Archive.
Saturday, September 27, 2003 Link
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A big, warm hello from Vancouver and the ATypI conference. I just thought I would sneak in a quick post between sessions and let everyone know that the conference tracks are extremely fast-paced, the weather has been nothing but gorgeous, and the pre-configured bagged lunches are indeed quite edible. The type marketing panel discussion which I am participating in doesn't take place until tomorrow morning, so I have been absorbing as much of everything else in the meantime. Linotype's Akira Kobayashi discussing Adrian Frutiger's revamp of the upcoming Avenir Next family, and the always spunky John Downer kicking off the Font Sprint Relay with supporting team members courtesy of House Industries and Orange Italic have both been entertaining highlights today. And yes, I have managed to find time to take a whack of photos around and about the host venue, the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design. Oops, I hear the bell ringing for the next bit of typographic academia. Later.
Monday, September 22, 2003 Link
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I wasn't trying to be rude. I meant ass in the AppleScript Studio sense - not what might also be referred to as the tuchus. It's time to move forward, beyond the three-button answer dialog. I've decided that I'm at the point where I can slide right past simply tinkering with AppleScript, trying to replicate some of the functionality of the various HyperCard stacks I've built over the years. There are new utilities to be created, folders full of time-saving droplets to be dropped, and self-contained applications with honest to goodness Aquafied interface widgets to be compiled and let loose across the network. Well, not all at once, but you can probably sense my enthusiasm. And I'm going to get there with a little help from Simone Manganelli and this incredibly useful Introduction to AppleScript Studio tutorial. Via MacScripter
Sunday, September 21, 2003 Link
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During one of those leisurely Sunday evening strolls through the bookmarks, I discovered a nifty article over at BeatnikPad on how to block ads using CSS selectors. The technique works by defining a series of specific tag and attribute selectors in a personal style sheet, and as described, seems to work in all Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Camino, Phoenix, etc.) as well as Safari. Seeing as the original post wasn't mentioned on too many sites when it first appeared back in March - and quite frankly, it's a very cool trick - I thought it merited a second look. I'm not that enamored with overriding the style sheets of other sites with my own, but the concept and implementation is very interesting regardless. Selective filtering or tagging of remote content simply by using a customized style sheet could prove to be a powerful tool. Perhaps for aggregating content. Perhaps for reformatting existing content for a particular context within a secondary site. Perhaps creating text-only or light-weight HTML versions of sites that are otherwise clogged with extraneous nested tables and graphics. There are probably a dozen other things I could use this same technique for - I just need to figure out what the heck they are.
Some of the most generous folks I know sit right across from me. For example, Issa dropped off a box stuffed full of previously loved Mac goodies for me at the office this past week. There was also a plastic grocery bag worth of floppies and manuals, but the really good stuff was in the box. Amongst the treasures was an LCII to add to my teetering pile of pizzabox Macs, a 12" low-profile color monitor in near perfect condition, an original StyleWriter printer, a strange little external hard drive of unknown capacity, an Apple CD300e Plus drive, a pristine Apple Keyboard II, a couple of nondescript fax modem thingies, plus enough cables and wallwarts to choke a couple John Dvorak-sized technology pundits. But the absolute best thing that could possibly have tumbled out of that box was a pair of AppleDesign Powered Speakers. The original kick-ass beige ones, not the tinny-sounding black wannabees that came out in later years. I had a pair of these speakers hooked up to my Quadra 840av when I worked at Image Club and then migrated them to my G3/233 tower at EyeWire. Those speakers sounded so good - even when cranked during those late night product mastering sessions - that I really didn't want to leave them behind when I finally decided to move on to other things. They had an industrial heft to them that said 'built with love and quality, baby'. Well, I finally have another pair and didn't have to scour eBay to find them. Now I just have to figure out what to hook them up to. Thanks Issa, you're simply a gem.
