June 29, 2003
Imagine this job interview:
Interviewer: So tell me about what qualifications and skills you can bring to this job.
Applicant: None, really.
Interviewer: I see. Why should we hire you?
Applicant: I've been working a long time.
Interviewer: Sounds good to me, welcome aboard!
We've been going through some layoffs at work. Because all non-management jobs in Minnesota state government are union-represented, and because the unions respect seniority above all else — certainly above competence — this means that people with seniority get to "bump" people out of their jobs, regardless of whether the more senior employees are qualified. Pisses me off.
June 29, 2003
At long last, a final build of OpenOffice 1.0 is available for Mac OS X. This requires XWindows; Apple's X11 works just great. I ran the installer with absolutely no problem and was up and running in a few minutes. Even the warnings that I might need to do some manual editing of a config file to get the Start OpenOffice script to work turned out to be unfounded: it asked me which X server I preferred to use and proceeded to just work.
I haven't used it extensively, just played around a bit, but my impression so far is that it might be usable on my iBook. A bit sluggish to be sure, and I miss Jaguar's font smoothing, but if I ever need an office suite, this will do nicely. No, it doesn't feel like a Mac app, but that's okay for now. At least I can use splat-S (or open-apple S if you prefer) to save instead of control-S.
I'm still keeping my eye on NeoOffice, which is working on an OS X-native version of OpenOffice. I just noticed NeoOffice/J, which is focusing on making OpenOffice work without X11. Using Java, it seems. Hm.
If you haven't tried OpenOffice, give it a shot, especially if you're on Windows and are used to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice 1.1 beta is very nice indeed. (Of course, I say this as someone who hardly even uses a word processor anymore, much less a spreadsheet or presentation software. And I have to say that MS Office 2003 looks spectacular.)
June 28, 2003
Cool, A patch has been submitted for Apache to work around the broken Digest Authentication in Internet Explorer. Huzzah.
June 28, 2003
On PHP Complete: Windows Isn't Ready for the Desktop. Tee hee.
I love that the first few comments are along the lines of "hmm, hasn't happened to me," and "here's how you fix it." Much as happens when someone complains that they can't get something to "just work" in Linux. Which is of course his point: "just because someone has a problem with something doesn't mean the OS is crap."
June 25, 2003
I'm not all that fond of accesskeys in web pages. It's a great idea that I feel pretty much falls down on implementation: the possibility of clobbering the user's own access key preferences is just too great, and the idea of every web site having its own set of accesskeys just makes my teeth hurt.
Still, if you're going to use them, you might be interested in using style sheets to reveal accesskeys, as described by Stuart Robertson, author of the recent ALA accesskeys article that garnered so much buzz. Rather clever, really, but unfortunately doesn't work in IE. You could go the route of Stuart Langridge's nice titles if that matters to you.
June 24, 2003
In a tightly-written essay in the Washington Post, historian Alexander Keyssar takes issue with Bush's dismissing as "revision historians" those who question the administration's rationale for invading Iraq. That's what historians do, he argues: revise accounts of the past based on new evidence.
The first histories of war and of major political conflicts are almost always told by the winners; the first sources of information tend to be men (and occasionally women) who hold the reins of power. But those official histories are always flawed and incomplete, precisely because the sources are partial and self-serving. Sooner or later, revisionist challenges emerge, provoking debates that are uncomfortable for political leaders, although salutary for the society those leaders are supposed to serve.
June 21, 2003
I'm on my way to my wife's family reunion today. I don't expect that it will be much fun, but I'm not dreading it, either. For some reason my family doesn't really go in for these events so much, although there was one a number of years back. I'm glad for that.
Back later…
June 21, 2003
Craig Saila interviews Mark Newhouse about CSS in design and layout. Mark has such a sane approach that I don't want to lose track of that link.
More things that I don't want to lose track of because I might refer to them soon:
June 20, 2003
I'm sure that my brother Chris would be proud to know that his birthday is the day that the Unisys LZW algorithm patent expires in the US. GIF is almost free.
OK. He probably doesn't care a whit, except that reading it here will make him chuckle.
June 20, 2003
As great a movie as it is, I don't know that watching Office Space every couple days is such a hot idea.
Heh. Earlier this spring, our IT department did an internal employee satisfaction survey. Since I wrote the apps that ran the survey and produced the summaries, I had occasion to glance through the results. Office Space was mentioned in employee comments, but since the managers interpreting the comments had never seen the movie, they couldn't understand, classify, or relate to the comments. So those comments are basically not reflected in any summary; they're available only if people read the raw data.
Not that it matters, since the results have been released only to senior IT management anyway. Hopefully that's just an oversight.
