Archive.
Tuesday, July 30, 2002 Link
You're frustrated, not just by the lack of proper font management under OS X, but by Adobe's questionably dubious decision not to develop a native version of ATM for your new operating system of choice. Sure, they gave you freshly tweaked and prettied-up versions of Photoshop and InDesign to run barefoot through that unfettered Quartz-ational wonderland, but they left you to your own resolution-independent devices when it came to wrestling your fonts into the untamed Unix wilderness. Well, don't just sit there with your diphthong hanging out. Do something about it. Sign the ATM for OS X petition. Who knows, maybe Adobe does listen to their customers on occasion. Via Typographica
Why on earth would anyone want to eat utensils? That's what I was thinking to myself as I innocently clicked the link. It turned out to be just another reading comprehension accident on my part. Beware the dangers of ploughing through mounds of questionable sentence structure without benefit of proper head protection.
The available domain name of the week is snaggleteeth.com
Monday, July 29, 2002 Link
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What do you suppose Apple has crawling up and down their sleeve when they apply for a trademark registration on the word Junkyard? The description of the goods and/or services pertaining to this application pretty cover anything they have shipped or could ship out the door. And it's not exactly a customer-facing term is it? Via MacRumors
That snarky little gem of a web server, MacHTTP went beta 10 over the weekend, sneaking one step closer to the official version 2.5 release. A couple more fixes. A couple more tweaks. Still a tiny footprint. But wait a darn minute, there's now a customized version of MacHTTP that works specifically as a web-based front end to Sand Hill Engineering's XTension home automation software. What else is hiding in there?
Friday, July 26, 2002 Link
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Pinched blue tarpaulin and caution tape. 4th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
You know, people actually read this site. Want proof? A little bird named Bob Sawyer let me know via email that he has a simple PHP-based RSS parser script available to all that takes all the useless data we've been talking about and converts it to a more useful format. Nifty. And yes Ian, I know what you're going to say. Actually having PHP available on the server would be useful at this point, wouldn't it? Running OS X? You can always fire up the likes of Brent Simmons' NetNewsWire and lock in feeds for all your favourite syndicated sites. A round of hat tips to Dean and Todd and Daniel for this find.
Thursday, July 25, 2002 Link
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Regarding yesterday's pronouncement that you could now access an RSS feed of this weblog, friend Ian wrote:
"RSS... that's great... how can I use it? Data is useless without tools to make sense of it..."
Well, of course it's useless on it's own, silly. However, I'm currently just supplying the content, not the tools to access it. Based on a suggestion found on Mark Pilgrim's fine (and extremely useful, I might add) site, I did add a <link> tag to the page header that facilitates auto-discovery of an RSS feed. And I suppose I should have pointed to a couple of articles on using PHP to parse XML-formatted data or even a general introduction to RSS news feeds. By the way, I discovered that data is useless without a lot of other things as well. Makes you wonder how come we have so much of the damn stuff lying around all over the place.
Wednesday, July 24, 2002 Link
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A sign of things to come, or the result of a need to continue sprucing things up around here? Whatever the reason, it was dead simple to do and there is now an official RSS feed available for this site. Go ahead. Subscribe and publish. I dare you.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002 Link
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The available domain name of the week is metalstock.com
It's time for me to stop hiding the rest of the site updates all over the blessed place and start mentioning things right here on the front page. Someone else besides me deserves to know that a lot of stuff beyond this weblog gets updated and finessed and blurped out on a regular basis by yours truly. And headlines. We need headlines on posts. I'll get on that right away. Of course, I'll only use headlines to precisely summarize and introduce each posting and not simply as a vehicle or excuse to show off just how clever I can be. Right.
Monday, July 22, 2002 Link
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NewtWiki riffs on the WordsSmashedTogether syntax style of the original Wiki software to easily create hyperlinks between the notes, dates, and names stored on a Newton. Once again, my little green chunk of obsolete hardware gets punted directly into the path of oncoming information management technology. And speaking of all things obsolete, Wiki even has a historical connection to HyperCard, good gosh golly. Sing praise to Ted Nelson and buy Bill Atkinson a beer, won't you?
