Posts in the Tech Category

Flurry is the new Satori.

• Mesmerized was published on Wednesday, August 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

Even in the bright, shiny, translucent world of Mac OS X, Windows haunts me like a vengeful spectre.

Upon deciding to strike out on my own, I knew I’d have to buy a laptop.  The older-model TiBook and two-months-old Dell Latitude both belonged to AOL Time Warner, and they would want them back.  When I went somewhere to speak, or to train, I would need a portable computing node.  I would need the ability to carry everything needed to deliver my presentation: all the slides, the working files, the examples.  Too often have I seen speakers show up assuming they could run their presentation via the net and be told, “Sorry, the connection is down.”  Or arrive with a CD-ROM they burned containing everything, only to have the presentation machine absolutely refuse to read the disc.

So I bought a new 1GHz TiBook, with the gracious assistance of a local Apple employee.  It’s shiny on the outside, and shiny inside too.  After a quick hard drive repartition and reinstallation of both OS X and the Classic OS, I spent a couple of hours adjusting the OS look to at least vaguely resemble my old Mac’s desktop, customizing the Dock and System Preferences to put the important things within quick reach, and learning how the new OS works as compared to the Classic OS.

Then I installed Virtual PC 6.  And the pain began.

Please realize I have very little against VPC6.  It does a stunning job of recreating a Windows operating system right there in a Mac OS window.  If I launched a Classic application, I could run three completely separate operating systems on the same machine.  Slowly, of course.

But anyway, I installed my Windows 2000 Professional edition of VPC6, and there it was.  Windows.  Mocking me.  Can’t live without me, eh? it sneered.  In a sense, no, I can’t: I need to be able to test designs and templates and CSS techniques in Windows browsers as well as Macintosh browsers.  And I need to be able to test in different versions of Internet Explorer.  To do that, you either need multiple Wintel boxes, or one Wintel box running Virtual PC for Windows—think about that for a minute—or one Macintosh running Virtual PC for Macintosh.  In the latter case, I’d also get OS X, which I haven’t been running but need to, since Safari is a serious browser that deserves to be taken seriously.

Economically speaking, there was no contest: one laptop that gave me everything I needed.  Aesthetically speaking, there wasn’t much of a choice either.  TiBooks are just so darned… cool.

I fought with virtual Windows for almost 12 hours yesterday, trying to make it behave with some semblance of normalcy.  Discovering that I’d done something sensible yet still horribly wrong, and having to start over, more than once.  At least with Virtual PC, a badly botched installation is no big deal: you just throw away the drive image and empty the trash can.  It’s like reformatting the hard drive on a Windows machine, except it takes less time.  You can also, once you get a drive image set up as a baseline, copy it to new images and make changes to the copies.  So I can have images with IE5.0, IE5.5, and IE6.  I can also install Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Firebird, and all the other Windows browsers.  (I’ll probably install them into the IE6 image.)

But getting to that point, making my life easy, was amazingly hard and deeply frustrating.  And I’ve been using Windows 2000 Professional on a regular basis for the last two years.

At least VPC6 has a “go to full screen mode” that will let me present my presentation slideshows using Opera, as I’ve been doing for more than a year now.  I was very glad to see that feature.  Now, if only the software had a “shrink drive image to eliminate unused drive space,” I’d be a really happy camper.

Oh, and the next time someone tells you how bloated Mozilla or some other browser has become, kindly point out to them that the install package for Internet Explorer for Windows 5.5, Service Pack 2, is 84.1 megabytes; IE6.0 is 76.7 megabytes.  Even at T1 speeds, those take a while to download—almost as long as it takes light from the sun to reach Earth, in fact.  The only reason nobody ever complained is that nobody had to download Explorer.  Funny, that.  Imagine if Microsoft had been required to offer Explorer for download instead of bolting it into the OS.  I wonder how many copies would be in use today?

• Windows Pains was published on Monday, August 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

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.

• All Tied Up was published on Friday, August 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

Note: I’m having e-mail troubles.  I can currently send mail, but I can’t receive it.  I don’t know if the mail server is accepting messages or not, but if you get a bounce, please wait a day or two before sending again.  If you don’t get a bounce, assume the message will eventually reach me, and that I’ll respond as soon as I can.  The hope, of course, is that this will only be a temporary glitch.

Two days after announcing I’m available for hire, too.  Hey, timing is everything!

Jesse Ruderman has created a nifty little game using JavaScript.  What’s particularly clever about it is that he’s only using a single image, and (with CSS) is shifting that image in the background of each tile to show the appropriate section.

