Spiral playground slide and cloud. Calgary.
Friday, May 31, 2002
Whoa. What a week that was.
Whoa. What a weekend this will be.
Monday, May 27, 2002
Spiral playground slide and cloud. Calgary.
With the unleashing of both a feral Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 3 and a not quite house broken Netscape 7.0 Preview Release 1 in the same blasted week, I'm feeling somewhat accosted by surprising code incongruities, temperamental rendering of standard elements, and various other visually annoying consistency issues. But then I guess that's what I get paid for.
Sunday, May 26, 2002
It's actually been quite a while since I last purchased a domain name for own personal use, a feat of indeterminate self-control that has frankly left me baffled. I was on a bit of a domain binge back in the late nineties, but then again, weren't we all? However, nothing seems to last and in a fit of whim this evening I nabbed yet another address at which to park some sort of creative inkling. If the truth be told, I'm astonished that the domain was available in the first place. Now the question remains... whatever shall I do with macpaint.com? Suggestions, anyone?
Two, count 'em two site launches coming up this week. One of them is small, yet significant in terms of how we're going to end up positioning this new-fangled company I'm working for. The other is a reasonably massive, yet hauntingly familiar undertaking. Those of you who have worked with me in the past will certainly catch some of the drift embedded in that previous statement. Now, ask me if I'm starting to freak a bit about the next few days. Go on, I dare you.
Saturday, May 25, 2002
If you've been on the prowl for a typographically-tilted daily, especially with the recent hiatus of Andy Crewdson's irreplaceable Lines & Splines, you might consider giving the typographica weblog a go. It's chock full of tasty type-related tidbits, creative curiosities, and other design considerations - including the dead tree variety - all submitted with care and attention by a growing roster of obviously interested and unquestionably authoritative parties. And I'm not giving you the big sales pitch just because I happen to be one of the contributors either. Go see for yourself.
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
It's been a while since I've posted one of my Three Line Poems from the Subject Lines of Spam, and seeing how my in box has been practically awash with new material today, the timing is perfect to share another one.That's EntertainmentThere. Now wasn't that worth the wait? On second thought...
[sara.black, elynt, lncarl456ee2026h40, 2002]
Got legal problems?
Get your band out of the garage
My friend has one of these
Monday, May 20, 2002
There are copious amounts of unmovable dirt under my fingernails from working in the yard. A fairly substantial patch of blotchy red skin stretches across my forehead from biking without quite enough sunscreen. Three of my fingers look at though they've been thoroughly pecked by ill-tempered chickens because the ends of the poultry wire I fastened to the pea trellis bit back on a regular basis. Oh, and my sneakers are disgustingly filthy. All three-day weekends should be this great.
Friday, May 17, 2002
Gull wing on sidewalk sans corpse. 7th Street Southwest, Calgary.
One thing leads to another. No, this isn't another lyrical tribute to The Fixx. I just happened to learn a little Google trick from Jish this evening that returns page where all of the URLs contain a specified string. I tried it using something close and dear to my heart, the name of my site, and discovered that a fellow named Chris Warren had profiled me for a project called Presentations of Self in Web Logs. Apparently my site and I are classified as a moderate example of visual presentation of self. Based on his brief explanation on the topic, I guess that's a reasonably accurate observation. I'm just befuddled as to why I was chosen to be included in the same limited sampling of other online personas such as Ev, Kottke, and Zeldman. I'll just back away slowly and be secretly pleased.
