afongen

I’ve recently started working with Dreamweaver MX, which is a far cry from earlier versions. I might even end up making it my primary editor for my PHP projects.

One thing that will be new to most Dreamweaver users is the layout scheme. There are all sorts of new panels, slightly new concepts… too confusing if all you’re trying to do is get up a quick page. The new workspace is useful if you know what you’re doing and do a lot of hand-coding, pretty much a pain in the ass if you don’t. For the latter, there is the Dreamweaver 4 layout mode. For the former, there is a tutorial at projectseven.com: Panel Management: A Dreamweaver MX Workspace for Designers.

Karelia has released Watson 1.5.5.

In Sherlock 3 (released with Jaguar), Apple duplicated much of what Watson does, thus making Sherlock actually useful for once. Watson is hands-down a far superior application, though. It runs faster, does more, and is just generally more pleasant to use. Try it.

We took this picture on the way up to my brother’s wedding last year, and to my shame only just got it developed. (That, since you didn’t ask, is one of the reasons I am glad to now have a digital camera.)

I could claim to be posting this now in response to our president trying to drag us into a war that it seems no one but he wants, alienating allies and making the US an even more desirable target, but nah. It’s mainly for the benefit of Mark Beihoffer, should he be reading, though I guess Chris (pictured) will get a kick out of it, too. And of course, so I don’t lose the photo. I’m really starting to put more and more things here just so I don’t lose track of them.

OK, really it just makes me laugh.

Great article in The Atlantic on Bruce Schneier and his views on security .

[S]ecurity measures are characterized less by their manner of success than by their manner of failure. All security systems eventually miscarry. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible. Engineers call such failure-tolerant systems “ductile.” . . . [W]hen possible, security schemes should be designed to maximize ductility, whereas they often maximize strength.

Many of the things being done in the name of security since September 11, Schneier points out, actually make us less secure — because they break badly.

Note to self: reread Secrets and Lies, Security Engineering, and possibly even The Atlantic.

Their home page doesn’t yet reflect it, but it appears that the Open Source release of Xopus is available for download.

Xopus is a browser-based WYSIWYG XML editor, which I think that I’ll be playing with quite a bit in the near term.

Jaguar comes with Perl 5.6. This is okay, I guess, but Perl 5.8 has been out for close to a month and includes some useful improvements, so why not install Perl 5.8 on Jaguar?

MySQL 4.0.3 has been released, and with it MySQL 4 is in beta.

All new features have been added by now and the TODO items are all done. The focus is on stabilizing the 4.0 tree now, while all new features are being implemented in 4.1 instead.

All sorts of fun things for me to play with today.

Maybe all it took was my complaining about it here. Because whammo, Netscape 7.0 has been released.

(Release notes, seizure-inducing ad graphic from the download page, FTP site).

Installation went smoothly, it grabbed my Mozilla 1.1 profile, plugins seem functional so far, and now I’m ready to recommend that we get it installed at work. Yes! That should eliminate about half of our Netscape 4 traffic, and along with it the conviction that every page must look exactly the same in all browsers. I still face that, I think largely because people expect all sorts of whiz-bang wizardry from the five-year-old monstrosity on their desktop.

I suddenly am not sure where I put my notes from OSCON. So before I lose this URL again: Abuse Detection in Apache, Brett Glass’s presentation at the 2002 Open Source Convention.

I’m with Pinder: I feel dirty using the IE skin for Mozilla. How weird. I wonder if I’ll feel better about the XP skin when it’s done. I’d like a Mac IE5 theme, it’s a much more pleasing design (the graphite color, please). Regardless, for those of you who get the evil eye from tech support for using a browser other than IE, here’s something to consider.