Archive.
Thursday, October 31, 2002 Link
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Hallowe'en lights and leaf rake on porch. Calgary.
A couple of interesting CSS-related links landed on my plate today. Depending on how cranked up your markup metabolism rate is, these articles could be enlightening or obfuscating or both. It's all in how they're digested. For a light snack, start with Introduction to CSS Shorthand Properties by Ove A. Klykken. Bite-sized servings aimed at clearing out all your style sheet clutter. Then sidle over to the Apple Developer salad bar for a heaping helping of CSS Hints for Internet Explorer 5. I realize that Explorer for Windows can cause no end of gastrointestinal problems for developers. The secret is to take small bites and chew carefully.
Steven Frank manages to pull himself together for a moment and ask a question which has stirred and troubled the programmer's psyche for ages. Well, at least since 2:44 this morning. Is this the smallest ASCII chart ever made?
[ Update ] The ever groovy Victor Rehorst has converted the aforementioned chart into a Newton book for anyone still programming on our favourite abandoned hardware platform.
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 Link
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Rush hour traffic in the snow. Canyon Meadows Drive, Calgary.
We're all aware of how you can find pretty much anything on eBay, no matter how obscure or useless a particular item may be. But did you know you can also bid on absolutely nothing? How refreshing. Via Toby
Sunday, October 27, 2002 Link
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I'm in the midst of updating the Veer site this quiet Sunday evening. Making sure that everything smells fresh and clean as our latest catalog hits the streets is something that I take pride in. And while I'm genuinely jazzed about some of the new product offerings we have popping up on the site this time around, I'm struggling not to make any directly commercial pitches in this here weblog of mine. That's why I'll just stand here and point harmlessly at the spiffy desktop wallpaper we've loaded up this month. I'm particularly pleased with the monkeys. I did those ones.
Where does the time go? The available domain name of the week turns three years old this weekend, yet it seems like only yesterday when it was brought into a cold dot com-starved world. I distinctly remember when it was not much more than a wee twinkle in my eye. And like all youngsters do, the page grew up fast, in spite of having to lug around all those ornery <font face> tags and other deprecated bits of unvalidated markup. Eventually, it became confident enough to starting strutting about for the ladies in more stylish duds. In fact, the page looked quite dapper at its second birthday last fall, wearing some of the latest cascading style sheets this side of the 49th parallel. Yet some things never change. It's still the weekly stop for hundreds of folks hankering for a regular dose of easy to digest domain inspiration. You'd think that I could have come up with something a bit less lame than debuggled.com for such an auspicious occasion. Enjoy it anyway. Here's to another three years.
Saturday, October 26, 2002 Link
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A couple of days ago, I noticed that the low-voltage lights under our kitchen cabinets flickered every time one the drawers beneath the gas cook top were opened or closed. I popped out one of the drawers and sure enough, that's where the contractor had installed the transformer for powering the lights. Figuring it was one of the low-voltage wires getting pinched or bent by the back of the drawer or the slide mount, I gently tugged the wires to see if I could determine the general vicinity of the problem. The lights flickered a few more times and then went out for good. What started as a quick fix before heading off to work had progressed into what would be a full-fledged, weekend seek and destroy mission.
This morning I pulled out both drawers under the cook top and surveyed the situation. It turns out that the low-voltage wire was intact (albeit about a metre longer than it needed to be and hanging limp inside of the cabinet). It was one of the 110 volt source wires feeding the transformer which had popped out of its marrette (that's a wire nut for my American readers). This generally isn't something you want to have next to an appliance which runs on natural gas. I flipped off the breaker, disconnected the remaining wires, and decided that while I was under the hood, I would go ahead and get the rest of the electrical bits in the area up to snuff. There's another outlet box under the cabinet which the piezo ignitors and the exhaust fan for the stove are plugged into. The supply wire for this outlet box was currently running through the same hole in the floor that had been cut for the exhaust vent. That's a bit sloppy for my taste. Likewise, I had previously installed a supplementary counter outlet but had never got around to connecting it into a circuit. This seemed like an opportune time to kill all the birds with one stone.