It's a pain in the pants when you have to migrate one of your externally hosted sites to another server because one ISP has been swallowed up by another. It is also an enormous pinch in the toches to have development on that site frozen for a better part of a week because the actual time of migration is not known. However, the most significant boot to the bottom is when the migration actually takes place, during the middle of a business day I might add, and you suddenly realize that your new ISP has neglected to mention that server-side includes aren't activated by default. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue if your site hadn't used SSI for the primary navigation, the generic page footers, and a significant portion of the product display pages. Not a huge problem, you say to yourself in a manner positively brimming with self-confidence. After all, both servers are running Apache and naturally the server configurations will be similar since they're migrating a couple hundred other sites besides your own, right? They wouldn't think of forgetting about something as fundamentally useful as include file support would they? Of course not. Just stuff a "AddHandler server-parsed .html" declaration into the .htaccess file and we'll be back in business. That'll show 'em. And you know, it would've shown them too, except that the ISP also neglected to mention that SSI has been completely disabled for security reasons. And they weren't about to turn it on for you or your little dog either. No exceptions. That's ok you grumble, somewhat subsonically. I was going to convert the entire site to PHP anyway. Just not this afternoon. Feh.
Thursday, May 16, 2002
I suddenly lurched and tossed and finessed and ultimately bandied about several links found in the sidebar. Nothing to be concerned with really. Move along now.
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Ceramic squirrel protecting trash by the back gate. Calgary.
According to an article over at The Register, you can apparently use simple household items such as felt pens and electrical tape to circumvent music CD protection. I'm not sure what's more hilarious - the fact that this type of rage-inducing, guilty until proven innocent, consumer-targeted encryption can be defeated so easily, or that the compiled list of discs using copy protection contains next to nothing that I'd want to listen to in the first place. Via myapplemenu
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
Call me nutty, call me obsessive. My poor little heart is palpitating like a sand worm thumper over this here gizmo. It doesn't even matter what it looks like, although it's darn pretty inside and out. As long as this latest chunk of hardware pr0n fits in the equipment rack, makes whirring noises, and just works the way Apple stuff just works, I'll be happier than a pig in poo.
Monday, May 13, 2002
You only plug the ones you love. Willkommen zum Plunderkind, ja.
Deep breath. Slow release. For the past year and a half, Andy Crewdson's typographically expansive and intellectually dense Lines & Splines has been a both a daily read, and at times, a challenging absorb. As sad as it may seem on the outset, the fact that he shut the blinds of the shop this past Sunday only means that other, much more wonderful things can be expected. At least that's what I read of the short note tacked to the front door. Of course, there are always the voluminous archives to trundle through once again. Thanks for your time, Andy.
Sunday, May 12, 2002
You can just tell when a software developer has trusted the freely accessible and extensive market research available to small business, embraced a qualitative brand strategy, and naturally tossed a few alternative choices past a focus group of potential users prior to deciding upon the name for his product.
I just received the last of seventeen of the most polite auto-response messages from Network Solutions that I have ever had a pleasure of reading. Basically, they go like this:"The registrar transfer request for domain name: nixietube.com has been approved. Though we're sorry to see you go, we've sent the transfer command to the registry as you've requested."Gosh, that's awfully swell of you guys. If I had even vaguely imagined that the process was going to be this painless, I would have started the ball rolling ages ago. It's been a slice boys. Smell ya later.
Friday, May 10, 2002
Water droplets in the car wash. Calgary.
A veritable smorgasbord of luscious Jaguar delicacies awaits young and old over at the Railhead Design steak house and screen door company. Drop what you're doing right now, then go there and take a long, drooling look before the non-disclosure enforcement goons at Apple wake up and start stuffing cease and desist letters under the wiper blades in the parking lot again. Via What Do I Know
Thursday, May 09, 2002
Copland Goes Gold Master "In a shocking move that has left the Mac community reeling, Apple engineers today announced that the operating system code-named Copland has been completed." Via rumortracker
All right, enough with the lollygagging. I finally stuck a crowbar into the code for the available domain name of the week page, and with the finesse of a weekend carpenter pulling rotten clapboard off a handyman special, I pried out all of the affiliate links pointing back to Verisign. The next step is to start prying all of my own domains out of that customer service sinkhole as well. Wish me luck.
Multi-dimensional arrays in PHP are a darn good thing.
