Archive.
Thursday, July 31, 2003 Link
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I've observed an interesting bit of my own online behaviour lately, and though I should mention it. As much as I've loved using NetNewsWire to pull together and display absolutely ludicrous amounts of aggregated news and bloggerisms in a single, unadorned window - I've found myself drifting back to my browser and my bookmark list. My desire to see the author's words in the context of the original intended design of their site has been outweighing my need for brute-force headline scanability and the speed at which I can process the data. Returning to the browser slows me down. Not slower in the sense of being more efficient. And not necessarily in terms of the amount of actual time it takes launching and opening and clicking and surfing. I find that by navigating from site to site, I am 'browsing' the information again, pulling out the interesting tidbits and diving off tangentially through various tabs and windows. This is opposed to simply consuming, digesting, and quite frankly excreting, mass quantities of information. I'm seeing similarities in my browsing and discovery habits that can be compared the slow food movement. A 'slow web' movement? It's working for me.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003 Link
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What the hell has crawled up some people's butts? Please indulge me for a moment while I explain. My wife and I, along with our dog, were enjoying a warm summer evening in our back yard. As goes one of our stupid pet tricks, we were telling the dog to look for squirrels. When he hears that particular 's' word, his ears adjust perpendicular to his skull, his eyes dart side to side, and he announces his presence vociferously to any fuzzy-tailed rodentia within earshot. We thought this was an activity well within the boundaries of proper and responsible pet ownership. After all, it was still early evening and there was plenty of other internal combustion-powered cacophonia emanating from the rest of the neighborhood. Surely to goodness a few innocent barks aren't going to be an issue to anyone. Apparently, we were wrong. From the back alley, we hear some crotchety voice declare, "I'm sick and tired of that barking all day and night." That faceless statement left my wife and I dumbfounded. Day and night? Surely he doesn't mean our dog. Whippets hardly say boo regardless of the time of day. And ours is quite dead to the world for the most part of any given 24-hour period, thank you very much. Before I could confront the disembodied voice for a little more detail regarding its concern, the source had disappeared. Normally, I would have shrugged this kind of incident off. The same way you laugh at the idiot who flips the bird after cutting you off during the morning commute. But this incendent bothered me. And it shook up my wife even more.Yyou see, when she was growing up, some self-righteous moron threw a poison-laced edible into her back yard and a family pet died. She worries that it's the same type of cowardly person - one who complains but doesn't show their face - that would poison a defenseless dog. I can't blame her for worrying, but it's not fair that some cranky boob behind a fence gets to shake us up and then vanish. Now we're faced with an unwanted image wedged in the backs of our brains. An image involving our dog and a misguided, spiteful person. Do we keep our dog quiet every time he's in his own yard? Or do let him just be a dog and then risk the potential retaliation of someone who obviously needs bit more bran in their diet? I'd like to think that we can keep on doing what we've been doing and that whatever stick that person has stuck up their anal orifice quietly slides into oblivion. Come to think of it, he's probably the owner of that freaking horny tom cat that scares the living crap out of us every night with its wailing and hissing and humping who knows what. Not that cat owners are the enemy here. Some of my best friends are keepers of the feline persuasion. Dang, I'm ticked off. Does it show?
What do you mean it's supposed to be every week? Are you sure about that? I've slipped a cranial cog before, but this is downright embarrassing. Somehow I managed to get three weeks behind in adding new candidates to the Available Domain Name of the Week page. Egad, that's rather sloppy of me. Let's just assume I was really busy doing really important things and leave it at that. As a lame attempt to cover up my tardiness, I'd like to offer the following trio of potentially obtainable internet whistle stops. Specifically, yet in no particular order whatsoever: disseminal.com; zonality.com; and my personal favourite tasty-choosy, grapeflavor.com, are awaiting your registration pleasure.
Monday, July 28, 2003 Link
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Another missing piece of the puzzle has been found. And it wasn't stuck between the cushions on the couch either. Ev notes that a new version of BlogThis! has been unleashed. Not only does it finally work in Safari - my current workaday browser - but it's also friendly towards pretty near every other modern browser floating around the ether. Good work Bloggerfolk. You've managed to eliminate several minutes of copypaste tidium from my daily grind. And that counts for quite a lot in my book.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003 Link
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Poster collage found on Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis.
The suspicions of many have been confirmed and documented. Apparently, the internet is shit after all. Now, if you would all please move along. There's nothing to see here.
