Posts from 2004

The circus came to town yesterday, specifically to the Case campus.  It had in fact been arriving for the past few days, but things really started to kick into high gear yesterday.  So Jim, who has a parking pass to the most conveniently-located garage on campus, and I decided to make a mid-day pilgramage to campus and enjoy the sights.  And hey, why not share them with you?  Maybe you love circuses as well.

Even before noon, the Lyndon LaRouche folks had set up right next to one of the access points to the “public discussion area” (otherwise known as the “free speech zone”).  From what I could tell the table was manned by college students.  I had no idea there were college students that wacked out.  So far as we could tell, they were obeying all of the posted rules, but the day was still early yet.

A little bit later on, we came across the Freedom Frankenstein, lumbering across the landscape like a big, scary, primary-color boogeyman.  Or something.  Okay, it was one of the decorations for the MTV concert area.  At least we think that’s what area it was in.  The people setting it up didn’t actually know, and crowd members seemed to be confused about which event was being held where.  Actually, the crowd members seemed to be confused about a great many things.

The football field just outside Emerson Gymnasium, the site of the debate, was covered with transmission trucks.  As we approached the field perimeter, we got the once-over from some grim-looking gentlemen in suits and shades.  A more normal-looking guy near the barrier line looked up at us and said, “You can’t take pictures here.  The Secret Service guys won’t allow it.”  So we retreated a bit, gained higher ground, and took the picture anyway.  Which drew the attention of a couple of Secret Service guys; as they started walking in our general direction, we decided it was time to check out the other side of campus.  It’s great to know that the media uplink trucks of the world are so well protected, you know?

The two books pictured were just sitting next to a crosswalk on Euclid Avenue.  There was nobody within thirty feet of them besides us.  We couldn’t quite work out if they were freebies (despite having cover prices) or if picking one up would activate some sort of hidden box trap.  We decided to leave them alone and go check out the Hardball rehearsal at the MSNBC stage.  Demonstrators for various causes and candidates had already staked out space, despite it being four or five hours before the show itself would air.  Chris Matthews came down and talked with the people along the fence line, and some volunteers practied handing out Krispy Kreme donuts.  Apparently that’s something they do during the show.  Or else did.  I didn’t watch it.

I’ll say this much: Chris Matthews looks a lot less healthy in person than he does on television.  I didn’t get a chance to ask him if Zell was still demanding that they duel.

In all, it was a fun time.  All it needed was some monkeys and maybe a juggling act, and the day would have been perfect.

• Circus Time! was published on Wednesday, October 6th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

Kat, Carolyn, and I send our good wishes and heartfelt congratulations to Jeffrey Zeldman and Carrie Bickner on the birth of their daughter, Ava Marie Zeldman.

Let the “valid and well-formed” jokes commence.

• Mazel Tov! was published on Monday, October 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been two replies.

You probably know that I’m a long-time Macintosh user, going back to the days of the single-floppy Mac SE.  At one point, I worked in a computer lab that had a “Changing the world, one person at a time” poster on the wall.  Every single one of my books, articles, and other resources has been written or developed on a Mac.  So you can imagine how thrilled I am to be featured in an Apple Pro article.  Not only can you find out a little bit about how I got into this whole CSS thing, but see a picture of me dropping some fat horns on my listeners.

I’ll put this Pro file on the shelf with being made a comic strip character as “ways to know I’ve really made it”.  But you know what really told me I’d arrived?  Discovering that someone had created a Wikipedia entry about me.  It was a pretty stubby page at the time, but its mere existence was enough to drop my jaw into my lap.  Now I find myself wondering if I should edit my own entry to include a full biography and related links, or if that would in some way be incredibly gauche.  (And asking someone else to do it for me would just be gauche by proxy, which is worse.)

It’s an odd thing to be famous, even when the fame is limited to a specific field of activity.  As a matter of fact, I was recently asked to write an article about the “fame game” and I’m still mulling over how to tackle it.  See, when you get right down to it, being well-known is both a reward and a restraint.  When people look to you, there’s a certain set of expectations that gets imposed upon you, whether you want them or not.  You’re supposed to always be right, always be fair, and always be in agreement with whoever’s looking to you.  None of these things are possible.

Nevertheless, I am where I am because I worked to get here (and was lucky), and I’ve no real complaints about the position I occupy.  All told, it’s not a bad thing.  It isn’t even a good thing.  It just kind of is.

So there’s still the question of what I might write about the “fame game”.  As it was posed to me, the editor was interested in my thoughts on “how influential designers and developers must balance ‘responsibility’ to the community with their own need to say what’s on their mind and use their clout to get good things done”.  In many ways, it’s the classic “how do you feel about being a role model?” question.  I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to answer the question, although I do have some ideas.  I often wonder what the community thinks, though.

