Archive.
Friday, August 30, 2002 Link
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Underside of bridge deck. Riverfront Avenue and Centre Street Southwest, Calgary.
Thursday, August 29, 2002 Link
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Brilliant, bloody brilliant. Now everyone join in on the chorus... I'm in love with the X10 girl...
Forget about getting anything else accomplished this afternoon. There's yet another browser to stuff into the closet arsenal. Indeed, Netscape 7.0 has been freed from engineering and is ready to wipe its feet on your mousepad. If you've already been fiddling with the 7.0 preview and all of its chewy tabbed window goodness, it's recommended that your nuke that version prior to installing this one. Need more filler? The full release notes are posted. Say, I wonder if the FishCam shortcut still works? Via AppleScript Info
Two quick pointers to articles that appear on Wired News this morning. Apple's Newton Just Won't Drop relates a fairly accurate description of the energy and enthusiasm that still exists in the Newton community. Aside from a couple of minor technical glitches (the top-end MessagePad 2100 uses a 162-MHz processor, not a 20-MHz), this story kicks it. And get a load of all those other Canadian green-bleeders hanging around the CN Tower. What a bunch of geeks, eh Victor? Unfortunately, a second article entitled Newton's Return: A Hit and Myth, seems to little more than a rehash of rumours and speculation surrounding Apple's return to the hand held market. I suppose it doesn't hurt to wish and wonder. Naturally, there's a discussion regarding the articles on the NewtonTalk list. Oh, excuse me... my Newton's ringing.
Wednesday, August 28, 2002 Link
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Dongle required urgently, plus waffle! A great album title in the making? Or an example of the broken English you'd find in some random piece of spam. Neither, I'm afraid. In fact, it's a strangely poetic subject line that somehow still relates to a message posted on the NewtonTalk mailing list. It caught my attention and I just thought I'd share.
Ross from the infamous ScarBitten contacted me this morning with an apology for having lifted my design and its various sundry contents. Although some remnants of the design are still wafting through the ether, the bulk of the site has been removed. He's obviously sorry. I'm reasonably satisfied. Let's move along. And of course, thanks to all who took the time to send the notes, cards, and flowers.
Tuesday, August 27, 2002 Link
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My site must have finally hit the big time. Why? Because the design has been borrowed blatantly made off with by some young git at ScarBitten (here's a screen grab of the page, just in case he proprietor managed to come to his senses by the time you read this). The minimalist table layout, the style sheet, the whole shooting match is there. The bloody nerve. Mr Ross, as he calls himself, hasn't even bothered to change the bulk of the text appearing on his about page. Compare mine to his. Could be related we could. And cripes, look at this... a dead giveaway for the origin of his code is the mention of a Newton in the page source. Come on, is it really that hard to use your own brain? Apparently so. Perhaps we should all let him know what we think of his site. Special hat tip to Andrea for blowing the whistle on this punk.
It's been nearly three days since I attempted to play a racquet sport that vaguely resembled tennis. I know it's been three days because my groinal area is currently aching in places that it should not be aching. These places should not even be aware that they are capable of aching in the first place. As friend Jon pointed out to me, humans don't normally lunge very much during their waking existence. This explains a lot of things.
Monday, August 26, 2002 Link
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Let us begin. The available domain name of the week just happens to be teledemic.com. Not exactly your cup of nom de plume tea? Well, I'll let you in on a special deal. I've just finished a quick little tidy of the domain name listings and found that a few previously registered contenders have become free agents once again. Do you have an achinghead.com? Perhaps you were beginning to thinkdrastic.com and started feeling all bleezed.com instead. Tired of all the ratcrap.com? Just be happy that Microsoft is notlinux.com. That'll knock the fluff off your lintmagnet.com, won't it? Ah, there's something inside for the entire family.
