July 30, 2003
The fifteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style will soon be released, with some very welcome updates.
There's a special place in my heart for the Manual. As a kid I spent hours reading and rereading it, and to this day I get a warm feeling when I hold a copy, or even see one on a shelf. For some reason I no longer own a copy myself (though I do keep Turabian handy) so I'm looking forward to this new edition.
July 30, 2003
Harry Fuecks: "PHP5: Coming Soon to a Webserver Near You", the clearest discussion I've read yet about what's new in PHP5. I should start paying attention to this, now that betas are being released.
And while on topic, I might as well mention that Damian Conway's Exegesis 6 has been published, demonstrating subroutines in Perl 6. If ever you held illusions that exegeses were more immediately accessible than their subject texta, Conway's series should disavow you of that notion. As they and the Apocalypses progress, I'm having a harder and harder time following what's going on. I think this is because each assumes a solid grounding in what's come before, which I of course forget. Maybe some weekend I'll sit down and read through them all succession. Then start writing with Perl 6 syntax, just to get the hang of it (CPAN modules make this possible).
In my dreams. Maybe I'd do this if I weren't back in the "refamiliarizing myself with Java in my spare time" groove.
July 29, 2003
The other night I emailed an HTML file to myself at work, but the message never arrived. At first I thought that we were blocking HTML mail, but other HTML mail was slipping past, so I set about analyzing the headers to see what the difference could be. That wasn't the problem, as it turns out, so in a way I'm glad that my efforts were fruitless.
The file contained dummy "Lorem Ipsum" text generated at lipsum.com (a site worth bookmarking). This line was triggering the spam filters: "Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus." Cum was the offending word, and my mentioning it here will probably get this site blocked by filters in public libraries and schools. So watch the Latin, folks.
Of course, explaining that this was just Latin text used as filler has done nothing to discourage my coworkers' notion that I'm an overeducated freak. Sigh.
July 28, 2003
It looks like there may be a Farscape mini-series that wraps up the loose ends. Of course, this could all be just rumor…
Predictably, Henson Co. is being cagey with information about a potential Farscape mini. After asking the company for a response for this story, they took four hours to come up with, "Though there are currently no plans for any immediate Farscape projects to be produced, the 'To Be Continued' ending in the final episode signifies The Jim Henson Company's commitment to the property and our belief that there are future opportunities for it to grow. We truly appreciate all of the continued fan support and commitment to Farscape." Which is a really fancy way of saying "no comment."
I think that "woo-hoo!" is the right thing to say at this point.
July 28, 2003
North Hennepin Community College is looking for a web designer/developer.
July 26, 2003
A couple months ago, my iBook battery died. Just seemed to stop taking a charge. For those who have little experience with iBooks, the end of the power cord glows orange while the battery is charging, green when it's fully charged. All of a sudden, when I plugged in the iBook, it would glow orange for about 30 seconds, then turn green. But when I unplugged the laptop, it would immediately power down. Too, the battery monitor consistently showed 0% charge, with no sign of climbing.
Well, dang. I researched the problem, tried all the suggestions that I read, talked with the folks in the Apple store, and nothing worked. I was all set to buy a new battery, when all of a sudden yesterday I booted up the iBook for the first time in over a week, and it worked. The battery meter showed a 50% charge. It charged up to 100%, and right now I'm running quite happily on battery power. It's at 83% and falling.
Weird. Good, but weird.
July 25, 2003
Lisa Guernsey in the New York Times: In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus.
I've been watching this trend develop from afar, not often finding myself in conferences or lectures where there's a wifi connection available. It's at the same time exciting and intimidating. I never stay long in IRC because the cacophony quickly becomes overwhelming (if I can speak of "cacophony" in a text-based world), so I'm not sure that I would respond well to a mixed, simultaneous online-offline environment
Years ago, while working as an engineer at a radio station, my father learned to follow several audio input streams simultaneously. He carried the same skill into reading while watching TV and listening to family conversation. Growing up with this, I picked up on the reading-while-watching-TV thing, but it stops there.
I was about to write that I didn't think that an online component would be useful or effective in a very small group, but then I realized how handy it could be in discussions or meetings to easily pass links or make quick notes for everyone to see. This is what first attracted me to Hydra. I suspect that an online back channel would be most useful in a lecture or conference only once a group reaches a certain size, yet that threshold may be very near a group's optimal size, beyond which the back channel becomes too hard to follow and too great a distraction. It certainly would for me. I'd have to school myself to tune out one or the other.
Later on, I'd love to have a transcript of the online discussion, ideally synched with audio and/or video.
