Thursday, February 27, 2003

Will the last person to leave the platform...

... please turn off the backlight? The title of this post refers to a popular email signature that floats around on the NewtonTalk mailing list. I mention it not only because it's oddly appropriate given what day it is, but it's somewhat ironic as well. Today marks the fifth anniversary of Steve Jobs' questionable decision to discontinue the Newton. The irony? Although the Newton community is no where near the size it was when the platform was still supported by Apple, it's certainly not shrinking. Over the past couple of years I've mentioned several new software and hardware projects that keep adding value and capability to the Newton platform. Fellow übernewtonhead Victor Rehorst posted an accurate summary of the current state of the Newton on his weblog earlier today. Newton devices are still available through sources like J & K Sales and offer significant value to those who choose to venture on the wild side of PDA ownership. People continue to discover and rediscover the Newton. Go figure. It's going to be an awful long time before anyone has to turn off that backlight.

Posted 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Being aware of being aware.

The available domain name of the week is cognisentient.com

Posted 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, February 24, 2003

More than just a fresh coat of paint.

The ongoing saga of the Newton Stowaway Keyboard Project is now being presented in a convenient and stylish weblog format. This no doubt means that I'll be expected to update it more than once every six months. Nevertheless, now that the artfully engineered keyboard actually talks to my little green friend, the potential for conjuring up entertaining tales of adventure is as boundless as imagination itself. Or at least as boundless as the crap you can buy on eBay. Heck, there's even an RSS feed to satiate your aggregator of choice. How did you get along without it?

Posted 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It must be Monday.

The mail server is offline this morning. It was sporadic last night, but now it is definitely having issues. The server in question handles mail for my domain and about 40 others. I worry less about missing my mail than I do about the mail for the dozens of other people who use the service. Since the mail server sits in completely different physical location than the web and ftp servers do, there isn't a lot I can do about fixing it right now. As friendly a gent as the other Grant is, I don't really want to stomp through his apartment first thing in the morning just to give the box a kick. Updates will follow.
 
[ Update ] The box hath been kicked. A lofty tip of the cap to Mr. Neufeld for taking care of business and working overtime.

Posted 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, February 23, 2003

Stop your whining.

Oh dear. The startup drive on this server is beginning to sound like an F-15 winging its way to some Kuwaiti air strip. Fortunately, the entire server gets backed up nightly alternating between two incremental images on a completely separate drive. None of my hostees need to worry about their data being irretrievably strewn amidst the other bits and atoms in my basement. However, it looks like I'm going shopping for a new chunk of fast-SCSI hardware tomorrow. So, when was the last time a hard drive actually failed after the length of the time indicated by the Meantime Between Failures rating instead of during? Nuts.

Posted 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sir, we have a stowaway.

Three and a half years ago, I posted a little blurb in my weblog about hacking my Newton to use a Stowaway keyboard. I ended that particular post with an encouraging "stay tuned for more..." Well, if any of you were around when I first mentioned this project, let me thank you personally for staying tuned all this time. Today, I'm finally using a Stowaway to enter data into my Newton. All it took was a disused Palm III, a length of old serial cable, an alpha release driver from the amazing Daniel Padilla, and about 36 more months than I had originally anticipated. Yes, the physical connection still needs to be finessed, the Palm case is just plain ugly, and the driver doesn't support the full set of character modifiers or function keys. But damn it, I'm typing on an actual Stowaway portable keyboard - something with enough inherent design aesthetic and technical chutzpah to deserve being connected to my MessagePad. It's a thing of beauty, even if the wiring looks like a big pile of spaghetti. I'm also in the midst of turning the static Stowaway project page into a weblog of its own, so updates won't be nearly as sporadic. Clickety, click.
 

Posted 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, February 22, 2003

Don't get your quotes in a curl.

Some people, like Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame, hate curly quotes in web content. Other folks, like John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, can't imagine ever going back to such a limited typographic palette as seven-bit ASCII. And while I can empathize with Doctorow's technical issues concerning the glitch-inducing properties of typographically correct punctuation in RSS feeds, I support Gruber's stance on encouraging the user of proper punctuation and enlightened typography within the blogging community. That being said, I personally avoid using curly quotes and other mainly because their consistent display across the vast spectrum of browsers is annoying at best. When they work, they look great. When they don't work, it's the textual equivalent of a train wreck. Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I'll rant about the use of foot marks instead of apostrophes on signage or advertizing or in the media. I would never consider dumbing down my own design or correspondence on the printed page or the physical world, so why do I sacrifice that same aesthetic on the web? That's a good question. If I could guarantee that everyone viewing a particular page of web content would see the same characters as they had been typed, then I'd consider using curly quotes and em dashes and other such niceties all over the blessed place. But guaranteeing character consistency across browsers (standards compliant or not) is like trying to guarantee that your layout will always appear the same. Sometimes, it's better to settle for legible than for perfect. Simplified punctuation may not be beautiful, but you get the gist. We getting closer to browser-agnostic consistency, but we're not there yet. Perhaps of there was a way to hide incompatible or undisplayable characters from non-compliant browsers - like a method of character replacement at a style sheet level - then we'd have a chance at solving this issue without sacrificing the typographic quality that we've come to expect and appreciate.