In order to rerun the supply wire for the under-cabinet outlet, I unscrewed the duplex receptacle and promptly had the hot wire from the supply cable snap off from the back of the outlet. It was around this point that I began to question our contractor's insistence that the renovations he did a few years back didn't specifically require an electrical permit. To wind up this tale, I ended up rewiring the entire circuit. I ran and secured the supply wires away from anything that could be a potential problem. I restripped all the wire ends and replaced all the marrettes. I pigtailed everything into a separate octagon box. Satisfied with the fact that at least one corner of the kitchen was up to code again, I flipped on the breaker. It was then I noticed that the under cabinet lights were on... but their switch was off. I'm back under the cabinets this afternoon.
Friday, October 25, 2002 Link
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I wasn't going to post anything about Blogger getting hacked today, because it's been making the rounds all afternoon and is pretty much beaten to death already. But events like this tend to get me thinking a little bit more seriously about moving away from a centralized service like Blogger and over to some sort of publishing system that I can run and maintain locally. Something feature rich and infinitely customizable. Something like Moveable Type for instance. Something that ties into a database for increased flexibility and can facilitate dynamic content generation. Something like PHP Nuke perhaps? Something that gives the control back to me. Something that would let me fix my own RSS feed when it doesn't quite validate. Something that I can spend my own time supporting and worrying about. Something with a steeper learning curve. Something that would require me to buy a brand new new server ... Erm ... Something that ... Oh yeah, now I remember why I still use Blogger.
Thursday, October 24, 2002 Link
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Indigo and the shoes. Calgary.
This image is for the benefit of all those friends of mine who have been pestering me for the past week to post a photo of our new dog. What's with you people anyway? Haven't you got jobs or something? Yeesh. Now, realizing that this particular shot is a bit on the impressionistic side, I have also posted a more traditional composition for those who can't quite get with the aesthetic.
Sure, I've got the Newtons. And I've got the PDP8/M, SGI Iris and Xerox Memorywriter in the garage. There's the prototype Bebox and stack of GridPads in the basement. Of course there's the pile of fourty foot SCSI cables, the wall of vintage software and the two Apple Lisas at the storage place, but I still ain't got nothing compared to this guy. You know what? I want to be Sellam Ismail when I grow up. I bow to the master.
Wednesday, October 23, 2002 Link
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Friend Issa has finally caught the CSS bug. Caught it bad. Not only has he managed to strip four hundred and fifty pounds worth of convoluted nested table code out of our corporate intranet's prebuilt templating system, but he's found time to rejig his own site as well. Nicely done. Oh, and by the way, if Garret happens to be reading this post, I apologise in advance for my lame attempt at clever latin phraseology. Te valere jubeo, buddy.
Sunrise through chain link fence. Heritage Drive Southeast, Calgary.
Don't go blaming me for the headline. That's exactly what it says on the Transmit 2.0 product page. Yep, the party boys at Panic have released an Aqualicious new version of their hype FTP client, this one specifically tuned up for OS X. Panic co-founder Steven Frank riffs further on Transmit's remixed innards amidst his weblog. Via AppleScript Info
Web-based typeface previewing tools are a bit old hat. However, the font consuming public still expects that if you sell type, your site should be able to display type in ways beyond the static jpeg. To this point, we launched a crisp, clean type previewer called Flont last week on the Veer site. We realize that it's not a perfect implementation. For example, it doesn't support kern pairs yet. But with EyeWire's Type Viewer stuck in aliased text mode, and ITC's Euripides currently missing in action, we think we're filling a widening gap. Let me know what you think.
Grant Neufeld has been mucking about with his own stylesheet for RSS, just in case you'd like to pretty up your raw XML for browsers that don't handle that particular function themselves. Here's an example of what it looks like. For comparison, the W3C RSS feed is also formatted using the same technique. And seeing as we've been on a validation tangent this week, I found a link on Daypop pointing to a beta version of the W3C HTML Validation Service featuring lots of accessibility improvements, interface tweaks and related bug fixes. Everything is listed on the what's new page.
