Posts in the Tech Category

Beyond the Pale

Published 23 years, 2 weeks past

First Nike claimed (so far as I can tell) a right to deceive the public under the First Amendment, and now Citrix is claiming that paying taxes violates its First Amendment rights.  I find it odd and faintly troubling  that I keep finding references to these cases on the O’Reilly Network, and not via more traditional news sources like CNN.

You know, I’m a big fan of capitalism.  It’s the one form of economics I’ve ever seen that best fits with basic human nature.  It allows capital to move around freely, which is the key to a healthy economy.  It’s based on currency, which is a very useful way to abstractly (and yet tangibly) represent the effort one expends in doing a task, and the worth of that effort.  It’s one step up from the barter system, but it’s an unimaginably powerful step.  It makes possible everything we take for granted in Western society.

Nonetheless, I do not and will not ever accept that capitalist actors—companies as well as individuals—should be totally unfettered and untaxed by government entities.  The government provides very useful services, ones I wouldn’t want to live without and that I can’t reasonably perform myself.  Like the people who inspect food to make sure it’s not going to kill me, for example.  They’re sort of important.  They aren’t perfect, but without them around I suspect food poisoning deaths would be a great deal more common in America.  After all, cleanliness is expensive.  Similarly, I think the EPA is useful, or would be if allowed to do its job.  In any case, taxes support those services.  Not to mention the military, which I’ve been given to understand is a popular institution with the American people these days.  No taxes?  No military.

I can hardly believe that any company has the gall to claim that they have First Amendment rights to not pay taxes.  Maybe, just maybe, the cumulative effect of these cases will be to have the Supreme Court definitively rule that corporations do not have rights, but are instead accorded privileges.  Am I dreaming?  Yeah, probably.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard credible rumors that Apple, while it was working on Safari, filed Bugzilla evangelism bugs so that the Standards Evangelists at Netscape (of which I’m one) would get the sites to fix their code to work with Gecko and other standards-compliant browsers.  This would then, they apparently hoped, get the sites working in Safari as well.  If this turns out to be true, I’m going to be furious; just the idea that it could be true makes me angry.  I don’t mind helping out Apple.  I’m a Macintosh guy and have been for more than a decade now.  I do mind being tricked into doing their work for them.  Hey, guys, what’s wrong with saying, “We’re both working on standards-based browsers, so let’s work together to get sites to support standards?”  You know, being honest?  How about that?  Anyone think of that?

The more I learn about corporate behavior these days, the more I think about becoming a hermit.  A high school friend of mine always said he could easily see me being a backwoods hermit philosopher, muttering about the Deep Mysteries to a bunch of squirrels and throwing a waist-length beard over my shoulder while munching wild strawberries.  Maybe he was just being prescient.

Beware of the Leopard

Published 23 years, 2 weeks past

Apple has launched a new open-source browser called Safari.  I wonder how Tim O’Reilly feels about that, given how long ago he launched his own Safari.

Unfortunately, the user agent string of Safari is Netscape 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48.  “Like Gecko?”  Right.  So if you’re doing client sniffing, better make sure you aren’t catching Safari in your “test for Gecko” code, because it’s not very much like Gecko.  Once again we see why client detection is a dangerously fragile and ultimately futile approach to, well, anything on the Web.  If you absolutely must detect, do object detection: look for support for the things you need to make your application work.  Otherwise, follow the standards and don’t try to serve up customized content, styles, or scripts to anyone.

Elegance and Eloquence

Published 23 years, 2 weeks past

At least one good thing has come out of the apparently-ending-soon thread on www-style: Robin Berjon posted a link to the specification for Ook!, which I hadn’t encountered before.  It was so beautiful, I shed a tear of joy.  Great domain name, too.

As I read How to Write Like a Wanker (thanks to Simon for the pointer), for some strange and obscure reason I found my thoughts once more turning to the aforementioned www-style thread.  I really have to find something else to occupy my mind.  I hear girls are a very popular mental obsession for some people; maybe I’ll try that.  I’m sure my wife will be just thrilled.

Carol Spears wrote in to share some CSS magnetic poetry with me, so I’m sharing it with you.  There are some other interesting CSS examples on the same page, so check them out.  They remind me a little of my one bout of noodling.  (Suddenly I wonder if I should shift that into css/edge.)

Here’s something interesting: Now Corporations Claim The “Right to Lie”.  I found the link at the O’Reilly Network, so you’ve probably already seen it, but if not I highly recommend a reading.  The historical information alone was quite fascinating.  For another side to the story, there’s a wire piece from last November over at CNN Money that concerns me as well.  I don’t believe corporations should ever have a right to lie, and it appalls me that we’ve come to that even being a question.  But is there a right to restrict what news organizations (even those owned by huge media conglomerates) can say, or what corporate members can say to the press, about politics or corporate behavior?  Does the actual ruling mean that?  I don’t know, but the whole thing bothers me.

