Photo of the day.
Translucent office window. 4th Street Southwest, Calgary.
Friday, November 29, 2002
Anchors await.
Tantek Çelik has once again dumped his big bucket of common sense all over the web authoring community. As a follow up to last months' piece on using semantically richer heading and paragraph markup, he has put together a series of simple little changes to make your permalinks (or whatever clever device you've used to designate anchors to various postings) a lot more meaningful. I've already taken these suggestions and put them to work on this here blog, although I have to admit that the code still isn't as semantically up to snuff as it could be. I'm still <blockquote>ing where I probably should be <div>ing, and <p>ing where I ought to be <h2>ing. On the bright side, my permalinks seem to have a bit more more spring in their step.
Thursday, November 28, 2002
So, what is it Kennooth?
The available domain name of the week is fooquency.com.
Mozilla keeps sneaking up on me.
I must have been busy doing something terribly important, because I completely missed that fact that Mozilla 1.2 was unleashed a couple of days ago. I need to start paying closer attention to these kinds of things, otherwise I'm going to have to set aside even more time to chew through platefuls of nummy release notes like these. A few things I'm digging from this version are being able to launch the browser with a preset group of bookmarks loaded into window tabs, link prefetching, and better theme support. Better theme support? A bit frivolous of me, perhaps? Not when you can improve your user environment simply by using Kevin Gerich's Pinstripe Theme and finally get a decent looking Mozilla-based browser. Don't get me wrong, I still think Chimera kicks under OS X, but the interface could benefit from a little finessing.
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
He just Raissa the stakes.
The versatile Eckhart Köppen has updated Raissa, his RSS headline reader for the Newton. This version finally adds one of the missing features which now makes Raissa a truly usable software tool and not just some proof of concept curiosity for an unsupported hardware platform. Headlines can now link to Newt'sCape, the Newton web browser, just like a real, grown-up RSS reader. Raissa can also be scheduled to update feeds when you like, and if you have the infamous MacInTalk and SpeakText extensions installed on your little green friend, it will even read the headlines to you during your morning constitutional.
Photo of the day.
Translucent office window. 4th Street Southwest, Calgary.
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
So that's what the top of my desk looks like.
I love products that do the one thing they were designed to do, do it very well, and make me wish that I had thought of them in the first place. The slick as a whistle Marathon DeskMount happens to be one of those products. I can't wait to have it show up at my door, so I can reclaim two square feet of my desktop and evict all those dust bunnies living behind my G4 tower.
Crap? I'll give you crap.
Being a Mac user means being able to laugh not only your own obsessive compulsive behavior, but the never ending foibles of the gang down in Cupertino. Enter AppleCrap, a site dedicated to celebrating the worst from Apple Computer and the Mac OS. What they lack in literary finesse, intelligent debate and wit, they more than make up for in locker room vitriol and typographical errors. For my money, there's much better coffee-spew to typo ratio over at MacEdition and Crazy Apple Rumors. Nice try guys. Now stop hanging around in the little boys room and get back to class.
Monday, November 25, 2002
Photo of the day.
Diffused fresnel lighting on film set. 6th Street Southwest, Calgary.
BBEdification.
Take a break and scroll through the nearly four dozen bug fixes documented in the BBEdit 7.0.1 Release Notes. One of them is bound to strike your fancy. There's something in there for the entire family.
I load. You load. We preload with onload.
Ever on the prowl for gracefully degrading web design efficiencies, I came up with a slick way to avoid having to worry about updating page-centric image preloading code every time we changed one component on a page. Normally I would preload every single rollover image on the page using an onload attribute in the <body> tag. This is fine for elements such as navigational graphics and other things that stay the same for months on end, but for elements that change much more frequently, I started using an onload attribute in the <img> tag of the rollover element itself.
Here's an example:The nice thing about doing things this way is that the image, its rollover code, and the preloader script all travel together in the same text snippet and I can include it on different pages throughout the site without having to update the JavaScript on each page. I'm sure there are plenty of technical reasons for not doing it this way, and I won't be offended should you care to elucidate. For starters, it sure as heck ain't going to validate any time soon... The upside is that it hasn't caused any flaming browser mishaps yet.<img src="/image.gif"
onload="javascript:if(document.images){n_img=newImage('/over.gif')};"
id="img01" alt="Nice image, what?" width="32" height="32" border="0">
[ Update ] Toby mentioned that I don't really need to include thejavascript:pseudo-protocol in the onload handler since I'm not attempting to mimick a URL. Here's the updated version:Simple, no? More details on why you probably shouldn't be using the pseudo-protocol anyway can be absorbed over at Jibbering.com<img src="/image.gif"
onload="if(document.images){n_img=newImage('/over.gif')};"
id="img01" alt="Nice image, what?" width="32" height="32" border="0">
Sunday, November 24, 2002
Maybe 1984 was just a little bit like 1984 after all.