Friday, July 19, 2002 Link
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In amongst all the fussing and excitement and ornery kurfluffle and other general nonsense, I completely forgot to mention that yesterday marked the sixth anniversary of my humble little domain. How about them apples?
Guess what? The new DSL connection is installed. That's what.
Thursday, July 18, 2002 Link
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Another dismal tale of asinine legal policy heavy-handedness and waving of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act flag. Read through the sequence of events over on Curt Cloninger's Playdamage and come to your own conclusions. Personally, stuff like this really snarls my short hairs. I am so glad that I'm not working for Getty Images anymore. So, so glad. Hat tip, Zeldman.
Moving cart and self-storage bays. 79th Avenue Southeast, Calgary.
Wednesday, July 17, 2002 Link
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By the way, for all of you immensely patient people who have your sites hosted by yours truly, you may need to wait until I get the new DSL connection before your sites are live again. I'm trying to map out the best way to transition everything, and perhaps not moving the domains around too many times is good thing. If you are in desperate need of having your little slice of the ether open to the public again, let me know. Otherwise, I'm just going to let things be.
You know when you go to check something on your site, and the site isn't there anymore. You know that feeling? Well I do, or should I said I did. I pinged my domain. Nothing. NSlookup. Nothing. So, does this mean that the server seized up? Maybe, but it hasn't completely jammed on me since I installed Rebound. And dammit, the IP responds fine. Hmmm. I can't check the primary name server to see if that's the problem, because it's still without a connection back in my basement at home. I check the secondary name server instead. The zone record is there, but I can't view the data. Click. It all comes back to me like getting a gym bag full of Lego dropped on my head. All of the secondary information was set to expire after seven days (as it should) and today is the eighth day since the primary server went dark. There's no domain information in the zones to view, and therefore nothing for other servers to look at. Damn. I guess I'll be rebuilding a bunch of zone records this morning. Here's hoping that the hairy-knuckled technician scheduled to wrangle the new DSL into place is still coming tomorrow. This is getting positively lugubrious.
Tuesday, July 16, 2002 Link
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I've always felt that one of the few things in life that designers need more than a new t-shirt is, quite frankly, an excuse to design a new t-shirt. And as if they were reading my mind, the wonderful Typophile has announced their first annual t-shirt design contest. Judging is provided by a fell swoop through the typoscenti, and designs are critiqued daily... in public. Oh, my word. And yes, I do realize that I already posted this item over at Veer today. I felt it merited more than one mention, thank you very much.
And the laughs just keep on coming.
Subject: Technical error re: VeriSign Domain Name Renewal Notices
Date: 15/07/2002 5:41 PM
From: VeriSign Renewals, Reminder.5853@info.nsi-direct.com
On Friday, due to a technical error, you may have received a renewal notice(s) for a domain name(s) that is no longer registered with VeriSign. Please disregard the notice(s) and accept our apologies for any confusion this may have caused.
Thank you,
VeriSign, Inc.
These guys really should take this show on the road.
Friday, July 12, 2002 Link
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Just one word. Sticky.
Apologies to Ian (fingerfarm.com, toloko.ca), Danyon (danyon.com, plunderkind.com), Sheldon (askthevet.ca, animalmedicalcentre.ca), and anyone else who has had one of their domains go dark this week. The endless pit of internet service provision doom known as Telus yanked my DSL gateway IP address two days earlier than expected, leaving my primary name server without a forwarding address. While this situation doesn't impact most of the domains hosted on my server, the aforementioned folks are shit out of luck (pardon my French) for a week or so because the secondary NS listed in their domain records hasn't been updated since I moved my servers homeward. Don't say I didn't warn you people how much fun this was going to be. By the way, the revised IP subnet should be arriving from the good folks over at Nucleus and my new DSL is due to be connected Thursday. Then all will be well again is name server land.
Tuesday, July 09, 2002 Link
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Looks like Ed is going dark once again. And this time it sounds rather permanent. Thanks for the anecdotes, the pictures, the tales of frustration, and the nuggets of wisdom, Ed. It's been a slice. See you in the funny papers...
