Thoughts From Eric Archive

The presentation files from NOTACON and the UIUC Webmaster Forum are now available on the Events page (and the Events Archive page) over at Complex Spiral Consulting.  Share and enjoy.

• Presentation Files Online was published on Saturday, May 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

So there was a big deal made out of the fact that iChat AV 2.1 and AIM 5.5 can do videoconferencing.  Apple’s iChat page and a press release from AOL both proudly announce how the two can interoperate.  For example, here’s an excerpt from the AOL press release:

The new live video instant messaging feature in AIM 5.5 is fully compatible with iChat AV 2.1, Apple’s breakthrough video conferencing technology. Now AOL users from a PC can tap into the worldwide community of iChat AV users on Macs. iChat AV 2.1, the latest version of iChat AV was released by Apple today…

This would be ideal for me, as my father has AOL and the latest version of AIM for Windows XP.  He’s also moving to Florida, where he’ll have broadband.  So I view this as the perfect way for him to keep in closer touch with us, and to be able to see Carolyn as she grows, even though he’ll be living a thousand or so miles away.  When she gets older, it will be a way for her to keep in touch with him as well.

Now, neither Dad nor I own a camera yet, but we do both have microphones, so I thought I’d test out the audio chat capability.  So far, zippo.  He and I have both made sure we have the right versions of our client software.  We can’t establish an audio connection.

So, has anyone gotten this to actually work, and if so, how?  I’ve opened up all the ports I can find that even seem to be halfway relevant, as per an Apple KB article I found, and have checked my router to be sure it’s allowing traffic on those ports, but I still can’t establish an audio connection with AIM users.  Text chatting, no problem, but I don’t even get an audio-chat icon in my Buddy List.  I do get one for all the iChat users in my List, and have audio-chatted with a number of them.  Do we both have to own a camera for this to work?  I had figured, you know, if video conferencing was supported then audio conferencing must be supported, but perhaps that would be expecting things to make too much sense.

If anyone out there has a solution, or even a pointer to information about it, comments are most welcome.

• Chat Lunatique was published on Saturday, May 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

I’ve converted “Thoughts From Eric” over to use WordPress, dropping my lovingly hand-crafted XML/XSLT solution for something packaged.  Since there’s no actual package, I guess I use that term somewhat loosely, but then I was also being very loose with the term “lovingly,” at least as pertains to XSLT.  I decided to go with WordPress because it’s all driven by HTML+CSS layout, and it uses PHP to generate the HTML.  I don’t know from PHP, but I can figure it out well enough to hack in the features I want, and the CSS-driven nature of the layout means I can do my own thing in a jiffy.  In this case, that meant bending the PHP files to produce markup consistent with the old meyerweb, and then applying my existing style sheets to the result.  Thus the visual consistency between yesterday and today.

Some changes that may or may not be of interest to you:

• By default, comment posting will be disabled but trackbacks will be permitted.  I expect things to stay that way until I decide what my policy will be regarding anonymous posting, comment spammers, and the like.  I’ll open up commenting on the occasional question post—I expect to put up one later today, in fact—but I won’t be opening up every post for comments.  I’ve taken note of how that’s gone at some other sites, and have rarely liked what I’ve seen.
• All feeds will continue to use excerpts; I will not be publishing full-content feeds, mostly because if I did y’all would saturate the outgoing pipes.  Yes, dammit, bandwidth does still matter.
• Both RSS feeds have lost their word-count and category information.  As soon as I figure out how to recreate those in WordPress, they’ll be back.  I had them figured out for WP1.0.2, but the very same functions seem to silently fail in WP1.2 beta, which is what I’m using.  I’ll get it worked out eventually.
• The RSS2.0 feed now includes <pubDate> elements for your sorting pleasure.  FeedDemon users of the world, rejoice.
• About 300 back-catalog posts (roughly speaking, December 1999 through October 2002) all got dumped into the “General” category.  You might not want to try to read that category all in one shot.
• I’ll likely fiddle with the categorization of old posts as I come across them, so don’t do anything that depends on a post being in a particular category.  No, I have no idea what that might be.
• The old archive pages still exist, so your permalinks won’t break.  If you want to update them to the new URIs, that would be appreciated, but if not, no big deal.
• The vast majority of posts, including posts up through last month, show as having been published precisely at midnight.  That’s because the old archive file didn’t carry time information for those posts, not because I’m an obsessive-compulsive night owl.
• Posts now show their categories, and clicking on said category names gets you a list of every post in the category.  Right now, that means a page that shows the full post content for every post in the category.  I plan to create a condensed-summary category view at some point.
• I’ll probably also continue fiddling with the layout, displayed information, and various other aspects of the post and archive pages.  Just don’t refer to a particular layout idea in a debate unless you grab a screenshot, that’s all.