Oh, the wondrous potential of pre-bloat Microsoftian application development. Complex formula-based calculations, multi-column linkable worksheets, context sensitive help and other aspects of pure electronic spreadsheet joy - all yours on a single 400KB floppy disk. Brought to you from the compunabula archive.
Friday, November 22, 2002
Telus what you think.
Our favourite monolithic communications behemoth is really good at looking like they want to listen to their customers. Of course, looks aren't everything. Scratch a bit of the colourful patina off the surface, and you'll find a cold corporate infrastructure that honestly couldn't care less. But that doesn't mean they don't put up a good front. For example, they are currently requesting feedback on different concepts for the redesign of their myTelus customer portal. They're certainly dishing out the standard buzzwords for any information-dense redesign. They've got your "navigation improvements" and your "organization improvements", not to mention your "design improvements". On top of it all, they're also looking at including "new, improved content". The emphasis is theirs. All three versions of the proposed redesign are unquestionably bland and formulaic, but go ahead and tell them what you think anyway. The feedback form appears to be open to anyone. It's unfortunate that there isn't a one-click "I think they all suck" button on the page. Something like that would definitely be a "navigation improvement".
Is that a x86 in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Here's a wonderful bit of speculation to chew on while hanging around the espresso machine this afternoon. Danyon pointed out an anomalous blip in this Mac OS X features table. Toward the bottom of the page, the last item in the "Other Features" section notes that Jaguar includes a little something called "Amd support". Ignoring the fact for just a seconf that the term is not capitalized exactly the same way as current rumor mill starlet AMD, it seems a tad odd that Apple would include this on a publicly accessible page. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no other technology, protocol, hardware architecture or computer-related acronym referred to as "Amd". So if it quacks like a duck, then... you get the picture. Here's a screen capture of the page, just in case Apple figures out that it's supposed to be a secret after all.
[ Update ] Well, that was a short lived news item. The pertinacious Aaron Straup Cope blows the lid off my conspiracy theory. Amd support means that OS X includes a daemon that automatically mounts a filesystem whenever files or directories within that filesystem are accessed. Part of me knew it wasn't as straight forward as a simple slip of the marketing department's pen. I just didn't dig deep enough into my Unix man pages.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
An observation from under the hood.
Let's say someone has built a system that has the ability to report the status of a given action using a series of differentiating error codes. You might assume that the person who built said system would encourage the use of those error codes in order to offer feedback to the user and otherwise communicate function or state changes within complex dynamic environments. You also might assume that the error codes would be documented somewhere and that you could easily access them without too much additional effort in order that your own functions could benefit from their use. You might assume these things, but you'd be wrong.
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
Press any key.
Tired of having that Enter key on your PowerBook right where any sane hardware designer would have put a Command key? Remap your keyboard six ways from Sunday with the OS X kernel extension DoubleCommand. It's obfuscatingly delicious.
What's the name got to do with it?
Does anyone else find the name of this product just a tad bit inaccurate? Even the support copy says that Art Directors Toolkit is for "...designers and production artists alike". So where does the Art Director part come in? Does the software hover around your desk and point out the most obvious out-of-place bits? Does the program suddenly decide that it doesn't like any of the colors you've used and request them be changed? And if this is truly for Art Directors, shouldn't there be an online shopping module for tracking the best prices on black turtlenecks and European eyewear? They should have called it the Futilely Attempting To Meet A Ridiculous Deadline Because The Art Director Told The Print Production Department Lackey To Change Everything At The Last Minute Toolkit.
FinderPop go boom.
Before I commit to making the jump over to OS X, I've been on this sporadic quest to locate those little software nuggets that will afford me the same level of utility and convenience as I'm used to under OS 9. One of those nuggets is FinderPop. As contextual menu enhancements go, it's usefulness teeters somewhere between downright indispensable and "why the hell don't you have FinderPop installed on this machine?" Today I discovered that Turly O'Connor has pulled down the old FinderPop site, save for a download link to the final version of the software. That's it. Gone. Done. At one point I recall him admitting that he probably wouldn't ever release an OS X version of FinderPop because of current projects and commitments, so I never got my hopes up. But damn... now he's saying that he isn't even working on Macs anymore. That hurts just a wee bit. Nevertheless, I did find an OS X contextual menu plug-in called Ittec that does pretty much everything that I ever expected FinderPop to do, and more. Hey Turly, thanks for everything. And good luck on whatever it is you're doing now. As for a FinderPop replacement, I think I'm covered.