June 20, 2003
Ooh, here's a reason to miss next week's open source conference: the WWDC keynote on a large screen at the University of Minnesota.
Update: Oh, damn. There's no conflict with the conference. And I can't go anyway, because I have a meeting. Aaargh!
June 19, 2003
A number of our colleges and universities have been redesigning their web sites lately, and there's some very impressive, beautiful work. Two in particular grabbed my interest: Minnesota State University, Mankato and Normandale Community College have implemented table-less layouts, using valid XHTML and CSS.
Now, I'm not a fanatic about this. I don't strongly object to using tables for layout, as long as they remain simple. You can get a lot of mileage with basic tables (i.e. not nested in several layers) and CSS. But I do have a general preference for CSS-P and still get excited when I see something as marvelous as Normandale's site pulled off with style sheets. Gives me hope that we might be able to do this on one of the redesigns that I'm working on this summer. Pointing to the CSS Zen Garden can only get me so far. Highlighting a few of our own colleges and universities who are doing this will carry some weight.
June 19, 2003
Cool-looking conference next week: Open Source - Open Standards. The Business, Legal, and Technical Challenges Ahead.
This one-and-a-half day standards conference for senior executives, comprising four panels, will feature an introduction of the issues and follow-up with an interactive discussion between the speakers and the audience. The aim is to capture and publish the issues that are discussed in order to raise the industry awareness of the benefits of Open Source.
It was suggested today that I go to this, and I probably should. I mean, hell, it's in town! If I can still register, I just might. Thing is, I'm not sure that I want to spend two days at an event geared toward "senior business executives." After a bizarre night several years ago in which I found myself at a cocktail party with CEOs of huge international corporations, followed by a late-night dinner with lawyers planning a trip to a week-long opera festival (I'll save that story for another day), I don't know that I'm ready for another schmooze-fest quite yet.
Then again, could be fun. At the very least, I have requested the proceedings, which may be all that I care about. We'll see.
June 16, 2003
The squeamish might not want to read this. It's nothing explicit, but if you're squeamish, you're squeamish.
Last weekend, I picked up my mother-in-law at the airport. She'd spent a few weeks in Moldova with several of her colleagues. (Don't ask me where it is, my sense of geography is seriously lacking. Somewhere near Romania, I think.) While in Moldova, one by one each of them got sick with flu-like symptoms that they could never trace to food poisoning or anything. She got affected just as she left for the long international flight home. Fun.
This past Friday, Kiara succumbed to what we assumed was food poisoning. It passed after a day or so, but she's still recovering. Then last night (all night), I fell victim to the same unpleasantness. And late last night, Owen threw up a couple times and was clearly uncomfortable. Poor little guy.
I'm not sure what would have affected us all. We blame Moldova. :-)
June 14, 2003
While wandering through Ruminator Books yesterday, I came across a book that looks like it was written just for me: Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France. Maybe for my birthday…
June 14, 2003
If you live in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, here's a neat idea: Twin Cities Free Market, "a listing service for Twin Cities residents who want to get or give free reusable goods for the home, garage and garden. It is part of an effort to reduce the amount of reusable goods being thrown away."
June 14, 2003
Earlier this week I was talking with a bunch of webmasters and mentioned that the main Minnesota State Colleges and Universities web site was still getting 10-15% Netscape 4 traffic.
Yesterday I took another look at the stats. To my surprise and delight, Netscape 4 is now hovering around 2% of the traffic. It seems that I was correct in my longstanding suspicion that most of that traffic was internal: our office switched to Netscape 7 and IE 6 a few months back, right around when the stats dropped. Yes, I could have easily verified my suspicion, but it was never important enough to bother.
Because, you see, I'm not sure how much I care, or what effect this drop in Netscape 4 traffic will have. My approach to dealing with Netscape 4 and other older, less-capable user agents has never been to ignore them completely. I just don't bend over backward for them, spending ungodly amounts of time ensuring that everything looks perfect. As long as everyone can still access the content and the pages don't look or act awful, then I'm happy. Nevertheless, 10-15% is nothing to sneeze at, so on the sites where I have influence, and certainly in my web applications, I spend a little time making sure that pages look more or less similar even for older browsers. Just not an undue amount of time,
My approach is similar to how I think about JavaScript. When I do accessibility training, I always emphasize that yes, you can use JavaScript and still have an accessible page. In fact, much as images can help some people understand or navigate a page, sometimes JavaScript can enhance a page's accessibility. But that's the key: treat it as an enhancement to core coontent and functionality rather than a basic requirement. Similarly, when putting together pages, I design with web standards so any user agent can access the content, then enhance and do cool things for modern browsers that can handle it. That is, I lean less toward graceful degradation as progressive enhancement.
