Posts in the Tech Category

I recently wrote that the font Freight Micro had broken Unicode references.  It turns out that I was basing my comments on a beta version of the font without realizing it.  The designer of the Freight family was good enough to provide me with a copy of the final version of the font, which I tested, and I’m delighted to report that it does not suffer from the same problem.

So my deepest apologies for any misinformation I may have spread. If you see anyone referencing my previous post on this topic, please point them to this one.  Thank you.

• Full Freight was published on Monday, December 19th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been no replies.

Tim Bray, that dashing man-about-town, recently sang the praises of Adium, a multi-service chat client for OS X.  I’d tried it a while back, and been only marginally impressed.  At the time, its presentational inflexibility was too annoying for me to take it seriously.  Okay, yes: it was a damn sight better than Messenger for OS X, which is the only reason I even kept it on my hard drive.  But I hardly ever log onto MSN any more, as everyone I know is on AIM.  So I’d stuck with iChat AV.

Still, Tim’s word is always gold (or at least high-grade palladium) with me, and he said the magic words (“highly skinnable”), so I downloaded the latest copy and poked around for a bit.

Boy howdy!  Adium has definitely come a long, long way since last I visited.  You can change the appearance of your chat sessions (with “message themes”), the dock icons, the contact list, and much more.  Since none of the default message themes really did it for me, I went looking for others.  There are quite a few available at the Adium Xtras site, but none of them were really what I wanted either.  In iChat, I cranked the graphic frippery down to zero so that the chat sessions were as compact as possible, but I still had the text look nice.  If I could recreate that in Adium, it would make the migration much, much simpler.

So I dug into the package contents of a promising message theme… and found out that themes are based on nothing more than XHTML and CSS.

Seriously.  The entirety of an Adium chat window is an XHTML document that’s being dynamically updated via DOM scripting—all of it pumped through WebKit, of course.  In creating a message theme, you define what markup will be used, and write CSS to style it.  You can even define variants on your theme by writing additional style sheets.

So with some quick hacking, I not only radically improved the markup generated during a chat (the markup I saw in the packages I downloaded was, um, sub-optimal), but I basically replicated my old iChat theme with some simple CSS.  And then I created some variants that slightly modify it in various ways, mostly to prove that I could.

I’m now wondering if I could write and attach JavaScript that would make chat sessions even more interactive, more robust.  (Update: Phil says yes.)  Click on a line to copy the whole line to the clipboard, say, or dynamically change the in-session presentation by hitting a button.  Adium may block that kind of thing, but if not, then it’s a chat client extensible beyond anything I’ve so far imagined.

And given how much I love to tinker with my software, that’s like waving a bulging suitcase of money in front of a senator.

Granted, there are some things I’d like to change.  For example, the markup you define in a theme is not used in saving the chat log.  In a log, you just get some basic markup with a case of classitis and very, very poor semantics.  It would be a lot cooler if you could define the log markup (or the log just used the markup you generate during a chat session) and the CSS to present it.

A chat log is also something that, it seems to me, cries out for a microformat.  The markup I’m using for my theme is also a first effort in that direction, recycling some other microformats’ concepts (I stole a bit from hCalendar and am planning to graft in some hCard as well) and setting up some basics.  If I can take this far enough, I might consider pushing to upgrade the markup Adium generates in its logs.  They’re dropping a lot of information on the floor when they write out the logs, and I think that’s a shame.

But then, I can make the effort to fix that and actually have a chance of it paying dividends.  The joys of open source, you know?

I’ll still use iChat AV for videoconferences, which are an essential tool for family cohesiveness when I’m on the road, as well as to keep close to my father down in Florida.  For text, though—which accounts for at least 90% of my instant messaging activity—Adium is my new chat buddy.

• Adium: Chatting With Style was published on Monday, December 19th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Microformats, and Standards categories.
• There have been forty replies.

A followup to my previous post: thanks to the nearly impossible to find Character Palette (and thanks to Todd Dominey for instructions on how to enable and use it), I was able to determine the problem and restore my editing pencils.  It turns out that a beta copy of the font “Freight” was what caused the problem.  This beta copy of Freight was for some reason convinced that Unicode 9999 is the reference to a Z-caron instead of a pencil symbol.  It didn’t do this for 9998 or 10000.  Just 9999.

So I removed “beta Freight”, and the pencils returned.  Thanks to everyone who helped me out!

Update: there’s more to the story, namely that the copy of Freight in question was a beta, and not the final release, and the final release doesn’t have the problem that bit me.  I’ve edited this post to reflect that fact.

• Pencilled In was published on Thursday, December 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been three replies.

Pretty much nobody but me ever sees this, but when I’m logged into meyerweb’s copy of WordPress (basically, all the time) I see a little pencil icon next to entries and comments.  It’s the “click here to edit this” link, and I generate it using the following markup:

<a href="[...]">&#9999;</a>

Ah, Unicode.

