuggets that have been rattling around between my ears to good use after all.
Why is OS X slow?
The president of Ambrosia Software examines some of the reasons why OS X seem to have sugar in its fuel tank, and potentially how to speed things up again. Bottom line? Buy lots of RAM while its still cheap like penny candy.
Tuesday, June 19, 2001 Link
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Hey kids! Zeldman says that the teal gradient is the new grey. Believe!
Monday, June 18, 2001 Link
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Macromedia Sitespring
Oh my, where the hell was this software when I was still working on all those convoluted web sites. Workflow tools. Asset management. File versioning. Client task integration. Nice. Pity the whole shebang requires a Windows-based server to operate, although that would certainly make it a perfect fit in my previous employer's backend. Ouch.
Sunday, June 17, 2001 Link
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New to the daily browse is brushstroke.tv, a super clean site all shiny and shivery with enticing drops of stuff about motion graphics, design speak, and other topics that I seem to be interested in. I think you'll enjoy it too. Serendipitously scavenged from lines & splines
Obvious to many, strange to others, it's Father's Day today. And since I'm a father to two technology-enabled, outstandingly precociously daughters, I was very pleased to receive a raft of simple, warm hugs and armloads of hand-crafted goodies from the both of them. If I actually had a job that required a tie, I would have probably received a tie. Instead, it was a morning filled with chunky embroidery bookmarks and coloured macaroni noodle pencil holders. Insert lengthy, contented sigh here.
Friday, June 15, 2001 Link
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Newton Connection Utilities, software which has not been updated since 1997, will work via Ethernet under Mac OS 9.1 on a G4 tower. Just in case you were wondering. And I know were. Don't you love it when stuff just works.
Tuesday, June 12, 2001 Link
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Tomorrow is once again a self-declared wireless Wednesday at our house. I'm going to spend the morning finding junk to recycle and the afternoon hammering nails into random pieces of lumber. As for the rest of you, try to turn off the computer for at least an hour and go outside. I'll shall return on Thursday.
Is there any reason, besides being able to dedicate adequate development resources, why the ThunderHawk browser technology couldn't work on a Newton? By Bitstream's own admission the client is based on easily portable, device independent code that "runs on any operating system", the browser footprint is a measly 100KB or so, and a color display is only recommended. Sounds reasonably Newton-friendly to me. If anyone out there has the scoop on some of the client-side platform requirements, I'm available for enlightenment. I may be missing something amidst the press release rhetoric, but it looks completely feasible to scronk this thing into any handheld device - even a Newton. Must find out more.
Some sweet soul managed to put the entire NeXTstep 3.3 Network and System Administration Manual online for all to see. Bless his little Mach kernel. Who knows, I may end up getting my two forlorn NeXTstations wedged into the server rack and doing something useful yet. Via mr barrett
This one is just for Mike.
With the announcement of PageMaker 7.0 at breakfast this morning, Adobe merrily reaches across the table and mashes grapefruit into Jakob's face. Portable documents everywhere... everywhere I tell you. Yes, the curmudgeonly one does make a couple of valid points. (Contrary to wide spread fact-mongering, he is occasionally right.) PDF shouldn't be use as the primary means of presenting or navigating information on a web site. And yes, the document should be formatted for printing on multiple sizes of paper. But come on, don't let search engine index the content? Go ahead and post all of that valuable data, but hide it from anyone trying to find it, ok?
Monday, June 11, 2001 Link
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If you've been looking for the dangerousmeta site, it's currently here.
I finally got around to ordering upgrades for some Adobe applications this morning. All three upgrades were for Mac, and all three serial numbers used to qualify for the upgrades were from previous Mac versions. The platform bias is not that big of a deal in itself, as I have dozens of products registered and recorded on the Adobe site, over 90% of which are for the Mac platform. I'm generally impressed at how well implemented most of the Adobe customer account system seems to be, and how easy it is for me to choose a valid serial number from my registration data during the purchase stream. To their credit, Adobe has managed my software purchase history and is able to use the data to simplify this type of transaction. With all of this information at their disposal, including a fresh transaction, do they proffer a Windows-specific call-out on the receipt page? I'm so clearly a Mac-focused customer it hurts. Why would they assume that I would be interested in this offer?
It's a small detail and probably a generic offer that everyone is confronted with, but I can't see why this space couldn't contain contextual offers based on your order. Keep trying Adobe. You're almost there.
Sunday, June 10, 2001 Link
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Studs are but one of the components required during the process of framing a basement wall. A process with which I have become intimately familiar. There are other technical details to framing that become second nature the more you work with them. Specifically, I already know quite a bit about the purpose and application of cleats, sole plates, and fireblocks. But those trimmers and cripples... they were completely new to me.
Friday, June 08, 2001 Link
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Still keeping track of standards compliance in browsers? If you are, then you'll be pleased to hear that Mozilla 0.9.1 was released yesterday. This version has XSLT support, although the release notes mention that "the implementation is still incomplete and has bugs." Yeah, like that's news. If all those fancy new acronyms aren't your cup of tea, how about a slick, little text-only browser? Pulling into a stall at the other end of the parking lot is a new beta of WannaBe for Mac.
Thursday, June 07, 2001 Link
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Note to self: When you click on any link that calls the JavaScript function OpenBrowser() from the Pardeikes Welcome Plug-in Edit Host page, the web server will crash with a Type 2 error. Damn. It had been running tickety-boo for over a month too. On the bright side, I discovered how to specify multiple file names for the directory indexes tonight. It's the little things that drive me nuts and make me smile.
