afongen
Sam Buchanan's weblog.

Dental purgatory

October 31, 2002

Note to self: when you schedule a root canal, don't schedule it more than 3 weeks away, thinking that the tooth doesn't hurt that much right now and you can wait.

You can't. The pain will only get worse.

New Books

October 31, 2002

I'm about a third of the way through Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites. This is without question the best book on web accessibility out there. Read it. I skimmed Constructing Accessible Web Sites a few months back, and it's quite good, but I find that I'm actually reading Clark's book. Part of that is the visual design. I never thought I would care so much about the visual and tactile appeal of a technical book (not that this is necessarily a technical book). Perhaps I was taking certain publishers' work for granted. glasshaus has been publishing some very good books, but their design makes the books rather unpleasant reading. Clark went to great lengths to make his book a worthwhile experience on so many more levels than just the words.

In other news, O'Reilly has published the third edition of Unix Power Tools. This is to Unix what the Perl Cookbook is to Perl. Once I had a basic handle on how to use Unix, how to move around, do basic administration, etc., I used Unix Power Tools to help me grok Unix, to understand its idiom, shortcuts, and mindset. I'm not sure whether I'll buy this — I'm curious to see what's been updated in this third edition — but I will wholeheartedly recommend it.

Too, a new collection of Rising Stars comics has been released, Visitations. This pulls together some ... I don't know, apocryphal stories, I guess you could say. If you're a Straczynski fan, you should read this series.

Wellstone killed.

October 25, 2002

US Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila, and daughter Marcia died in a plane crash today. I am floored. It might be a while before I post anything here.

USA Patriot act allows easier access to library records

October 25, 2002

In the Minnesota Daily yesterday: USA Patriot act allows easier access to library records.

Congress passed the USA Patriot Act last year in a flurry of anti-terrorist hype. One of the things this act did was to make it easier for Federal authorities to access library records. No probably cause need be demonstrated to obtain a warrant.

"With the USA Patriot Act and its amending of FISA, the FBI only has to show a secret court that what they were searching for is relevant to a terrorist investigation," Freedman [president of the American Library Association] said. "It's in a secret court. The library has no appeals process. The search warrant can be served immediately. There's no due process."

Distressingly, librarians can't even admit whether they've been asked to relinquish records. The act states that "no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI has sought or obtained tangible things."

Librarians are rightfully outraged.

This came up a couple months ago at work in a debate about new security policies for MnSCU (my employer). MnSCU's been exploring options for securing public-access computers against attack or being used in attacks. One of the options put forward for consideration — one of several proposals, I want to emphasize — involved requiring logins for all computer use. This inspired vigorous and at times histrionic debate, in part because of poor communication typical of an organization with over 15,000 employees, but also because librarians are keenly aware of the USA Patriot Act and have no desire to participate in activity that puts them in the position of policing library patrons, risking both civil and academic liberty.

Oddity on UPS

October 25, 2002

I very much like being able to track packages on UPS's web site. It's a great feature of the service. On their tracking page, they've recently started requiring you to check a box indicating that you agree to their terms and conditions before you can submit your tracking number(s). A slightly annoying extra step, but perhaps they've been experiencing some abuse. More than likely lawyers got involved and decided this was a good idea. Whatever. Click.

I noticed by chance today, though, that the link to their terms and conditions page is an image, not text. What's more, the image is actually a form submit button.

Hm. Odd. And worse, there's no alt text. I wonder why. Other links on that page are text links. A bleeding shame, since now that text is completely unavailable unless you are physically able to see the image. It's certainly not to create valid HTML: <input> can contain an alt attribute, but not the width or height attributes, one of the reasons I'm generally not too fond of using images for submit buttons.

I'm not trying to rag too hard on UPS, though I will send them a nice note. Just thought it strange.

Republican Switch Ads

October 22, 2002

First Microsoft, now the Republican Party has copied Apple's switch ad campaign.

At least Microsoft recanted.