Tuesday, October 22, 2002 Link
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I run several weblogs besides this one. Most of them are powered by Blogger Pro, which has this option to publish an RSS feed along side the normal HTML version of the weblog. I figured I should check those feeds using the spiffy new RSS validator built by Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby. Of course, Blogger-generated XML doesn't quite validate anyway due to an issue with the date formatting, but I found a completely different issue with the validator that affects the testing of feed for this site. Specifically, when the XML is served up from a Windows or Unix server, it looks like this. A similar feed served from a Macintosh server looks like this. Both servers use the same RSS 0.91 implementation that Blogger spits out. When you view the XML directly in a browser or as a raw HTTP request, they both appear identical. Both servers also have the correct MIME type definitions (TEXT/XML). The only difference is that files served from the Windows IIS server have CR/LF line endings and those served from the Macintosh WebStar server have straight carriage return line endings. A request has been sent asking if the validator could parse the XML correctly regardless of the type of line endings used the source file. Stay tuned. Additional information and commentary is available at diveintomark.
[ Update ] Mark Pilgrim just informed me that the brand spanking new version 1.0.3 fixes the line ending problem. Don't you just love getting instant feedback?
Monday, October 21, 2002 Link
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The available domain name of the week is boltdozer.com
Look at what I found rattling around on the web today. To begin, Mr Zeldman has started redesigning using pure CSS. Begone ye vile nested table dwelling creatures. You have jury duty? Godspeed Jeffrey. And please keep an eye on the sandwiches. I've heard tales. Next we find that something seems to be buzzing in the far corner of the Blogger cable closet. What ever could that be? The mind boggles. Oh yes, and our very own Veer weblog is now lovingly syndicatable for your aggregating pleasure. And this happens to be just the start of our XML exploits. Watch and learn. Finally, a hefty helping of mad props to John Anderson and the gang at Everchanging for the public preview release of their Cocoa-based Newton synchronizing tool - nSync. Steve that, Mr Jobs.
Snow melting on metal grate. 7th Street Southwest, Calgary.
Saturday, October 19, 2002 Link
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Gosh, that was almost painless. The server move went flawlessly, at least for the machine which hosts this site, and everything seems to be running the way it should. The Cobalt Qube that handles the Newted Community duties is still chugging through a disk status check, but should be online again this afternoon. While I was in middle of the whole mess, I finally got around to updating the FTP server to the most recent version of Rumpus. If anyone has been having issues with dropped connections or timeouts, especially when publishing using Blogger, this update should help alleviate some of the problems. By the way, if you've been using an IP address rather than the host name to access your account on the splorp.com server, you'll need to change it in your Blogger and FTP client settings. The new IP address of this server is 207.34.68.36. Now, back to the Qube.
Friday, October 18, 2002 Link
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Well, not a beagle exactly. More like a Whippet. In fact, just like a Whippet. A three quarter size version of a greyhound. A type of dog that was apparently bred by crossing a hybrid of a fox-terrier and a full-sized greyhound with one of those fit-in-your-glovebox style Italian greyhounds. Interesting, no? At any rate, yesterday our household officially became home to a four-legged, tail-wagging friend with all the sundry accoutrements. As for personalized nomenclature, are currently seeing how the name Indigo fits. We've been calling him Indy for short and "Hey you, don't pee on my foot..." for special occasions. My wife and I have determined that he must be part cat as well, since he loves to curl up in your lap, nuzzle into your arm, and fall asleep - just like that. Not that any cat would ever admit to nuzzling into any part of your body. I have also recently rediscovered that the air is very fresh outside when you're watering the dog at five in the blessed morning. And yes, everyone was absolutely right when they told us that it's just like having another baby in the house. Except this one is weaned. Pictures of the new family member will be forthcoming. Wish us luck.
Just when everything seems to be running smoothly, you may as well change it around. Back in July, I moved the splorp.com and newted.org servers (and all of the web sites accommodated therein) to Webcore Labs while my ADSL connection changed from Cadvision to Nucleus. Well friends, it's been three glorious months since my Nucleus connection went in and I started freeloading off the good folks at Webcore. I suppose it's time for me to move my servers back home again.
What this all means is this... my web site, along with the others hosted by me, will be sporadically unavailable over the next couple of days beginning this afternoon. My apologies for the short notice, but the window of opportunity for doing these types of things is limited. The servers will be moved by this evening and then the name servers will perform their magical dance of the thousand propagations. Please note that the server move does not affect e-mail for any of the hosted domains. Fortunately, the mail server resides elsewhere. Thanks for understanding.
Thursday, October 17, 2002 Link
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Late afternoon sun on Government House. 7th Street Southwest, Calgary.