Thanks to Modulo 26, I now have a whole bunch of kanji representations of my name.  I kind of like them.  How does your name look?

• Out On The Tiles was published on Saturday, August 2nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday’s announcement has generated a fair bit of attention, which is certainly a good thing for a new startup.  My deepest thanks to everyone who wrote words of support and congratulations, through all the e-mail and many a weblog.  Your collective enthusiasm has definitely made today one of the best in months, and eased my mind quite a bit about the step I’ve taken.  And those of you who got in touch regarding contracting my services get extra-special thanks!  (What are the rest of you waiting for?)

I mentioned that one of my clients is “a major and highly respected name in the industry,” and I’m proud to say that client is Macromedia.  My work is actually in two different areas, both of which relate to CSS, and I’m looking forward to talking about the projects in more detail once they’ve been completed.  For now, let me just say that Macromedia is serious about using CSS well, and in doing the right thing.

I’m hoping that this weekend I’ll get the consulting site material together and ready for launch—I don’t even have a design yet.  What I may do is use a variant of a meyerweb theme as a first look and then, like Zeldman did earlier this year, redesign in public, commenting on my choices and techniques as I go.  I don’t know if a business site has ever done exactly that kind of a redesign before, and it seems like it would be an interesting experiment.  To be honest, I may chicken out and just jump from one design to another instead of evolving it over time, rather than experiment with a business site.  We’ll see what kind of feedback I get on the idea.

Speaking of feedback, I need to pass along some tidbits readers sent in response to my discussion of governments and open standards:

• Bob Sawyer wrote to say he’s created a discussion forums for Webmasters at the fledgling Built For The Future, which looks like it could be just the kind of resource people need.
• Felix Ingram sent in a link to a fascinating Wired article on standardization and its distinctly political nature.
• Rob Lifford pointed out the Texas Governors’ site is accessible, and even has a dedicated statement about the use of W3C standards.  That jostled my memory and I remembered that the City and Borough of Juneau, Alaska‘s site did something similar a while back.
• Paul Martin speculated that, until recently, standards use and accessibility have been almost entirely the concern of hand-coders, the people who know the nuts and bolts that make a page work.  If that’s so, then the WaSP was absolutely right to concentrate on getting tool vendors to clean up the markup they generate.

I’m going to take the weekend to concentrate on responding to e-mail, doing some writing, and fleshing out the new site, and should be back bright and early Monday morning to regale you with more random stuff.  Enjoy your weekend!

• Feedback was published on Friday, August 1st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

In response to yesterday’s musings, a correspondent wrote in to say:

…a local Swiss government [has] switched their site (now 95%+) to structural HTML and CSS and freed the site from font-tags and framesets….  In the meantime, I have found that beginning at January 1st, 2004, a new law will be in force that demands from all official Swiss sites that they be accessible.  So to speak, Switzerland has now [its] own “Section 508”.

I noticed some layout problems in IE5/Mac, but otherwise the site looks pretty good.  The important point is this: there are people working in government sectors who care about accessibility and forward-thinking design.  What we need now is a channel to get them in touch with each other and swap tips on how to advance the cause.  Who wants to set it up?  (I’d do it myself except I already ride herd over a high-volume mailing list, and that’s plenty.)  If someone does create a venue for government Webmasters who are pasasionate about using standards, and is willing to devote the time and energy to making sure that venue is a good one, please tell me where it is via e-mail and I’ll share the news here.

Another reader wrote to say that in the wake of a recent redesign:

…we’ve gotten quite a few letters from people who work for various federal government agencies (especially the DOJ) saying they aren’t even allowed to use any other browser besides Netscape 4.

I can’t say this really surprises me a great deal, having talked to folks at a U.S. government research facility who only recently managed, after much internal argument, to convince their IT staff that running Mozilla instead of NN4.x was an acceptable course of action.  I suspect that a major reason the government sticks with NN4.x is its relative level of security; it may not be bulletproof, but it’s a darned sight more secure than some other browsers I could name.  Then again, this is the same government that uses Windows more or less universally, so I’m not sure how secure they really are.  (Not much.)

Then there was a followup message from my unnamed government source, who said in part:

…none of the other on-staff developers really want to learn new methods, I think, and therefore they’re going to stonewall any endeavor that’s going to require them to take some classes (or, potentially, cost them their jobs, I suppose).

