Yesterday I was grabbing some coffee in the Dunn Bros coffee shop that opened up a few weeks ago in the Lawson building in downtown Saint Paul. There's going to be a lot of coffee in that building soon. The Bean Counter (who bought the Roastery, where I once worked) has a store in the building for Lawson employees only. (Poor Lawson. Whereas the Bean Counter's roasting is slowly improving, they still can't brew coffee worth a damn.) And Starbucks is opening up a store in the building, just down the block from Dunns. This is ridiculous.
Anyway, while I was in Dunns drinking my joe, one customer accused another of being a Starbucks spy. The accused just smiled and walked out. Okay, accepting the possibility that she's a Starbucks employee, as the accuser self-righteously affirmed, who cares?! (Never mind the question of why he'd know that, if he's such a loyal Dunns customer.) Why is it assumed that if a barista from one shop walks into another, they're spying? Maybe they just like coffee. And face it, Dunns has the only really good coffee downtown. When I was working in coffee, I spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in coffee shops...because I liked to! Not because I was an industrial spy. Give it up.
Well, damn. Starbucks in the Forbidden City.
Venus will be easily visible Wednesday eve.
::
Echoing Scott Andrew LePera's comments about how the new browsers' support of the DOM throws opens the door to building powerful web applications with the browsers as a platform, a new article on O'Reilly argues the same sort of thing from a different standpoint, emphasizing Mozilla as an application environment that moves beyond the browser. This is exciting stuff, folks. Mozilla's been talking about it for a long time. And I'm just beginning to catch on.
::
More O'Reilly goodies: What is P2P ... and What Isn't. Related articles that aren't listed there: O'Reilly's Peer-to-Peer Summit, Jabber Jihad - Universal Instant Messaging. I kinda wish that I had a use for something like Jabber. Seems cool.
Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler. I miss the days when News Radio was good.
::
Now that I've found most of my favorite comic strips online--or at least the ones I read on a regular basis--I need never feel compelled to buy a newspaper just for the funnies.
And from time to time I pick up Sinfest, although usually I just read it where Jim has thoughtfully published it.
Before you think me mad, I should reassure you that I'm kidding about Fred Basset. A friend of mine once proposed that Fred Basset is published without the last panel, which would actually make it funny. I live in search of those missing panels.
::
Crazy busy at work for the next week or more, catching up on projects on which I've fallen behind. Deadlines fast approaching, I don't think that I'll be updating here with any frequency.
::
Today Cameron Barrett has an interesting series of links about DSL providers' troubles and the way that Verizon's screwing everyone over. Competitors and customers alike. Not that he's bitter, de gozaimasu.
And while at Camworld, check the link to Geek Boy Services. Oh ye gods.
Gutenberg online in the UK and in Germany. This is wonderful.
I once got a tour of the special collections of the library of St. John's University. It was great--they have the most amazing things: the seal of Empress Maria Theresa; an Egyptian leather "book" (similar to how they used papyrus) that had been cured with urine (it pretty much reeked); letters of Napoleon Bonaparte; a Bible in which each of the letters was composed of tiny little dots (so perfect it looked like a modern print edition); and a Bible printed a couple years after the first Gutenberg--not by Gutenberg, but in a village or city down the road. I actually held it in my hands and read it. An electrifying experience, to say the least.
Kiara pointed me to speeches on the History Channel, an audio collection of famous speeches and tidbits, like Charles De Gaulle urging the US to join the Allies, or Albert Einstein calling for an end to nuclear proliferation.
::
In reference to yesterday: sure enough, 128-bit encryption with SSL has about the same strength as 1024-bit RSA encryption. Thing is, SSL uses a 128-bit symmetric key (encrypted with an asymmetric key pair, possibly with RSA), which is about as strong as a 1024-bit asymmetric cipher like RSA. Has to do with the number of possible keys. However, symmetric key encryption suffers from other weaknesses, which is why asymmetric key encryption was developed and is used to exchange keys in SSL.
Confused? Read my brief intro to public key encryption, which has links to a few other resources to get you started.
RSA Encryption in Perl. One problem:
Many Web servers support 128 bit SSL encryption. This level of encryption has been proven to be fairly ineffective since 128 bit encrypted messages can be broken in short order. 1024 bit keys are much more secure.
I Am Not A Cryptographer, but I think he too easily dismisses the 128-bit SSL. I'll have to check on details, but I think that it's actually about the same as a 1024-bit RSA key: he's confusing his ciphers.
Nevertheless, RSA encryption with Perl. Legal. Love it.
Mind you, a 512-bit cipher challenge was cracked not too long ago, so it's probably about time to up your PGP keys to at least 1024-bit if you're not there yet. That is, if you're concerned about teams of brilliant Swedish researchers spending over a year to crack your keys.
Jon Udell: Component Software: The Next Generation.
