Posts from 2003

Everyone complains about Jakob Neilsen’s site design, but nobody ever does anything about it—until now.  Bob Sawyer has announced a “redesign useit.com” contest that’s being held with the blessing of Dr. Neilsen himself.  Dare we call it Designer’s Eye For the Usable Guy?  The contest closes at the end of October, so you have some time to really do a great job.

The trends described in the Time article “Believe It, Or Not” bother me quite a bit.  The last paragraph in particular seems chilling to me.  I’ve no objection to religion, as long as it isn’t being shoved in my face, and frankly I think more people could use a strong moral/ethical core.  It’s the decline in intellectualism and critical thinking, and the view that one can’t be moral without a belief in God, that trouble me deeply.  I can say with absolute certainty the latter is patently false, unless one defines morality to be solely derived from religious teachings, in which case either the term needs to be expanded or we need to ask a different question.  For example: “Is it necessary to believe in God to be an ethical person?  A good person?”

As I looked at this and the last several entries, I see that most of my recent posting has been personal in nature.  The CSS has fallen more or less by the wayside, which also bothers me.  I’m going to take a week off and think about the balance or technical content versus personal commentary, and how I want this site to evolve as I move forward with the consulting business.

• Grand Designs was published on Saturday, August 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Culture categories.
• There have been no replies.

Our power came back on about 8:00am EDT, sixteen or so hours after it failed.  Not everyone is back online.  Portions of Detroit may be out until Sunday, and I’ve gotten word that parts of New York City are still offline even as I write this.  As an example, Jeff and Carrie Zeldman are still blacked out, so try to go easy on the e-mail for a while.

There was a flutter in the power before it went out yesterday that was kind of fascinating.  I heard a low surging sound, repeated five or six times, coming through the speakers on my computer; it sounded very much like an old cassette tape warble, except I could see the power was fading in and out on the speaker set.  My biggest concern at that moment was that my speakers were getting ready to short out.  As it turned out, the entire power system shorted out instead.  I was hearing the death rattle of a multi-state power grid, and didn’t realize it until later.

As for Kat and me, things went fairly well.  I had the new TiBook to work on, and although I was cut off from a lot of the files I needed I still got some work done.  We cook with gas, so we were able to make dinner by flashlight and eat by candlelight, which is never a bad thing.  Since close to the entire city was blacked out until this morning, the clear weather last night made it a perfect chance to stargaze and get a good look at Mars.  I spotted the Milky Way faintly through the summer haze, and the across-the-street neighbors had a fairly powerful telescope, so we checked out Mars and the Moon, then sat in the moonlight chatting.  All in all, the evening could have been worse spent.

• Between Darkness and Light was published on Friday, August 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Flurry is the new Satori.

• Mesmerized was published on Wednesday, August 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

I just found out that Joshua Davis will be in town tonight, and I’m not going to be able to make it.  So the rest of you local types need to get down there and attend!  Even if you don’t use Flash, as in fact I don’t, Josh is a great speaker and you’ll have a lot of fun, so hurry up and RSVP.  The entrance fee may be a bit of a deterrent, but trust me, if you have the cash to spare it will be well invested… if for no other reason than getting a chance to look at Josh’s extensive tattoos.

I don’t know how your day has been, but I learned something about myself this morning.  There’s an online CSS-centric forum that I frequently read—actually, there are several that I read, popping up every now and again to post, but there’s this one I have in mind.  My last few posts there have gone basically unacknowledged, despite the fact that my posts were (I think) detailed and helpful.  Of course, I didn’t post them to generate worship, but these didn’t even get so much as a “thank you” or “that worked.”  I posted, and then it was crickets.  Other threads were continuing, so I knew the community was still in some sense active.

So as I made my morning rounds of various weblogs, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups, and so forth, I thought to myself, “You know what?  I’m not going there any more.  I don’t have time to help out people who don’t even acknowledge that I tried to help out.”  Childish and petty, I suppose, but that’s what I thought.  Then, several minutes later, I found myself headed to the very place I’d resolved to abandon, because I wondered if there would be any interesting posts, anyone looking for help that I could provide.  I realized that providing assistance was more important than any wounded feelings I might have.