I urge you to read Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" if you haven't already. His "In-Room Chat as a Social Tool" is also quite instructive, especially for ideas about how these tools are actually used.
On a related note, Ray Ozzie's idea for a combination wiki and collaborative text editor, and (Hugh Pyle's quick implementation) is more than a little intriguing.
And hmmm… Groove text tool? A quick search for that led me to Groove's Notepad, which appears to be a Hydra-like tool for Windows, but more. Groove does such cool stuff, I wish I could use it.
July 25, 2003
You can control and even stop animated GIFs. You can block images from different and/or selected servers. Now with the "Flash Click to View" extension for Mozilla/Firebird, you can block Flash until you want to see it. Finally, an end to those god-awful annoying Flash ads.
July 25, 2003
A friend arrived home the other day to discover ChemLawn signs in her yard. Her lawn and fenced garden had been treated, and a bill left for her.
Or rather, a bill had been left for her neighbor two doors down — ChemLawn had gone to the wrong house. Our friend never hired them to treat her lawn. And now everything in her garden — the garden she tended every day, the garden that had been thriving — is dead.
When she called ChemLawn to complain, they told her that she "didn't have to pay for the treatment."
When she pressed that no, ChemLawn would be compensating her for damage to her garden, they responded, "Well, we don't know how much those plants were worth."
Who says stupid shit like this?
That's where it stands now. Rest assured that is not where it will end.
July 23, 2003
Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites is now available online. The whole thing. This book is essential reading for those who need to, well, build accessible web sites. I still think that it is hands-down the best book out there on the subject.
(Online version discovered via Mark Newhouse's WebVisions presentation, "CSS, Markup, and Standards".)
July 22, 2003
Every now and then the universe seems to beat me over the head with something until I pay attention.
Years ago, I encountered almost daily references to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for an entire month before I finally picked up a copy — at which point the references abruptly stopped.
A while later I found myself in the same boat with Antonin Gramsci, until I holed myself up in a library and devoured his Notebooks. Nothing like immersing oneself in the thought of an imprisoned Italian Marxist to add flavor to a week spent visiting your girlfriend at college. But it worked: Gramsci stopped haunting me.
Now the same thing seems to be happening with Moleskine. I can only hope that buying and using one of these very, very nice notebooks will have some effect.
July 18, 2003
I've got a few things in the works here but they'll have to wait — I'm heading to the lake for the weekend. It's Kiara's family's cabin. I don't actually like it there much, but watching Owen swim in the lake will be a blast: he loves to be in the water. Gets that from his mom.
We're celebrating the triple birthday: in a highly unlikely coincidence, Kiara's father, her brother, and I all have the same birthday. How's that for uncanny?
July 17, 2003
S: The boy is sleeping, so speak in hushed tones.
K: (rests hand on S's head)
S: …or communicate in Morse code by tapping on my head.
K: (silence)
S: ???
K: I'm trying to remember if it's P waves or S waves that pass through your skull when I tap on it.
July 16, 2003
Macromedia has announced Contribute 2, though it has not yet been released. A coworker is doing an exhaustive review and user group test of Contribute for possible use at work, and along the way we've noticed some oddities. Version 2 will likely be released before we make a decision. Not sure what effect that will have.
Aside from features like FlashPaper, which looks to be a PDF competitor, it's not yet clear what's new. Beyond bug fixes, I'd be interested in something that's more suited to an environment in which more than one person is using a computer. In Contribute 1, a web site administrator sends a connection key to the site updater(s). The connection key contains the username and password necessary to access and edit the site, and is available for use by anyone with access to that computer. I'm not comfortable with that, and it's downright unusable in a situation like a computer lab. This and other little niggling details have been discussed on the newsgroups quite a bit, so I'll be curious to see what Macromedia's done.
At least there will be a Mac version now.
As to FlashPaper, I'd like to see how accessible it is. Text in Flash files should be accessible to screen readers … some screen readers, at any rate … but I don't know how structured text is dealt with. I expect it to take a while to approach the sophistication that PDF has, if that's even a goal.
That reminds me: I must look at Acrobat 6. I have it but haven't even looked to see what's new.
July 16, 2003
Here I am, diligently ignoring the announcement that AOL is nixing Netscape. Much too busy.
July 16, 2003
It has come to my attention that several employees are talking at their desks during scheduled work hours. I must convey the importance of NOT talking at your desk, or to your desk partner. Talking greatly decreases work productivity, and company morale.
If you need to talk to someone, please schedule a meeting room where you can talk, or use the break rooms. If you are caught talking at your desk, you will be escorted into a meeting room and questioned as to why you are talking, and if it is relevant to your job. If not, you may be subjected to disciplinary actions.