Photo of the day.
Ceramic dog guarding vintage Linotype specimen book.
Sunday, November 17, 2002
You put how much money into that internet company?
Nothing like a post-bubble investment to bring your financial reality into focus. And if you still happen to have a few shekels left in your business bloomers, have I got a web address for you. The available domain name of the week is dotcompoop.com. I know, I can't believe that one wasn't taken either. In fact, there's only two references to dotcompoop through Google. Sounds like another trip to the pseudodictionary is in order. [ Update ] Bingo!
Friday, November 15, 2002
Hey. Where'd the rest of the text string go?
Erm...Ah, that's better.var t = document.form.text.value.replace('&', '%26') ;
Get yourself unlinked.
Back at the shop we've come across several niggly bits and other annoyances while using Adobe InDesign to produce our catalog. Don't get me wrong, we adore using InDesign nearly as much as we enjoy vehemently abusing QuarkXpress. However, nothing is truly perfect, especially when it comes to software. And the longer you use a piece of software, the more gum you find stuck underneath the seat. The latest pain in the floating tool palette was the fact that there was no way to unlink multiple text boxes without completely reflowing all of the text contained in the individual boxes. There was no way that is, until I found this wonderful AppleScript written by the equally wonderful Peter Boctor. There's also a VBScript version for all you Windozers as well. I think we just saved two days worth of drudge work. Huzzah.
Photo of the day.
Untitled.
Thursday, November 14, 2002
Why didn't you tell me my local part was missing?
After nearly five years of habitually inserting clever nicknames into my email account user name (eg: Grant [Perl Interrupted] Hutchinson), I have had to discontinue the practice. Not that I've run out of witty nom de plumage by any means. I place the blame solely on the current state of disheveled and misconfigured email server and client software. I have been witnessing more and more instances of my messages bouncing back with errors such as:Delivery failedMissing or malformed local part, my sweet aunt fanny. Since when have brackets been considered illegal characters in internet mail header fields? If someone can point this out to me in the standards document, I'll back off. Damnation. And it's not the few messages that bounce back that bother me, since I can simply resend those messages using a slightly less embellished user name or another account altogether. What bothers me is how much email never reached its intended party and never notified me that there was an issue because of the way a certain mail server may have been configured. I guess from now on I play it safe and boring, saving my cleverness for other venues.
550 rejected: syntax error in 'From' header when scanning for
sender: missing or malformed local part (expected word or "<")
in "Grant [Faux Finish] Hutchinson <grant@splorp.com>"
Discomfort, billed monthly.
The available domain name of the week is contractpain.com. And yes, I know I'm several days late posting this. Just remember that this is a free service. You'll get over it. Of course, I could start billing monthly. Paypal donations anyone?
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
It doesn't suck, even more than last time.
If you're a Machead and a code jockey, this will probably make you sit up and smile or else gape wide-eyed in complete astonishment at their tenacity. What the heck am I yammering about? Just the fact that Bare Bones Software has unleased BBEdit 7.0 on an unsuspecting world, that's what. Need details? Of course you do. Read up on what's new while you're wiping the drool off your chin.
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Photo of the day.
Sunrise from car dealership parking lot. Calgary.
Monday, November 11, 2002
Old platforms never die...
... they just keep getting references on tech culture news sites. With nothing more than a quick aside by Dennis Lloyd, the publisher and proprietor of the iPodlounge site, the slightly imitative but ever respectful Newtons Around The World gallery gets a sundry mention near the end of this Wired News article. Hmmm... how many more times do you think this obsolete platform that I love so dear can get mentioned in Wired before the end of the year? Apple should have been so lucky to get this much press when the Newton was shipping.
Sunday, November 10, 2002
Having a bad block party.
You get one lousy error message in the midst of a project. Naturally, you make sure everything is backed up elsewhere and then dive into the problem. Five and half blessed hours later, your secondary 40 GB hard drive is finally wiped, initialized with zeroes, and verified. I guess you can get back to work now.
Thursday, November 07, 2002
Getting to the cruft of the matter.