Friday, August 23, 2002 Link
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It was news to me, but it explained more than a couple of gaps in my server statistics over the past few months. Apparently, when you copy a WebStar log file using FTP, WebStar thinks the file is busy during the session and stops writing to it. This would be fine as long as WebStar resumed logging to the file after the FTP session was completed. Well, it doesn't. I had copied a week's worth of log files, including the current log, in order to crunch through and locate a recent burst of referral traffic. When I copied the current file, WebStar silently objected, suspended logging, and left me with a partial record of the traffic for that day. I found out on my own that if you manually suspend and activate logging using the remote admin, WebStar will start writing to the file again. This solution is documented in the WebStar Knowledgebase, but just barely. I'm still running version 4.x on this machine, so I can't say whether or not this occurs with the most recent release as well. Just one more thing to file under "quirky application behavior" I suppose.
Thursday, August 22, 2002 Link
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At some point this morning, my faithful Newton web server passed the 30,000 hit mark. Scoff if you must, but this number represents a year's worth of traffic passing through the cabling to my slightly larger than pocket-sized friend. To be honest, it's significantly more traffic than I ever expected to see. Not only did we pass this particular milestone today, but I also tracked down a small, yet important trick to keeping the server running that much better. You see, the NPDS software has a plug-in module specifically for watching various processes while the server is running. If one of those processes or connection states goes kerflunky, the watcher application is supposed to attempt to restart the server. Sometimes this means the Newton gets cold booted. A lot of the time it means that the server just sits there not serving. Bummer. However, what I found out today is that if you don't minimize the watcher application window, it's able to continually monitor the server processes and does what it's supposed to do. When the window is minimized, it's basically a crap shoot as to whether the server will get restarted when there's a problem. Alright, I realize that the majority of your folks reading this are either nodding off right about now or have your index fingers twitching over your mouse button in order to click the hell out of here. I completely understand. It's just that for the two or three dozen other people like me who also run NPDS on their Newtons, this is wonderfully chewy stuff. One little change makes for a much more reliable server. Sometimes I just need to share.
Fading signage on brick building. 9th Avenue and 12th Street Southeast, Calgary.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002 Link
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If you know me even slightly, you are likely to be familiar with my fervent opinions regarding the creeping evil of HTML e-mail and the sanctity of plain text messages. Well, sometimes you need to bend with the wind. Not only did I break down and agree to send out a HTML-formatted e-mail to a bunch of overwise nice folks who visited our site, but I have to admit that it was a fairly effective piece of marketing fluff. I even tagged the links in the e-mail with soft identifier codes so that we could get a simplistic, yet useful click-through conversion rate. We would have got a simplistic, yet useful click-through conversion rate that is, if the stupid IIS server logs actually included CGI arguments as part of the request data. Oh, the identifier codes are buried in the logs files all right, but as a component of the local referrer data - not the actual page requests. This makes for a much more entertaining experience when extracting out the useful bits of information. I'm sure there is something deep in the bowels of Microsoft's IIS documentation that will explain why this is so and how to fix it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to burn an afternoon futzing around with a bunch of configuration settings stuffed into an endless summer of tabbed dialogs. Feh.
Paint spattered manhole. 5th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
Tuesday, August 20, 2002 Link
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Think Secret is dishing dirt reporting that the next major OS X update will be code named Panther, blatantly akin to the feline persona tacked on to the recent version 10.2 Jaguar update. A disturbing trend is disclosing itself here. The code name selection process has apparently come under the jurisdiction of the marketing department, rather than the engineers. We can all see that absolutely no good can come from this. No more Danook and Thag. No more Big Bang or Beta Cheese. Wave a fond fairwell to Buster and his Bride. The downward spiral is further evidenced by the animal hide swaddling of the once distinguished OS X trademark which covers the current retail packaging. And don't even get me started on the navbar on Apple's OS X page. What's next? Leopard spots for 10.4? I can't wait for the Calico release. Meow.
Sorry. You caught me napping. I nearly forgot to post the past two weeks worth of available domain names. Ok, I was out of town for one of those weeks, so I think I'm entitled to a bit of slack being cut. Anywho, feast your hover property on these puppies. The domain names for this week and last are wetbag.com and puddingskin.com, respectively. How could you ever have doubted my ability to deliver the goods?