Hey, this is a cool use for the sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape. Well, at least for web developers. Enter in a URL and test it in your choice of validators (it would be nice to see more choices there). Unfortunately, due to some unexpected limitations in JavaScript, a new window has to be opened rather than opening the validator in the same window. :(
For the past couple hours I've been trying out a few different free web-based discussion forums, and I have to say that I really like Phorum. I was cautious at first because all the implementations I've seen showed nested threads rather than the flat presentation that I've been looking for. The end users might be confused by multi-level threads. However, Phorum is configurable to flatten the threads, while offering the option to show them if the user wants to see them. Very cool; I was afraid that I would have to rewrite whatever I chose, or pay for something like the Ultimate Bulletin Board. There are enough other desirable features--including, it appears, file uploads--that I think that Phorum's gonna be the way to go.
::
I'm reading Scott Andrew LePera's DOM scripting intro tutorial, which I mentioned the other day. My spine is tingling--this is fun stuff! And although I know I've read it all before elsewhere, LePera adds a fresh, engaging spin to scripting the DOM.
::
Oooh, the new issue of Digital Web is out. I'm not a designer but I really like this magazine.
::
Well there, I've moved everything to PHP.
With Rael Dornfest's new article on Meerkat's XML-RPC interface, and now that I've moved the site to a host that offers me a more useful development environment, I am psyched to revamp the news page. I also decided last night to convert the site over to PHP. I've been toying with the idea of server-side includes, but figured that PHP would be more fun and more flexible to work with.
::
As I write this, Kiara's watching Seven in the background. Spooky.
Farscape has its own browser skin. None for Mac yet, though. :-( Windows only so far.
The Many Faces of Mozilla, an introduction to Mozilla as an application platform. Along the same vein, Scott Andrew LePera has a list of articles on scripting for DOM-supporting browsers, including his own tutorial.
Those who are more attentive than I noticed problems with a:hover in Netscape 6, after all. Oh well, at least it didn't crash on me.
::
The Browser War: Nobody's fault but yours. Damn straight. His basic message: take advantage of the DOM and CSS, using browsers as platforms for developing web applications. Exactly what excites me about Mozilla. This is my introduction to Scott Andrew's site, which will likely dominate my time this weekend. Actually, getting rid of our Honda will do that.
O'Reilly is starting a very cool service: Safari. Online subscriptions to their books, with the ability to swap out books that you don't need anymore for new ones that you do. Plans look like they start at $10/month for 5 books.
::
Pope, Protestants Open Source Bible. Be sure to follow the Sourceforge link.
Home again, feeling like death again. Was better last night, but no more. :-(
::
This is interesting: Macromedia will be integrating O'Reilly's Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference into Dreamweaver 4. At-your-fingertips HTML and JavaScript reference, even code examples. Great idea. I'd like to see CSS reference integration, too.
::
Netscape 6 has been released in a final (non-beta) version. Go get it, folks. Overwhelm those FTP servers.
After playing around with Netscape 6 for a while myself, when I wasn't feeling too damn crappy to sit in front of a computer, I gotta say: I prefer Mozilla to Netscape. True, Netscape crashes less frequently for me that it does for others--more than a few have noted that it crashes immediately upon launch in Win2K--so I'm not as bitter as some. But it has crashed on me three times today. Not good. Not the way to win over the public. Gotta say, IE5/Mac is still my favorite browser.
Mozilla's fun to work with, though. Much, much potential. So fun that I think I'll download another nightly build to see if they've fixed the problem with the sidebar.
I will continue to use Netscape, or at least Mozilla, for at least three reasons:
::
I downloaded today's Mozilla build. The sidebar is working again.
And as a special bonus, a:hover is working again. It had disappeared in PR3.
Home, feeling like death. Sleeping, mostly.
::
'Round about this time of year, two things happen: I drink a helluva lot of coffee and I read a lot of religious texts.
Once a 50-cups-a-day coffee drinker (I kid you not), I've cut back dramatically, due in no small part to an increasing appreciation for quality coffee. The longer I worked in the coffee biz, the less I drank and the more I enjoyed. Now I am for the most part a tea drinker. But in the fall, right around the time that classes start (whether or not I'm taking classes), I start to drink coffee. I'm at about 5 cups a day now, which is a major leap from zero. Now it's even supplemented with Penguin Caffeinated Peppermints--not for the caffeine, but because they're the finest mints I've ever had. But the caffeine is bound to have some effect on me (and may be why I feel like shit today).
And I wonder about its connection with religion. I've long been interested in different religions and their various permutations, long spent my time reading religious texts and commentaries on those texts. For some reason that, too, increases in the fall. True, I'm usually reading more in general, but the increase is not proportional. There's something more. I often think that the change in weather, the starkness that the air takes on in cool (now cold) fall evenings, this is what drives me to a more pensive, religious mood. Or maybe it's just the caffeine. Either way, there's a lot of good stuff to read, and I don't hold back.
Lately I've devoured a couple books by John Selby Spong, an Episcopal bishop who's written some of the only books that make me think seriously about Christianity. I heartily recommend two of his books: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism and Resurrection: Myth or Reality?