Apple's iTools web services look like they're going to be rebranded as .mac once the Jaguar update to OS X is released, at least according to a short blurb over at Think Secret. One the one hand, I'm all about Apple using the Mac brand as often and as thoroughly as possible - it's really to their advantage. In fact, losing the iTools moniker actually helps differentiate them from other web-related products, such as Tenon's iTools server utilities. And I have to disagree with the comment in the article about it being a "very confusing name". It not confusing as much as is seems to be a somewhat tardy "hey, don't forget about me..." response to Microsoft's .net platform. I wonder if ICANN would be open to another new top level domain application?
Lane behind 9th Avenue and 14th Street Southeast, Calgary.
BlogChalking "...is a movement attempting to create a region-sensible blog-search system - decentralized, improvised (influencing existing Internet search engines) and world-wide. Truly cool and simple." Via DayPop
Monday, July 08, 2002 Link
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Could somebody remind me again why I thought installing Acrobat 5 was a good idea? Why? Because it's a slogging resource pig, that's why. And it is just me waxing rhetorical, or are all of Adobe's OS X-compatible applications designed specifically to suck massively when used under OS 9? Not classic, we're talking under straight-up OS 9. The whole works... Illustrator 10, Photoshop 7, Acrobat 5... all of them run like they've got sugar in the tank. The only Adobe application that actually runs better than it previously did after undergoing an OS X update is InDesign. Not that it isn't ripe rife with minor issues all of its own, but at least it doesn't feel as if all four tires are blown out and it's dragging a large mammal carcass tied to the trailer hitch. There's probably an interesting, pre-Macworld, OS 9 is dead conspiracy theory buried in here somewhere, but I honestly don't have time to investigate at the moment. Right now, there's a pile of software downgrades I need to reinstall.
Friday, July 05, 2002 Link
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Microsoft just slid a minor browser update out the door for all you folks clinging to your classic Mac operating systems. Internet Explorer 5.1.5 offers some HTTP enhancements which don't seem to be documented anywhere, and apparently corrects several security vulnerabilities (what else is new) which are covered in more detail here. I suppose I should also mention that the OS X version has been plucked and preened as well. Enjoy.
Oh, and to top the week off, I have an infected sty in one of my lower eyelids and I seem to be having some sort of inflammatory reaction to the antibiotic ointment that the doctor prescribed. The fun never stops.
You may have been wondering why you haven't been able to connect to this site over the past couple of days. Or perhaps your concerned where the heck your own site that was being hosted on the splorp.com server went. Well, let me fill you in.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have found it necessary to switch to a different ADSL service provider. Because of the timing involved, this switch has unfortunately affected the availability of the splorp.com server and all of the sites that are hosted on it. This means that all web access, e-mail accounts, and ftp services were down for an indeterminate amount of time. My original guess was that this server was to be offline for approximately 2 or 3 days starting on the 12th of July. Rather than wait for that date, the soon to be no more Cadvision decided to yank all of my IPs Wednesday afternoon, leaving my servers without any forwarding addresses. However, all was not lost. Thanks to Bruce Livingston and the lovely folks at Webcore Labs, I was able to move the servers to a temporary hosting location that will be their home until Nucleus - my new DSL provider - has me all hooked up again. I wish I could be more exact with how this whole thing will shake out, but as anyone who has had to deal with changing internet providers and updating domain name records can attest, this is not going to be a precise chain of events.
I will advise you of any changes to the status of this situation as they occur. And of course, I'll post a full report of this entire, lovely experience after the whole mess blows over. Whee!
Well hello again. Fancy meeting you here.
Monday, July 01, 2002 Link
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Due to circumstances beyond the control of any mortal and the serendipitous nature of computer hardware, I have once again be able to prove that the hard drive making the loudest grinding noise right before it seizes up completely is most likely the same drive with the least current backup. I suppose it could have been worse. All of my files could have been on that drive as well. So the next question is... has anyone used DriveSavers lately?
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