That’s about it.  I just thought some of you out there would be interested in the details.

• Switcheroo was published on Saturday, May 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General, Tech, and WordPress categories.
• There have been ten replies.

Because it’s Friday and my brain is fried.  It won’t be as over the top as one of Owen’s magnum opii, but still, it should be a spot of fun.

• Like you haven’t seen it already, but hey: Dave Shea‘s A Roadmap to Standards.  It’s definitely worth reading, and I’m not just saying that because somewhere near the end he recommends more than half my book catalog.
• Seeing itself might get a massive upgrade in the near future thanks to laser light and mirrors.  Hmmm… how much fun would it be to have a complete CSS reference overlaying the world?  Yeah—not very.
• It occurs to me that Simon St. Laurent might be interested in the possibilites that a full-color personal display might bring filtering the world, considering the thoughts he had with regard to this DVD player.
• You could, of course, view DVD alterations as a way of correcting or filtering a piece of work to conform to your worldview.  Sometimes, as the British Medical Journal points out, corrections can be a good thing.
• And I wonder what Jack Valenti thinks of a DVD player that alters copyrighted material?
• Ro collected 300 images from around the Web and they’re… well… familiar.  It’s almost an art piece.  I like the use of negative letter-spacing for the title.
• A note for OS X users: Panic, creators of the inestimable Transmit, have released Stattoo.  Looks veeeery interesting, although it’s so rare for me to have any appreciable portion of my desktop visible that I’m not sure how much use I’d get out of it.
• Now here’s a tool we all can use: a list of the changeover points from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time all over the world.  And you can even find the change points for the last five years.  Woohoo!
• Elena, the radioactive Russian rider, had to remove her photojournal because a few million too many people went to check it out.  Thankfully, there are a number of mirrors available.
• Of course, if you wanted to get close to the high-Geiger action yourself, you could join a Chernobyl tour.  I didn’t see any mention of oversized earthworms or Matthew Broderick, though.
• Tom proposes a geographical metaphor to measure your memetic cluefulness.  I put myself somewhere near Bingen, mostly because I like the sound of the word “Bingen.”
• You may as well join the memtic herd, think of badgers, and then visit Kenya.  How long will you be able to stay?

• Linkapalooza! was published on Friday, April 30th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

After delivering the keynote and a technical breakout session at the 5th Annual Webmaster Forum (and I’ll be posting those files over at Complex Spiral‘s web site by week’s end), I realized that I had planned poorly.  When I arranged to drive to the UIUC campus for the conference, I did some research and discovered that it would be about a seven hour drive.  Because of that length, and not knowing exactly how the conference schedule would work out, I decided to get there Monday evening and leave Wednesday morning.  Now here it was, the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday, the conference was over, and I had nothing else planned.

So I checked out and started driving.  I left the UIUC campus right around 5:00pm Central Daylight Time.  As I departed, I knew that as I crossed back into the Eastern time zone, I would lose an hour, so I wouldn’t arrive home until 1:00am local time.  Most of the drive would be done in darkness, which I dislike, and I would have to fight road fatigue every mile.

It was worth it.

I passed through Indianapolis as the sun was setting, almost getting lost at the junctions of Interstates 74 and 465, mentally saying “hello!” to the gang at New Riders as I curved past the downtown and merged onto Interstate 70.  Three hours later, I edged around Columbus, matching speeds with an Animal Control Unit van on the theory that if he was doing 87 miles per hour on the outerbelt of a major city, it must be okay for me to do it, too.  Around 11:40pm, I refueled at the BP station just off the SR 97 exit (Lexington / Belleville), the exit closest to my home town.  As a high school student, I used to gas up at the same station on my way to and from work.  I sent another mental “hello!” to my sister, who still lives in the area, and my father, who the next day would be moving away from the area for the rest of his life.

As I got back onto Interstate 71, headed north, I cast my thoughts ahead to my arrival home, now only ninety minutes or so away.  I pictured dropping my things in the dining room, going up the stairs in the dark, and walking slowly and quietly into Carolyn’s room.  For a moment, I imagined looking over the edge of her crib just as she opened her eyes, gave me a big welcoming daddy smile, stretched, and then shut her eyes again to drift back into sleep.  I could see her face and her smile in my mind just as clearly as I could see the road in my headlights.

It was, after all, what had compelled me to get into my car, even knowing the length of the drive before me, late that afternoon.  It wasn’t that I was bored; I could have found any number of things to do in a college town.  I was in my car, passing within a few miles of my family without stopping, because I missed my wife and child more than I could stand.  I had chosen a lengthy, boring, late night drive over another night away from them.