And since you asked, Momoko Kikuchi is my favorite Japanese switch ad, hands down. Why? This will make sense only if you know Japanese, and may be interesting only if you're a linguist. It's how she identifies herself: "Kikuchi Momoko, gakusei...desu" :) Gotta love that last-second "oh yeah!" before she adds the "desu."

Apple gives Jaguar to US Teachers

October 18, 2002

Wow. If you're a teacher in the US, Apple will give you a free copy of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).

Truth Maintenance

October 16, 2002

A coworker wrote me today to say that the DARPA Information Awareness Office's logo is certainly funny, but did I read the vision statement? Uh, no, not really. Gotta say, it lost me after the first couple lines:

The most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define. IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats.

Blah, blah, blah. The whole site reads like that. Sigh.

Among the technologies they plan to develop or work with I noticed:

Yeah, okay, whatever. Hm, "Biometric signatures of humans" — a little creepy, but hardly unexpected.

There I stopped. Had I continued reading, I might have spotted these gems:

Stop laughing. I'm serious, it's there. Don't believe me? Go see for yourself.

Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning? Useful technologies, to be sure. Man oh man, have I been waiting for those. Bet they're classified. George Bush certainly doesn't seem to have access to them.

Story telling? wtf? And what on earth is "truth maintenance"?

Clearly this site deserves more exploration.

CSS hacks explained. Well.

October 16, 2002

If you haven't read Eric Meyer's latest CSS book, you should. It's excellent. Even if you already know everything he covers, which I'd guess a fair number of readers of this blog do, there's something about how Eric writes that makes it seem fresh and worthwhile.

And guess what? He's posted material written for the book that didn't make the final cut. Of particular interest right now: "Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles: Turning Browser Flaws to Our Advantage."

I have been of two minds on this. On the one hand, easily hiding styles from Netsape 4.x by using @import or the media attribute is really handy and I do it all the time. For some reason, though, Tantek Çelik's box model hack has always bothered me. I've generally preferred to move to designs that would push me toward that hack, which seemed to be going a bit over the edge. I don't know why, maybe because I figured it'd cause problems somewhere down the road. Seeing these workarounds all together like this, though, laid out clearly and intelligently discussed, makes me feel a bit more comfortable with the idea.

I am such a sucker for packaging.

Red Hat and DMCA

October 16, 2002

Interesting article on The Register about how Red Hat is helping make the DMCA look ridiculous. They've released a kernel patch that addresses a security problem. To get details about the patch that explain the problem, you must first agree to a license in which you state that you are not under US jurisdiction. Otherwise, see, there's danger of violating the DMCA.

Red Hat explains:

RHSA-2002-158 is an errata kernel which addresses certain security vulnerabilities. Quite simply, these vulnerabilities were discovered and documented by ppl outside of the US, and due to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act legislation in the US, it is potentially dangerous to disclose any information on security vulnerabilities, which may also be used in order to circumvent digital security - i.e. computer security. For this reason, RH cannot publish this security information, as it is not available from the community in the first instance. The www.thefreeworld.net site allows for accessing this information, but requires you agree to terms which protect the author and documenter of the patches from being accusations that they themselves have breached DMCA.

What a mess. How long do you figure before Congress realizes what a mess they've made of things with this lousy legislation?

OpenOffice beta for Mac available

October 14, 2002

An X11 public beta of OpenOffice 1.0 for Mac OS X is available for download. Yes!

I have not yet installed this, I'll have to wait 'til I get home tonight. However, based on some things that I've read elsewhere that lead me to believe that people are confused about this, let me say something right now: yes, you need to install XWindows first. This is included with the OpenOffice download, and if the developer build was any indication, it'll walk you through that. Don't worry. It's not hard.

What I don't know, because I haven't tried this yet, is whether you'll need to download the new Jaguar XWindows installer first. That made a huge difference in the developer build.

If an X11 version isn't your cup of tea, keep your eye on NeoOffice, an OpenOffice port that will run natively on OS X.

This is why I wanted that degree in semiotics, ma!

October 14, 2002

Jesse Walker alerts us to DARPA's new Information Awareness Office — if the name isn't enough to stir the conspiracy theorist in you, and if their leader John Poindexter doesn't ring any bells, you gotta at least check out the logo.