Getting Mixed In/Up

Published 23 years, 3 weeks past

Remember the redesign competition I mentioned (along with a lot of other people) a while back?  They’ve announced the prizes up for grabs, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the Grand Prize package includes a copy of Eric Meyer on CSS.  I do have to wonder how much use it will be to someone who can successfully restyle another person’s site with CSS… but hey, no complaints here!  Good luck to all the entrants.

Contrary to what Zeldman has to say, I generally don’t wish I were not writing a book.  When I’m writing a book, I enjoy it because it’s something I like to do and because I wouldn’t have agreed to do it if I weren’t excited about the project.  When I’m not writing a book, I enjoy the time off, but usually get back to the authorial keyboard within six months or so.

Rewriting a book, though… that’s a whole other story, and one with distinctly fewer comedic overtones.  I hate having to revise my own work, because my deep-seated impulse to tinker usually drives down the quality of the text.  The dread spectre of endless revision is tempered by the glimmer of needed new material, but to me, it’s like mixing chocolate syrup into a thick vanilla milk shake: the end result isn’t as awful as it could have been, but Lord, it sure isn’t good.

(It may help your understanding of the previous paragraph to know that I loathe chocolate.  No sympathy is necessary, because believe me, I’m not missing out on anything.  Call to mind a food that you truly despise; something that, if you accidentally got a mouthful, you would instantly spit out and then try to scrape off your tongue.  That’s what chocolate is like for me.  Kat couldn’t be happier, because I never try to steal her dessert.)

Reviewing other people’s work isn’t bad.  I’m currently reviewing two books, and this morning I started getting severe dèjá vu.  The chapters I was reviewing for both books referred to the same sites, and even had screenshots of those sites that were taken on the same day.  I’m about 98% certain it was all just a big coincidence.  Either that or the computers that run the Matrix are getting less creative.

Head Banging

Published 23 years, 3 weeks past

Earlier this afternoon, I was seriously thinking about smashing my forehead through the monitor of my Windows machine.  Why?  I was trying to do some standards-based scripting for IE5.5.  You’d think I’d know better by now, but no.  It’s a very simple little routine, and yet IE5.5 just silently fails at one point for no good reason (and, I’m told, so does IE6).  I have script debugging turned on and it still doesn’t tell me anything.  It just stops the routine.

In another area of the page, I have a block-level element set to 100% the width of its parent element, which is also 100% the width of its parent, with none of them having any margins or padding.  The expected result is that the “innermost” element will be as wide as its parent, and that element as wide as its parent.  Does IE5.5 do this?  Of course not—that would be too easy.  Instead it leaves a roughly-one-em gap to the left.  Oh, and the links in about half the lists simply fail to respond to user interaction of any kind.  The link text becomes plain old ordinary text for no apparent reason.

I’m really beginning to loathe IE/Win.  Sure, sure, NN4.x is worse, but I’ve stopped worrying about how it renders pages (by dint of hiding most styles from it) and I don’t even try to script for it.  Thus IE/Win now occupies the “most unforgivably broken browser” slot in my life.

I should learn not to talk about music until I’ve had a chance to listen to it a few times.  My opinion of Gravity has sharply improved in the past week.  I really started to like it when I told iTunes to always skip track 9.  Gravity still hasn’t grabbed me the way Spiritual Machines did this time last year, but it’s still darned good.

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan in your life is likely to find the Buffy Sex Chart amusing on some level.  I found myself remembering the relationship charts that were drawn up in an attempt to map the emotional landscape of Twin Peaks—which was, let’s admit, only possible if you extended the chart into several more dimensions than the usual three.  I was also reminded of an analysis of the show’s vampire population ecology I spotted recently.  It’s  a population-dynamics paper with equations and graphs and everything, although it’s written specifically to be understandable even if you don’t follow the math.  Now that’s über-geekitude for you.  I love it.

Speaking of television, last night Kat and I saw a commercial for Domino’s Dots™.  These are, it would seem, fried dough balls with cinnamon-sugar coating and a white icing.  They sound like donut holes to me, and they seem like a half-step from the Cinna Stix®, which are themselves a half-step from breadsticks.  So here’s my theory: Domino’s is very slowly evolving into a national-chain version of the typical local neighborhood Italian bakery.

It’s so crazy, it just might work.

Harmful Considerations

Published 23 years, 4 weeks past

Tantek muses: “I wonder who is going to write the ‘”Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful’ essay.”  It’s always a weird feeling when I share a brain with someone other than my wife.  I almost wrote that essay a few months ago, when I’d been sent one too many “considered harmful” links, and that was going to be pretty much its exact title.  Guess I’d better jump on the idea now, before someone else does it.  If I had to make a guess, I’d say look for something to show up tomorrow.

Fly the really friendly skies: Hooters adds airline wings (CNN).  I can’t decide if this a highly creative way to bankrupt a restaurant chain or a brilliant move.  I suppose if the airline is repositioned as high-end CEO charter service, with prices to match, it could be a hugely profitable business.  Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “hugely” in the previous sentence.  Sorry.

