Posts from 2003

Ever worry about the security holes in your graphics and audio technology?  Yep, you guessed it, there’s a critical flaw in DirectX (specifically how it handles MIDI files) that will—say it with me, now—let an attacker take control of your Windows machine.  Go, read the security bulletin and get the patch.  Again.  For the second time in nine days.

To those who are wondering when meyerweb became the Windows Security Monitor: rest assured, I’m only passing along the flaws that Microsoft deems “critical.”  The lesser severity levels (like “important”) don’t get mentioned, because otherwise I suspect I wouldn’t have room to talk about anything else.  If you’re running Windows, you really should go sign up to get security bulletins sent to you.  It may increase your daily e-mail traffic, but at least you’ll be informed.

Critical security flaws in the multimedia APIs?  Picture me shaking my head in weary, resigned disbelief here.  The amazing part to me is that people actually choose to buy machines using this technology—and I seem to be using that term very loosely.  The real irony is that I may be buying such a machine myself, in the not too distant future.  Quite possibly next Sunday, A.D.

• Broken Windows was published on Sunday, July 27th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

Adam Kalsey shares a method for rounding corners that has minimal HTML impact.  I explored the same basic concept (along with several others) in Project 10 of Eric Meyer on CSS, although in my case I used it to provide rounded corners between two differently-sized sections of a document; sort of the visual inverse of what Adam demonstrates, but using the same fundamental techniques.

It’s always interesting to see ideas emerge in different places, mutate, evolve, advance, and generally act like they have a life of their own.  Did somebody say “meme?”

The thing is, of course, that we’d be better off not having to hack in bits of HTML just to get these effects.  CSS3 offers proposals for corner-rounding properties, and that’s a good step forward.  One can also use XBL to dynamically insert the needed bits and style them, without having to clutter up the source document.  Here’s my XBL-based recreation of Adam’s demonstration.  Now here’s a variant employing more complex corner and border effects.  And then there’s blockquote styling with great big background quotation marks and rounding of some corners.

The above examples will only work fully in Gecko-based browsers (as of today, anyway), but what’s interesting to note is that they don’t look bad in non-Gecko browsers.  Take the blockquote example, for one.  In a Gecko browser, you get all the eye candy.  In a non-Gecko browser you get a visually distinct blockquote with less eye candy.  It still looks pretty good, or at least not bad; it could probably use some padding, but these aren’t polished examples.  The document structure is clean, and semantically appropriate.  What’s not to like?  This seems like another aspect of the concept of graceful flexibility—or, if you prefer, progressive enhancement—and one worth further investigation.

• Rounding A Corner was published on Friday, July 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but there’s an aural-CSS supporter besides Emacspeak out there.  It’s called Fonix SpeakThis, and while its aural CSS support is pretty limited, it does exist.  (A tip of the hat to The Literary Moose, by the way, for passing along the information.)  I find the existence of another aural-CSS browser, however limited, to be interesting in light of the aural style sheets appendix of CSS2.1, which says in part:

We expect that in a future level of CSS there will be new properties and values defined for speech output. Therefore CSS 2.1 reserves the ‘speech’ media type… but does not yet define which properties do or do not apply to it.  The properties in this appendix apply to a media type ‘aural’, that was introduced in CSS2. The type ‘aural’ is now deprecated.

In other words, aural is a dead end, and speech will be used in the future.  At some point.  Really.

Fans of complexspiral‘s visual groove might also appreciate Atlantis, which looks a whole lot more professional.  As is to be expected.

Raffi Krikorian raises some long-term problems arising from URL-shortening services that are worth pondering.  It isn’t the case that absolutely everything has to be preserved for all time, but how many links would suddenly break if a popular shortening service disappeared?  I already don’t like such services because they hide the ultimate destination, which robs me of an important piece of information in my quest to decide whether or not I should follow a given link.  How many times have you seen a post that says, basically, “This is interesting!” followed by a shortened link?  It could be a political story from the BBC, a collection of Battlestar: Galactica fan fiction, the official site of the Malaysian legislature, or an outrageously disgusting fringe-porn site.  How can you tell?  By following the link.  It’s like Web roulette.  Place your bets!