Still, I must admit, 2% makes me feel a helluva lot more comfortable than 15%.
June 13, 2003
There's nothing quite like starting the weekend several hundred dollars poorer. On her way into St. Paul today, our car's brakes failed on Kiara. Not completely, but enough that they needed to be replaced right away. Thank goodness everyone was safe and that today was payday.
June 13, 2003
The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities web site is getting a much needed redesign this summer, and for the first time the implementation is being done by the internal web team instead of a design firm. This means that for the first time, little things like accessibility and web standards will be paid some attention. Yes!
In preparation for this, I've been going through a copy of the "Strategic Communications Plan" furnished by our Public Affairs department, who are responsible for the site. Some of it is actually quite interesting, but it felt really, really weird to be reading both that and the latest Dr. Dobbs Journal on the bus this morning.
No, scratch that. Dr. Dobbs had nothing to do with it. It's just plain weird to be reading something called a "Strategic Communications Plan."
June 09, 2003
Strange that keeping track of dates would be such a pernicious programming problem. But it sure seems to be.
A few months ago on Perl.com: The Many Dates and Times of Perl. More recently, on OnJava.com: Making Sense of Java's Dates.
June 08, 2003
I forgot, when i first came across it (via Rafe Colburn, I think), to point to this wonderful piece tracing the history of the Bush administration's self-contradictory statements on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Seeing it published in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune reminded me to send you that direction.
Along the same lines, the piece they did on The Daily Show a few weeks ago: Bush vs Bush. Masterfully done.
June 05, 2003
PHP offers choices in syntax for control structures. You can do this:
if (expr) {
statement;
}
or this:
if (expr):
statement;
endif;
I am none too fond of the latter. Especially when the programmer whose code I have to edit doesn't consistently indent a damn thing. At least with curly braces I can use a decent text editor to indicate matching braces. Compound this lack of proper indentation with code blocks that are way too big to keep track of so it's hard to tell to which if an endif belongs and you've got yourself a mess.
Or rather, I do.
Grrr…
June 05, 2003
Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS.
For a while the folks at JBoss were running PostNuke. Beyond the expected questioning of why the web site for a Java application server was running on PHP, they found that some unfortunate design decisions meant that PostNuke didn't scale.
Ultimately, it didn't work with PHP, so we decided to pull the plug on the PHP web site and put all we had learned about system design for scalability in four years of J2EE in JBoss (including EJB) to the test. Could we port the Nukes engine to J2EE? We did just that.
Nukes was born.
If we had a chance in hell of using JBoss at work, I'd actually be excited about this. Instead we're almost certain to go with another application server, for better or worse, and I think we'll be stuck with its CMS. So instead I just read the article with interest.
June 05, 2003
I have no idea how it happened, but somehow The Daily Show managed to get former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to appear for an interview with Jon Stewart.
Confession: I love Jon Stewart's interviews. He's no Terry Gross, no, but given the constraints he works with (just a few minutes on the show, the fact that the show is first and foremost a comedy), he can pull off some really interesting interviews.
The Albright interview was good, albeit hampered by Stewart's need/desire to cover a whole lot more than is possible in the short time frame their format allows:
Granted, Madeleine Albright can hardly be speaking from an unbiased perspective, but I credit her for being reasonable and intelligent. Except that she chose to appear on a fake news show, of course. :)
June 03, 2003
This rant is a bit late in coming, but I finally got sick of hearing people complain about the iTunes 4.01 update. Oh boo hoo, Apple disabled the ability to stream music across subnets with iTunes. Those dirty, rotten, greedy, freedom-hating bastards.
I'm sorry, I have no patience for that attitude. Yes, being able to listen to music streamed from home while sitting in a coffeehouse or at work is pretty damn cool. Certainly falls within the realm of personal use, and I'm all for it. But obviously it was causing more of a legal hassle than it's worth. What did you expect? All Apple did was remove the far-too-easy point-and-click means to do it. Guess what? You can still set up Apache to serve up those files. Drop a few bucks and you can use Andromeda to stream your music. And obviously, you can still use iTunes to stream within your own network. So what's the problem?
I have to say, though, that the hullaballoo has given rise to some amusing conversation amongst the Windows users at work. They never quite seem to have their facts straight.
Update: Whew, could I sound more bitter?
June 03, 2003
Interesting. Among other things I'd rather not discuss for fear of frothing at the mouth in anger and disgust, the 2003 Minnesota Legislature passed legislation requiring all state employees to be paid 100% by direct deposit. Period.
Well, it doesn't piss me off, but it is an interesting step.