It was worth it.

When I did finally arrive home, two minutes shy of 1:00am, everything went just as I had imagined it up until I snuck into Carolyn’s room.  She didn’t wake up, as I’d known she would not, even when I leaned into the crib to kiss her lightly on the forehead and whisper good night to her.  I knew that if I woke her she would smile at me, but that was never even an option.  So there was no welcoming smile, but that was all right.

For another minute or so, I just stood and watched our daughter sleep, listened to her breathe.  The pure innocence and beauty of a sleeping baby cannot be put into words, no matter how hard pop stars and rock stars and poets may try.  But I understand why they do.

It was worth it, I told her without words, looking down at her face, the same sleeping face I’d imagined in every detail.  It’s all worth it.

• Homecoming was published on Wednesday, April 28th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Personal, and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

Upon arriving at NOTACON, I discovered two things in quick succession: they didn’t have Internet access out of the conference network when I arrived, and I had neglected to grab screenshots of the Zen Garden designs I wanted to talk about.  This was intolerable—those designs needed to be seen in order to make the point.  My own stupidity had caused the problem, but hopefully my savvy could fix it.

Kat had come downtown with me to go to lunch, and over dim sum I planned out my strategy.  All I needed was three minutes on an open network.  And fortunately for me, I knew where to find one: the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library.  The reading garden there is covered with an open wifi network.

With lunch over, we headed back into downtown.  As we crossed East 9th Street, I had Kat slow down and pull over to the curb as I pulled out my laptop.  “We can’t stop here,” said Kat, pointing to the street signs.  I looked out my window and realized we were in front of the Federal Reserve Bank, not the Library; I’d told her to slow down a block too early.  Odds were that if we stopped here for any length of time, we’d be the focus of some unwanted attention.  Kat slipped forward a block as I fired up MacStumbler.  Faint network signals flickered across my display panel as we drew close to the garden, and then there it was: CLEVNET.

“We can’t stop here either,” said Kat, but I urged her to do so anyway.  As we came to a halt several yards past the garden, CLEVNET disappeared from the monitor.

“Back up,” I said, intently watching the display and catching a glimpse of Kat’s disbelieving look out of the corner of my eye.  We rolled back slowly, stealthily, but nothing was coming through, and the garden was locked up for the season.  We were getting too close to a bus stop, teeming with people, and I still wasn’t getting any signal.  We were going to have to try another approach.  We circled around the block, coming at the installation from the rear.  Kat looped past a van and pulled into a service entrance right next the garden.  Bingo!  CLEVNET was back.  “Good!” I barked.  “I’ve got the signal.”

“Hurry up,” Kat muttered as I fired off a prepared bookmark group and started grabbing screenshots.  One minute down; I had about a third of the screenshots I needed, but the rest of the pages were still loading.  My fingers drummed impatiently on the keyboard housing.  The next page finished loading: I took the shot and closed the window.  Another three pages loaded at once, and I got them as well.  Two minutes, and I was half done.  I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed us.

Suddenly, we caught a break and the rest of the pages all finished loading within a few seconds of each other.  I grabbed each in turn, my fingers flashing back and forth between the trackpad and the keyboard, capturing and closing windows as fast as possible.  Five left… almost there… three.. two… stay on target…

“Okay, let’s go!” I said triumphantly, flipping the laptop shut.  “Got ’em all.”

Kat eased us away from the curb, moving off at a relaxed pace so as not to draw any attention.  As we turned toward the north, we shared a glance and a quiet laugh.  We’d gotten in, gotten the data, and gotten out in the space of less than five minutes.  Perfect.  Just the way I’d planned it.

When I was unable to get the laptop onto the conference network for my presentation on High-Powered Style, every pulse-pounding minute of the heist paid off tenfold.

• Mission: Insignificant was published on Friday, April 23rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’ve remembered what it is I wanted to talk about, thanks to Phil Ringnalda, whose last name I’ve finally learned to spell correctly.  Phil just posted that:

Apparently the in thing to do with your blog this month is to add links to each post’s Technorati cosmos, down in the place where you would have a comments link if you had comments.

I first spotted mention of this over at Tantek’s weblog, and since meyerweb doesn’t (yet) support comments or [track|ping]backs, I was initially intrigued.  About six seconds later, I had lost most of my interest.  There were two primary reasons why.