That’s sad, but it’s also not unique to the Web field; you get reactionary behavior of that kind in just about any work situation.  I wonder, though, if perhaps it’s more entrenched in the government sector because job losses are so rare.  Or are they?  I always thought federal jobs, at least, were massively protected and rarely did anyone ever get fired, but I might have swallowed some Reagan-era Kool-Aid.  Someone let me know if I’m wrong.  Too many things to learn, not enough brain tissue…

• Federation was published on Wednesday, July 30th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

Anyone who’s been reading this site for more than a year might remember my rantings last year when the Section 508 Web site went online and proclaimed it worked best in IE5+ for Windows.  The other day, I got e-mail from another developer working for the U.S. House of Representatives, who had some disheartening information to share, and I think it’s worth talking about.  I’m going to quote my source in some detail, but as you might expect, this will be an “unnamed government source.”  I’m going to use the pronoun “he” because it’s technically gender-neutral English, and I don’t feel like saying “he or she” every time I need to use a pronoun.

The e-mail was prompted by this person finding and reading last year’s rants.  Thus, after a short introduction, he said:

…as far as the 508 guidelines go, we use them, but nobody seems to actually be concerned with accessibility. It’s just making sure the InFocus software approves you according to the guidelines, and plod onwards. Nobody cares about the usefulness or lack thereof of the features they’re putting in, nothing is planned out, and the barest minimum to meet the guidelines is all that you’ll get from most developers.

This, of course, is a problem of management: it would seem nobody in this particular shop has made forward thinking a priority.  Rather than plan for the future, they’re stuck in the past.  (Some would say this is unsurprising in a government institution, but never mind that now.)  You might think a quick intravenous application of Designing With Web Standards might be just what the doctor ordered.  However, it turns out there’s a reason the project managers don’t care:

Of course, this is infinitely more preferable to the attitude from the actual Congressmen; I’ve actually had aides ask me if the site has to include accessibility features.

And there’s the problem.  The clients are not only aware of accessibility, but borderline hostile to it.  How do you overcome that kind of hurdle?  We can say, “It’s your job to educate the client,” but at a certain point you have to stop singing to the pigs.

I seem to recall that, some time back, AOL was sued for being inaccessible, and lost.  Will it take a similar suit to bring government sites into the 21st century?  I sincerely hope not; if there’s one thing I think America could do with less of, it’s lawsuits.  (No offense intended to the legally inclined folks I know.)

In such a situation, the best approach to improvement would likely be a back-stage effort by the coders themselves.  They can just do the right thing and not bother their clients with the details of how things get done, right?  Maybe not:

…just about everybody is still coding with FONT soup. This is especially frustrating when people ask me for help to do something which would be trivial if they knew a modicum of CSS, but which is onerous at best given whatever HTML hack they’re using. I’ve broached using more CSS with people, and they all just mutter something about Netscape 4 and stick their heads back in the sand.

At this stage, I’m not sure what can be done for Our Hero, except maybe expressing some compassion and pity.

This is the kind of situation that I think is more common than many of us realize, and it’s a serious impediment to the forward motion of the Web.  The enormous amount of wasted bandwidth and time such coding practices incur would, if translated into dollars, very likely cover a significant chunk of the U.S. national debt.  There are too many Web authors stuck in 1999, and not enough who are looking forward to 2005 and beyond.  What words, what memes would penetrate their shells and point them in the right direction?

This is a deep and serious challenge for groups like the W3C and the WSP, not to mention people like me, who just want things to be better than they’ve been in the past.  Last night I met a guy who expressed incredulity that Netscape had hired me, back in May of 2001, to tell people that standards were a good thing.  “What was your title, Manager In Charge of Repeating the Painfully Obvious?” he asked, laughing.  If only that had been so; in an ideal world, there would have been no need for Netscape to hire me in the first place.  What seems so obvious to so many of us seems to be utterly unknown to so many more—or, perhaps worse, known but disregarded.

What will it take to turn things around?  More corporate XHTML+CSS designs?  A pronouncement from one of those consulting firms who get quoted by the media all the time, but nobody really knows what else they do besides issue semi-useless browser demographic data and charge huge consulting fees?  Another grass-roots campaign like the original WaSP?  Blackmail?

I wish I knew.  This is yet another uphill battle against overwhelming odds, but a battle so much worth fighting that I can’t walk away from it.  I think this is my third such battle in the Web space alone.  Sometimes I wonder how many battles I have in me.  I also wonder why I keep finding new battles to fight.

• One Foot In the Past… was published on Tuesday, July 29th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

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.