Thoughts From Eric Archive

Okay, so yesterday’s post was a bit of tongue-in-cheekery, but with a very serious undertone.  As a matter of fact, today Kat, Carolyn, and I went to a doctor’s appointment, then to vote, and then out to lunch.  When we got back, there were two voice mail messages.  I laid 3:1 odds that they were both political, and yes, they were both GOP ads.  While we were retrieving those messages, another message landed in our voice mail box—this one also from the GOP.

The flood of political calls has been, not to put too fine a point on it, infuriating.  I signed up with the Do Not Call list for a reason, geniuses.  I’m doubly glad to be on it now that we have Carolyn.  I’m not especially concerned that the phone will wake her, bless her heart; once she goes to deep sleep, you could practically send a marching band through her room to play “Columbia, The Gem Of The Ocean” at full volume and she’d continue snoring.  (Such cute little snores they are, too.)  But some nights, especially when the teething is particularly bad, she never really gets to a deep sleep.  The last thing I want is for her to be woken up by a ringing phone and experience more pain because some politician or political activist thinks I really need to hear from him (or her).  I don’t.  Stop bothering me.

Now, I’ll admit that my vote for President was never in serious doubt.  It was easier to justify, though, on the grounds that Kerry and his allies had invaded my family’s privacy to a lesser extent than did his opponents.  It’s a classic “lesser of two evils” rationalization, but hey, any port in an electoral storm.  It’s also a metaphor for the Bush administration’s stance on social and privacy issues, now that I think about it.

And why was my vote never in serious doubt?  I can explain that in ten words (16 words and three letters if you count the names).

General Tendencies

	Social	Fiscal
Eric A. Meyer	Liberal	Conservative
George W. Bush	Conservative	Liberal
John F. Kerry	Liberal	Liberal

That’s it in a nutshell.  I’ve had a number problems with the Bush administration’s policies and actions, and most of them stem from the differences in philosophy that table summarizes.

There’s another reason I voted for Kerry, though: the Congress is almost certainly not going to be controlled by the Democrats.  Thus, the only things that will get through the legislative process are those with broad support.  Most observers feel that should Kerry win, he’ll have to set aside some of his grander (read: more expensive) plans for at least the first two years of his administration.  That’s just fine with me.  Since a Republican-dominated government apparently can’t show a sense of fiscal restraint, I’d be happy to have it arise as a side effect of an opposite-party government.

Well, not exactly happy, really, but hopefully you know what I mean.

It’ll certainly be interesting to watch how all this plays out.  Now, if you haven’t yet, get out there and vote!

• Vote Baby Vote was published on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

Dear President Bush,

How are things going?  I hear you’ve been very busy, doing a lot of traveling, that sort of thing.  In a way, it’s too bad you don’t fly on commercial airlines, because you would have a whole pile of frequent flyer miles.  You could probably earn three or four round-the-world trips.  Though now that I think about it, you probably don’t really need that kind help getting around, do you?

I’ve long been an undecided voter, thanks in no small part to the choice of candidates this time around.  I’m sure you’re a very honorable man, at least to the extent your office will permit.  Nonetheless, about half your policies have been deeply dismaying to me.  On the other hand, about half your opponent’s positions are no more appealing to me.  On the whole, as I’ve complained from time to time, I’ve had a very difficult time making up my mind how to vote.  It’s true that I’m traditionally a liberal type, but that’s mostly in the social arena.  That, incidentally, should provide a good indication of which half of your policies have dismayed me.

As a resident of a “battleground” state, or “swing” state, or whatever it is we’re calling them these days, I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls these days.  I imagine you know a thing or two about that; after all, your mother and your wife both called.  So did Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Also Gwyneth Paltrow and Sarah Jessica Parker, although they of course weren’t calling on your behalf.  In addition, I’ve heard from a number of dire-voiced men warning me about the terrible dangers inherent in electing you, or your opponent, to the White House.  Over the past month, I’d estimate that I’ve received at least fifty calls from campaigns, political parties, 527 groups, and so forth.  In one recent night, three such calls came in the space of twenty minutes.  I’d most certainly have gotten more calls, but I was out of town for a week.