Saturday, September 20, 2003 Link
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Many, many moons ago, I jotted down an item on my to do list entitled 'Upgrade Rumpus'. That item ended up getting migrated from old list to new list and new list again for at least two years. For those who aren't familiar with Rumpus, it's the natty little FTP server that I use for this site and about forty others residing on the same box. For all it's lovely Macness and reasonable stability, the version I had been running was not without a few, um, quirks. The least of which was its tendency to move temporary files created by EvoCam to the trash rather than deleting them. When EvoCam would try to upload a new webcam image, it couldn't rename or delete the previous file because it was sitting in an inaccessible directory, namely the trash. Well, last night I finally bought the latest Rumpus upgrade (by my count, I was one major version and about 7 dot-revisions behind) and installed it. I'm trusting that the previous issues have been dealt with in this version. However, should my loyal customer base run into any inexplicable file transfer shenanigans, they should let me know. At the very least, I can cross one item off my to do list.
Friday, September 19, 2003 Link
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I finally got around to hooking up the Blogger-powered RSS feed for the Newted Community news page. Now anyone with a half decent news aggregator can slurp down the latest updates around the house. All you folks with the internet-enabled MessagePads have absolutely no excuse for not installing Eckhart Köppen's amazing Raissa and grabbing the newsfeed pronto.
http://newted.dyndns.org/news/rss.xml
And speaking of newsfeeds for obsolete computing platforms... you can now subscribe to the UNNA news page as well, thanks to the capable hands of Victor Rehorst.
Thursday, September 18, 2003 Link
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Relax, there's nothing to be concerned about. It's just a littleblip.com - the gosh darn cutest available domain name of the week we've ever had the pleasure of posting. Awww.
Tuesday, September 16, 2003 Link
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If you haven't been fortunate to see one up close, allow Bill Noll to help loosen up those saliva glands with his slobber-inducing series of G5 images. It's the next best thing to caressing that teasingly perforated aluminum skin in person. Via the recently discovered Macinblog
Monday, September 15, 2003 Link
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It won't eliminate spam or protect a colony of endangered phasmids, but perhaps it's an idea worth sharing. Every once in a while, one of the nutty visitors to this site will send in a suggestion that merits some attention. It may even warrant an off-handed mention. At the very least, it deserves a fate better than being hidden at the back of the credenza. Of course, it could be that I honestly enjoy the fact that people actually send me mail about this site. Regardless of the rationale behind its appearance on this page, not only did the available domain name of the week save Waylan Limberg from an otherwise websiteless existence, it apparently inspired the following micro-treatise.
As you gave me the domain, and by extension the idea, that resulted in my website, I thought I would contribute to your effort, or whatever you call it. You can, of course, ignore my suggestion but I recently came across the domain sixfruit6.com and misread it as sixfoot6.com. Now, as I am 6' 4" this caught my attention and my gears started turning. As far as I can tell, the domain (sixfoot4.com that is - I haven't checked sixfoot6 as I wouldn't personally be interested) is still available.
Imagine the possibilities for such a domain: a personal site for someone such as myself, a site that reviews items from the perspective of the taller than average buyer (imagine the time it could save me when car shopping - short, and even average people always perceive a car to be roomy in a very different way than anyone over 6 feet), or perhaps a online shop for tall people (yes, I know, a boring idea but someone had to mention it).
Anyway, this is my way of saying thanks for the inspiration that lead to my, as yet, very incomplete site. If only I had more content, or at least more time to add content, the pun would be more readily apparent. To view my half baked idea, point your browser to achinghead.com. Just make sure you have a bottle of Tylenol, Excedrin, Advil, or whatever you use nearby (If you're wondering, I haven't decided if the strangely sorted blog entries are part of the theme or an error on my part - although I'm leaning toward error).
Oh yeah, 'superdense.com' - not bad. I might be inclined to use it, but the fog just won't seem to clear.
The Waylanator
PS: Feel free to use the content of this message as you see fit. I only ask that you credit me with any of the hair-brained ideas included herein.
Thank you Waylan. Indeed, it is the policy of this site to credit all hair-brained (and hare-brained, for that matter) ideas. Yours included. And you're quite welcome.
