Posts in the Interviews Category

All Tied Up

Published 21 years, 3 months past

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.


Standing At a Crossroads

Published 21 years, 4 months past

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]


Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Published 21 years, 5 months past

Since I’ve been known to link to interviews with me in the past, it’s only fair that I give you a chance to participate in an upcoming one.  DMX Zone will be interviewing me in the near future, and you can submit questions to be asked.  If you’ve ever wanted to put me on the spot in public, here’s your chance.  DMX Zone recently published an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman, which I point out not only because it’s interesting but because the graphic they created for it is hilarious.  Not as hilarious as the graphic on Molly’s interview, though.


Spanning the Globe

Published 21 years, 6 months past

This afternoon I wrapped up an interview with a guy from Radio New Zealand’s Digital Life programme, who was calling me from tomorrow morning.  (They’re eighteen hours ahead of me.)  I noticed almost no lag despite the distance; after watching the one-second-plus pauses in conversations between anchors at CNN Center and field correspondents in the Middle East, I expected a similar effect.  There was a very slight delay, it seemed, maybe a quarter-second or less, but no more.  We were separated by roughly ten thousand kilometers (six thousand miles) of linear distance and probably thirteen thousand kilometers (nine thousand miles) of surface distance as we talked, and yet the conversation was no different than if he’d been sitting across town.  Just wow.  I’ve been promised a transcript of the interview, so I hope I was reasonably coherent.

Yesterday’s entry drew some responses, all of them basically telling me to stop worrying.  I appreciate that.  I think I’ll still fret for a while anyway, just because it forces me to think about what I really want to do.  If I find other things more interesting than CSS, then I need to admit that and move on.  If not, then I need to stop dithering and get back to work.  Probably the latter, but one should take stock every year or so.

On this, the second anniversary of starting at Netscape, Microsoft agreed to settle an antitrust lawsuit by paying AOL a large pile of cash, and furthermore let AOL continue to use IE in the AOL client for the next seven years for free.

Well.  Perhaps the reflections upon my career and its future will come in handy after all.


Randomatters

Published 21 years, 7 months past

When you withdraw for a couple of weeks, all kinds of stuff piles up—in the house, in the Inbox, in life in general.

During our Passover seder on April 17, I spotted a label on a bottle that cracked me up.  Since I’d acquired a digital camera just the day before in hopes of taking pictures of both our families at one table, I couldn’t resist capturing the label for posterity, so I’ll share it with you. A label from a Coca-Cola bottle that reads, in part: NCAA Final Four - Tune in and be a part of the MADNESS on CBS - Log on to cokemadness.com for more information. Somebody really needed to think a little harder about their domain name choice.  Then again, had they done so, I’d have been deprived of a good laugh.  Hey, maybe they’re going back to their original recipe!  Wouldn’t that be fun.

The day after Mom’s death, Netdiver published a close-ups* interview with me.  You’ve probably already seen it, but if not, there you go.  It’s long, but that’s mostly due to it having a lot of questions, some of which were actually difficult to answer.

Chris Casciano updated his PNH Developer Toolbar to fix some typos, add more links to useful tools, and make the toolbar work in Phoenix/Firebird as well as Netscape/Mozilla.  I don’t think I mentioned the toolbar here before, so let me just say it’s insanely useful and thoroughly awesome.  I’m already becoming addicted to it, especially in conjunction with the DevEdge Sidebar Tabs, which lets me drill into various W3C specifications quickly and easily.

Everyone got all upset at Dave Winer, who in turn got upset with everyone; things were said, mistakes were made, meanings were imposed and decomposed.  If it hadn’t started with a post about designers and CSS, I wouldn’t even bother to mention it.  My reaction: everyone over-reacted.  Dave didn’t say in that particular post that there was anything wrong with CSS, although he did make some interesting statements about what works and what doesn’t.  Of course the advantages of using CSS are fairly self-evident to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, and (to my eye) far too compelling to ignore or eschew.  There are indeed flaws and omissions both in browser support and the CSS specification itself, but that’s never stopped anyone.  Meanwhile, anyone who’s using CSS as a political club of some sort needs to cut it out.  CSS is a technology, and a good one that promises to get better.  It’s not a religion, despite the odd quasi-religious titles people keep affixing to my name (“CSS Pope” being one of the funniest).