Anyway, I thought I’d let you know that from what I can tell, the organization of your campaign, and of those efforts aligned with you, has been more effective at reaching voters in my area.  At a rough estimate, calls from your campaign, the Republican Party, and various 527 groups close to your side of the ideological spectrum have outnumbered those from the other side of the spectrum by about a third.

Accordingly, I’ll be casting my vote for John Kerry.

• Making A Call was published on Monday, November 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been five replies.

For those who are interested, I’ve added some new stuff to the Tools page, in addition to reordering it just a little.  The first addition is a URL decoder/encoder, something I’ve needed from time to time when trying to unravel encoded-JavaScript bookmarklets.  I’m sure every other developer in the world has created his own version of this tool at some point; well, here’s mine.  The second new toolbox entry is for users of NetNewsWire 2: a small collection of themes.  There are three as of this posting, each with a very, very different aim—one artistic, one historical, and one technological.

Hopefully I’ll have more to add to the S⁵ portion of the toolbox in the near future.

• More Tools was published on Wednesday, October 27th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Tools category.
• There have been no replies.

Some time ago, Simon Willison pointed out a very cool bookmarklet that helps solve the “I have one password for all my public sites” problem.  This is where someone picks a password they can remember, and then uses that as the password for their accounts on Amazon, eBay, Hotmail, Netflix, et cetera.  This is one of those things that security experts tell you never to do, and yet just about everyone does, because given the plethora of accounts most of us maintain, there’s no way we could keep track of which password goes with which account unless it was all written down somewhere… and that’s something the security experts insist that you never, ever do.

So the bookmarklet takes your ‘master password’, crosses it with the domain of the site, and generates an MD5-based result.  So let’s assume meyerweb had accounts.  You would fire off the bookmarklet, which would ask you type in your master password.  So let’s say your master password is ‘passwd’; this is combined with www.meyerweb.com and the resulting password is 68573552.  On the other hand, if you just use meyerweb.com, the result is 92938a6e

Now, while those aren’t the most secure possible passwords, they’re a lot more secure than ‘passwd’.  So I’d like to make use of this bookmarklet.  Fine, great.  The problem is what you just saw: the generated password changes if the full host and domain name bit changes.  This could be a problem if, say, amazon.com suddenly starts routing all logins to a server named login.amazon.com… or vice versa.  So I’d like to adapt the bookmarklet so it grabs just the domain and TLD (I probably got those terms wrong; I usually do) of a URL.  Problem is, I can’t write regular expressions for squat.  I don’t even understand how the regexp in the existing bookmarklet works.

So, a little help, please?  Given the form http://www.domain.tld/blah/foo/wow.xyz, I want the regexp to return just domain.tld.  Just leave a solution in the comments, and you’ll earn the respect and adulation of your peers.  At least those of them who read the comments.

• Regular Expression Help was published on Wednesday, October 27th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been forty-four replies.

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten a few complaints about S⁵ breaking in one browser or another—IE6 and Safari got the most mentions, but there were others.  As an example, there was a report that the slide show would just stop working after a certain number of slides.  In every case I’ve seen so far, these problems have been caused by invalid XHTML.

The most common validation problem I expect people to run into is with the structuring of lists.  For example, suppose you want two levels of lists on a slide.  You do it like this:

<ul>
<li>point one</li>
<li>point two
   <ul>
   <li>subpoint one</li>
   <li>subpoint two</li>
   </ul>
</li>
<li>point three</li>
<li>point four</li>
</ul>

Notice how the nested list is inside the li element?  That’s correct.  You should never put nested lists between list items on the ‘outer’ list, even though a lot of people have made that a habit.  The only element that can be a child of a ul (or an ol) element is an li.  That’s it.  Anything that needs to be ‘nested’ goes inside one of the list items.

Alternatively, you can put structures after the list, if that’s what you want.  As an example:

<ul>
<li>point one</li>
<li>point two</li>
<li>point three</li>
</ul>
<pre>
...code sample...
</pre>

Nothing wrong with that, as long as you keep the side content inside the <div class="slide">...</div> element.  Or you could put your pre inside the last list item.  It’s really up to you.

Remember that S⁵ stands for “simple standards-based slide show system”.  That’s not just marketing: the CSS and scripts pretty much depend on valid markup structures.  If the markup is invalid, it will very likely lead to confusion and unexpected results.  In other words, violate the standards and they’ll violate your slide show.  There’s a certain poetic symmetry in that, I think.

