January 29, 2003
I'm up at Lake Superior College for the next couple days, doing web accessibility training for their faculty, so will be incommunicado.
I'm looking forward to it, should be fun. (Especially after the bureaucratic hell it took to arrange my involvement. But that's a story for another day.)
January 29, 2003
I've switched the DOCTYPE of these pages to XHTML 1.0 Transitional, even though I will continue to "code" to Strict. Why? Because Dean Burge makes sense: the XHTML media types summary from the W3C suggests that XHTML 1.0 Strict should not be sent as text/html. Until user agents can consistently support application/xhtml+xml (yes, I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer), I'm treating the markup as Transitional and sticking with text/html.
I thought about serving up Strict to user agents that claim support for application/xhtml+xml. Paul went that route a while back, before he went off the deep end and moved to HTML (albeit for sound reasons). It just doesn't seem worth the trouble, though, especially since I'm not doing anything very XML-like with the XHTML at this point. Until I do, I'm not entirely comfortable calling it Strict. Although one could claim that technically it is, it's the spirit of the matter that sways me.
January 29, 2003
Mr. Paul Sowden is writing on his web site again. Very glad to see you, Paul.
January 27, 2003
Kiara was at big band practice, where she had of course broken out photos of the boy. One guy peered closely at a picture. "That's his first bath," Kiara offered helpfully.
"Yeah..." He squinted at the picture for a while longer. "Is Sam a programmer?"
When I heard this, I was dying to see what picture had led him to this conclusion. I didn't think I had a Perl shirt on in any of them. Maybe an Apple shirt? Nah, that'd just peg me as a Mac user. Maybe that MySQL shirt...that would still be weird, though, why would he assume programmer?
Then I found it.
If this were TV, here's where the camera would quickly back off to the house, then the city, then the country, then the planet, all while my screams echoed through the galaxy.
In the photo, I am wearing a Visual Basic .NET t-shirt.
Go ahead, Matt, chortle.
Why would I wear such a thing? Two words: free clothes. And I'm not the language bigot you might make me out to be.
It's really funny the reactions I get to the shirt when I work up the courage to wear it in public. No one's actually come up to me and tried to start a conversation, as has happened when I've worn Perl gear or an Apple shirt, but they do stare. Aghast, I assume. ;-)
January 26, 2003
Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions Superbowl trailer.
Excellent. This is what I get for not watching the game. (via Hack the Planet)
January 25, 2003
There are two movies that Kiara and I absolutely loved but it seems no one else ever actually watched: Dark City and Gattaca. No more. Wil Wheaton is a self-described Dark City weenie.
January 25, 2003
Ooh, guess what just made it to my wishlist: All Creatures Great and Small on DVD. Series 1 and Series 2 are out, it looks like Series 3 will be available before long.
I love this show. When Kiara was in Sweden for Christmas a couple years ago, my evenings consisted of pouring myself a glass of 20-year tawny port, dimming the lights, and watching episodes from the first season. It runs at such a completely different pace from anything else I've ever seen. If ever you find you need to slow down your life, All Creatures is for you. It might take some getting used to, especially if you've only been exposed to the frenetic whirlwind that is modern television, but take your time, kick back, and let yourself go. It is absolutely marvelous.
No, I never read the books. Probably should. They don't have Peter Davison, though.
And did you know that there's a BBC America Shop? Me neither.
January 25, 2003
It's been cold here in Minnesota the last few days. Really cold, refreshingly cold. The kind of cold when I can stand at the bus stop feeling smugly, snugly warm in my thermal underwear and multiple layers, laughing at the wind as it fails to whistle through my windblocking polarfleece scarf. Hah!
And now finally, after the cold lets up a bit and it's climbed above zero, we're getting snow. I cannot tell you how good it feels to shovel again. Seriously. Mostly, though, I love the crunch under my feet. I love the quiet hush of snow falling at night. I love that maybe, finally, Kiara can go skiing.
It can't last. We've been teased like this before this winter, getting a similar dusting right before Christmas. It disappeared shortly after my sister and family left town, back to Indiana...where they promptly got more snow than we've seen all year.
Not that I'm bitter, de gozaimasu.
No, I have little hope that this snow's going to last. I'm gonna go walk the dog.
January 23, 2003
Two articles on the same day about producing Excel spreadsheets using the Apache POI project, APIs for manipulating Microsoft document formats with Java:
I keep having to create Excel spreadsheets on the fly. I do it with Perl, of course, but POI is intriguing. One of the reasons that I'm getting back into Java is all the cool Apache projects that use Java.