So what I learned is that I can be petty, but that the pettiness gets trumped by other, stronger motivations.  I think that’s a good balance to have in my life.  It may be the key to thickening one’s skin, which is another necessary trait, particularly online.

• Pray Tell was published on Tuesday, August 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Even in the bright, shiny, translucent world of Mac OS X, Windows haunts me like a vengeful spectre.

Upon deciding to strike out on my own, I knew I’d have to buy a laptop.  The older-model TiBook and two-months-old Dell Latitude both belonged to AOL Time Warner, and they would want them back.  When I went somewhere to speak, or to train, I would need a portable computing node.  I would need the ability to carry everything needed to deliver my presentation: all the slides, the working files, the examples.  Too often have I seen speakers show up assuming they could run their presentation via the net and be told, “Sorry, the connection is down.”  Or arrive with a CD-ROM they burned containing everything, only to have the presentation machine absolutely refuse to read the disc.

So I bought a new 1GHz TiBook, with the gracious assistance of a local Apple employee.  It’s shiny on the outside, and shiny inside too.  After a quick hard drive repartition and reinstallation of both OS X and the Classic OS, I spent a couple of hours adjusting the OS look to at least vaguely resemble my old Mac’s desktop, customizing the Dock and System Preferences to put the important things within quick reach, and learning how the new OS works as compared to the Classic OS.

Then I installed Virtual PC 6.  And the pain began.

Please realize I have very little against VPC6.  It does a stunning job of recreating a Windows operating system right there in a Mac OS window.  If I launched a Classic application, I could run three completely separate operating systems on the same machine.  Slowly, of course.

But anyway, I installed my Windows 2000 Professional edition of VPC6, and there it was.  Windows.  Mocking me.  Can’t live without me, eh? it sneered.  In a sense, no, I can’t: I need to be able to test designs and templates and CSS techniques in Windows browsers as well as Macintosh browsers.  And I need to be able to test in different versions of Internet Explorer.  To do that, you either need multiple Wintel boxes, or one Wintel box running Virtual PC for Windows—think about that for a minute—or one Macintosh running Virtual PC for Macintosh.  In the latter case, I’d also get OS X, which I haven’t been running but need to, since Safari is a serious browser that deserves to be taken seriously.

Economically speaking, there was no contest: one laptop that gave me everything I needed.  Aesthetically speaking, there wasn’t much of a choice either.  TiBooks are just so darned… cool.

I fought with virtual Windows for almost 12 hours yesterday, trying to make it behave with some semblance of normalcy.  Discovering that I’d done something sensible yet still horribly wrong, and having to start over, more than once.  At least with Virtual PC, a badly botched installation is no big deal: you just throw away the drive image and empty the trash can.  It’s like reformatting the hard drive on a Windows machine, except it takes less time.  You can also, once you get a drive image set up as a baseline, copy it to new images and make changes to the copies.  So I can have images with IE5.0, IE5.5, and IE6.  I can also install Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Firebird, and all the other Windows browsers.  (I’ll probably install them into the IE6 image.)

But getting to that point, making my life easy, was amazingly hard and deeply frustrating.  And I’ve been using Windows 2000 Professional on a regular basis for the last two years.

At least VPC6 has a “go to full screen mode” that will let me present my presentation slideshows using Opera, as I’ve been doing for more than a year now.  I was very glad to see that feature.  Now, if only the software had a “shrink drive image to eliminate unused drive space,” I’d be a really happy camper.

Oh, and the next time someone tells you how bloated Mozilla or some other browser has become, kindly point out to them that the install package for Internet Explorer for Windows 5.5, Service Pack 2, is 84.1 megabytes; IE6.0 is 76.7 megabytes.  Even at T1 speeds, those take a while to download—almost as long as it takes light from the sun to reach Earth, in fact.  The only reason nobody ever complained is that nobody had to download Explorer.  Funny, that.  Imagine if Microsoft had been required to offer Explorer for download instead of bolting it into the OS.  I wonder how many copies would be in use today?