See, you ask a simple question and someone, somewhere will oblige you with an explanation. To wit, Matthias Gutfeldt writes:
The major issue for us techno-geeks is the incompatibility of XFORMS and XFRAMES with the HTML forms and frames model. But for the proverbial "Joanne Average", the issue is something completely different: This new version is complicated as hell and completely unmanageable. HTML4 was comparatively easy, and browsers were very forgiving, But this thing here - XForms, XFrames, CSS3... it's a geek's wet dream, and a normal person's nightmare. And browsers are _required_ to be very strict about what they accept and what not.
Unless someone creates sophisticated tools that allow the technically uninitiated Joanne Average to produce her "my flower arrangements" site like she used to, the self-published web will become an endangered species.
More than two years after XHTML1 went public we still don't have fully XHTML1-capable visual editors. It will probably take even longer until an XHTML2-capable publishing system is available - if it is possible at all to produce such a beast! Until then, Joanne Average won't be able to produce much in the modern format.
They set out to create a simple markup language that enabled people to communicate with each other. And now they've turned it into the "black box" complexity of a Microsoft Word document. It's a pity. But I bet it's good for us experts. :-)
I didn't think the issue was as mundane as deprecated tags. And as Matthias points out, this could be quite the can of worms for the entry-level web publisher. It seems that the complexity of modern construction materials has taking away the ability to build a house using nothing but a hammer and saw. Perhaps it's a bit harsh, but it's apparent that the ability to create and communicate online content is being yanked out of the hands of the people. It's the opposite of the increasing accessibility of desktop publishing tools in the late 80's. Indulge me for a moment while I completely oversimplify the situation. What if XHTML2 could co-exist with a lightweight version of markup specifically for the novices and other non-techies out there? Go ahead and offer all the power of the advanced markup to professional developers and propellerheads with XForms, XFrames, and CSS3 and the like - but maintain some sort of humanoid readable, junior markup that can be easily generated by thin software tools or by hand. Oh wait a minute, that sounds like HTML4 doesn't it? And we're trying to get away from that, right? Aw, nuts.
Monday, August 19, 2002 Link
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I've been aware that the W3C was cooking up a new edition of the XHTML recommendation for some time now, but I wasn't entirely clear on the extent of the backwards compatibility issues brought up by this article on ZDNet. I'm assuming that the bulk of the problems being chatted about in the article could be handled with a properly declared doctype and the ability for a modern browser to differentiate between versions of markup, right? The mention of this draft publication was touched on by friend Jeffery as well as the Web Standards Project, but only just. It's probably too soon to start getting all worked up about this, but information delivered early and incomplete is often preferable to getting a pile of unexpected unpleasantries dumped on your head later. So let me voice this one question... is the major issue here that fact that many of the old, clunky markup crutches will be deprecated in this version of XHTML? It would be nice to know in advance, I suppose. Of course, the current working draft is a bit thin on details in the old documentation department. What am I missing, if anything?
Hi. I'm back. Miss me?
Friday, August 09, 2002 Link
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Since it pleases me so, I should mention the fact that the second Veer Visual Elements Catalog started landing in North American mail boxes this week. It's a damn fine direct marketing vehicle for creative folks who consume vast quantities of digital content. Yes, I work at Veer and yes, this is a bit self-serving. But all of us (Yeti, Cacomixl, Sporadicus, Nuther, and rest of the lot who don't happen to have sites I can link to...) are darn proud of what we've managed to whack together in a few short months. Now heads up, here comes the pitch... If you don't receive the Veer catalog at the moment but my spiel has somewhat intrigued you, please sign up. We'll send you some swell, paper-based eye-fodder and you can download some free bonus goodies to boot. Heck, if you just want to download the free stuff and not get the catalog - that's ok too. Thanks for visiting.