January 20, 2003
John Le Carré in the London Times last week: The United States of America has gone mad.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world?s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet.
To follow up on a point in that first paragraph, something I meant to point to last week. A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society", tries to connect the dots between the disparate stories of just how our freedoms are being eroded (actively attacked, more like). Small stories about will appear in the mainstream press but not framed in the larger sense in which they really need to be seen.
One major hurdle is, of course, that the very people who most need to read this report are the ones least likely to see it. Many will disregard it solely because it comes from the ACLU, which has the unfortunate reputation of being just a bunch of whining commies. As if concern for civil liberty were not among the highest of American values.
Oh wait. That's right. The idea of valuing civil liberty went out the door a long, long time ago. Silly me.
On the slightly geekier side, I thought it was pretty nifty how they have separate links to download the report and to display it in the browser — it's available only as a PDF. I cannot tell you how often I have fielded questions from users panicking because they're not getting whatever behavior they expect from a PDF, just because their browser either does or does not have the Acrobat Reader plugin. The ACLU's solution — to use different Content-Type headers — is not perfect, but it's an interesting idea.
January 15, 2003
Damn. The US Supreme Court ruled against Eldred, 7-2. Lawrence Lessig has copies of the rulings on his weblog.
Update: I like what Dan Gillmor has to say: "Supreme Court Endorses Copyright Theft."
The thieves are the members of the copyright cartel. Hollywood, the music industry, publishers and their vassals in Congress have continually heisted what you should already own: the words and songs and films and more of people, long dead, who have already been richly (and justly under copyright law's original intent) rewarded for their creations.
They call it piracy now when a college student downloads an MP3. The most recent extension of copyright terms, giving huge corporations royalties on ancient art for another 20 years for no other reason than pure greed and corruption, is the single greatest act of copyright piracy in history.
On a more positive, related note, here's an interview with Representative Rick Boucher, who's introduced a bill to fix the DMCA: the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (HR 107).
The bill is very simple. It says that if a person is bypassing for a lawful purpose, then the bypass itself is lawful. If a person bypasses for the purpose of piracy or otherwise infringing the copyright, then the bypass and the infringement would remain unlawful. The bill also says that the manufacturer of technology that has multiple uses, some of which are potentially infringing, and others of which are useful, will be permitted under the DMCA; and that the manufacturer will not be punished under the DMCA, if the technology is capable of substantial noninfringing uses.
January 14, 2003
Following up on yesterday's announcement of the OWASP Top Ten, David Sklar (one of the authors of the PHP Cookbook) has posted an article about how to avoid those security vulnerabilities if you use PHP.
January 13, 2003
Sorry for the buzzword title there, but this is amazingly cool: The Detroit Project:
The idea for this project came to me while watching -- for the umpteenth time -- one of those outrageous drug war ads the Bush administration has flooded the airwaves with. You know, the ones that try and link using drugs to financing terrorism. . . . Why not turn the tables and adopt the same tactics the administration was using in the drug war to point out the much more credible link between driving SUVs and our national security? Thus began our campaign to create a series of TV ads designed to win the hearts and minds -- and change the driving habits -- of American consumers by asking them to connect the dots and think about the effect energy wastefulness is having not just on the environment, but on our foreign policy.
January 13, 2003
The Open Web Application Security Project, to which I wish I had more time to devote, have released their list of top ten web application security vulnerabilities (PDF).
January 13, 2003
I was finally able to see The Two Towers over the weekend. Past attempts have been foiled by Kiara's wanting to watch Fellowship again first, then by Owen's cold. Bringing a sick baby to a three-hour movie didn't seem like such a hot idea. Ironically, we ended up leaving him with his grandma when we went to the movie.
I liked it. It's great. Not gonna say more.
Okay, here's a confession: I haven't read all the books. I haven't even made it through The Fellowship of the Ring. I just don't much care for Tolkien's prose. It's a fine world he created, I just have little patience for reading his books.
The next day, we went to the Vikings exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. I had very much been looking forward to it, and I must say that on the whole it was enjoyable. What ends up happening whenever I go to a museum is I start out all excited, then before long the crowds and the exhibit begin to feel tedious and oppressive, I lose all energy, start to feel sick, and hurry through the rest of the exhibit so I can sit down and catch a breather. That's exactly what happened on Sunday.
Too, I think there's a good reason that there are pre-learning activities before kids go on field trips. I don't feel that I walked out of the exhibit knowing a whole lot more about the Vikings than I did when I went in. I'm sure I would have got a lot more out of it had I prepared by studying a little first. As it is, about a third of the way through, I'd seen more than my fill of evidence for Vikings being fishermen, farmers, etc., so wasn't terribly much in the mood for what would normally have held my interest: Viking legends/sagas and history of their exploration and travel.