In the first, Spong plows through the Christian Gospels and letters of Paul, discussing in detail why a literal reading of Biblical texts is not only ridiculous or impossible but ultimately destructive to Christianity and to a relationship with God. He goes on to describe how he's found it possible to make Biblical texts meaningful--pointing the way to the divine--without bastardizing the texts. Indeed, reading the Bible without a literal-minded approach makes it come alive.
In Resurrection, Spong focuses on the Easter moment and the mythology that's built up around it, again arguing against a literal interpretation of the texts and for a more meaningful engagement with the Bible. What I like about Resurrection is that Spong more fully fleshes out an idea that is at the foundation of many of his other books, although he did not always have the vocabulary to express it: the gospels are midrash. (I will not attempt to explain midrash here, sorry.) This has a tendency to offend both Jews and Christians (at least those Christians who have a clue about what midrash is), but I really think it's an idea worth considering: that the earliest Christians, themselves Jews, sought to understand the powerful manifestation of the divine that they experienced in the life of Jesus by turning to their scriptures. In writing the gospels, they captured familiar, sacred themes and described them in present-day terms. In this same way, a non-literal reading of the Bible today can be informative and enriching experience, even for non-Christians (or non-Jews) like me. Even the Easter moment, which Spong makes come alive (excuse the weak pun) for the modern mind even while denying the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus.
Well worth the read.
::
Philip Greenspun: What can we learn from Jakob Nielsen?Same guy of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing fame. Aside from the ironically too-long section on content length, it's worth a quick read. Nothing new, though. The reader comments are often better than the article itself.
In case you haven't seen color differences between browsers:
That's IE5 on the left, Mozilla on the right. On my Mac. Now, throw in another OS or three, different room lighting, different monitor settings, even more differences in how images are displayed...joy, oh joy. All in a day's work.
Interesting, though. Mozilla and Netscape 6 are both doing some weird things with the border on that image (which I've now removed because I didn't like it). Instead of the black border that I specified, it was yellow. Oh...it was the link color. Just as older versions of Netscape put that ugly blue border (or whatever's specified with the <link> tag) around images with links, newer versions are doing the same thing with the link color specified with CSS. I wonder if that's a bug or a CSS implementation decision; I don't know what the CSS specs say. They tend to be vague about these things.
::
At Jim's suggestion I downloaded a recent Mozilla build (nightly) to see how it compared to M18. Nice! a:hover is back, seems to be rendering reasonably quicky, hanging less frequently. :) For some reason the sidebar doesn't work, though--I cannot switch between tabs. Suppose I oughta report that. If you haven't tried Mozilla yet or recently, I encourage you to do so.
::
Michael and I rented a PlayStation 2 yesterday and played DOA2. Very cool, better graphics and sound than I remember from th'original Playstation. We were impressed. Then while we were busy with this, Kiara downloaded a game demo for our Mac that pretty much put the PS2 to shame.
ThML: Theological Markup Language.
::
K: Is this Running Man?
S: Yeah.
K: I thought so. I figured that anything that featured Arnold Schwarzenegger in a ridiculous outfit like that was either a Japanese vitamin commerical or the Running Man.
::
Veteran's Day Observed. I'm home, playing with this site and (sigh) working on some code for work that otherwise won't get done anywhere near on time. Somehow I've pushed myself into a position where I have a tremendous amount of work to get done this month. And in truth, this gives me a chance to play around with PHP and MySQL on this site with some code that I've already written. Soon I'll be testing some sort of web-based BBS. Will the fun never end?
Actually, I don't know who I was kidding. Whom. Whatever. There's no way I'm gonna do work today. I have too many other fun things to do. For starters, seeing if I can't set up Zope. I still do have to look into that BBS thing, though...
::
Besides, as it turns out, a friend is coming over to be social.
Well, I did it. I registered afongen.com and am moving things over here. I'll have a lot of catch-up to do, as well as experimenting with a few things I've been wanting to try once I had a better development environment. More later.
Ah, damn. I just overwrote this file, losing some changes. I think I can remember what I'd done:
As glad as I am to see that the State of Minnesota has endorsed and embraced digital signatures, I am dismayed to find that there's a State Muffin.
At least it's blueberry.
Been quiet here, I see. I'll try to make some changes to that this weekend. Although considering Mark Newhouse's article at A List Apart, I might be busy playing. I've been considering developing a few skins for this site, which since all the layout is done with CSS oughtn't be that hard. It's just a matter of making the time. I'm also considering moving the site over to a new domain sometime soon...we'll see.
Count Dracula is being driven out of Germany by Neo-nazis and bureaucrats.
7:30 p.m. CST. I just discovered that Daylight Saving Time is over. Heh. I've gone through the whole day an hour ahead. Not a big deal, except that I suspect that i annoyed my friend Michael by calling an hour early this morning.
My father was working in radio when Minnesota was debating the move to Daylight Saving Time. One listener called in angry about what an hour of extra sunlight would do to his lawn. This was sadly typical, apparently.
Unable to get Meerkat feed.