We want you to work hard at eBay, and enjoy your work. Please contact management if you have any questions.
I wasn't sure whether I should post this, because I'm never quite sure that the "leaked" memos at InternalMemos.com are for real. Is posting this just rumor-mongering? But then I realized just how very funny this one was, and I don't care if it's real. It could be.
July 10, 2003
This one's for you, Mike. From chromatic's wrap-up of OSCON day 3:
Brian Aker, fresh on his new job as Senior Architect at MySQL, shocked the world (or, at least, me) when he announced that he'd embedded Perl in MySQL and was using it for stored procedures a couple of years ago. Of course, it did segfault rather often. Fortunately, it's highly mature now. In his talk on "Making MySQL Do More", Brian showed the embedded function API. You can write new functions for MySQL in Perl, Python, PHP, and Java. (Keep asking him about Ruby.) You can link to C libraries; he's used Image Magick and zlib.
Oh my god.
July 09, 2003
I'm not at OSCON this year, and man am I bummed. It probably doesn't help that I've been trying to keep up on what people have been writing. Phil Windley's been doing some great session summaries. Jeremy Zawodny, of course, and many over at use perl;. Don't forget the OSCON wiki and the official page. Only a few people seem to have picked up on the trackback URLs (see the conference grid), which is a damn shame: last year's trackback page over on movabletype.org was really useful, and by now more people are familiar with the concept. it would help to follow the goings-on.
It's going to take me a while to sort through everything. Probably just as well, it'll give me something to do while I'm musing about how I'm going to go next year.
July 09, 2003
I've mentioned before that one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of public key encryption is that it's just too damn hard. Even smart, tech-savvy people take a while to wrap their brains around it, and that's only if they think it's worth their time. If people don't already think that crypto is important (i.e. "I have nothing to hide"), why invest the time and energy in trying to understand it, much less learning to use the software?
Identity-based encryption may help.
IBE greatly simplifies the key management process. When Alice sends a message to Bob, she encrypts the message using Bob's public key. What's Bob's public key? His email address. Note that Bob never had to set up a public key and Alice never needed to look it up. When Bob receives the encrypted message, he contacts a key server to get his private key so he can decrypt the message. He can store this key locally so he can reuse it.
Very cool.
A new company, Voltage Security, is having a go at selling software that uses IBE. See that site for a better write-up of the idea. It looks like they're still filling out the product line, so it's a bit early to comment. But how can I not?
July 08, 2003
Ah, it's raining. And I've got to catch a bus. Nothing like a tall guy standing out in the open in a thunderstorm, holding a metal rod in the air.
July 05, 2003
July 05, 2003
July 05, 2003
I took some time off this week to spend with my sister and her son, who were in town for the holiday. We went to the Aboretum, the Children's Museum, walked through some woods along the Mississippi River, hit a couple parks, went swimming… the usual. It was a lot of fun, and boy am I wiped out. Might take me a while to catch up with some things I want to write here.
The Nephew is an outgoing, energetic little boy. It's really an effort keeping up with him; luckily the rest of us outnumber him and can take turns. What really amazed me is just how extroverted he is. Watching him engage people in conversation is draining. Yesterday at the lake, I found myself wanting to call him back from talking to someone or other ("stop bothering the nice man") but realized that my sister — although watching carefully — seemed content to let him chat away. It struck me that my discomfort with his behavior was not caused by any concern that he was talking with strangers (he was, after all, closely observed by three responsible adult relatives) but rather the fact that I would never be that outgoing. Ever. And I have trouble imagining that anyone would be.
I asked my mother if I or any of my siblings had ever been that extroverted. Nope. Not all of us combined.
So I wonder: what if my son is an extrovert? I know that the difference between introversion and extroversion is rooted in chemistry, so it's a distinct possibility. What would it take for me to deal with an extroverted kid? I'm exhausted after just a few days with The Nephew. And how well will I be able to judge what is genuinely inappropriate/impolite behavior as opposed to just something that makes me uncomfortable because I would never do it?
Punt, I suppose.
July 01, 2003
Just like the title says: Netscape 7.1 has been released, as has Mozilla 1.4. So far, using Netscape 7.1 on Windows doesn't force me into all sorts of preference-resetting contortions when I quit and go back to Mozilla. Happy day.
No, I don't use Firebird on Windows. I eventually will, I'm sure, but so far just don't have a compelling need to do so. On OS X, on the other hand, I do prefer Firebird to the full-blown Mozilla package. At least for development, which is all that I use it for anymore on my Macs. Safari has become my default browser.