Still glad I went.
January 13, 2003
iTrip: an FM transmitter for the iPod. Together with a PowerPod Auto, that'd be one cool road trip.
Now I'm one step closer to buying an iPod...
January 07, 2003
Sure, I turn my back for a few hours and actually do some work, and what do I get for it? I'm behind the times. Cool stuff announced at Macworld. Things that I care about:
January 07, 2003
Checky is a Mozilla plugin for checking a page with a variety of validators and services. You can check using just one service, or configure the agent to use several at once. Validate your XHTML, CSS, and RSS, and check accessibility through one convenient interface. I love this thing.
These are the browser-based web development tools I now use on a daily basis:
All but ViewStyles are Mozilla-based. If you're a web developer and are not using Mozilla, you're missing out.
Of course, I'd also like to know what I'm missing. Dangit, I really need to set up comments.
January 03, 2003
I broke a bunch of stuff on this site a couple days ago and am slowly getting around to fixing it. Today it's the RSS feed. How's that for a lunchtime project.
After vacillating between the different RSS versions, I finally settled on RSS 2.0. While Mark Pilgrim's arguments for 2.0 in "In praise of evolvable formats" are compelling, in the end it pretty much came down to a gut feeling: I like what's been done in RSS 2.0. RSS 1.0 introduced greater complexity than I think is necessary for what I want to do.
Now I just can't wait to see what happens in NetNewsWire. I'm curious whether it will display the <description> or <content:encoded>, or whether I can set that in the preferences. Dang, I wish I had my iBook with me.
While I was at it, I also upgraded to the latest Movable Type. About damn time.
Next up...spiffing up the blogroll.
January 02, 2003
I've got some changes in the works, but the most immediate and probably most important is that I've finally got off my duff and added permalinks.
January 02, 2003
I am an introvert.
This should come as no surprise to those who know me. It doesn't necessarily mean that I am shy, although I am a bit. Shyness and introversion are quite different things. Those familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator will recall that introverts are characterized by drawing energy from within, easily overstimulated by the external world. Too much stimulation and we need to spend some down time, recharging. Extroverts, by contrast, are energized by the outside world: people, places, things, activities. I'm getting tired just thinking about it.
I've known for a long time that I am an introvert. I cannot handle crowds or too much activity, which is why I eschew going places like the State Fair, the Mall of America, and parties. Sometimes even getting together with a close friend is too much to handle. Kiara's the same way, although less noticeably: she's not only more extroverted than I, she's more right-brained, so is a less typical-seeming introvert. On a lark, I picked up a book for her this Christmas: The Introvert Advantage, How to Thrive in an Extrovert World. I expected that it would be fun to read through, pick up some tips for dealing with ardent extroverts like her father. Turns out that it's packed with all sorts of great information.
What first grabbed my attention is the discovery that introversion is physiological (as opposed to shyness, which is behavioral). Extroverts and introverts actually use different neurotransmitters and different neural pathways to the brain. Introverts' dominant neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, is associated with the energy-conserving parasympathetic nervous systems and with moving memories into long-term storage. Because introverts operate heavily in long-term memory, when speaking we tend to pause or speak more slowly than most extroverts are comfortable with. I can certainly relate to this, as I'm sure anyone who's spoken with me much would agree.
Too, the book lists personality traits and habits that I had not associated with introversion, but that I clearly exhibit:
These are all traits that have their root in physiology. Amazing.
The author is a psychotherapist, and about two-thirds of the book is devoted to suggestions for navigating life as an introvert in an extroverted world, as well as advice to extroverts for dealing with introverts. There are chapters on relationships, work life, parenting, socializing. Frankly, it smacks a bit too much of the self-help genre that I typically avoid, and with this prejudice in mind I doubt that I'll take much of the author's advice. Still, it has helped me remember how important it is to take time throughout the day to slow down and recharge.
Fascinating read.
January 02, 2003
Get it while you can, this is good stuff: The Glass Wall.
Until either my webhost or my bosses ask me to take it down, here is a document detailing the design process behind the BBC homepage. The research methods and synthesis they went through is pretty interesting, and hopefully some of the process, artifacts and outcomes documented might be useful for web design practitioners. I'll feedback any comments to the design team involved.
January 01, 2003
Happy New Year, everyone!
I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, so I decided to try something new. Here goes:
Peace.