Matthew Thomas takes a fairly balanced whack at all the legacy gunk that accumulates on human-computer interfaces in his essay When good interfaces go crufty. One of my favourite bits comes near the end of the piece: "In human-computer interfaces, as in real life, horrible things often have minor benefits to some people." Ain't it the truth. This statement pretty much sums up my experience with Netscape and style sheets over the past two days. Horrible things indeed. Via Studio Log
Photo of the day.
Ephemera in window of antique shop. 9th Avenue and 14th Street Southeast, Calgary.
Speak of the devil.
Not that I want to perpetuate this theme any more than necessary, I can't help but mentioning the Silly Dog site, home of the soberingly thorough Netscape Browser Archive, the technically intriguing Netscape Version Guide and what must be the largest single page collection of Netscape Now! buttons on the planet. God help us all.
When in doubt, roll it out.
Here's the update to yesterday's adventure in tweaking style sheets for the most persistent of obsolete browsers, Netscape 4. After a bit more futzing, the changes have been rolled out on the Veer site. It's not perfect, but it looks a damn sight better in Netscape 4 than it did 24 hours ago. In the process of getting certain chunks of the CSS to work, I discovered that some configurations of IIS will not serve up images that are a few thousand pixels in one dimension. Solution? Don't use images that are a few thousand pixels in one dimension for background images. Yeesh. I also managed to merge two secondary style sheets into the primary one and stripped out a pile of other browser-specific and deprecated code. If you don't need it, get rid of it honey. Feeling adventurous? Fire up that old copy of Communicator and have at it. But please let me know if you uncover any weirdness that renders the site completely unusable, because that would probably be a bad thing.
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Those guys better appreciate this.
I spent the bulk of this afternoon finagling the style sheet for the Veer site so it doesn't look quite as crappy for Netscape 4 users. Why? Is it because I feel compelled that everyone visiting our site should be able l to see text set in Verdana instead of Times Roman? Maybe. Is it because I enjoy the pure text editing satisfaction of finagling style sheets? I do, but that's another issue altogether. Is it because I'm simply a conscientious web designer concerned with a consistent customer experience? Well, let's not get too crazy here. Is it because five freaking percent of our measurable visitors to the site still use that tragic excuse for a browser? Bingo. By the way, the style sheet changes haven't been rolled out to the public site yet, so don't bother telling me about how crappy it still looks in Netscape. Check back tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Oh yeah? File this.
A word to the wise. Having less than stringent file naming conventions in place during development and production can result in the occasional rude non sequitur.
A server in error.
To be slightly more specific, a diabolically obtuse error message along the lines of: -ERR[SYS/PERM] Unable to process from lines in /var/spool/mail/; Change recognition mode or check for corrupted mail drop. System what? Permanent? Corrupted? Yuck. I just love getting error reports like this one from folks trying to access mail on one of my servers. Of course, up until yesterday I had never seen an error like this before. Doesn't that just figure? It couldn't have been a problem that I had successfully dealt with in the past, right? I had to be completely new. Thank goodness for Google. A quick trip to a couple of mailing list archives, and then diving into vi to trim a half dozen partially digested lines out of a mail spool file. Shazam! Everything works again. The user is happy. I am amazed.
Monday, November 04, 2002
When I grow up, I want to bite the hand that feeds me.
Late last week, the indefatigable Bryce forwarded me a link to this truly hilarious movie that whacks the advertising agency culture smack dab in the middle of the forehead with a 32 oz. drop-forged ball peen hammer. The tail end of the clip shows a Monster.com logo, so it may have been a legitimate advertisement at some point. I don't know anything else about it other than it's hosted on the Hart Associates client project server. Has this clip made the rounds before? If so, where the heck was I? Take a couple of minutes and enjoy.
[ Update ] Jason Perkins writes in saying "...this may have been a parody of a series of Monster ads that had kids saying things like, 'When I grow up, I want to be a, yes man.' presumably to underscore the fact that a better job was to be found on monster.com. I'm reasonably certain that the originals didn't have kids mentioning that they wanted to smoke a lot of dope..."
Trendlines and hemlines.
The available domain name of the week is uphilldownhill.com
Friday, November 01, 2002
The FAQ be back.
After a two month hiatus, the Newton FAQ has been updated and is currently available for your primigenous PDA platform perusing pleasure. You may also wish to note that the Newton FAQ is now operating under new management. Newton developer and all around buen huevo, Daniel Padilla, has taken over the controls from former faqmaster Paul Guyot. Paul, thanks for all of the blood, sweat and compilation time poured into the project over the past three years. And Daniel, thanks for failing to realize just how much you've bitten off to chew. Mad props to the both of you.