So I’ll throw it out to you lot: in your personal opinion, how should influencers balance community responsibility with personal expression—or does there need to be a balance at all?

• Finding Fame and Fortu—Okay, Just Fame was published on Monday, October 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Interviews, and Personal categories.
• There have been twenty-two replies.

September was quite an eventful month around these parts.  Guess who learned to crawl, started pulling herself to a standing position, began “cruising” (hesitantly walking while holding on to a couch, table, or other object), moved up to a bigger car seat, figured out how to drink from a sippy cup as well as she already could through a straw, and acquired full object permanence within that thirty days?

And those are just the developmental changes we’re sure happened.  We’re very tired now, thank you.

In the process of installing baby gates all over the house, I discovered that I’m becoming vaguely handy.  It’s a little weird.  Practice does get one closer to perfection, and Ged knows I’ve a very long way to go before I even begin to approach the contemplation of perfection in being handy, but I’m now to the point of seriously thinking about building my own workspace furniture, sort of like Dan did a while back.

Most of my practice was obtained by trying to baby-proof our kitchen.  This is no easy task anyway, but the, er, “interesting” choices made by the house’s previous owner made it about a zillion times more difficult.  Because of the way the drawers and cabinets are faced, it’s almost impossible to secure about half of them.  Of the half that could be secured, two-thirds of them were a royal pain.

Of course, sometimes the difficulty wasn’t with the materials.  I had a friend over to help me with the kitchen proofing, and we spent a lot of time complaining about the idiots who had put together the kitchen.  We had just pulled out a drawer to install a lock.  He selected a thin bit to drill a guide hole, and then started.  The drill bit didn’t even penetrate the facing.  He pressed harder, and still nothing.  Harder, and I realized the drill bit was actually starting to bend.  It wasn’t getting anywhere.  We were kind of impressed, as the facing didn’t look that tough.

No matter; he switch to a sturdier bit and started again.  That one made no better progress than the first one, and as he bore down, we both saw a wisp of smoke curl out of the drill site.  When the drill was lifted away, there was simply a small dimple in the facing.  Now we were seriously impressed, and more than a little confused.  What the heck was this facing made of, anyway?

Just as I started rooting around in the toolbox for a hammer and chisel, he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, I am such a dumbass.”

It was suddenly very, very clear what had happened.  I couldn’t help it.  I started laughing, as did he.

He clicked over a lever on the drill, put the bit back in place, and hit the drill trigger.  It tore straight in.  I almost fell on the floor, I was laughing so hard.  I couldn’t speak, could barely breathe.

“Well, go figure!” he said in a self-mocking tone.  “I guess it works better when you have the drill actually going forward instead of in reverse!  Wow!  Who’d have thought?”

Indeed so.  Lesson learned.

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Since there were requests for pictures of the little one in action, here you go: one crawling, one standing, and a bonus “on the swings” picture.  No, I don’t need help adjusting the brightness on these, but thanks.

• Baby Proof was published on Monday, October 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn category.
• There have been sixteen replies.

Thanks to the help of several contributors, the simple standards-based slide show system I put into public beta status, and which I may well end up calling S⁵, is almost ready to go final.  At its core, it seems to work consistently in Internet Explorer (both platforms), Firefox 0.9, and Safari 1.2.  I’ve also scripted things so that the system works in Opera 6 and up, basically allowing those browsers to fall back to using Opera Show.  This allows the slide show’s behavior to be consistent with what Opera Show users already expect, which seems like a good thing.

There are two things that don’t work as I’d hoped.  The first is the “click anywhere to advance a slide” feature, which is broken in IE/Win.  It throws a JavaScript error about the target that doesn’t make sense to me.  The second is the show/hide of the menu in IE/Mac, which I just cannot get to work.  If anyone can figure out how to make those work, let us know in the comments; otherwise I’ll just prevent IE from running that code in the final version, which will of course mean a reduced feature set in those browsers.  I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep if that happens, but I’d rather have the system be feature-consistent across browsers if possible.

(Update: if you downloaded the archive between 1421 EDT and 1504EDT, grab it again.  I initially forgot to update it with the new files.  Sorry!  It’s fixed now.)

• Slide Show Beta 2 was published on Saturday, October 2nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been seventy-three replies.

Everyone’s been pointing to the newly restored Mount Saint Helens webcam page, mostly because it’s come back online just as geologic events such as earthquake swarms are occurring in the area.

I’m pointing to it for a different reason.  To see what I mean, view source on the webcam page, or hover your mouse over the webcam image in a modern browser.

Now that’s good alt text.  The title text isn’t bad, either.

• Good Show was published on Tuesday, September 28th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been three replies.

