Archive.
Monday, March 31, 2003 Link
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What started as a subtle visual declaration by several regulars in a typography forum, has transformed into a full-on community-powered display of creative voice. Submit an icon or three to the Typophiles For Peace virtual quilt, brought to you by mighty folks over at - where else but - Typophile. I've sent in a couple tiles so far, maybe you could too. Naturally, as are all things subjective, participation is completely optional.
Sunday, March 30, 2003 Link
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No, this isn't a photograph from my non-stop birthday party weekend. If you must know, the hastily scrawled caption on the back of the snapshot reads as follows: "Grant fetching some beer for Dad. August 1964." Aside from the shape of the bottles and the style of my shorts and, I suppose some things never really change. Actually, I don't wear orthopaedic footwear anymore.
Friday, March 28, 2003 Link
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The available domain name of the week is floodedbuffer.com
Fellow PDA enthusiast and developer Adam Tow has released a stream of interesting software, some of it for the Newton, some of it for the Palm. Today, Adam announced the public release of Soybo, a technology which bridges those two hand held platforms, your desktop, your laptop, and pretty much anything else you can throw at it. Soybo is a cross-platform and device independent system that allows applications to publish their functionality as web services. Those services are accessible via any internet-enabled device capable of running a web browser. Adam thinks this will be big. I'm still digesting some the possibilities, but the fact that it's open and extensible (heck, you can write your own custom service extensions in AppleScript), means that it has some incredible potential. I'd also like to thank Adam for releasing version 1.0 on my birthday. A strangely refreshing coincidence.
Thursday, March 27, 2003 Link
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Ah, the things you discover while playing around with discs full of old software. Apparently you can't just double click an installer disk image from a pre-beta developer release of System 7 in the Mac OS 9 Finder. Well, nobody told me.
The gang at Veer threw me a little Hawaiian-themed birthday shindig today. In between actually trying to get a catalog proof out the door, it was all about leis, lawn chairs, loud shirts, and flourescent slushy fruit drinks. Paper-chain decorations in bright rainbow gradients garnished the hallway and my desk. A macramé hammock on loan from somebody's patio hung precariously from the aluminum grid of the suspended ceiling. I work with a fine bunch of haoles, I do. And why all this trouble for little, old me? Maybe, just maybe, it's because my odometer flips over to 40 tomorrow. I sure hope my parents opted for the extended warrantee. I'm feeling a wee bit kapakahi lately.
Sunday, March 23, 2003 Link
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If recent referrer logs are any indication, there has been an enormous surge in interest with regard to spiral logos. But it's not just any old body displaying their curiosity. I've been doing this spiral logo thing far too long for it to be considered newsworthy in North America. The Russian weblog community on the other hand... well, that's a different story. Two sites in particular, dirty.ru and vimya.ru managed to contribute to a significant bump in visitors this past week, as well as providing a mighty fine stream of new logos from across the strait for me peruse. Indeed, someday all of these swirly submissions will actually grace the mighty critique. Until that time, I will simply say welcome to my new found comrades. Welcome.
Saturday, March 22, 2003 Link
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When we're between catalog drops at Veer, that generally means that I have more time to fix things on the web site that have been dogging me. More time to go through the piles on my desk and either toss the various sheets of paper into the recycle bin or the filing cabinet. More time to gradually inch down the dog-eared to do list and scratch things off, one by one, deftly avoiding adding too many new items to the bottom of the page. With a bit more flexible time on my hands (notice I didn't say 'free time' on my hands), I can explore other things that need exploring. RSS feeds of the new products being added to the site, for instance. Typeface previewing enhancements and the related impact on the user experience. Whilst meandering through the vast topic of typography, I'd liek to mention that I've also started working on a new typeface design based on some recent sketchbook doodles. It's probably been two years since I took a serious look at any one of the dozen or so unfinished font designs languishing on my hard drive. Rather than fire up Fontographer and keep stabbing away an one of the old files, I decided to start fresh. Building characters and glyph elements bit by bit directly in Illustrator. This will probably be the first typeface I've ever completed in software other than Fontographer. It shall be sprung from the fertile loins of FontLab instead. OpenType and all. Naturally, you'll have to wait a bit to witness the result. I'll show stuff when I think there's enough to show, just like I'll roll tweaks out onto the web site when I think they're compatible with public consumption. I'm not completely sure where I was going with this post, other than to say that I'm muy ocupado. Very occupied, and in a very good way.