I guess it’s also true that shortening services irk me because they should be utterly unnecessary.  In the first place, there’s almost no excuse for URLs to be so long that they need some kind of shortening service.  Okay, maybe mapping programs have some excuse, but that’s about it.  The kind of enormous cryptic URLs that most database-driven sites generate is just sloppy and wrong.  In the second place, as for putting URLs in e-mail and newsposts, you can contain the URL in angle brackets—<http://like.this/>—and any client worth running will understand that the whole string is a single URL, and ignore any line-wrapping that might occur within the brackets.  If your program can’t handle that, especially if it tries to interpret the bracketed text as an HTML tag, then it’s time to get another one.

Incidentally, the title of today’s entry is a hand-shortened form of “Speech, Shells, and Shortening.”  Which is better?  Granted, it’s kind of cool having an entry title that sounds like a door on Star Trek, but it isn’t what I’d call particularly useful for determining the contents of the entry before you actually read it.  See what I mean?

• SpShSh was published on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’ve made the big time: Internet gossip columns!  Okay, not really, but Opera Journal has just run a short piece about my ruminations over possibly moving to another country.  On the theme of moving elsewhere, CNN recently ran an article about Americans who are heading for Canada.  I do hope these folks do a little more research before making the move; nowhere is as perfect as it first seems—no, not even Canada.  Anyway, having that article come so closely on the heels of my recent posts makes for a weird feeling, like the universe somehow centers on me.  Which I’m pretty darned sure it doesn’t.  Personally, I wouldn’t want it to; as someone I know used to say, “The problem with solipsism is that it makes me responsible for all the idiocy in the world.”

[Aside: I’d just like to point out that the markup for the word “me” in the previous sentence is <em>me</em>.  Maybe MC Frontalot could use that as a (much) nerdier version of Eminem’s name, as a parody or something.]

To come back to something vaguely related to having my potential moves discussed in public, I had a very interesting conversation with my father Sunday at the anniversary porch party Kat and I threw.  Among discussions of my job situation and the prospect of striking out on my own, and how that might work in a fiscal sense, he said to me, “Back when you were in high school, you told your mother and me that you wanted to be a recognized name one day.  I don’t remember if you had a specific plan in mind, but it’s something your mother and I talked about a couple of times in recent years, how you’d worked toward that goal and achieved it.”

This took me completely by surprise; I don’t remember ever having said that, nor that it had been a goal of mine.  I always felt like I’d lucked into whatever fame I have.  Granted, I worked hard to reach my current position, but I was lucky to be in the right places at the right times, and to have opportunities that could be developed into advancement.  But now I wonder if the idea of being a “known name” lurked in the back of my head for years, and subconsciously guided me toward the place I now find myself.  I also wonder if, at any time before a couple of years ago, I knew why it was important to me.

• Being Noticed was published on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Five years ago today, standing under a tree before a small gathering of family and friends in her parent’s front yard, Kat and I vowed to make each other laugh at least once a day.  On that sunny Long Island morning, we promised to listen to each other, to hold each other, and to support each other through everything that life would bring our way.

Mom once told me that she’d never seen me as happy as I was that day.

• Silver and Wood was published on Saturday, July 19th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Apparently I’m a desirable emigrant.  In response to yesterday’s comment-in-passing that Kat and I had been kicking around the idea of moving to another country, I’ve had three people write encouraging me to emigrate to Canada, and one other person recommend the United Kingdom.  The Canada people actually make a pretty good case, since apparently there’s a plan afoot for Canada to make the Turks and Caicos Islands their eleventh province.  That sounds pretty sweet, even if I would have to spend the whole year encased in zinc oxide.

Personally, I’ve always liked Toronto as a city.  Their weather isn’t significantly different than what we experience here in Cleveland, plus I know a number of very cool folks who already live there.  I can’t comment on places in the UK, since I’ve never actually been there (although I hope to fix that within the next year or so).  For the record, the country we had in mind was Norway.  I also gave some thought to the Bahamas, but then we’re back to the prospect of me resembling a lobster on a semi-continual basis.

There’ve been a whole lot of XHTML-and-CSS redesigns announced in the past ten days, and I’ve been remiss in pointing them out.  Here’s a list of the ones I noticed: The Open Championship, Quark, Message Digital Design Ltd., Phish.com, Lawrence, Kansas Weather, Adaptive Path, and Inc.com.  There were some others, I think, but the URLs seem to have escaped me.