Monday, July 21, 2003 Link
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Miss me? If you did, you may also be wondering what the heck was up with the recent radio silence. Well kids, I've been sans connectivity whilst tootling around the Twin Cities, being slightly overwhelmed by the heavy-duty typographic content and charmed by the friendly folks at TypeCon 2003. I'll post a few of my observations, some photos of the city, and of course, all of the well-deserved gratitudinal predilections a bit later. At this point, I simply need to finish shovelling the smelly chunks of spam out of my sagging inbox.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003 Link
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First of all, I'd like to thank all those folks (who obviously have an enormous amount of extra cycles to burn) that took the time to tell me that the pages linked from my RSS feed looked - well - less than sexy. Last week, I explained the gruesome details of why the pages looking the way they did. In the process, I managed to lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of the new version of Blogger, rather than on my somewhat convoluted use of untyped include files. Yes, I was well aware of the problem and certainly felt compelled to find a solution. However, I didn't really think it merited immediate attention. Well, silly old me. Enough people commented about the problem to embarrass me into finding a solution sooner, rather than later. Yes, the pages look much better now. I discovered a nifty way to wrangle the Pardeikes Welcome plug-in running on my WebStar server to make like a mod_rewrite and mash the item links into something that points to the archives proper. The rewrite rule looks for improper archive paths and then adds the missing '.html' component to the original path before sending it all back to the browser. The only issue I've found is that the anchor reference doesn't get relayed back to Safari (or any other KHTML-based browser, such as the current OmniWeb beta). What ends up happening in these cases is that the proper archive page gets returned, but anchors to specific posts get lost in the shuffle. This doesn't appear to happen with IE or any Mozilla-based browser. Since Dave Hyatt was seeking out non-UI specific issues in Safari, perhaps this is a good time to mention it. And please let me know if this fix isn't jiving for you either.
Monday, July 14, 2003 Link
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The web seems to be chock full of tasty little gems today. Always one to share, I offer the following digital curios for your perusal. First up, here's looking at you. The video conferencing capabilities of iChat AV may be all well and good, but I'm not quite ready to shell out for a new iSight just to slather my mug across the digital abyss. Enter iChatUSBCam, an Application Enhancer module which lets you use your current USB webcam with iChat AV. Nice. Now, moving from Apples to oranges... I find it a bit hard to swallow the claim that there are still six million active Commodore users around, but it's certainly nice to see that someone is considering to relaunch the brand. I would like to clarify at this point that in my younger days I was an Apple II geek - not one of those other guys with a Vic-20 or C-64. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Speaking of 'back to the future'... Markus Schmidt and Joacim Melin of NeXT Information Archive fame, have launched the inaugural issue of a nifty PDF-based publication called NeXTeZine. My favourite article has to be the tutorial on how to install a developer release of Rhapsody under Virtual PC. Now that's the kind of convoluted technology integration I can really sink my feet into. Oh, and by the way, just as America Online killed newsgroups and the web, it's apparent that the death of weblogging is close at hand as well.
Friday, July 11, 2003 Link
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Painted utility access in alley. Southeast, Calgary.
Wednesday, July 09, 2003 Link
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At long last, some wonderful soul has compiled the closest thing to a definitive list containing all the wonderfully obscure Macintosh keyboard sequences and startup modifiers. My favourite (and previously unbeknownst to me) key combination? That would have to be the pentadigit cmd-opt-shift-delete-octothorpe, where octothorpe represents the ID number of the SCSI device you want to boot from. And what's an octothorpe, you ask? Everyone gets to learn something today, by golly. Via Mr Barrett
Encouraged by the series of 'What Panther Should Fix' missives posted by Hadley Stern on his AppleMatters site, and the continually entertaining persnicketiness of the eminent Mr Gruber, I've been compiling my own grumpy list of things I'd like to see addressed when Panther finally pads into town later this year. I'm not asking for the moon. I just want to find out what happened to a few old school conveniences, because they obviously fell off the truck when OS X was first delivered. Here's handful of things to chew on...
- Finder windows that update immediately after something happens in them. I don't know about you, but having reasonably instantaneous feedback on whether something happened or not is pretty useful to me.
- A previously voiced complaint of mine is the lack of an easily accessible user option of specifying smaller, crisp, aliased text in Finder views (you know, like I can do in PathFinder.) The abuse of screen real estate is atrocious and wasteful in OS X. Hey Steve, sometimes things look better when they're not fuzzy-edged.
- When font-smoothing (or anti-aliasing) is turned off, how about actually displaying the fonts using the proper character spacing? Some applications can apparently do this without any problem (Summary, BBEdit, and PathFinder come to mind...) but the Finder is notoriously snotty about having font-smoothing turned off. Time to get over it.
- Put the borders back on all windows, please. When multiple windows are stack on top of one another, there isn't enough contrast to discern where one stops and another begins. I'd appreciate more of a boundary differentiating these overlapping areas. I would also like to be able to drag windows from any edge - something I became used to doing in OS 8. It looks like the new Finder in Panther starts to do this by adding a whole crapload of brushed metal futzing around the default view. But again, it goes away once you collapse the toolbar and sidebar components with that dinky little lozenge widget.
