Archive.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003 Link
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Hole punch on its last legs. Calgary.
Monday, August 25, 2003 Link
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I not sure why I didn't point to this earlier, but Dan over at Superfluous Banter recently launched The Old Technology Giveaway. If you know me even vaguely, you'll probably recognize this as an unavoidable opportunity driving right up my alley and screeching to a halt in front of the garage. Ancient technological curios? That's my middle name. And my coincidental pondering over the Jasmine driver diskette in the previous post only solidified my resolve to enter something in this contest of sorts. Here's my first pitch. There's plenty more where that came from too.
Wednesday, August 20, 2003 Link
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In my ongoing (and somewhat laughable, according to my wife) attempt to catalogue every single, freaking piece of hardware and software I've managed to collect over the past twenty years, I occasionally stumble across some simply glorious nuggets. This evening, I verified ownership of several floppies worth of classic driver and utility software from the sophomore years of Macintosh SCSI peripheral development. Anyone remember the LoDown CD drive, the first that ever shipped for the Mac? Got it. How about the TapeCrate tape backup device from Crate Systems? Got it. Ever noodle with the various utilities for a Novy Systems Mac Plus accelerator card? In spades. Surely some of you used a ThunderScan, right? Two versions of the hardware and software straight out of 1984, baby. Now, where'd I pack away that old ImageWriter? But back to the original subject of this post... one of the disks in my hot little hand is for an original Jasmine 20 MB hard drive.
The fact that I still have this software in my possession is a side-affect of my compulsion, and not necessarily hippy or dippy in any way. The aforementioned hippy dippiness presents itself in the form of the strangely poetic slogan found on the obverse side of the disk label - and I quote: "The flowers of yesterday, the fruit of today, and the seeds of tomorrow are one." Finding any connection between this text and second generation Macintosh storage technology is a bit of a stretch - even for me. What on earth were they smoking at Jasmine Technologies back then? In retrospect, it might explain their unfortunate demise via Chapter 11 proceedings in the early nineties.
Things like a PowerBook nailed to a wall for instance.
Tuesday, August 19, 2003 Link
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Today, we unleashed a spiffier, and dare we say, much speedier version of the search engine on the Veer site. Yes, it still needs some of the chrome polished and one or two of the hubcaps are missing, but it's what's under the hood that we're tickled about. Go on, take her out for a spin. Let me know what you think.
Monday, August 18, 2003 Link
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Hello. Remember me? Oh good. I just took a bit of a summer break there. It's nice to see that almost everything is still working somewhat. What was I doing? Oh, you know... sitting on the beach. Throwing the kids into the lake. Kicking back, enjoying the weather. And pretty much avoiding all of the raging forest fires currently toasting the British Columbia interior. Oh, and while I was out, the Veer clan moved into their shiny new home. I'm still unpacking, but you can get a taste of the decor via the grantcam. (Which will be the 'a little bit more than just the grantcam' until I can find out where the bracket for the camera mount ended up.)
Tuesday, August 05, 2003 Link
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That's how the indubitable Mr Breibish described our current office space at Veer. This wasn't a reflection on our comrades and cubicle mates per se, but on the current living conditions. This was especially true today, since the air conditioning decided to conk out and the internal building temperature was certainly creeping close to 'little boxcar on the prairie' levels. Ah, but it's less than a week until we move to more spacious (and better ventilated) confines whose previous claim to fame was housing the über-smarmy executive team that ran the doomed Bre-X Minerals into the dust of history. In the meantime, we'll be rubbing our collective elbows in the boxcar. That is, a boxcar with running water, a 29th floor view of the river valley, and a broadband connection.
Monday, August 04, 2003 Link
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Permalinks and RSS article pointers are working again. Gah.
Friday, August 01, 2003 Link
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I just had to share this with someone. It doesn't matter whether you are already registered on the Photonica site or not. Simply put, if you're not signed in, you're presented with this confusing lump of interface nonsense. Please tell me why registered users should have to navigate past this singular piece of idiocy? Ever heard of using cookies to store session variables or identifiers, people? Never mind the fact that it takes a good two or three reads of the text to understand what the hell they're trying to say in the first place. I am so gone. Oh, and the kicker? The message is designed to look like a modal dialog box, but takes on the appearance of an error message. What did I do? What's wrong with the site? When I click the button, does my browser window close? No, a new page loads into the same page. Oh, that makes sense. This is bad on so many levels, my head hurts.
On a whim, you decide to publish a page on your site featuring a plethora of disturbingly similar logos accompanied by a few snarky comments, and before you know it, you get quoted in an article on TheStreet.com about another brand design atrocity. I promise not to let the fame go to my head.
One of the dozen or so bounced email messages I received this morning that were associated with a particular domain, had this rather odd self-referential error tacked on:
Could not deliver message (ID=25300).
Local account 'mail' is not enabled for mail.
Now, I don't really want to be the one pointing out obvious problems in other people's systems, but you'd think somebody might want to look into this.
Programmatic maniac Eckhart Köppen is about to do it again. The man who has already blessed the Newton community with exploits involving XML parsing, an RSS news reader, Blowfish encryption, the capability to play MP3 tracks (and streams), and a bunch of infrared communications goodies so we can all beam stuff back and forth with our cell phones - is about to tackle Bluetooth as well. Go nuts, Eckhart. We'll pretty much install anything you post on your site. It does make me wonder how you manage to keep up your day job at Nokia, though.
Furthermore.
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