Wednesday, August 07, 2002 Link
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Since I seem to have this habit of continually expounding the virtues and facilitating the purchase of certain internet properties that may or may not be of use to anyone, I was intrigued - nay, entertained - by this article on defunct domain names. Did I say entertained? Hell, I nearly laughed my TLD off.
The available domain name of the week is preboard.com - yes, you read that correctly - preboard.com is not currently registered. And as if that wasn't plenty enough to set your wings aflutter, preboarder.com and its verbaceous kin, preboarding.com are also available at this writing. Go crazy, you high-flyers.
Oh for the love of Zeldman. Continually on the prowl for things to make my ears prick up and itch, friend Danyon passed along this typographically finessed error message found whilst attempting to peruse the FontShop site.
Witnesseth yet another reasonably clever company blaming their visitors and their browser of choice rather than examining their own flakey markup and otherwise decrepit development habits. Is there anything on this site that couldn't be built using tidy, browser-agnostic markup and a sprinkling of simple JavaScript? Not that I can see, Magee. And don't get me started on the fact that this ColdFusion-enabled site is so numbingly slow that I almost bailed out on a couple occasions even before seeing the error message for myself. Somebody throw a couple more hamsters into the Pentium, will ya? Oh yes, and the three layers worth of <frameset> tags which make up this particularly cumbersome typeface browsing mechanism are positively draconian. Please tell me this approach to web design is becoming less common. Please?
The rawking new ADSL connection has been cattywumpus for the past 24 hours. The modem has been reset once or twice. The cables have all been uncabled and recabled and uncabled once again. The call to technical support has been placed. Nucleus seems to think that Telus boneheadedly mistakenly tripped over the hardware in the POP without telling a blessed soul. It's times like this that I'm glad I simply haven't got around to moving the web servers back home from their temporary lodging over at Webcore. Presently, I'm waiting for an update from the tech boys. I'll let you know how things work out.
Monday, August 05, 2002 Link
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I found this well-intentioned text accompanying most of the "back" links on the idrink.com site. It just goes to prove that it's better to confuse your users with several ways of handling a simple task than to leave it up to them to figure out where they came from. And note the platform-centric mention of "right-clicking". I guess Mac users should just go ahead and click the link, right? Oh, but that's not recommended. Oh dear, now what do I do? And now that I think about it, what happened to the closing parenthesis? Is it missing because I clicked the link rather than right-clicking? Now I know why I need a drink.
Saturday, August 03, 2002 Link
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Saturday morning. Formatting a floppy disk. A medium-density 800 KB floppy disk. Formatting a floppy disk so I can make a copy of a ClarisWorks database file. A file that currently only exists on the 40 MB hard drive inside of an 11 year old PowerBook. A PowerBook running System 7.1 in a measly 12 MB of RAM. A PowerBook with no Ethernet. Formatting a floppy disk. Saturday morning. Sigh.
Thursday, August 01, 2002 Link
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Electrical conduit and red pipe in stairwell. 5th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
The August update of the Newton FAQ is in the house.
The following little tater gem of an item was pinched from that pearl onion of the Mac news world, the Crazy Apple Rumors Site. It made the rounds on the NewtonTalk mailing list yesterday.
Q: I have a eMate 300 that I have completely tricked out. I have a 64 MB PCMCIA card and I've overclocked the processor from 25 Mhz to 29 Mhz! Trust me when I say this baby screams! The refresh on scrolling through a document is almost real-time! Surfing the web is... well, it's still really lousy, but it's much faster than it was! I've looked at some Japanese sites that show you how to make special plastics and...
A: Dude!
Q: ...I'm totally going to make a custom enclosure. Then...
A: DUDE!
Q: What!? What!?
A: Dude... no one cares.
Q: Huh? Oh. Oh. OK.
It's not funny because it's intelligent satire or even because it's wonderfully detailed and focused exaggeration. It's funny because it's true. It's funny, quite frankly, because it's us.
Furthermore.
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