Posted 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, February 20, 2003

Photo of the day.

 
Aluminum muffin pan on kitchen counter. Calgary.

Posted 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

afp:/at/nfg*

During one of the more recent Jaguar updates, my ability to access AppleShare volumes ceased to be. I honestly didn't notice the problem until this past week. Since I'm still hooked on OS 9, I had been using OS X pretty much for intense bouts of browser testing and only needed to access web and FTP. Starting last week, I began migrating more of my daily bumps and grinds to OS X, which included accessing AFP volumes on our illustrious NT servers. Naturally, I ran head-long into a brick wall. Attempting to access any AppleShare service, local or otherwise, resulted in a rather rude and unhelpful error message. An alert box continually taunted me without any ways or means of correcting the problem. Nice. After determining that the amazingly descriptive -5002 error had something to do with the Microsoft User Authentication Module (UAM), I started poking around the various AppleShare client files strewn about the file system. That was a fairly fruitless endeavour, but one thing I did discover was that if I created a new user account, the problem didn't exist. There wasn't any issue with connecting to an AppleShare volume while logged in as root either. The problem had something to do with my own user settings. Google came up bupkis as did Apple support when I searched for more information. However, I did find this thread on the Apple Discussions site. I obviously wasn't alone in my struggle or in my quest for a solution.
 
The fix boiled down to editing this file:

/~user/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

Replacing:

<key>afp_cleartext_allow</key>
<false/>

With:

<key>afp_cleartext_allow</key>
<true/>

Somewhere along the way, the Allow Clear Text Password option had been unchecked in the network connection window and had gummed up the works. After the mess I swam through to find the solution to this issue, I'm hoping that posting this information on my weblog will make it easier for folks in the future. A jaunty hat tip to Issa for digging through the bowels of the file system with me.

Posted 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BBEdit updated. Again.

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Prepare to kick back for a spell if you're about to dive into the 7.0.2 release notes for the latest BBEdit update. Nine pages of new features, functionality tweaks, bug squashes, and other assorted finagling to scroll through. Woof. The main emphasis this time around seems to be tackling the convoluted tale of text encoding. However, some of my favorite bullet points in the release notes inform us that "The configuration dialog for the UnComment plug-in is more OS X studly." and "File Browsers will try a little harder to display files that aren't obviously text files.", while also producing nuggets of wisdom such as "Command-period will stop the current processes in a shell in addition to Control-C. If you bind both Command-. and Control-C to menu items, you are going to be out of luck, so don't do that." You've got to appreciate release notes with personality. They remind me an awful lot of the self-deprecating humor found in the user manuals from Marathon Computer. After you grab your BBEdit update, trundle over to Marathon and download a PDF or two, just for a laugh.

Posted 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, February 17, 2003

We're just exuding sensibility.

Sharing the available domain name of the week duties, and helping me pick up the slack for being out of town last week, is the indubitable Peter Schwartz. No being one to simply browse through the visceral gems on my site, Peter felt moved enough to send in the following suggestion:

"As I was listening to Fiona Apple's song Mistake, the words 'well-made mistake' exuded the same sensibility as the domains posted on ADotW. Since I have no use for wellmademistake.com, I am submitting it to you in the event that it strikes your fancy."

As luck would have it, my fancy was indeed struck and his suggested domain name is this week's contender. Seeing as I still need to make up for the truant behavior of the previous week's entrant, I would like to humbly toss anotherbrother.com into the ring. And as we all can imagine, a wellmademistake.com could possibly result in anotherbrother.com, could it not?

Posted 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Counting blessings, among other things.

I hadn't been consciously counting the days since my mom had her aneurysm. Somewhere in the back of your brain, events of this magnitude can't help but leave some sort of dog-eared page or red circle around a date on the internal calendar. The days get counted anyway. Some seemingly unrelated occurrence reminded that yesterday was the two month anniversary, if you will, of my mom's collapse. Under some circumstances, I can't imagine my mom not being in the hospital. It just seems like she's always been there, in one room or another, if not on the eleventh floor, then on the fifth. Other times, it's as if she was only admitted a few days ago, and I'm still hoping that my dad will be able to make it through all of this. Two months into it, I realize what the difference really is. Instead of counting the days until she recovers, or if she recovers at all... we're starting to count the days until she gets to go home.

Posted 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, February 15, 2003

The server god.