The problem is that at some point in the recent past, my OS X 10.3.9 laptop started rendering that character as a Z with a set of rabbit ears on top, whereas my OS X 10.3.9 desktop machine still shows the pencil.  I can only assume this is due to a recent software installation on the laptop, possibly one that stuck in a badly structured font or something.  Or else an update messed up the Unicode pointers.

Whatever the cause might be, does anyone out there know if there’s a way for me to figure out what font is being used to generate the funky Z, or how I might otherwise be able to track down and destroy it and get the pencils back?  Because it’s driving me frickin’ crazy.

Update: the problem is now fixed, as described in the followup entry.

• Pencilled Out was published on Thursday, December 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

The Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal explosion and fire has doubtless dominated news in the UK and Europe, though in all honesty it hasn’t gotten major play here in the US.  Doubtless that’ll change if it’s found to be a terrorist attack and not an accident, but that’s not actually my point.  It occurred to me that this is a relatively high-yield detonation, and I have the means to chart its effects in a basic way.

So, based on the seismic report of a 2.4 magnitude event, I’ve estimated the yield at about four metric tons of TNT (as per the chart found on the Wikipedia‘s Richter scale article, as well as other sources).  As you can see on the chart, that gives figures consistent with initial damage reports: the 0.25psi ring extends out to 1.02 kilometers (0.64 miles), which is about where you’d stop seeing widespread window shattering and door displacement.

Remember that the distances shown don’t define the distance out to which a human would be able to feel a blast, and certainly don’t say anything about the distance at which a blast could be heard.  And also remember that I’m making a rough estimate of yield based on an initial estimate of the explosion’s seismic magnitude, not to mention I just made a guess as to the exact epicenter.

Still, it’s interesting to be able to chart the event like this.  To me, anyway.

• Mapping the News was published on Monday, December 12th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Tools categories.
• There have been four replies.

Well, An Event Apart Philadelphia is in the history books.  (Or, as they might say on the original Iron Chef, “Battle Standards is OVAH!!!”.)  If you want to relive the event, vicariously or otherwise, there’s a Flickr group for the event, as well as all the public photos tagged “aneventapart”.  As I write this, those two sets of pictures don’t form a perfect union, so if you’re really curious, it’s worth checking out both.

I haven’t seen any feedback yet, so I only know what I thought of the event.  At the risk of sounding egotistical, not to mention ungrammatical, I thought it went great.  There were things that could have gone better—my presentation on em-based layouts particularly needs some buffing and polishing—but given that it was the first in the series, and as such largely uncharted waters, I’m not sure I could be happier about how things went.  Even the problems that arose, like the morning crushing of the wifi, were corrected quickly.  The audience seemed really involved and their questions were sharp.  We got a few laughs.  Life was good.

Jeffrey and I would like to sincerely thank each and every attendee for making the event so great, and to thank our sponsors (AIGA, Media Temple, New Riders, and Pixelworthy) for helping make the event possible at all.

• Post-Event was published on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been twelve replies.

Speaking of AEA, the good people at AIGA released another podcast interview with Jeffrey Zeldman.  Rumor has it they’ll have one coming soon starring Our Man Stan, and there might even be another from yours truly.  Grab hold of their podcast feed if you’re interested in any of that, or in hearing from other designers in the future.

(One week to go.  Woo hoo!)

Update: Jason’s interview is now available.

• AIGA Interview Redux was published on Monday, November 28th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Quite suddenly, workshops and seminars seem to be all the rage, don’t they?  The Carson Workshops schedule keeps growing, and the shows selling out.  They recently announced a Web applications summit in London that frankly sounds amazing.  UIE recently announced a six-city roadshow, and seats are already selling.  Clear:left is sponsoring a one-day show on Ajax programming starring the indominitable Jeremy Keith.  And then of course there’s my personal favorite, An Event Apart, which sold out six weeks before the Philadelphia event (which is, yikes, now only a week away!) and is soon to visit other cities.  Keep an eye on the AEA RSS feed to get the latest on those cities, by the way.

Look over all the workshops’ line-ups, and you see a lot of big names and smart people standing on stages (or at least in front of rooms) talking about some truly important and interesting topics.  A determined workshop-goer could run him- or herself quite ragged trying to catch even half the shows, given their geographic dispersion and temporal proximity.  It’s almost a shame, because every one of them sounds really, really interesting.  Have I said the word “interesting” enough times yet?

But really, the most interesting part to me is not that these seminars are being announced, but that they’re generating such strong interest—that they’re selling out.  It’s another indicator, and a very clear one, that the industry is well and truly recovering.

Addendum: just to add a little bit more support to what I said, 37signals announced their overhauled Basecamp seminar, The Getting Real Workshop, and sold all fifty seats in twelve hours.  Whoa.

• So Many Stages was published on Sunday, November 27th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been six replies.