- A key modifier combination that would allow me to quit an application simply by clicking on its icon in the dock. (Similar to how the wonderful Process Manager control strip module works under OS 9.)
- When I create a new folder in the Finder, immediately select the name so I can start typing. Again, just make to do stuff like it did in OS 8 and 9. And don't even get me started again on the whole getting used to a different keyboard shortcut to create a new folder thing, yeesh.
- Allow me to resize the 'Search in' list in the Find window so I don't have to scroll to find the last folder or volume in the 'specific places' list.
- Bring back search criteria options such as 'visibility', 'creator', 'type', 'label', 'custom icon', 'folder attributes', and 'comments' - just like Sherlock 2 offered. Oh yes, and let me save preset criteria again.
- When dragging a file or folder into an open Finder window, dragging to the edge of the window to scroll the contents of the window is flaky and annoying to no end.
- When I get info on a folder, please tell me how many items are inside - not just the total size of the data. Hello? Apple? You do remember how to do this, right? If you want to make this window even more useful, take a cue from the way you're currently handling Multiple Item Info windows. Split out the contents of the folder into the number of files, number of subfolders, number of invisible files, and Then add it all up for me.
- Remember when you used to be able to drag and drop an image out of your browser, or save something from a web page to disk, and the orginating URL of the item would be included in teh comments field of the Get Info window? I do. Sigh.
- And while we're still on the subject of Get Infoing, wouldn't it be nice if the disclosure widgets would keep the status of the last time they were displayed. Why do you keep collapsing the preview? Better yet, get rid of those cruddy looking disclosure triangles, and use those natty, low-profile tab buttons.
Give me a minute or two, I'm sure to come up with a few more...
Monday, July 07, 2003 Link
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It's not just about the booth, it's also what the booth is about. The available domain name of the week is kioskology.com
Friday, July 04, 2003 Link
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Thursday, July 03, 2003 Link
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You see son, that's why we don't go off installing prerelease operating systems all willy-nilly. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't make it right. I mean, if Avie went and jumped himself off a bridge, would you?
Jack Mottram wrote in this morning, "...there's something funny happening at splorp.com - whenever I click on a link to an entry to your weblog from NetNewsWire, the web page loads up without a good chunk of code - Doctype, head tags, etc. are all missing, and I am faced with an unstyled, navigation-free version of splorp instead of the usual pretty page." Indeed, there is something funny and I've known about it all along. The reason Jack is seeing unstyled (and frankly, not very valid) weblog entries is because there is no way in the new version of Blogger of specifying how the item links in the RSS feed are formatted. My archives get spat out of Blogger as chunks of raw html, unencumbered by the surrounding document structure, style sheets, and so on. The officially sanctioned archive pages are produced by combining the unadorned Blogger-generated archive data and the CSS together using server side includes. The permalinks in my blog work fine because they point to the correct, combined html. The links in the RSS feed point to the bare-bones include file. Compare these two article links:
/blog/archive/2003_06_01_archive#105701113953980154
/blog/archive/2003_06_01_archive.html#105701113953980154
The first one points to the archive include file (as does the feed used by NetNewsWire), the second points to the true archive page (as do my permalinks). Both links work, but the second one is a damn site prettier than the other. This wasn't an issue before the Dano version of Blogger was launched. The RSS feed that was generated prior simply tacked on a item ID anchor to the main weblog URL. That worked because the newsfeed would always have links to articles that were current on your main blog page. Since the news feed is transient, it made sense to me that the articles didn't need permanent links to the archive pages. The Dano feed is much more robust now, but it assumes too much about where the archives are. I guess I should look into fixing the way I'm building my archive pages instead.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003 Link
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Listen, just because I got all excited about this new DevCenter article by Danny Goodman (yeah, I'm talking about that Danny Goodman...) entitled Super-Efficient Image Rollovers and couldn't wait to start diving in head first, it doesn't mean I'm a geek. Ok, maybe it does.
Tuesday, July 01, 2003 Link
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The recent spate of love it or hate it posturing around the latest iteration of the Mac OS X Finder is historically rooted in the ongoing search for the perfect file management environment. A search, I might add, that has been in progress since the introduction of the Mac. Of course, there is no such animal - Jaguar, Panther or otherwise. But we've been darn close. Somewhere between ingenious simplicity of Andy Hertzfeld's Switcher (no, not that Switcher...) and the half-assed implementation of MultiFinder, there was Macintosh Servant. Yet another reason that Apple should have kept Andy a bit happier and had him hang around the campus longer than he did. He certainly cranked out a continuous stream of goodies for a lot of other companies after vacating the fruit stand. The article above was written by one of my Newton-using acquaintances, Josh Burker. It had been buried (or in his words, 'festering') on his site for a while. I happened to stumble across the link while visiting his Newton web server. It's a good read for those interested in the developmental minutia surrounding the Macintosh.
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