On an oddly related note, Jeffrey and Tantek and Matt batted about thoughts on RSS, syndication, hand-rolling a weblog, and so on.  This particular journal (as I call it) is basically hand-rolled, and for a long time I manually updated the current entries and archives: when I added a new entry to the home page, I’d cut the least recent entry and paste it into the archive page.  That worked so long as I posted weekly and didn’t want to do anything else with the entries.

But then I started hearing from people who said that without an RSS feed, they couldn’t keep track of a site.  I write these entries so that people can see them, and I was sort of interested in RSS anyway, so I decided that I needed a way to set up a feed and automate the process of managing the entries.  As long-time readers will recall, I accomplished this by teaching myself XSLT and using it to create a very minimal content management system of my own.  Entries are written in an XML format I derived from RSS itself, and I run the XML file through a series of XSLT recipes to produce the most recent entries on the home page, the archives, and the RSS feeds.  I suppose I could also create messages to e-mail to people who signed up for them, but I’m not up to that yet.

So anyway, I agree with what Jeffrey says about pouring an entire site’s contents into an RSS feed: why would I bother?  Part of the experience of reading a personal site is how it looks, the way the words are arranged, the layout of the content.  So I’ve been doing basically what Jeffrey is now doing, and dropping the first sentence of each entry into the feed.  That keeps the feed small, it allows people to know when I’ve posted something new, and gives them enough information to decide if they want to go read the new entry.  It also forces me to think about writing good lead sentences, since an entry description of “I just had a thought….” isn’t nearly is interesting as “I was pondering the relationship between XSLT and CSS, and had an idea I think is pretty cool….”

(Incidentally, those of you chastising Jeffrey for “selling out” need a serious perspective check.  Try some deep-breathing exercises while you’re at it.)

Matt observed that I should drop the plink class on the permalinks and use a contextual selector to style them, and that I should add rel="bookmark" to the permalinks.  The latter I’ll implement in my next XSLT update, as I should have done long ago.  The former, however, I’ll probably not do just because I like having a class that applies only to the permalinks and nothing else.  I might decide in the future to move the permalinks from one element to another, and I don’t want to have to juggle a bunch of selectors when I do.  The structure and design of the site are always in a slow state of evolution, so I try to plan for future mutations as best I can.

That’s one benefit of hand-rolling the whole system.  I can plan ahead with the greatest possible clarity because I know exactly how everything is put together, and how changes to the structure will affect the layout and experience.  I can also make sure the site’s markup is as lean and relevant as possible, because the most advanced document optimization tool ever devised is still the human brain.


Multiple Exposures

Published 21 years, 8 months past

Two interviews with me have come out in quick succession:

I think a question got dropped from the UI7 interview text, although the answer is still there; I’m going to go e-mail them about it right now.

This morning I watched a freezing rain turn to snow.  All the tree branches and power lines look like bizarre combs, with ranks upon ranks of small icicles hanging every few inches.  I can’t quite decide if it’s beautiful or not.  Something to contemplate on my way to tonight’s meetup.


Releases New and Old

Published 21 years, 11 months past

Netscape 7.01 has been released, and there’s a lot more to it than a one-hundredth version number increment would indicate.  The new release includes popup controls, which let you globally block unrequested popups while defining a whitelist of sites where you accept popups; and a way to make a collection of Web sites your home page, with each one opened in its own tab.  If you’re using Netscape, you should definitely grab this release.  Netscape 7.0 had over 12 million downloads, and with these new features I’d bet the update will be even more popular.

At some point in recent weeks New Riders posted an interview with me, and I completely missed that fact until some time last night.  Since it’s a publisher interview I spend a little more time than usual talking about why I write books at all, but it covers other ground as well, including advice for people starting to learn CSS and what I think about tables for layout.


Wednesday, 12 June 2002

Published 22 years, 5 months past

Digital Web has published an interview with yours truly, conducted by Meryl K. Evans.  I get to babble on for a bit about CSS, the W3C, Netscape, and my radio show.  Now, if only I could figure out what they did with the picture I sent them… I just hope I don’t get Photoshopped onto Salacious Crumb’s body, or something.  (Update: I found out what they did with the picture.  Whew!)

Scott Andrew LePera’s brilliant Netscape 4 birthday gallery has a new home on his site.  If you haven’t seen it already, go forth and partake of its artistically acid bounty.


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