If I haven't posted anything for a day or two, it's usually because life has been busy with other things that are simply more important than staring at a sheet of pixels. In a way this was true yesterday as our household launched our first ever Wireless Wednesday. No computer. No radio. No television. No geiger counters. You see, my friend Sean, who has two precocious, tech-savvy daughters about the same age as mine, mentioned that his family had made Wednesdays No Electronics Day at their house. My wife and I thought that it sounded like a dandy way to chisel the kids (and me) off the computer for at least one day a week. So we did it. I have to admit that I did feel the urge to jot something down in my Newton more than once. But, I stood firm, relinquished the collapsable stylus, and instead plastered yellow sticky notes all over it, reminding me to enter the data in the morning. The first Wireless Wednesday went off with only a bit of minor grumbling from the short folk. Minor, due to the fact that they still have school during the day. Come July, we'll have to see whether this forced freedom from technology becomes a positive habit unto itself or a perpetual battle of wills. If nothing else, I caught up on some light reading last night.
Tuesday, June 05, 2001 Link
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I know this is getting to be creaky news, but I still get a swift kick in the head out the the fact that Microsoft needs to issue security updates for a freaking word processor. Makes me think that RTF is not longer simply an acronym for Rich Text Format, but perhaps the more nascent "Reformat That Fucker." I'm sorry, did I type that out loud?
Monday, June 04, 2001 Link
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Somehow, an innocently forwarded link to this curious toy led to a convoluted email exchange with Howie involving the online marketing potential of cat mucus. How, in the name of James Burke, do these things happen? Original link via svn. Damn them.
I think I've just filled up my summer reading list. Tom Owad over at the Applefritter site recently posted over 5,000 pages of technical texts, manuals, historical documentation, and schematic diagrams related to the Apple Lisa. There is so much information here, that my eyeballs are spinning in opposite directions while I attempt to make a choice of which PDF-encased document I should download first. The Lisa 1 Press Release? No, too obvious. How about the original Lisa Marketing Requirements? Better, but could be a bit dry. Hmmm, a paper regarding the Lisa Graphical Object-Oriented User Interface? Now we're getting somewhere. Ah, here we are. Something visually satisfying, yet just technical enough to stretch the synapses a bit. I guess I just can't resist an Illustrated Parts List when I see one. Plus, you just have to love it every time the original Apple corporate typeface, Motter Tektura pops up. Whee!
Saturday, June 02, 2001 Link
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After my pitiful display yesterday, the pleasantly aloof Daniel offered to help me beat my misbehaving style sheets into submission. Not that I haven't been having fun smacking my head against my keyboard over and over again. This evening, I am prematurely returning the favour by starting up another fusion for him to share with the world. Gosh, all this camaraderie is starting to make my eyes water. Sniff.
Friday, June 01, 2001 Link
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Cheeze & crackers, I've been chatty today. I must be relaxed.
So here's the deal. This site will turn five on the old year-dometer in approximately a month, and I have been frantically working on a redesign just for the occasion. A redesign that is not just a random spritz of æsthetic spray paint, but a desperately overdue technical overhaul. So the problem is, while I really wanted to take the high road and make the damn thing as standards compliant as possible, I just can't seem to contort my style sheets into anything that even vaguely resembles my original concept. Obviously, my CSS skill-set is still a bit underpowered and I'm having trouble merging into the flow of traffic. For now, I will simply apologize in advance for what will end up being a lively tousle of tables, style sheets, and various other unseen hacks. I guess that's an improvement over the current tousle of tables and <font face> tags. Or not. As soon as I have something that plays nicely in more than one browser, I'll let you know. And stay tuned for the unveiling, or unravelling... as the case may be.
I knew there were rumblings that Adobe was working on some snarky stuff with XML and PDF. Well, here's just a sample of the toys we're going to be able to play with. They've just released a beta Save As XML Plug-In for Acrobat 5 that will take a "tagged" PDF and allow you to spit out the following ever-so-friendly data formats:
XML-1.00 without styling
HTML-4.01 with CSS-1.00
HTML-3.20 accessible
HTML-3.20 without CSS
And, what's this? Holy 7-bit ASCII, Batman, it's...
Text-only!
The trick here is to be working with a PDF that has been internally tagged so that the XML plug-in can make heads and tails of the data. Even though the XML plug-in is available for both Mac and Windows, you can only create tagged PDFs using certain bits of Windows-centric software, such as Office 2000 apps and Adobe's potentially confusing Make Accessible Plug-in for Acrobat. Yes, you can use the cross-platform Web Capture plug-in to create a tagged PDF, but I don't see much point in converting an HTML based page into PDF just so you can save it as XML or HTML again. Oh well, it's a start. Document portability may never be the same once Adobe has finished rolling out all their tools. It might just be possible after all.
About a month ago, I told a story of how my trusty old Multiple Scan 20 monitor had started turning sporadically green. After applying a liberal amount of compressed air to purge the bunny build-up, I thought I had the problem licked. Alas, it was not to be. I finally lugged the beasty off to the friendly neighborhood Mac garage earlier this week to get the bad news confirmed by someone wearing an off-white smock. Apparently, my poor cyclopic hardware has been rendered "vintage" by the Department of Hardware Obsolescence down in the land of Cupertino, and spare parts are no longer officially gettable. Nuts. On the bright side, I did manage to locate a thread on the Apple Support Boards where some smart guy with the identical problem has identified the source of the greenish hue back to a single faulty solder joint. As soon as he can describe the exact location of said solder joint, the flux'll be a flyin'. I really wasn't looking forward to paying someone to replace the entire main deflector board anyway.
Furthermore.
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