Thoughts From Eric Archive

iRant, But Not Too Much

Published 21 years, 3 months past

From my point of view, the biggest news from Steve Jobs’ keynote this morning was the announcement of iLife.  More specifically, it was the new version of iPhoto, which I’d really been hoping would be announced.  And so it was.  It’s much faster, more capable, enables photo sharing with Rendezvous—just about everything I’d hoped would happen.  Unfortunately, it also came with something I hadn’t expected: a price tag.

I have no problems with Apple charging money for a piece of software.  What bothers me is the practice of releasing it for free and then, without warning, bundling it into a commercial suite.  If they’d charged for it all along, that would be fine.  If we’d known ahead of time that it would be free until Apple felt it was a product worth selling, at which time it would stop being free, fine.  But that was never made clear, if it was even mentioned at all, and I find that annoying.

Further exacerbating the problem is that of the five iLife components, I have use for only two of them, iPhoto and iTunes, and the former of them is (for the moment) free.  iDvd, iMovie, and Garage Band are completely useless to me as I have neither a video camera nor a garage band.  So if I really want iPhoto 4, I have to pay $49 for it and a bunch of unnecessary code.  That doesn’t make sense to me.  Hopefully, Apple will offer the iLife components separately, so that I could pay $9.99 for iPhoto and ignore the rest.  Or, better still, they’ll release an update to the free iPhoto that fixes the sluggishness but doesn’t include the other cool stuff in the commercial version.

Alternatively, I could hunt for a freeware replacement to iPhoto.  At least one colleague has asked me why I use iPhoto at all, given its slowness and the bloated data files and directory structures it creates.  The thing is, I really like the way iPhoto allows you to modify photos while preserving the originals, and the way album organization is handled.  The transition effect in the slideshows is pretty nifty, too.  In general, the whole iPhoto interface and feature set works pretty well for me—it’s just the lack of speed that’s a problem.  Well, that and the lack of smoothly resized exports, but I’ve complained about that in the past.  If I could find something equivalent to iPhoto, or at least darned close to it, I’d probably switch.  If no such application exists, then I’d love to see some open-source coders get together and create one.  Any takers?

Running Just To Stay In Place

Published 21 years, 3 months past

The e-mail backlog has finally forced me to do something I’ve long resisted: the site now has an FAQ.  I thought about calling it a QAF (Questions Frequently Asked) or maybe an FRE (Frequently Received E-mails).  But in the end the weight of tradition got me to go with the traditional nomenclature.  If you’re thinking of sending me e-mail, please read the FAQ first to see if the answer is there.  As much as I love correspondence, I just can’t keep up any more.  In fact, I couldn’t even before Carolyn arrived, and so now I’m doubly unable to keep up.  Hopefully the FAQ will help, just a bit.  Thanks for your collective understanding.

This is truly excellent: arbitrary-element hovering in IE/Win.  In other words, stuff like pure CSS menus and such can actually be used in real-world designs, thus reaping the benefits of dramatically reduced markup weight.  The approach the behaviors take reminds me a lot of what we did to get the Netscape DevEdge menus working in IE/Win, except we did it in JavaScript, which may have made our technique a little weightier on the back end.  Either way, they’re both excellent solutions.

There’s a lot more gold to mine in the behaviors/script/structural markup vein, I suspect; the melding of IE-specific behaviors with lightweight scripts and CSS could lead us to a great many advances in standards-oriented design.  While it would be nice to see IE advancing so that we didn’t need these kinds of solutions, at least they exist.  Here’s my short, off-the-cuff wishlist for things for which we can hopefully use behaviors to replicate CSS2 functionality:

  • Support for generated content; counters would be a truly awesome bonus
  • Fixing the box model in versions of IE previous to IE6
  • Better (read: more smoothly scrolling) support for fixed-position elements and fixed-attachment backgrounds than current scripts provide

I think there’s a way to use behaviors to get alpha-channel support in PNGs, too.  Can anyone confirm that?  If not, it’s something to investigate.

Now on to slightly more surreal matters.  Sure, I’m fairly well known as an expert in CSS and Web standards, and some of you know that I do a weekly Big Band-era radio show, but how many of you were aware of my career as a shoe designer?  Doug Bowman wrote to let me know that Matt Haughey had spilled the beans, so I’ll own up to it here.

Okay, not really.  But if you go to the Medium Footwear site, wait for the Flash interface to load, hit “Collections,” and then click anywhere on the splash page, you’ll see—and I swear that, like Dave Barry, I am not making this up— the Eric Meyer Collection.  There are nine different models, and the really funny punchline to the whole affair is this: guess which of those shoe styles I like enough to consider buying?  As it turns out, the “Structuralist” design.  Seriously.