1. Unlike comments and trackbacks, a “comment cosmos” link (hereafter referred to as “echorati”) offers no information about how many comments will be returned, assuming any at all.  True, we can probably assume that any given Boing Boing post will have at least a few links back to it, and that the popular ones will have dozens or even hundreds.  99.9% of weblogs will have no links to 99.9% of their individual posts… but there’s still no way to know without clicking on the echorati link and hitting Technorati’s servers, which are already kind of flaky.

   (Yes, the service is free, but it also returns a lot of incorrect data, PHP configuration error messages, and so on—when it responds at all.  Echorati links are just going to increase those problems.  This isn’t criticism of the “Technorati sucks” variety; I really like Technorati.  It’s more criticism of that service’s present stability, which I suspect they would agree with me is not as robust as we’d all like.)

   One way to solve this dilemma, as others have suggested, is to have a script that queries Technorati to get the number of echorati links, so you can put right on your site how many there are—again, assuming there are any.  But that leads us to my next objection…

2. Technorati cosmos data expires.  In other words, if a link to something is on a page that hasn’t been updated in a while, that link falls out of the cosmos.  So however many links comprise an echorati cosmos in, say, the first week after a post is published, that count will fall over time to zero.  Let’s say that a year from now, somebody stumbles across the Boing Boing post about using Technorati to create an echorati cosmos.  They click on that post’s echorati link and Technorati returns “Ouch! 0 links from 0 sources.”  The impression is that nobody ever commented on the post, even though we know that’s not true (as of this writing, there were 29 links to said post).

   So any mechanism that queried Technorati for the number of links in an echorati cosmos would have to keep doing it, and the numbers would slowly drop over time until they finally hit zero.  I don’t know what the expiration interval is at Technorati, but it can’t be more than a few months.  If they start getting slammed by echorati queries, they might have to reduce the interval.

The perhaps obvious solution is to modify your echorati mechanism to ask for the links, harvest them from Technorati, and register them locally as you would a trackback.  That works when Technorati can identify a post, but I’ve noticed that doesn’t happen with regularity.  That means you’d just be harvesting their main URLs, not the URL of their comment on your specific post.  I’ll take a recent ‘popular’ meyerweb example: my post “Conspiracy Theory.”  Of the first ten “freshest” results returned this morning for that post’s echorati, three lacked a “Read Full Post” link.  Technorati also returned 20 results and claimed the post had 12 links from 12 sources.  I then hit the “rank by authority” filter and got 26 links from 26 sources—what was that about service stability?—and five of the top ten had no “Read Full Post” link.

I suppose that echorati harvesting could be an interesting minor addition to the linking toolbox, but I don’t see it replacing trackbacking and comments any time soon.  The capability will have to be built into popular blogging packages to gain any sort of currency, and even then I suspect it will be presented as a part of trackbacking.  Maybe they’ll be called “linkbacks.”

On a related topic, check out Ping-o-Matic.  It’s already replaced the bookmark group I had set up to do my own pinging.  Okay, so it replaced a bookmark group with a single bookmark.  It’s still progress, right?

I’m feeling much better, thanks.  It’s a good thing, too, because I have to give two presentations tomorrow at NOTACON, and two more (one of them the conference keynote) on Tuesday at the 5th Annual Webmaster Forum.

• Echorati was published on Thursday, April 22nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been no replies.

c|net seems to have injected a note of disbelief into its headline “AOL plans to revitalize Netscape?” and I suppose they could be forgiven if that was intentional.  My read on the situation is that AOL is going to put their efforts into the portal; the fact that the positions are in Columbus, Ohio, the site of their Compuserve division, was my primary tip-off.  Apparently there will be a new version of the Netscape browser this summer, based on Mozilla 1.7, but that to me bespeaks a piggyback strategy.  They’ll employ enough coders to wrap the Netscape/AOL chrome around Mozilla, and call it macaroni.  Not that this is a bad approach.  I just expect that it means Netscape isn’t about to re-enter the browser development space, nor will they be asking me if I’d like my old job back.  I’d love to be wrong, but I get the sense that they’re going to chase eyeballs.

Enough about my former employer; let’s have me talk for a bit.  I did just that with Russ Weakley of Maxdesign and the Web Standards Group, and the result is now available for your enjoyment, or for your frustration if you’re of certain persuasions.  Font-size zealots of all kinds, I’m looking in your direction.

There was more stuff I was going to talk about, but a severe cold/stomach bug/allergy condition has my brain operating at about one-fifth its usual speed.  Maybe it’ll come back to me tomorrow.  The only reason I’m even typing this entry is that I accidentally took a daytime medication instead of the nighttime equivalent, so now instead of sleeping off the illness I’m propped up in bed snuffling my way through it.  Bleah.

• Cold Comfort was published on Wednesday, April 21st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Interviews categories.
• There have been no replies.