The available domain name of the week is rejectable.com
Tuesday, October 15, 2002 Link
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Ah, what wondrously cryptic dispatches lie just beneath the surface of modern software. Not only is the phrase "Portable Document Format File Format" a fine example of descriptive over-exuberance (not unlike the Beach Boys tune which waxes lyrical on the populous fashion of wearing huarache sandals), but I find the whole idea of having an error message for an error message downright charming. This very nearly useless dialog box was kindly submitted by Mr Popiel, who always seems to have these things pop up right when he needs to get something accomplished.
See Veer post two (count 'em two) honest-to-goodness, never before seen press releases the same darn day. Even the peripherally cognisant will notice right off the bat that one of the releases is basically an announcement of the launch of our company six months after the fact. That's a commonplace practice in this industry, isn't it? I think it plays out like this: Nab a concept. Find funding. Launch the concept. Grow a bit. Work the bugs out of the concept. Grow a bit more. Announce the concept. See, we did it just like that. And by the by... you can also glean a few juicy bits about all the wonderfulness this team I work with has accomplished in our previous lives. Swing your grasping appendages through the rest of the press room and see what grabs at your Velcro®. Can actual business cards be that far off?
Oh, I'm still here. Don't you be worrying your pretty little heads about anything. I've simply been off the air due to an extended version of the Canadian Thanksgiving Day long weekend. Included in the mix was a multi-day sojourn to the Queen City for my grandma's 90th birthday, a peruse of a science centre constructed inside a vintage power generating plant, a three-story hotel water slide, and several ample helpings of perogy, cabbage roll, and crispy gobble-bird. I am currently attempting to purge the last straggling molecules of a certain incapacitating amino acid from my system so I resume normal blogging velocity. Please bear with me, the contents of the overhead bins have definitely shifted during the flight.
Wednesday, October 09, 2002 Link
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Metal salvage yard fence. Ogden Road, Calgary.
Tuesday, October 08, 2002 Link
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Just a short note relating the fact that I have added a natty little link pointing to the RSS feed for this here weblog. The aforementioned link currently appears in the upper right hand corner of the page, directly below the ISSN designation. You have no excuse now. Syndicate away.
Monday, October 07, 2002 Link
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Today is our thirteenth wedding anniversary. No needling, no reminding, no blatantly obvious hints were required. I remember our anniversaries. And to be sure, our anniversaries remind me of things as well. They remind me of how crisp autumn mornings don't necessarily mean that the only thing coming is winter. They remind me of how good the warm afternoons of an Indian summer can feel on your face. They remind me of having a cold, but not really caring that I have a cold. They remind me that autumn is the best time to have homes full of family and friends. They remind me of the smell of several things cooking all at once in a crowded, clamouring kitchen. They remind me of kids running around in backyards full of leaves, being as loud as they can, or at least as loud as the dog that's running around with them. And they remind me of being immensely happy and truly in love with my wife. Even more than that Saturday in October thirteen years ago. Imagine that.
Sunday, October 06, 2002 Link
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Remember all those faxes you thought you sent, but didn't realize they hadn't made it to their intended recipient until it was too late? Well, maybe it's because this week's available domain name is fauxmachine.com, or not.
The almost definitive online guide to Newton-related terms and definitions has finally been updated. Yes, I'm talking about the indispensible Newton Glossary. Now sporting over 700 terms for your perusal and subsequent enjoyment. I know it seems like forever since I updated the glossary, but hey, it hasn't even been ten months yet. Yeesh. And please note that I also managed to convert all that nasty deprecated page formatting junk into compliant HTML and CSS to match the much prettier parts of this site. Only 6 or 7 more sections to go, kids. I'm on a roll...
Saturday, October 05, 2002 Link
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Hmmm.... Looks like something big is happening down in Seattle, kids. It appears that all Getty Images sites sport a similar message this afternoon. Are they finally consolidating the last of the brands under the circus tent roof of gettyimages.com? Maybe some of the "scheduled updates and maintenance" will address the browser issues discussed earlier. Yeah, right.