Building Blocks

Published 21 years, 4 months past

Imagine my surprise to discover that an off-hours bit of work done with a couple of colleagues got a mention in the mainstream press.  XFN, which seems to be spreading through the blog world and is generating some very good feedback, was mentioned in a Seattle Times article titled “Social networking beginning to take shape on the Web.”  I’m amused that years upon years of work on CSS, which is arguably a cornerstone of the modern Web, netted me (so far as I know) exactly zero newspaper coverage, while something to which I made minor contributions merited ink within a month of its launch.

With that article still fresh in my mind, I received something like my fourth or fifth invitation to join LinkedIn, which was mentioned in the very next paragraph after the bit about XFN.  Since I’m rather interested in social networking technologies these days, I decided to set up an account and experiment a bit—do some compare-and-contrast between LinkedIn and XFN, from a user’s point of view.  It’s interesting, but I’m not sure I quite grasp the point of it.  Are links intended solely to deliver prospective clients to vendors?  Or is it supposed to be a way to show who you know, and thus who they know, and so on?  For myself, I’ve decided to limit my connections to people with whom I’ve had some contact professionally.  So if you’re a member and want to invite me, go ahead.

One of the people I did invite to link to me is George Nemeth, Cleveland-based superblogger extraordinaire.  I dropped by his site to see what he’s talking about, and spotted a link to a LEGO® recreation of M. C. Escher’s Relativity.  The same people also did Ascending and Descending, and a few others besides.  Color me impressed!  From there, I visited some other LEGO®-sculpture sites, finding at one point a really large model of a stegosaur, which was even more impressive, both from a sheer achievement point of view as well as a testament to the amount of free time some people have available.  And check this out: the guy who came up with a model of the Nebuchadnezzar, a mostly working badger, and a whole bunch of other LEGO® sculptures besides, lives right here in Cleveland.

Like how I came full circle with that one?

Turning Points

Published 21 years, 4 months past

As the calendar turns to another year, I’ve reached a major goal.  I just now finished writing the preface and dedication for the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, which means that the primary writing is fully and completely done.  Some chapters have already been through technical review, copyedit, and author review, and are moving through production.  Others are queued up for me to deal with in the next several days.  So it looks very much like we should be able to put the book on shelves, and into your hands, before summer gets underway.  This is, for me, a major relief.

As for the sequel to Eric Meyer on CSS, that’s suffered some setbacks due to Carolyn’s arrival, so I’m not sure when it will be finished and published.  Half the projects are already written, and the sixth has the working files all set up.  That leaves just a few more to write.  I’m hoping to get them finished before January is done, but I’m feeling less and less optimistic about meeting that goal.  We’ll see what happens.

Speaking of Carolyn, she’s suffering through her first cold, so we stayed home last night.  There are certainly worse ways to spend a New Year’s Eve than with your wife, new daughter, and a home-cooked meal.  We didn’t even bother to watch the ball drop, although the shouted countdowns from our various neighbors let us know exactly when the new Gregorian year began.

As Kat and I lay in bed last night, Carolyn miserably gurgling and wheezing between us, I kept saying to myself, “It’s just another day.”  There was something about the change to 2004 that hit me hard, a realization that this is the first year in which Mom has always been dead.  Throughout 2003, even though she was gone, she’d been a part of that year.  When that last digit changed, artificial though the division of time might be, there was suddenly a sense that I was farther away from Mom, that I’d crossed a boundary that was suddenly like a wall between us.

But it is, in the end, just another day.  Mom doesn’t have to be any further away from me than she was yesterday, or the day before.  She is always as close as I choose to allow, as close as my memories of her will permit.

Distant Fires

Published 21 years, 4 months past

As I took out the garbage this evening, there was a bright orange flare to the south, swelling over a few seconds and then fading quickly.  It was bright enough that the ground was dimly illuminated; some time later, a distant roar could be heard.  There were a few more white flashes that followed, and shortly thereafter I heard sirens as well.  I honestly wondered if an airliner had crashed into one of the nearby suburbs.

Instead, it was a fire at a magnesium recycling facility about seven miles away from our house.  As I write this, a few hours later, the fire is still burning, and is expected to continue burning for 24 hours or more.  I’ve been hearing explosions several times an hour, some of them rather loud.  According to news reports, there is a series of magnesium storage silos currently sitting just outside the flames.  Every time I hear a new rumble, I wonder if it’s the silos cooking off.  In fact, I just heard a string of deep booms that could well be them.

