Archive.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004 Link
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I've witnessed a load of questionably designed and inadequately proofread dialog boxes in my travels. But I'm at a complete lost on where to start with this one that popped up in front of me this morning while wrestling with LaCie's SilverKeeper backup utility. I count seven major interface design errors, not even mentioning the ones that go against the basic tenets of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. How many can you spot? There are a lot of benefits to off-shore software development. This is not an example of any of them.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004 Link
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The latest round of Lightboxing features retro-freshy Jen Funk Segrest knocking heads and Photoshop palettes with the ubiquitous Nate Steiner. It's a country song in the making.
On a reasonably regular basis, I perform a complete backup of the entire veer.com web site (all of the html and image components anyway) to a dated archive. I have been doing this since the site was launched in July of 2002. I danced a similar jig while working on the EyeWire web site as well. This behaviour is driven not only by paranoia of losing something I have worked on, but by an equally indeterminate urge to save the ephemeral - even something as transient as a web site in a given state on a given day. Yes, it's an illness. But, it's also my own little Internet Archive Wayback Machine stored in cozy StuffIt archives right on my desktop. Part of the challenge of making these backup copies is that it must be done via FTP. As the site gets larger and wider and deeper, I have found the GUI-based FTP clients such as Fetch and Transmit timeout and disconnect more and more as the site increases in complexity. This could be because the clients have to traverse an ever-growing directory structure, and it takes time to switch back and forth between folders and then update the status for the user. You've heard me rant about this before... graphical applications are slugs under OS X when compared to similar software running in OS 9. Likewise, some of the network connection issues are probably related to goofy firewall we have in place between our desktops and the server, but I'm not about to get into that right now. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Fetch and the perpetual handy-dandiness that the Panic boys crank out. But the reality of the situation is that FTPing vast amounts of data from a voluminous hierarchy of directories is just plain faster via the command line. Period. That being said, I would like to thank the bountiful smartness of Waferbaby for pointing out the suite of NcFTP tools. Slick recursive copying of an entire top-level directory is now so easy and interruption-free, I can hardly stand it. This small open-source download beats the digital pants off the weak FTP functionality built into OS X and will save me hours over the next several months. No kidding.
Monday, February 23, 2004 Link
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Amaryllis reflection. Calgary.
Monday, February 16, 2004 Link
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The available domain name of the week is overherd.com
Like I don't have enough things sucking time away from this blog and my family, I've teamed up with Jason Perkins to kick his single word domain feed idea up a couple of rungs on the old concept ladder. It'll look pretty and won't take too long, I promise.
Monday, February 09, 2004 Link
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Most days this web serving thing makes complete sense. Then there are days like today. For some inexplicable reason, the server which you are now accessing without any trouble whatsoever, decided to take leave of its senses this morning. Not only did it no longer wish to serve any files ending with the .html extension, but it also managed to lose track of where the FTP directories are located. No FTP access. No viewable web pages (other than a hard-coded error page which several kind souls told me they were now seeing). No quick fix via the web-based admin tools that were still functioning. I ended up shutting down the web server remotely, figuring that no web site was slightly better than a hideously broken one. All you smart people who peruse this weblog via the RSS feed would have be none the wiser, since the server was having no trouble at all handling .xml files. After a reboot of the machine this afternoon, everything seems to be running as it should. Again. Apologies to both visitors and hostees for the unscheduled (and somewhat puzzling) downtime. Oh, and did I mention that on top of everything else, I just spent 45 minutes trying to corral a squirrel that somehow wandered into our basement? Whatever.
Sunday, February 08, 2004 Link
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Newtendo Entertainment System
Friday, February 06, 2004 Link
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The proprietor was shuffled to a new location on the factory floor this morning and subsequently the grantcam has a brand new outlook on life at the workstation. By the way, that body behind me is my new departmental co-star, Mark. Past him is the kitchen. Handy, no?
Wednesday, February 04, 2004 Link
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Stucco building and bench. 19th Street & 1st Avenue Northwest, Calgary.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004 Link
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The available domain name of the week is statusbarn.com
And while we're in the midst of pointing out seemingly nonsensical conventions and other examples of implementation malformance, Andrei Herasimchuk (yes, that Andrei Herasimchuk...) would like to ask a few random questions about CSS & XHTML. Why on earth is it called a class? Why doesn't font-style have the bold parameter? We lose the <b> tag to favor a more semantically correct <strong> tag. But who wants to write <strong> all the time? Was <st> taken? He's taken a whole slew of those niggly little things that have been bouncing around in my brainpan ever since diving into the wonders of the semantic sandbox and finally typed them onto a page. None of this is going to change anything, but it feels good to have it out as an open discussion. It's still confusing and disorienting, but in a better way.
Nobody enjoys a fling of the muck at schizophrenic user interface conventions more than yours truly. And as a source of consistently fine editorial persnicketiness in this field, the likes of John Gruber cannot be questioned. However, it's refreshing to see that other folks can get their collective widgets in a twist on par mit herrn Gruber. Other folks like Paul Sowden, who has discovered a wonderful nit to pick regarding Apple's uniformly inconsistent formatting of window status bars in OS X. Indeed, why are even Apple's own applications so confoundedly disparate in common elements such as this? I guess that's why they're referred to as human interface guidelines, and not human interface commandments.
I haven't run into problems with any previous Safari update. Perhaps this is a happy coincident, but every release has been better and more robust than the last. Until now. Yes, version 1.2 is definitely perkier and I adore the ability to tab to my hearts content through all of the elements on a page, but a couple significant things are being a bit too grumpy for my taste. The most visually annoying issue is that images used in rollovers have a quirky little flash when first displayed, regardless of whether they are preloaded or not. There is mention of this behaviour on Macintouch, so I can take solace in the fact and at least I'm not alone in this observation. This may have something to do with the changes made to the way Safari caches information in this version. Secondly, although I can't pinpoint what causes it exactly, some text cannot be pasted into another application after copied from a web page. I seems to be related to certain CSS formatted text blocks, but it's inconsistent. Occasionally, when you select some text and copy it, you only get 'unknown' content on the clipboard. Toggling the style sheet off allows the text to be properly copied and pasted. And then again, sometimes it just works the way it's supposed to after navigating to another page and back. Sigh. Last of all, the size of form controls seemed to have shrunk on the Veer site. For example, we define select elements (pop-up menus) as having a 10px font size. Now these elements appear to be sized equivalent to 9px text. Checkboxes have become smaller as well. Can I go back to Safari 1.1 now, please?
[ Update ] I think managed to fix the form element weirdness by removing the font property from the input selector assigned to a certain class of checkbox and then reloading the style sheet. Why a value assigned to checkboxes affected the pop-up menu elements is beyond me.
Furthermore.
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