Speaking of odd commercial news, it would seem the Segway is a popular item (CNN) after all.  I’m having trouble believing this isn’t just more hype, since Amazon doesn’t want to give out sales figures, and I’ve never really understood why anyone would want to spend a large chunk of money on a really high-tech scooter.  Then again, I don’t understand people spending large amounts of money on sporting-event tickets and memorabilia, so what do I know?

Well, at least somebody finally did what I’ve been expecting, and decided Eric Meyer on CSS was picking up too many five-star reviews.  It managed to collect 23 top ratings in a row before the backlash started, so I feel pretty good about that.  I won’t even try rebutting the three-star review, as it makes some reasonable points.  The book is not a cure-all; no book ever is, which is why I wrote the “Should You Buy This Book?” text.

Meanwhile, the United States may or may not be going to war with one or more members of its self-created “Axis of Evil.”  Not that I think those were countries with our best interests at the forefront of their minds—and why should they have?—but throwing around labels with a level of sophistication not too far above fourth-grade recess just doesn’t seem like a good way to manage foreign policy.

I should talk.  My Christmas gifts included an XBox game where you can use a giant robot to blow up everything around you, including buildings, a so-so rock album, a comic-book movie, and a truly deranged comedy cult classic.  Too bad I couldn’t come up with anything personally meaningful to request for the holidays this year.  At least I found out that my family does in fact know me well, as I was given quite a few Eeyore-themed items.  The slippers were an especially nice touch.

Over at his own journal, The Ferrett comments rather directly on the sexualization of pre-adults in the movies.  I agree with him in a generic sense, although I disagree that the “Harry Potter” cast was destined to be over-eroticized.  Just because an author does a remarkable job of making characters real (for certain definitions of the term “real”), that doesn’t force an eroticization of the same characters on film.  No, I think that’s just the evolution of video storytelling over the last several decades—and it’s been happening for longer than most of us realize.  The Major and the Minor is a movie about a young woman posing as a 12-year-old who falls in love with a man who thinks she’s, well, twelve.  Of course he has no interest in her other than semi-paternal, but by the end of the movie they end up together, depsite his being engaged at the movie’s outset.  It stars Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland and was written by Billy Widler, so that will give you a hint regarding its age.  My parents weren’t even born when it was filmed.  So making sexual objects out of minors is not exactly new.

Remixing Fun

Published 23 years, 1 month past

Okay, so I’m late to the party as usual, but this is still pretty cool: WThremix, a contest to see who can take the new W3C home page and make it look less plain.  Maybe even visually striking and exciting.  Personally I think they should have added one more rule, which is that no content or structure can be altered in the restyling.  There could have at least been a “restyled original markup” category.  I’d think about entering, but as you can see from my private attempts (one – two – three) at the same thing back in late September, I’m not exactly a world-class visual artist.  Like you hadn’t guessed that by now.

Anyway, I really like the contest idea.  We have a site that uses valid structural markup to hold its content, and CSS to lay it out.  One of the great things about CSS is that the user can change a site’s presentation to suit their own needs, whatever those may be.  Similarly, it’s possible to take the same markup and completely change its layout and appearance just by changing stylesheets.  This is one of those really amazing things about the (X)HTML+CSS combination, and browsers are up to the task of making such things possible.  Contests to restyle sites may not be exactly what the specification authors had in mind, but it’s a creative application of all the promises of W3C technology.

I have been falling behind in my journal entries of late, but that’s because I’ve been trying to correct my falling behind in e-mail.  I’m getting tantalizingly close to catching up—just in time, of course, to go offline for a few days.  C’est la guerre, if I got that right.

To those who celebrate them right about now, please enjoy your holidays!

ScatterShotBot?

Published 23 years, 1 month past

The standards/design community has taken notice of the new Hotbot, and with its bold design statement being carried out in XHTML and CSS, it’s certainly worthy of comment.  Unfortunately, there’s a slight problem with it.  If you visit the skinning preferences page in Mozilla, Compuserve 7, or AOL for OS X, you get the following message:

To choose a new skin for HotBot, you must download a browser that supports Web standards.

Visit the same page with Netscape 7.x and you’ll have no trouble at all.  All of these browsers use, essentially, the same rendering engine.  They have the same standards support, give or take a few bug fixes.  The source of this roadblock seems to be a poorly written detection routine on the server itself.

Fortunately, this is a problem that’s easy to fix.  All the HotBot folks have to do, as my co-worker Arun wrote so cogently, is spot the Gecko, and here’s hoping that they do so soon.  If you’re doing UA detection of any kind, either client or server side, then you ought to read his excellent explanation of how to detect the whole Gecko family at once, rather than client by client.  It’s liable to let you avoid a whole lot of headaches.  You’d avoid even more if you did object detection instead of UA detection, but one thing at a time, I suppose.

It’s just occurred to me to wonder if anyone’s written an AmIHotOrNotBot.  The search parameters in the advanced interface would no doubt be very interesting.

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