On that last one, Dan talks a bit about the particulars of the Inc. redesign, and Doug points out that the markup size reduction for Inc.com’s redesign was just about the same as that for the redesigns of Adaptive Path and Wired News.  I’ll add that it’s very close to the markup size reduction seen when ESPN.com redesigned.  So yes, Doug’s absolutely right: there’s a trend here.  Old-school table-and-spacer designs can be visually recreated using lean, structural markup and CSS, and the process cuts page size by about half.  Some sites will see less savings, but some will see more.  As an example, my off-the-cuff guess (having peeked at the source of a typical page) is that eBay could drop its page weight by 66% or so.  They could probably reduce their annual outgoing bandwidth by several petabytes.  Tell you what, eBay: I’ll show you how to do it and do it right, and you can pay me five percent of your savings over the next five years.  Deal?

• Moving and Shaping was published on Friday, July 18th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

If you’re feeling safe (in a computing sense) you might want to rethink that view.  I just came across a USA Today article that leads off with:

Microsoft acknowledged a critical vulnerability Wednesday in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software, the first such design flaw to affect its latest Windows Server 2003 software.  Microsoft said the vulnerability could allow hackers to seize control of a victim’s Windows computer over the Internet, stealing data, deleting files or eavesdropping on e-mails.

Yes, there’s a patch, so if you’re using Windows, go get it before crackers reverse-engineer the patch to figure out the flaw and start attacking systems.  As it turns out, Windows ME is immune to the problem, so those folks are safe, at least in this case.  Oh, and there have been two more security bulletins and patches published since the one in question, which was released yesterday.

Hardly a week goes by any more that I don’t see one of these and feel really, really glad that all my important personal data—like my books and a current mirror of this Web site—is on a Macintosh.  One running the Classic OS, I might add, so it’s even less vulnerable than OS X machines, which are pretty darned safe.  Plus the system crashes a whole lot less often than Microsoft releases Windows security patches, and when it does crash it’s usually because of Microsoft Word.

Anyway, back to the article I was reading.  Near the end of the piece, the author adds a really chilling note:

The announcement came one day after the Department of Homeland Security announced that it awarded a five-year, $90-million contract for Microsoft to supply all its most important desktop and server software for about 140,000 computers inside the new federal agency.

Just the other day, Kat and I were kicking around the idea of moving to another country as sort of a grand adventure and interesting career move for us both.  Now the idea almost seems like a reasonable personal safety measure.

• Open Door Policy was published on Thursday, July 17th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

There has been more detailed information written about yesterday’s events, so it’s worth reading if you still care.  Personally, I thought Dave Shea’s summary was quite amusing.

I indicated yesterday that DevEdge would likely not be updated.  That’s because the standards evangelism team has been disbanded.  Two team members were among those let go, and the rest of us went to different places within AOL.  I’m really not sure what made the difference between those who were axed and those who were not. 

As much as I’m unhappy that we’ve come to this pass, I don’t regret for one second having taken the position of Standards Evangelist.  While it lasted, Netscape funded close to ten full-time and part-time positions whose job was to promote standards, not proprietary technology, and to spread that message as far and wide as possible.  They may well have been doing it for selfish reasons, but that hardly matters.  We were able to inform, educate, and proactively help a lot of sites get better cross-browser behavior by using standards.  In our own way, we helped make things better, and we made a difference.

So here’s to Bob Clary, Marcio Galli, Katsuhiko Momoi, Chris Nalls, Tristan Nitot, Arun Ranganathan, Doron Rosenberg, and Susie Wyshak.  We fought the good fight and created a lot of great material, including information about the redesign of DevEdge itself.

Moving forward, I have to decide what I will do: accept the position into which I was reassigned, turn down the reassignment and look for another position within AOL, or decide to take the severance package and leave AOL altogether.  This isn’t exactly an easy call, partly due to the economy, but also because the importance of standards to AOL is not, at present, clear to me.  Perhaps the message has sunk in and there will be a place for someone like me, and perhaps not.  I hope to find out which over the next week or so.  No matter what, I face some tough choices, but at least I have choices.  I can’t say the same about 50 former co-workers.

Meanwhile, DMX Zone just this morning (my time) published an interview with me, so those interested in such things can click away.  Love that Dark Jedi groove thang!  [insert lightsaber sound effects here]

• Standing At a Crossroads was published on Wednesday, July 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Interviews, and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.