Wednesday, May 08, 2002
After reading Tommy William's Mozilla 0.9.9, XHTML, CSS, and Madness, I thought to myself... wow, does that ever sound familiar. Although I'm not working with XHTML markup, the inexplicable goofiness that Mozilla displays while attempting to render the style sheets for a validated HTML 4.01 transitional document is frighteningly similar. Basically, it doesn't work on but one of the servers I'm using. If I remove the DOCTYPE in the source file or change the DOCTYPE to HTML 4.0 Transitional, the CSS works in Mozilla on this particular server. Of course, the page renders perfectly on every other server I've tried, using Mozilla or otherwise. Tired of smacking my own head against the wall trying to figure this out, I naturally tried Tommy's suggestion of adding the appropriate content type declaration to the server's config file. Then using telnet, I checked that the HTTP headers were changed and coming back correctly from the server in question, as he did. After clearing the browser's cache, everything was appearing as it should - finally. Now, just don't get me started on what Mozilla does to the vertical cell spacing in all my 4.01 transitional documents. Again, switching to a different DOCTYPE fixes the problem. But that's not the point, is it now? Via diveintomark
Tuesday, May 07, 2002
Lion sleeps with the lamb. Mac OS X on Dell monitor. Calgary.
Monday, May 06, 2002
I suppose I should say something regarding all the news out of Cupertino today. Specifically, I'm pleased that Apple (or I suppose Mr Jobs) finally admitted that the Rosetta handwriting recognition from the once-proud Newton is actually good enough to include in the latest version of OS X. It interesting to note that it took them just four freaking years to find a way to jimmy it into a "robust and modern" operating system. And I didn't even take exception to the jab ol' Stevie Wonderful took at my favourite hand held platform. Something to the effect that they were finally "getting something out of the hundreds of millions of dollars of Newton technology..." Smart ass. Oh, there are a lot of other chewy Jaguarlicious goodies that I'm all over about as well, but... hello, what's this? A rack mount server solution to be announced next week, you say? Be still my beating heart. Be still.
Sunday, May 05, 2002
I must of pulled something while posting all those items on Thursday. Yeesh.
Thursday, May 02, 2002
It's the first week of May in Calgary, so naturally that means that it's snowing. Wet, stick-to-everything, springtime snow that is at least partly responsible for the minor power outages over the past couple of hours. I've found that operating a computer while the electrical current has indigestion makes routine tasks such as blogging and responding to email much more interesting. At least I know that my industrial-quality, uninterruptable power supply is working. The servers in the basement have been sucking on it all night.
Well how about that. Adobe actually won the patent trial against Macromedia revolving around all those dockable, draggable palette widgets. Maybe once they've cashed the settlement cheque, they'll consider using some of those 2.8 million clams to port a version of AlterCast to OS X. Erm. It'd probably be easier to get Macromedia not to appeal the ruling.
HyperCard? SuperCard? MetaCard? PythonCard!
Oh for crap's sake. Cranky typeface behemoth Agfa Monotype has got it's intellectual property knickers in a twist and is attempting to use the asinine legal crutch known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to prevent Tom Murphy from distributing his TrueType embedding tool. A tool, I might add, that he created for use on his own fonts and that was released prior to both the enactment of DMCA and the merger of Agfa and the Monotype Corporation in the first place. For pure enjoyment factor, the scary lawyer letters that he has documented are a pure laugh riot. Of course, there's even more vociferous blandishment regarding the stupidity of it all over at slashdot. Via Line & Splines
Milk crate in parking stall. 4th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
Oh yes, it's time to settle down, twitch your mouse finger, and adjust your lumbar supports in preparation for yet another edition of Three Line Poems from the Subject Lines of Spam.I Know Your SecretsIs this becoming a habit yet?
[bannedcd, admin, XoHuRLeYBaBeoX20, 2002]
Ruin anyone anywhere anything
We guarantee your great chances are here
Whoever you are I suggest you change your password
I'm starting to slip like a bad transmission. I can't believe I completely missed this announcement last week. 4D released a decarbonized version of WebStar 4.5 specifically for Mac OS 9 users. Decarbonized. I love it! It looks like I might be able to hold out for those rack-mount Mac servers before switching to OS X after all. Via myapplemenu