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 Link
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After a three month fast, the unquestionably nourishing and vitamin enriched Newton FAQ has been added back on the menu and is awaiting your ready consumption and subsequent digestive processing. This is what I call real brain food. Now fortified with even more valid links.
After nearly 60 hours of uptime running the latest Newton Personal Data Sharing modules, my Newton server stopped working. Not to worry, it's not a permanent situation. In testing this new thread-safe version of the NPDS software, I've stopped using the NPDS Watcher component. The Watcher would keep an eye on the various connections and threads on the Newton and would reboot the device if the server stopped doing what it was supposed to do. With nothing watching what what going on, nothing happened when the server stopped responding to connection attempts. You could ping, but nobody was home. Still, having more than two days constant uptime is a bit of a record for this software. A big tilt of the sombrero to Paul Guyot, the big brain behind the current development branch of NPDS. Kudos can wait, however. Right now, it's time to go home and reboot my Newton.
Visitors have often mentioned that they'd like to see a comments system on my site (especially this guy). The various methods of communicating this request have run the gamut from meek asides to adamant insistence. I've always regarded the ability to leave comments as nice thing to have, but not something that had to exist for a weblog to be a weblog. This may be why I've never got around to mucking about with any of the multitude of third-party solutions out there. Every once in a while there has been talk about Blogger rolling out its own integrated comments - but I never got my hopes up. I always assumed that when the time was right, I'd either move this whole weblog thing over to Moveable Type which has all that fancy-schmanciness built right in, or I'd slap something together on my own. Let's focus on the latter of those two options.
Believe it or not, I've started building a framework for my own comments system. One of the limitations in developing this system is the platform on which this server runs. We're talking about a six year old PowerMac 9600 running a stripped down install of Mac OS 9.1, baby. It's all WebStar, all the time. No Perl. No PHP. Nothing but NetCloak. Keeping an incredibly open mind about this whole exercise, I'm anticipating that the system will still have most of the functionality found in many of the remote hosted comment services (like backBlog for instance, but without all the freakin' smilies). Naturally, my optimism may need to dampened somewhat. NetCloak affords me the ability to set cookies to store user information, maintain persistant server-side variables for keeping track of the comment numbers, and of course, it also supplies the means to create and modify files directly on the server. But I still need to actually build this thing. That plate being laid on the table, a test version may be available by the end of the week.
Monday, March 17, 2003 Link
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The available domain name of the week is speakspoke.com in case you were wondering. Can you tell how much thinkthought I put into this? Apparently not quite enough.
Treadmarks in frozen slush. Heritage Drive Southeast, Calgary.
Friday, March 14, 2003 Link
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Was I asleep at the helm or just too busy navigating the channel to notice? Either way, I managed to miss both the release of Mozilla 1.3 and BBEdit 7.0.3 earlier this week. I'll just mention them both here for the benefit for those who were napping along with me. Getting back to Mozilla for a moment, I'm intrigued by the new image auto sizing features which allows you to toggle between full-sized images and images that have been scaled to fit the browser window. Sounds like a interesting way to handle image galleries. And I always enjoy read that there are "... fixes for performance, standards compliance and site compatibility." The release notes are a bit light on the details, but I'm sure it means nothing but good things for all of us. Now, where are my pajamas?
Thursday, March 13, 2003 Link
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User interfaces aren't just about accessibility, easily identifiable content areas and the ability to complete tasks in as few steps as possible. They're also all about taste, texture and flavour, baby. Baring that in mind, the available domain name of the week is chunkygui.com
By the way, I forgot to post the previous week's domain name and I do apologize. Especially to anyone out there who happens to be a fan of Frank Herbert's incredibly dense and entertaining Dune series. Doesn't nullentropy.com sound like a Flash portfolio site just waiting to happen?
Tuesday, March 11, 2003 Link
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A good thing is finding out that your site experienced record visitors and page views yesterday. A not so good thing is determining that the bulk of the page view increase was due to a triplet of Google's unmanned page scrapers hammering your site quite a bit more than is generally acceptable. A good thing is having server log analysis software that is flexible enough to make the above determination very easily. A not so good thing is having to routinely add IP addresses into the host filter in your server log analysis software in order to get visitor and page view statistics that accurately represent your traffic. A good thing is finally managing to get those accurate statistics after all. A not so good thing is remembering that the reason you need those accurate statistics is because you're attending an all-day company offsite meeting tomorrow. A good thing is being finished for the day. A not so good thing is the process taking longer than you expected, losing track of the time and being really late for supper with your family.