About twelve years ago, when I first worked for Image Club Graphics, our office inhabited a renovated warehouse just east of the downtown core. (As a little bit of calgary-related web trivia, this was the same building that currently houses the folks behind iStockPhoto, Webcore Labs, and Evolvs.) The point of telling you about this warehouse is to set up a Valentine's day story. No, really.
 
At the time we occupied that old warehouse, it had been lightly modernized. This meant that there was running water and clean washrooms and electricity and the like. What hadn't been modernized was the roof. It's leaked a little bit. In fact, it leaked a little bit directly over our file server. Our valuable, mission-critical file server consisted of an Macintosh SE/30 motherboard stuffed into an SE case running AppleShare 2.0 under System 6. It also sported a third party composite video card because the original internal 9-inch monitor had given up the ghost a year prior. All this, plus a 1x CD drive. But I digress. The server was encased in it's own enclosure salvaged from an old noise-dampening printer hood. The enclosure deflected most of the drips, but not all of the them. Since the leak in the roof really wasn't a constant stream, and it certainly wasn't getting any worse with time, we left the server where it was and found another solution. Anyone who used to string daisy-chained AppleTalk cable through an office with more than three computers will understand why we didn't really want to move the server. Once that network was connected and running, you didn't touch anything. Getting back to the story, which isn't about the network or the server at all. The story is about what I used as the solution to the leaking roof problem. Remember the leaking roof?
 
At one point I had brought a small cactus to work in order to add a bit of nature to my desk. I can't remember what the cactus was originally planted in, but it ended up occupying a white, German-manufactured 8 ounce coffee cup. The fact that it was made in Germany has absolutely no bearing on the story, but I thought you might appreciate my innate attention to detail. Since the server was about three feet away from my desk, the cactus in the cup ended up sitting on top of the server enclosure directly beneath the leak in the roof. It also became known as the server god. Each time we moved to larger office space, the server god came with me. It sat on my desk, on top of my monitor, or on the window sill, all the while occupying that same coffee cup. When I finally left EyeWire, the server god came home with me, taking up refuge on the sill of the bay window in the kitchen. As happens with succulents, the cactus had been slowly outgrowing its surroundings. A chop stick had been stuffed into the peaty soil to keep it from teetering over and out of the confines of the cup. A repotting was way overdue. And that's how we get to the Valentine's day part of the story. Remember Valentine's day?
 
My wife and I decided to limit ourselves to spending no more than five dollars on each other for Valentine's day this year. It's a lot harder than it sounds. You end up having to think really hard about it, and it makes the gift that much more special. Teri spent a goodly portion of her five spot on a new terra cotta pot. A new pot for the server god. I blinked and smiled, impressed with the thought she had put into the gift. I think the server god was secretly pleased as well.

Posted 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, February 13, 2003

Blend over backwards.

And over. And over again. I can't stop playing with Eric Meyer's Color Blender, a nifty little JavaScript hack that, well... blends colors together in an iterative fashion. I know, I know... it's supposed to be a tool, not a toy. But I can't help myself. By the by, users of Mac IE may want to turn off scripting error alerts in order to get a completely uninterrupted performance. Those pesky JScript Runtime errors are a bloody pain in the modal dialog. Via Zeldman

Posted 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frothing at the bit(map).

Maybe it's my affinity for consistent user experience and common sense design. More likely it's my appreciation of the finer points of slamming interfaces that aren't quite colouring within the lines. No matter what the reason is, I'm certainly enjoying the almost daily schpiels of Matt Gemmell on his Irate Scotsman weblog. Intriguing topics like Death of a Dogcow and NSSchizophrenicControls have stuck in my head me like crumbs in a keyboard. I hope Matt doesn't get tired of talking about this kind of stuff, because I honestly never get tired of reading it.

Posted 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Photo of the day.

 
Tchotchke and thank you note. Calgary.

Posted 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

It's nothing a little Ibuprofen can't take care of.

Friend Ian told me that posts documenting my attempt at getting Movable Type and company set up on my Qube "... are getting painful to read". His suggestion that it would be easier (and truth be told, faster) for me to set up a previous loved PC with Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl and whatever else strikes my fancy, than it would be to solve all of the issues with the Qube, are not unfounded. But where's the fun in that? Moving to something tried, true, and in his words "more mainstream" would certainly be simpler. But I'm in no rush to roll this out. As mentioned before, the main issue I'm facing is maintaining the integrity of the 900 users on the Qube. There is no way of moving them to another box without hiring some *nix jock to do an exotic filesystem/useraccount migration finagle. So as it sits, there's this cute little Cobalt Qube running an admittedly obfuscated version of Red Hat Linux, and that's all I have to work with. If I indeed manage to figure out how all this stuff fits together, it'll benefit me (because I'll have hopefully learned something in the process) and it'll benefit other poor souls (because I hold fast the belief that there are indeed other people out there with the same weird-ass machines as I). Naturally, documenting all of this silliness along the way helps immeasurably. Even if what I have been doing doesn't help anyone solve their problems, it might just discourage them from descending into the mess in the first place.