Semiotically speaking, this is the most inept administration in years. Either that, or its art department is trying to tell us something.

Heh.

Back when I worked as a coffee roaster, I was driving around one day with my boss Jeremy and we decided to stop by a recently-opened Dunn Bros Coffee for a cup. Company founder Ed Dunn happened to be there roasting; we chatted with Ed for a half-hour or so before leaving.

"Hmmm," Jeremy mused as we drove away, "did you notice how he never once mentioned the Illuminati? Don't you think that odd?"

Upon reflection, maybe I should never have loaned him Foucault's Pendulum.

Lessig on Eldred

October 12, 2002

Free the mouse Lawrence Lessig blogs his thoughts on how his arguments before the Supreme Court went.

I mentioned this case to Kiara, but NPR had been doing its job and she already knew about it. Great! She was quite interested, as was I, in the story of the bookmobile. I hadn't heard of it until Aaron Swartz mentioned it.

And on a related note, in the latest issue of New Architect magazine, Lincoln Stein writes about the Hollings Act, and Bret Fausett writes about how technology is undermining the concept of fair use in copyright by enforcing copyright protection far beyond what the law intends. This is something that Lessig discusses in great detail in The Future of Ideas.

Wired goes all standards-y.

October 11, 2002

Wired News has unleashed a standards-compliant, XHTML+CSS design. If you're wondering how, Eric Meyer interviews Douglas Bowman, the "brains and primary driving force" behind the design.

Thanks, Wired, and congratulations.

Writing for the Web

October 11, 2002

This has been cluttering up my bookmarks for too long, I have to make note of it here or I'll forget to get back to it: Writing for the Web, Jakob Nielsen on sun.com. A pretty useful guide that covers, among other things, how writing on the web is different from writing for print.

This is something that I'm going to be spending a lot of time talking about at work over the next year or so, as my team begins more actively working with people to figure out how the web does or does not fit into their business processes. As people make the transition toward the web being the sole delivery mechanism for some documents, it's taking some effort on my part to explain how the publication standards to which they have become accustomed over the past several decades don't necessarily apply on the web, or at least need some modification.

Sometimes it's little things like headers: people often want them centered, because that's usually what works well in print — or at least that's what they're used to. On a web page, though, it often makes more sense to have headlines left-aligned: it's easier for people to identify headlines that way. Not always, no, it depends on other elements of the page layout and design, but left-aligned headlines are a convention to which many are accustomed, so are a Good Thing.

The really hard part is helping people shed their desire for absolute control over presentation. They want everything to be PDF because they want to control exactly how everything looks. Resisting the urge to scream, "GET OVER IT!", I instead explain that no, PDFs are good for some things, and we can certainly make PDFs available, but we have to have HTML versions because they allow for much greater flexibility, they're much more broadly accessible, and are the very foundation of the web. The ability to display HTML documents in many different devices and presentation formats is a feature, not a bug. I honestly think that I have an easier time discussing this with professional designers with a print background than I do the amateur desktop publishers.

What I think I need to do, then, is focus attention on non-presentational aspects of creating web content: how the writing is different, how to write more effectively for the web. Hence my interest in Nielsen's work and this sun.com article in particular.

A couple major hurdles I expect to face:

Banned in China!

October 09, 2002

Looks like I'm banned in China, as is my employer. Interesting project: Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide.

This is a big part of what bothers me about filtering software. If it can be used to protect children from sites they shouldn't see, a laudable and necessary goal, what's to prevent a government from "protecting" citizens from sites that it doesn't want them to see?

Well, that and filtering doesn't work: it blocks sites it shouldn't and fails to block sites that it probably should, thus doing harm to educational opportunity.

MacASP

October 07, 2002

MacASP 1.0 is now available. For €299.

Why? I mean, what on earth does this do for us? I suppose it might be helpful to those still running OS 8 or 9, but for far less than €299 you could upgrade to OS X and run Apaceh and PHP. If you have old hardware that can't support OS X, you can run Linux.