A couple of additional notes regarding the Getty Images Creative site and their laughingly ineffective browser sniffing and compatibility. It's obvious that the script being used on the site is aiming specifically at Netscape browsers, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to witness the obfuscation using iCab (view screen dump) either. Does this company test with any other browser beside Explorer? I know they're a Microsoft shop, dedicated to a fault. Servers, workstations, laptops, backoffice, frontoffice, refrigerators, you name it. But for the love of Pete... Their customers are - by their own recognition in the name of the site - creative. The last time I checked, a significant amount of the creative community used other platforms and - I'm going out on a limb here - perhaps even different browsers than those that ship with that other ubiquitous operating system. To show that I'm not alone in this state of agitation, here's what Michael McCracken passed along:
"Just thought I'd add an image of the Getty site in OmniWeb (view screen dump), a web browser that is just non-CSS compliant enough to expose whether the designers really tried to make it accessible. I'm glad that people are still talking about the web's basic browser usability issues - it seemed for a while that people thought the problem was solved, and it clearly isn't. If browsers weren't so nonstandard and entrenched, we'd have such an opportunity for new web design, instead of rehashing the old stuff..."
Oh, I'll keep talking about it. And so will others. For additional laughs, Mr Zeldman points out that Microsoft's latest redesign is completely unintelligible in Netscape 4.x and Dylan Foley performs a quick tidy just to prove that logic and wisdom could prevail if it really wanted to.
"Here's a demo page I cooked up, showing how easily some of this could be rectified. In the time it took to drink a cup of coffee, I was able to turn their mishmash of wonky html into an xhtml/css compliant page."
More details here. Crap, I love this kind of stuff.
A bunch of sites linked to this late in the week, but it's just one of those wonderful things that merits as least one more mention. ColorMatch 5K takes the drudgery out of selecting, discovering, and iterating a decent web site color palette. Simple. Elegant. Useful. All that, and only 5k in size. Take it anywhere. Fits in your pocket. Via Daypop, amongst others.
Friday, October 04, 2002 Link
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Shopping carts and leaves in parking lot. Lake Bonavista Promenade, Calgary.
At one point in the not so distant past, I would have ripped a bloody strip off of any site that blocked or discouraged certain browsers or platforms. Lynx was the baseline for accessibility, as far as I was concerned. In fact, I distinctly remember giving the designers and developers of the gettyone.com site a double-barrelled shot of "wtf" about a year and a half ago for shutting out Netscape 4 Mac browsers. I was in the employ of Getty Images at the time and felt compelled to offer as much constructive criticism as I could. Especially, considering that they obviously didn't know what the hell they were doing in the first place. Of course, nobody listened, but it felt better getting it out of my system nevertheless. Today, I can almost forgive a company or individual for designing a site that discourages the use of 4.x and older browsers. These browsers are evil, and we would dearly love to be rid of them once and for all. Unfortunately, they're still entrenched in the consumer and corporate environment and won't be completely through with them any time soon. Note that I said "almost". Discouraging the use of certain browsers is quite different than blocking them entirely. Getty Images still blocks some of them, including the older standalone version of Netscape Navigator and text-based browsers of all flavours, as demonstrated by this oddly apologetic page on their site. Encouraging potential users of your site to upgrade their browser is commendable, providing your give them easily accessible and usable alternatives. Telling your users to download the latest and greatest browser is fine, unless your site doesn't work in the latest and greatest browsers. Sure, the Getty Images Creative site presents itself in all its faceless sterile glory when using Internet Explorer, but... when your site implodes with spectacular consistency when using Netscape 7.0 (view screen dump) and Mozilla 1.1 (view screen dump), then you probably need to go back to the drawing board. I'll be the first in line to admit that the sites I build aren't perfect either. But at least they don't haphazardly scatter their constituent widgets all over the blessed screen.
Tuesday, October 01, 2002 Link
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Weblogs have pedigrees and bloodlines? I hadn't given the concept of relationships between blogs (or Weblog Genealogy as Stepan Riha calls it) much thought until I ran across BlogTree this week. I suppose it makes sense, seeing as many of the stalwart online journals that we know and love have inspired or begat other weblogs. In my case, it was primarily Matt Haughey and his (at the time) fledgling Metafilter site that convinced me I had enough crap floating around in my cranium to warrant my own slice of the daily raving ether. I have to admit that the whole concept of BlogTree is a bit addictive. Once you register your own weblog on the site, you can relate parent and offspring blogs to yours, helping define the growing family tree of weblogs. Here's where my weblog currently sits in the BlogTree hierarchy. This is like sequencing the genome, except it's much easier on the pocketbook. Get going and help fill in the gaps between the branches by adding your own blogs to the tree. Go on... it'll be fun.
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