Posted 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Freshly rumpled.

No, I didn't forget about you. I'm back from what turned out to be a substantially relaxing break in Victoria. Four days of inhaling volumes of the spring-like air on Vancouver Island, walking through blocks of antique shops and used book stores, listening to robins twittering songs that won't be heard in Calgary for at least another eight weeks, and just generally hanging out with good friends. Back in the saddle, I've discovered that a number of interesting developments merit some attention. Some are work related, and as per usual, some aren't. The Veer design team ponied up for a couple boxes of Jaguar and are now knee-deep in dabbling with OS X. Cripes. This means I'll need to make the official switch sooner than later. And if that wasn't enough to make me miss my chair whilst negotiating a sit, Getty Images has finally made the announcement that they're pulling the plug on eyewire.com, and rather sloppily if you ask me. However, stay tuned for further developments along this particular theme. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Oh, I'm such a tease. Last of all, I found that you can now run Linux on your iPod. Why? It doesn't matter. Just be happy that you can.

Posted 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Another permutation.

After reading my previous blatherings on trying to get the DB_File module installed on my Qube in order to use Movable Type, gentle reader Peter Wilkinson took pity on my soul. He offers this alternative to the Perl module hell I've been wading into of late:

"I just read your note about DB_File being a bit of a hassle to get going, I ran into similar problems and decided to port Movable Type to use SQLite as its database. If you are able to install DBD::SQLite from CPAN on the Qube I'd be more than happy to send you the small mods I made to Movable Type (about 6 lines in all). I've heard from Ben Trott that SQLite support will be in the next version so upgrading from my patched version to the next real one should be painless - at least thats the hope."

Painless. One can hope, can't he? If nothing else, this sounds like an interesting option. My only question to Peter was whether or not SQLite has a Perl version dependency like DB_File does. That's where my tale started getting convoluted before, as I need to wedge in a new version of Perl onto the Qube in order for DB_File to install. If I can just keep running my older version of Perl, there's less chance of me breaking the Qube's admin scripts. Peter mentioned that SQLite requires another module called DBI. The current version of DBI says it needs Perl 5.005_03, which is definitely fresher than what I currently have. However, SQLite doesn't really need the most recent version of DBI, so we may be all right. My, this certainly is a twisted path we're gotten on, isn't it?

Posted 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

Speaking of which...

No, I haven't managed to install that new version of Perl yet. The same goes for the pesky DB_File module that requires installation of the aforementioned Perl. Nor Movable Type for that matter, given that it depends on both of the previously indicated components to be in place prior to it being even a tiny bit useful. No. Not yet. Soon. Maybe. I promise. Thanks for asking anyway.

Posted 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New tee on?

My favourite pixel-flinging Swede, Andreas Lindkvist, and a cohort from across the pond, Cynthia Malaran, have pooled their talents to launch the first exhibition at teemuseum, a gallery of limited edition wearable works of art. Sure, they're more expensive than the shirts any old schmoe or their furry friend can flog through CaféPress.com, but these babies come numbered and authenticated by the artists. And I imagine that the designs don't peel off in washing machine after a half dozen cycles. Ok, enough with the sales pitch. Go ahead and take a guess at which one I just ordered...

Posted 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, February 03, 2003

Veering south by southwest.

With not much more than a whim and wave of a twenty dollar bill, I entered the Veer web site in this years SXSW Interactive Festival Website Competition. Well, knock me over with a foam rubber chew toy if we didn't jump the queue and land smack dab in the middle of the finalists for the "services" category. We haven't won yet, but you can certainly help in the meantime. Why not saunter your fine looking self over to the SXSW People's Choice Award page and click, tap, or otherwise jab that cute little radio button beside Veer's name? There, I've gone and said it. Now I'll just leave it be and thank you very much for your time.

Posted 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Domain blame of the week.

Cheese and crackers, I seem to have slipped again. Regularly scheduled updates are supposed to be just that - regularly scheduled. If the feature was called "the sporadically available domain name of the once in a blue moon", then I'd have a much more valid excuse for slacking off. But weekly it's named, thus weekly it shall be. Hang on, I'll fix it right now... while you wait even. How's about shrugger.com for you undecided shoppers? Not exactly what you were looking for? I've also got a low milage plexitude.com waiting in the wings for just the right buyer. Browse. Ponder. Come back soon.

Posted 9:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My thoughts exactly.

 
Copyright © Walt Kelly / Okefenokee, Glee & Perloo, Inc.

Posted 7:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)