Posts in the Tech Category

Yesterday, I finally cleaned out my old desk, which is now Kat’s desk, so she could make use of the drawers.  More than a decade’s worth of mementoes, knick-knacks, toys, scraps, and other oddities were there to be sifted.  It was like digging back through my own past, a sort of temporal archaeology.  There were even pieces of other men’s lives, like my father’s old Zeiss-Ikon camera, still in perfect working order, lent to me years ago and never reclaimed.  Since the desk itself originally belonged to a great-grandfather of mine, the sense of history surrounding the whole process was even heavier.

Not that it wasn’t fun to dig back into the past!  I threw out a whole bunch of stuff, of course, but all my old Animaniacs fast-food toys went to a good home, and I salvaged a number of wall signs whose origin is murky indeed.  So too I rescued some college-era photos, a box of stationery, assorted shoulder patches, and old conference passes.

And then, in a medium-size blue notepad with the name “Lysa” inexplicably written across its front in thick black marker, I found several pages of handwritten notes regarding HTTP 1.1, HTML 3.2, PICS, and several other technologies.  These were the notes I took sitting in the W3C track at WWW5—and there, in the middle of it all, were the notes I took as I encountered CSS for the very first time.  I checked the agenda for that conference, which was still with the conference pass, and discovered that the date for the presentation “Cascading Style Sheets and HTML” was Wednesday, 8 May 1996.  That was a good seven months before CSS1 was made a full Recommendation.

It’s a distinctly odd feeling to hold this loosely bound collection of paper in my hand and think about all that sprang out of that one, simple little page.  I was also amused to see that my notes, as minimal as they are, don’t validate (can you spot the error?)

There were other things rescued from the desk cleaning yesterday, of course.  There’s a box of memories sitting in a corner of my office now… but this one notebook made the whole experience worthwhile.  Just for a minute, as I flipped to that page, I remembered once more what it felt like to be completely blown away by a new technology and to know, beyond any doubt, that it was going to change my entire life for the better.  At the time, I just thought it would make my Webmastering job both simpler and more interesting, but even then, it was enough.  There was an incredible promise there, and I wanted more than anything to see where it led.

I still want that, even today.  For all that’s been learned, and all the things that have been done to make CSS the important piece of Web design it’s become, there is still a vast amount of uncharted territory.  I haven’t added anything to css/edge in quite some time, but the statement made there is still true.  We haven’t figured out everything CSS can offer us, even today, and as support improves and the specification is enhanced, we’ll be able to do still more.

I can hardly wait to see what’s next!

• Out of the Past was published on Monday, September 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, History, and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

The TiBook’s Ethernet connection is all wireless now, thanks to the Netgear MR814 I installed yesterday.  I discovered that the one place on the front porch I really wanted to have access is a complete dead zone, which is highly annoying.  The rest of the house and the back yard all give me anywhere from 75% to 100% signal strength, and even the other half of the front porch wavers around 75%.  But the part where we have the really comfortable chairs set up, not to mention several short tables for drinks and such, is just a huge cone of silence.

Eventually, I realized it was probably our screen windows.  I’m pretty sure ours are a metal mesh, not vinyl, and if I’m correct it means they’re forming big impenetrable barriers to any WiFi signal.  My experiment of walking out into the front yard and immediately getting 50% signal seems to confirm this.  In all honesty, it’s probably just as well that there’s at least one area of the house that cuts me off from the Ethernet line.

To celebrate, I’m sitting here on the active side of my front porch, enjoying the sunny, breezy weather and listening to the cicadas while I share with you a few amusing and/or interesting things I’ve collected from various sources in the last few days:

• You may recall the Bork edition of Opera, and of course there have long been scripts that alter content to sound like Yoda or any number of other distinctive speech patterns.  A close cousin to the Jive filter is Tha Shizzolator, courtesy everyone’s favorite rapper/porn artist, Snoop Dogg.  I found its translation of meyerweb highly amusing—I love the fact that it turns a reference to Doug and Tantek into “bomb diggity muthas”—and can hardly wait to see what it does with this entry.  Societal note: if you are offended by certain “naughty” words, or live/work in a place characterized by easy offense, you may want to avoid the Shizzolator.  I’m just sayin’.  Interesting technical note: the entity ¶ becomes &pimpa;.  I have no idea why.
• I never enjoyed the group pictures taken ad nauseam throughout my senior year of high school, but at least none of them ended like this one did.  Takes ponding to a whole new level, really.
• Speaking of group photos gone horribly wrong, this one also features a soaking.  The difference is in the liquid vector, and of course there’s a little more intention behind this one.  I just hope that was the last picture in the series, instead of the first one.  There’s one guy toward the left side of the group who seems to be a little more aware than the rest.  Or maybe he just had forewarning.
• Badger aerobics were never so… odd.  I got this from Jeff Veen, who was dead on when he said, “Every single person you know is about to send you a link to this.”  You may as well just get it over with now.  How long can you stand to let it run?  I timed out after roughly five minutes.
• This little Flash movie is funny in certain ways, and yet not funny in too many others.  Likely to be offensive to people who have an aversion to inconvenient truths.