Not many people know about it, but several major version numbers ago, Opera introduced a feature called Opera Show.  This feature allowed you to invoke a projection-medium display mode by hitting a single key.  (They’ve since introduced a similar single-key invocation of a handheld device.)  In this mode, any style sheets that applied to the projection medium were used to present the document.  It was a lightweight form of Powerpoint—not as powerful, perhaps, since it was best suited to showing a slide show of static pages, but definitely useful.  Many of my talks over the last two years have used Opera Show.

The great thing is that with one (X)HTML document, you can have a slide show, a printer-friendly version, and a screen presentation.  I put markup and CSS examples right there in the document, ready to be printed, and simply hide them in the slide show.  In some cases, I printed out the file for handouts, and then used the exact same file for the slide show.  It was very, very handy.  It was also browser-specific… and when Opera 7.5 for OS X came out, it introduced a problem: the banner ads showed up even in slide shows.  I didn’t really feel like buying a Web browser just to make my slide shows neater—if I were going to spend money on a presentation solution, I’d be much more likely to buy Keynote.

About the same time, though, Tantek Çelik was using a slide show system he’d cooked up, one that was nominally cross-browser.  It used CSS, JavaScript, and a single HTML document to create slide shows.  Here’s one example of a slide show using his approach.  I liked what he’d done, but when I dug into the guts I found that it had certain limitations I didn’t like.

(Aside: Apparently Steve Champeon has been using a similar slide show system for a while—here’s an example—but it has many of the same things I didn’t like about Tantek’s approach, such as explicitly ID’ing each slide in the markup.  My script assigns IDs dynamically, thus freeing you from having to number the slides in the markup and thus making it much easier to rearrange or insert slides.)

So I took Tantek’s idea and expanded on it, making it more flexible on the markup end and adding some features.  I’ve run into some stumbling blocks, though, and so in the best tradition of the LazyWeb, I’m turning to you folks for assistance.  Here’s the latest test file, and here’s an archive containing the test file and its associated files.  At the moment, the best (as in “most like what I expect”) rendering of the slide show is in Firefox, although it may seem a bit sluggish.  Other browsers have one or more problems; these are documented in the test file.  My goal is to bring Firefox, Explorer, and Safari together in terms of how they act.  Opera is secondary because I currently plan to hide all of the stuff I’m doing from Opera, and let it handle the slide show via the built-in Opera Show.  It won’t have quite the same functionality, I admit, but it will be good enough for me to call it done.

Note that the test file itself contains a bullet-point explanation of what’s going on, and lists the bugs I’ve yet to squash.  If you’d like to help squash them in return for credit in the source code, go crazy.  If you’re more in the “I want to use this” crowd, then you might want to wait until the system exits beta.  How will you know when that happens?  First, I’ll announce it on meyerweb.  Second, it will be given a jazzy name of some kind (thus causing the name of its directory to change).  And third, the word “[BETA]” won’t be plastered all over the test document.

Most of my current bugs are DOM and JavaScript related, although there’s a presentation problem in IE/Win that I frankly just haven’t had the energy to tackle.  Note that I’m willing to use detection methods in the JS to make the features work, but I am not willing to serve up browser-specific style sheets.  Call me a purist, but I just can’t bring myself to go there.

I’ll leave comments open for people to share information on bug fixes, or suggestions for ways to go about fixing them.  Also, if you run into a problem not listed in the slide show, you can leave a comment.  NOTE: I don’t care if the slide show feature doesn’t work in NN4.x, because I’m planning to hide all CSS and JavaScript from that browser before this exits beta.  That means NN4.x users will see a perfectly straightforward HTML document, not a horribly mangled attempt at the slide show.

My appreciation for whatever assistance people can provide.

• Slide Show Beta was published on Friday, September 24th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been fifty-five replies.

Back on September 10th, liberal Tom Toles published a political cartoon equating the hurricanes pummeling Florida this season with a message from God regarding the 2000 election.  Now, thanks to Photo Matt, I’ve now laid eyes on a map that kind of makes the joke seem more real.  Assuming the storm tracks and election results charted there are accurate, and from what little information I’ve been able to gather they appear to be, that’s kind of… spooky.  Hey, if God does indeed have a presence in this world, you’d think he would have dominion over the course of hurricanes; given that, you have to wonder if maybe he’s trying to tell us something.

Especially since the prediction about Ivan turning west is actually coming true.  Having dissipated over the continental United States, the low-pressure remnants of Ivan have managed to get all the way back to the Gulf of Mexico and are re-forming into a tropical storm.  Ivan is currently projected to bring flooding to Louisiana and Texas.  Seriously.

Hmmm…..

(All right, all right, if we must be serious about this, here’s the Snopes rebuttal.  But please note the categories for this post.)

• It’s A Sign! It’s A Sign! was published on Thursday, September 23rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Politics categories.
• There have been four replies.