• Windows Pains was published on Monday, August 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

Remember I mentioned the “ZARGON” license plate?  Gail Cohen wrote me from Miami, Florida to tell me whose car that was.  His name’s Rex.  I’ve talked about moments of technological vertigo (technovertigo? technologigo?  technigo?) in the past.  This is another such moment.

So apparently Gail and Rex are both members of the International Association of Haunted Attractions, and his hobby is being an interactive actor in haunted houses.  You know the guys who jump out at you with goalie masks and chain saws?  He’s one of them.  Oh, heck, take a look for yourself.  So it turns out that terror really is his business, at least as a hobby, and I suppose it does take guts.  Just not the kind I meant.

• Spooky! was published on Saturday, August 9th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Technovertigo category.
• There have been no replies.

Fresh from a Taiwanese factory and several FedEx planes, I now have in my claws a brand-spankin’ new 1GHz 15.2″ TiBook.  Ahhhhh…. except for it running OS X, which I still don’t really quite understand.  Thanks to Mac OS X Hacks, I quickly located the terminal window and added it to the Dock for handy access.  <mood type="bliss"/>  I even got the built-in AirPort option even though I don’t have WiFi in the house.  So, of course, I’m in the market for a wireless access point.  Anyone have suggestions for a good one?  Bear in mind the access point will be situated inside a lath-and-plaster house, which may mean a whole lot of metal wire mesh in the walls.  Then again, the house was built in 1920, so I don’t know for sure that they were using much metal in walls back then.

Also bear in mind that I didn’t buy an Airport base station because I didn’t want to spend that much on a wireless extension to my existing wired network.  I’ve been looking at the LinkSys WAP11, as I have a LinkSys router already and the price is right, but I’ve been reading online that its range is limited and I want to cover three floors of the house, plus the front and back yards.  As long as I can good signal at a fifty-foot range from the station, and moderate signal up to one hundred feet, I’ll be more than fine.  I found a how-to on hacking the WAP11 to boost its transmission power, but I don’t know if the current firmware still allows the hack.  What does sort of bother me is that the WAP11 won’t pass through AppleTalk packets.  It’s not that I do tons of AppleTalk, but that it bothers me buying an access point that absolutely slams that door shut.  I will want to communicate between my Classic OS desktop and the TiBook, obviously.

Anyway—have need for wireless access point, need to cover multistory house, will want Mac-to-Mac communication, looking for recommendations.  The more plug-and-play, the better.  Meantime, I have to figure out how to best go about repartioning the hard drive into my usual triad of boot volume, data volume, and scratch-space volume.  And then I have to come up with a catchy name for this beast.  Oh, the crosses I bear.

Somehow I missed the fact that Opera Journal published a short interview with me on Tuesday and Wednesday.  You should probably start with part one, and then follow it to part two.  I think it got broken up because I spent some time answering the first question, but it really is short—five questions, if I counted correctly.  But not a Friday Five.

• All Tied Up was published on Friday, August 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

Just to demonstrate that my brain has melted, I’m actually thinking about adding a “Plate Watch” box to the site sidebar.  On my way back home this afternoon, I found myself situated behind an SUV whose license plate read “ICU PEKN.”  I was impressed.  It isn’t often you see reverse psychology employed on a license plate.

The business side of life seems to be jumpin’, as they would have said back in the Big Band era.  Besides the work for Macromedia, I have one confirmed CSS training contract and three possibles, plus what looks like three conferences between now and Thanksgiving.  I’m also hoping to sign in the next week a few more contracts to do standards optimization and strategy work for various companies.  All that, plus I’m trying to assemble a business site for myself and create or acquire the materials that are so vital to being on one’s own.

Considered in this context, I suppose the persistent light insomnia is a bit of a blessing in disguise.  Still, I’ve no cause to complain.  I think I almost had to go out on my own at some point, just to find out if I can hack it.  If so, great!  If not, then I’ll know that I tried.

At any rate, the heavy work load does make for light journal entries.

• Plated was published on Thursday, August 7th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.