• Off the Wire was published on Saturday, September 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the General, Humor, Politics, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Right in the middle of the Iron Chef of Web Design presentations on Wednesday, a calm female voice announced over the public-address system, with quite a bit of volume, that due to a security situation the Moscone Center was to be evacuated.  As it turns out, the entire complex was being evacuated, not just the Moscone West building.  That’s a lot of people to dump on to the sidewalks of San Francisco all at once.  Fortunately, the hotel here has a WiFi network in the lobby, so I could check e-mail after all.

Dreamweaver MX 2004, and the rest of Studio MX 2004, has shipped and is available for download.  If you use Dreamweaver and you’re interested in CSS or stadndards-oriented design, it’s very likely worth the upgrade.  There’s a free 30-day trial, so you can always check it out if you aren’t sure.  You’ll get a chance to work with the templates I contributed and a design firm prettied up.  I spent some time talking with Macromedia folks while in San Francisco and was impressed anew by their interest in doing the right thing when it comes to standards.  These are folks who think about not just today’s Web, but the Web to come, and how they can best help authors get from here to there.  That’s a highly commendable perspective in a tool vendor.

• Released was published on Friday, September 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I wrapped up the three-day speaking and training session at Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday, and it seemed to go really well.  This having been my first multi-day training session, I was a little bit nervous that I might have problems with pacing, but everything seemed to come together just fine.  The attendees certainly were positive about the material, and how much they learned.

Now I’m off to Albuquerque to catch a flight to San Francisco (by way of Houston) for Seybold.  I’ve been four days from home, and have another five before I return.  Kat and I talk at least twice a day, and it seems like every conversation begins and ends with, “I miss you.”

• …the Weird Get Going was published on Saturday, September 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

Much to my delight, Containing Floats hit Blogdex, just above a story about Al Franken (when I looked, anyway).  It also tied for 29th with the Ars Technica Macintosh browser smackdown, which I was further delighted to see used the complexspiral demo as one of its evaluation criteria.  Thus we come spiralling back to where we started.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Zeldman and Doug Bowman on their new project with Apple!  Doug explains that they’ll be giving Apple strategic guidance toward better using Web standards, which is wonderful thing for me to hear at this stage—it’s another indication that there is indeed a demand for the kinds of services I’m offering through Complex Spiral.  I’ve very little doubt that the demand exists, but reinforcing evidence is never a bad thing.

Speaking of Apple, I like OS X a whole lot better now, but not because I’ve gotten used to it.  Instead, I’ve gotten it used to me, with help from Robb Timlin.  He wrote the freeware tool Classic Window Management, the installation of which instantly eliminated about 85% of my frustration with OS X.  Now the Finder acts the way I think it should: when I click on the desktop, all the Finder windows come to the front instead of staying hidden behind whatever application I was just using.  In other words, now OS X acts like a Mac, not a Windows machine.  That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

I also recently upgraded my computing experience by finally ditching the Apple hockey-puck mouse in favor of a Logitech MX700 cordless optical mouse.  Between the freedom to mouse anywhere on my desk and the application-specific programmable buttons, I’m a happy guy.  I also picked up an MX500—same mouse, except with a cord.  I was going to use the MX700 on the TiBook so that I could use a mouse on flights and not have to fight with a mouse cord.  It was the perfect plan until I realized the plan involved using a radio transmitter on a commercial airliner.

Oops.

• Spiralling Apples and Mice was published on Thursday, August 28th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, Mac, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

It’s up, running, and official: Complex Spiral Consulting finally has a Web site.  So far I have up recent news and upcoming events, information about the services I’m offering, ways to contact me, and a publications area that contains a new article: Containing Floats.  If you’re having trouble getting elements to stretch around floats, this article is for you.  Anticipate more such articles in the future, as well as the addition of information on just what I’ve been doing in the past month, and for whom.

Also today, Macromedia announced the impending release of Studio MX 2004, including a major new version of Dreamweaver MX.  I’m happy to say that the CSS support in this new Dreamweaver is pretty darned good, and it comes with a number of CSS-driven templates already installed.  I provided the layout skeletons to Macromedia, and then helped make sure the markup and layout were acceptable once a design firm made the layouts look pretty.  And hey, who are those mugs being quoted in the Dreamweaver MX press release?

There’s also a new layout for the Macromedia Web site, and it uses some relatively sophisticated CSS to create the layout.  I did some CSS optimization and upgrade work for the site, running in parallel with the Dreamweaver MX input I was providing.

• Multiple Launches was published on Monday, August 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

The weeklong break is over.  Now I start a weekend break.  Meanwhile, a few things that flitted across my radar while I was away:

• Please, for the love of all that’s holy, patch your Windows boxes!  Like Zeldman and Kurtz, I too have had an e-mail address filled into forged e-mail headers, and been hit with bounces galore.  Hopefully this will all soon become a lesser problem with a change in server, but still—patch those leaky systems!  Now!
• Some interesting quotes from and commentary on Weaving the Web.
• Thanks to a post by Mark Pilgrim, “‘Considered Harmful’ Essays Considered Harmful” is getting some traffic.  This amuses me.
• Hell yeah.  I’m behind George 100% on pretty much every point he makes, and I’ll just add that we’re a major airline hub so finding reasonably priced flights to just about anywhere is a snap.  ‘Nuff said.

That’s it for the moment, but I hope to have a new site and some new content to share with you on Monday.

• Ketchup was published on Saturday, August 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

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.