OK, so maybe running a Linux server makes no sense for the "home users and low profit organizations" that are apparently the target market. Too, I suppose MacASP could be useful for those ASP junkies who for some reason are forced to run on old Mac hardware and want the comfort of a familiar environment. Even that doesn't make much sense, since "MacASP language is NOT compatible with Microsoft ASP".

I don't know. I imagine that there's a small market penetration to be made. I am wholly unfamiliar with the pre-OS X Mac web server market. But heck, even small non-profits running Macs could do better than this.

Slow adoption of Apache 2.0

October 06, 2002

On ZDNet, "Has Apache peaked?" discusses the slow adoption of Apache 2.0, suggesting that the intended performance benefits in Apache 2.0 just aren't there, pushing many either to other web servers or to remain on Apache 1.3.x.

It's tempting to think that Apache 2.0 missed the boat. The vast majority of Web sites running it are hosted brochureware. The improvements in 2.0 are meaningless to them. Sites with higher-end needs are more likely to be running a higher-performance Apache alternative like IIS or Zeus already. And if an Apache site actually needs the performance improvements they would do well to treat the current version like a beta. This is how we all should think of it for now.

I have a different story. I've been keeping a close eye on Apache 2.0 and am anxious to use some of its new features, but we haven't switched at work because mod_perl and PHP are not yet stable on Apache 2. It's that simple. I suspect that this is why the "vast majority of Web sites running it are hosted brochureware" — not that Apache isn't ready, but that third-party modules commonly used on complex sites aren't ready for production. Until then, Apache 1.3.27 makes me quite happy, thankyouverymuch.

Intro to Venkman

October 05, 2002

Introduction to the JavaScript Debugger — a.k.a. Venkman, one of the many reasons to use Mozilla. If you're used to dealing with debuggers, you probably don't need this. If you aren't (like me, I'm ashamed to admit), then it's worth a read.

OpenOffice and NeoOffice on OS X

October 04, 2002

I do so wish that I were at the Mac OS X conference going on right now. Here's a rundown of the Mac OS X OpenOffice porting project: where it's been, the issues they've had to consider, and so on. Interesting. Much of this is stuff that I haven't considered, probably because I've never developed a GUI app for Unix, and don't have a clear idea of what it takes to port Unix apps to OS X.

And I am so dang excited: sounds like a public beta of the X11 release of OpenOffice for OS X 10.2 will be released soon, like next week. And at the conference, the speaker unveiled an Aqua version of OpenOffice, called NeoOffice. <drool>

Up

October 03, 2002

Based on Scott's recommendation I bought Peter Gabriel's new album, and he's right: it's great. I hardly ever listen to music anymore, something I've been thinking I should change, so this is a treat.

I knew I'd made the right decision when the very next day I saw the cover for Doris Lessing's Sweetest Dream.

The hard part for me when I buy new music is that I am not a lyrics man. Hell, I'm hardly a music man. I can watch a movie and not even notice that there's music — except when it's conspicuously absent, as in the masterful final duel scene in Rob Roy. My musician friends, on the other hand (my friends always turn out to be musicians, it's kind of eerie), walk out of a movie talking about nothing but the music. And there's little ol' me, wondering, "there was music?"

Even when I am deliberately listening to music, though, I am oblivious to lyrics. I can listen to a song over and over again, having no idea what the words are. So please don't ask me for a favorite track on Up, because I just don't know.

Damn fine album, though. Yessir.

MS Word to use XML

October 01, 2002

The next version of Microsoft Word will include support for XML. What's explained in this article sounds interesting but it's too soon to be clear what it really means. It does not seem that XML will be the native file format, as is true with OpenOffice/StarOffice, which is a damn shame. That's one of the many reasons I'm fond of OpenOffice, because it means that I can use those docs in all sorts of different ways.

Still, if Word content is in any way exportable or accessible using XML, this is a Good Thing. I'm sure that Microsoft will find a way to keep everything in the family, making it really easy to use with other Microsoft products but a pain in the ass to use anything else. We shall see.