Friday, September 12, 2003 Link
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Seeing how Daniel's Old Technology Giveaway is still running and I seem to have an inexhaustible supply of the aforementioned 'old technology', I've uploaded a few more examples of the digital detritus littering our basement. There's not quite as much to slobber over as was in the previous load, but it should be relatively entertaining nonetheless. Of special note to trade show tchotchke junkies is the pair of 'We Be Geeks' pocket protectors. I can still see Jean Louis Gassée sporting one of these babies in the Be booth at the 1996 Boston Macworld. Ah, thememories of a simpler time when Macs had clones and French-speaking high technology executives ate Twinkies with spray cheese.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003 Link
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Mr Neufeld, the friendly neighborhood geek down the street, elucidated thus on why my AppleScript woes were suddenly vanquished to the ether:
"When you removed the conflicting osaxen, your script just compiled against the system dictionaries. Since it was already compiled when you put the osaxen back, it remembered which commands to use (the system ones) by more than just the words of your script (scripts are actually stored using OSType codes - not the English language commands)."
See, I knew there was a technically obvious explanation. Word up.
Please do not adjust your set. We are currently experiencing issues with the file uploading feature of our webcam software. It seems that when the camera is running, the FTP server randomly flips out during the sequential file renaming. And when FTP is finally working properly, I forget to leave EvoCam running on my machine at work. Doesn't that just beat the band?
Monday, September 08, 2003 Link
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Looking for an internet address as equally suited to the study of collapsing supernovae as it is to a Meat Loaf fan club? Have I ever got a deal for you. It just so happens that the available domain name of the week is superdense.com
During one of those 'head meets desk' moments today, I discovered that AppleScript under OS X recognizes scripting additions that reside in your OS 9 system folder. On one level this makes an awful lot of sense, since this is the same basic behaviour the two systems use with respect to fonts. Simply, OS X can use fonts that are installed in the OS 9 system folder. While this may seem a logical and reasonably transparent way to accessing fonts residing in multiple locations across operating systems, the same concept caused no shortage of frustration in terms of getting a certain AppleScript to compile. I still run a couple of applications in classic (most notably Claris Emailer) and rely on a half dozen customized scripts for various repetitive tasks. I also had a few older third-party scripting additions dumped in the system folder, namely Akua Sweets and the relatively ancient FB text manipulation tools, because you never know when you might need one of them. My problem was that it attempting to read and set type and creator information via a script, the ding dang script would choke on the property statement for grabbing the creator of a file. After finally trying the script on another Mac and discovering that it was in fact something on my machine and not my questionable scripting prowess, I removed all of the non-Apple osaxen and tried again. Sure enough the sucker worked. But weirdness of a different animal still persists. Even after putting each of the scripting additions back into the OS 9 system folder in order to determine which of the little buggers caused the initial burp, the issue is gone. Everything is fine, as if nothing happened. I guess I'm happy about that, but I'd sure appreciate a bit more closure.
Thursday, September 04, 2003 Link
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In the midst of a voluminous, teetering load of honest to goodness work, I've managed to steal away a few minutes to install the latest release of Panther. Excuse me while I wander off and muck around a bit... Perhaps I can find a way to present a little show and tell later on, while still managing to stay within my non-disclosure agreement.
Monday, September 01, 2003 Link
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Commericial signage. Kensington Road & 14th Street NW, Calgary.
So apparently what happened was this... the domain name of the week took off on an unauthorized late summer hiatus all on its own. My intention was to make sure that it was well supervised and updated every week, but then I noticed that something was amiss. It turns out that the page hadn't been updated since the end of July and something had to be done. And done it has been. The 'back-to-school' edition of the available domain name of the week features five - count 'em five - new bits of registrar fodder. A jaunty dunk of the domain name derby to local favourites Ian McDougall and Duane Wheatcroft, as well the inimitably delicious Dean Allen for their previous suggestions and occasional prodding. Without you three, I would have had to come up with even more of these things on my own.
Furthermore.
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