Friday, March 07, 2003 Link
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A new version of Camino (nee: Chimera) was released yesterday. Even though this little bit of news has probably made it's way through the bulk of the choice weblogs and various reporting outlets, I feel obliged to mention it again. Why? Because the huge list of improvements, tweaks, and other sundry twiddles found in the release notes is nothing short of impressive. I also find myself being torn between whether to use Camino or Safari for the bulk of my browsing. To be honest, I'm quite enjoying the implied slugfest developing between the Safari and Camino camps. Friendly competition is a very good thing. Especially since none of us can remember the last time anything was heard about new version of Internet Explorer for OS X. On a related note, Zeldman recently elucidated on several areas of inconsistency whilst comparing these two underdog browsers. Dry as toast, this is our daily bread. We need to eat and digest this stuff, don't we?
Thursday, March 06, 2003 Link
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Parkade ramp with sodium vapor sconce. 5th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
I hope you'll excuse the short spell of downtime earlier this evening. It was absolutely necessary, I assure you. I had put off replacing the toasted backup drive in this server for far too long and I figured that the seething masses could survive without a half hour or so of splorp and company. The verdict? I simply plopped in one of the 4.5GB Seagate drives that I traded Sean a box of Timbits® for, and everything is right in the world of nightly incremental backups. For my next trick, I plan to add a wonderfully convoluted set of IP filters to my router so I can back this silly thing up to the fancy-schmancy network attached storage drive hanging in the rack directly above the server.
Wednesday, March 05, 2003 Link
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You know what I like about security patches? I like the fact that they always work the first time you apply them. I like the fact that they always explain in precise, human-readable detail exactly what will be modified once they're applied. I like the fact that they never have any obscure software dependencies and will automatically notify you if something is conflicting or missing from your system before the installation takes place. I like the fact that no matter how much a given security patch changes the configuration of your server and the various constituent components the operating system, they can always be easily removed without leaving any residual malformed data or other detritus. I also like the fact that I don't have to deal with them very often, but when I do, I get to write about how wonderful they are. As if.
I spoke with my dad today about my mom. He had a conversation with the doctor earlier this week discussing her recovery. The doctor related that my mom wasn't making as much progress as she had expected. Physically, mom is doing well and is expected to be able walk out of the hospital at some point, with assistance of course. Mentally, it's apparently a different story. The people involved with her assessment and therapy seem to think that she should have recovered more by this point. She should be doing more of this and less of that. I really don't know what to think. Every time I see my mom, I can see progress. I can see transition from before to after. I can see a little bit more of her personality sneaking out. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places or for the same things that the trained professionals are. Maybe I don't need to. My mom has surprised us more than once over the past couple of months. She's bound to do it again.
Monday, March 03, 2003 Link
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Wipe that smirk off your face, PerversionTracker is not what you think it is. In fact, this site scours the web for the cream of poorly implemented and amazingly useless Mac software crop - and then reports back to you, the hapless user. All software reviews should be this scathing - and honest. Makes a nice companion read to the refreshingly tangy Crazy Apple Rumors Site. It's "milk out your nose" wonderful.
Sunday, March 02, 2003 Link
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Up late on a Sunday night, working on getting the latest site updates posted to the Veer server. Say, let's go check my own site's stats while I've got a minute to spare. Crap, can't hit the server tonight. Come to think of it, somebody sent me an email earlier this evening saying that the splorp.com server seemed a bit sluggish. This could mean a couple of things. Either the dog tripped over the ethernet cable under my desk again, or the hard drive in the server finally jumped the shark. As it turns out, it was the latter (and naturally, the least enjoyable) of the two potential scenarios. After cracking the server case, I was surprised that it wasn't the start up drive that ceased to be, it was the internal backup drive. I couldhave sworn it was the original 4GB internal drive that was ready to fly off its bearings. The fortunate part of this story is that nobody lost any data. For now, I've disconnected the dead drive to get the server back up and running, and I promise I'll install the replacement drive tomorrow.
Furthermore.
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