(And yes, I do know that as of posting, this entry doesn’t validate.  Believe me, the irony is not at all lost on me.  This happened because I haven’t gotten around to fixing WordPress so it strips HTML before inserting the entry title into the title element.  I ranted about the problem a while back… and it will eventually get fixed.  Possibly when I upgrade to the next version of WP.)

• S⁵ Validity was published on Tuesday, October 26th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the S5, Standards, and Tools categories.
• There have been twelve replies.

Mail here at meyerweb.com is, for the moment, dead.  I threw up a notice on meyerweb’s home page and was going to leave it at that, but it occurred to me I could get more data from people if I posted and let them comment.  So if you’ve gotten a bounce back from my e-mail address, or if you send me (or Kat) a test message and get a bounce, could you post the error text and relevant headers in a comment here?  It will help diagnose the problem.

Oh, and check to see if someone else has posted the same error before you post.  We don’t need a hundred copies of the same error.  If you have a different error than those already posted, though, then by all means share.  Other information, perhaps such as that divined by you command-line wizards and server administrator types, would be most welcome as well.

Thanks… and I hope this will be fixed in short order.

Update: it’s fixed.  Let the spam flow once more!

• Dead Letters was published on Friday, October 22nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been ten replies.

For those who aren’t sure how to tackle creating an S⁵ presentation, I’ve put a basic primer online.  In addition to explaining the basics of an S⁵ presentation, it links to a ZIP archive of a “blank” presentation, so you can use that as the basis for any presentations you create.

I’m planning to write in the near future a short guide on how to switch themes.  It isn’t quite as simple as it first sounds, mostly because of the possibility that an author would create a theme package containing only the files that need to be replaced, instead of everything that usually goes in the ui/ directory.

Like it says at the end of the primer, let me know if anything’s missing or unclear.

• S⁵ Primer Online was published on Wednesday, October 20th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been four replies.

Okay, folks, here it is: S⁵ version 1.0.  In addition to a few minor tweaks to make the system more robust, I’ve created a couple of themes to add to the ones Martin Hense created.  I have links to them all on the new S⁵ Themes page.  Share and enjoy.

One of the more notable tweaks is that the URL of slides.css is now read by the JS at document load, and used from then on.  Thus, you can point to a slides.css that’s in a different location than the rest of the UI files, if you so desire.  Another change is that the introductory slide show now contains some images, including one that maps out the file structure.  These were added so that new users would have some inkling of how to put images into a slide show.  There may of course be other ways of accomplishing the same task.

There were a number of good ideas and code contributions, but they were also too last-minute to be included in v1.0.  I’ll add them to a “to do” list for v1.1.  As to the suggestion that the project be moved to SourceForge, it’s certainly an idea I’ll explore further.  I don’t know enough about SF to know how such an arrangement would work; I only ever go to SF to download stuff, and find the site to be somewhat annoying in that it’s never immediately clear to me what I’m supposed to download, not to mention finding detailed information about whatever I’m downloading seems much harder than it should be.  For now, I’ll keep S⁵ local to meyerweb.  It can always be migrated over to SF later on, if that turns out to be a good idea.

There are still limitations in the system.  For example, if the slide show assumes 1024×768 and your window is 800×600, then you’re likely to have content cut off by the footer.  So edit the CSS to assume 800×600 (the easiest step is to lower the font-size of the body element).  Or set things up so that scrollbars will appear on the slide content if it overflows the slide.  You get the general idea, I think: this is very much a DIY-type system, at least for now.  The JS works, and the core styles help it work, in a cross-browser fashion.  Anything after that is up to the theme author.

There may one day be routines that automatically scale text, or dynamically break up slides, in order to solve the clipping problem.  There may also be features that let you trigger animations by hitting “next”, let you easily integrate SVG content, allow the use of the navigation menu in Opera Show, permit dynamic theme selection, and so on and so on.  For now, we have a good standards-based slide show system, one that should suffice for a great many people.

And my deepest thanks to all those people who have contributed, directly or otherwise, to S⁵, including those who made suggestions I haven’t yet folded into the system.  You have made, and will continue to make in the future, S⁵ better than I ever could have made it on my own.

• S⁵ 1.0 was published on Monday, October 18th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the S5, Standards, and Tools categories.
• There have been thirty-eight replies.