In a weird way, this may be as close as I ever get to understanding what war is like.  No, of course it’s nothing like the same; I have basically no fear that I could be harmed by this fire, even if the storage silos go up.  But the glows on the horizon, and the semi-continual thunder that no cloud produces, imparts some of the foreboding and dread that I suppose a nearby armed conflict must instill.  It sounds like I always expected distant artillery would.

As a cold front moves through the area, the rain is picking up, clattering against the house with more force and volume.  In almost any fire, this would be a welcome relief for the firefighters, but in this case it’s almost the worst weather imaginable, as those of you who remember your chemistry classes will have realized.  There’s a horrible irony somewhere in there, especially given that it’s the end of December and today was rainy and in the low 50s.

Tonight my thoughts are with the firefighters who will spend hours upon hours fighting simply to keep the fire contained, knowing that they can’t try to douse the fire directly without making things worse.  All they can do is fight a defensive battle, and that has to be incredibly frustrating.  I only hope that they all make it through this safely, and are able to prevent any more damage to the area surrounding the plant.

An Absent Voice

Published 21 years, 4 months past

If she had somehow lived to see it, today would have been Mom’s 60th birthday.  It was always a sort of relief to Mom that her birthday came just one day after Christmas, because she could let it get lost in the shuffle.  Usually, we’d give nearly all our presents for her on Christmas morning, and then each of us would give one present the next day.  That suited her just fine.  She was always much happier giving presents than receiving them.  It’s a trait I absorbed from her at some point; like she did, I feel a bit awkward about receiving a gift, even from family members.

For that and other reasons, neither Mom nor I enjoyed Christmas very much, except in the last few years, when Kat dragged everyone kicking and screaming into the holiday spirit, whether we wanted to or not.  She’s good that way.  The joy and pleasure she feels over things like Christmas and Disney World is so pure and unbounded that it spills over into people around her.  Sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I am to have married Kat.  In her last days, as we said our good-byes without ever uttering those words, Mom never once told Kat to take care of me, nor me to take care of Kat.  She knew it wasn’t necessary.

Neither did Mom ask me to speak well of her to my children, whenever I had them.  In that case, she probably never even gave thought to her legacy, because it wasn’t her way to think about herself.  But again, it wasn’t necessary.  When Carolyn asks me about my childhood, I will tell her how Mom would read a chapter of a book to me and my sister every night, and how Mom wept every time Charlotte died.  How she made toad-in-the-hole for breakfast after we’d read Danny, Champion of the World.  The way she could admonish me with a look, the one we called the Hairy Eyeball, capitals and all.  There will be warmth and love in my voice, but also wistfulness and loss.

I look at Carolyn, named in honor of the grandmother who never knew her, and try to imagine all the things she has yet to learn.  I wish she could have learned some of them from her namesake, and indeed we have books that Mom bought for our children—some before the cancer was discovered, and some after.  A few of them contain her name, in short inscriptions written years before they would reach their intended audience.

When I read those books to Carolyn and any future siblings, I think it will be hard for me to avoid tears, even though none of them is Charlotte’s Web.  Partly that’s because I will regret that Mom wasn’t able to give many more gifts to her grandchildren, gifts of books and learning toys and words of wisdom, but there’s deeper reason.  I will always read these few precious gifts to my children when they ask to hear them, but I will always wish that another voice, a softer and wiser voice, were reading them instead.

The Fix Is In

Published 21 years, 4 months past

I feel kind of honored whenever I find out a browser’s been altered (hopefully fixed) as a result of something I’ve done.  Check out point (20) in Dave Hyatt’s recent Safari progress update.  Glee!  I could also feel good about point (19), which I reported as a bug a while back, but I apparently they’d known about it long before I noticed it.  To see that bug in action, drop by the XFN profile document.

My optimism on Sunday regarding Libya may have been misplaced, it seems—or was it?  It’s hard to tell, and CNN isn’t much help, since it’s provided information on both sides of the fence.  In a summation article regarding an interview Gadhafi gave to CNN, it was stated:

Asked about his decision, Gadhafi acknowledged that the Iraq war may have influenced him, but he insisted he wanted to focus on the “positive.”

For that matter, the title of the article was “Gadhafi: Iraq war may have influenced WMD decision.”  That was on Monday.  I went looking for a full transcript, because I wanted to see exactly what was said, but didn’t find one.  When I went back again to look on Tuesday, the article had been updated and did not contain the above paragraph.  It instead stated:

Asked about his decision to dismantle programs and whether the Iraq war or the capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may have influenced him, Gadhafi questioned why Iraq had to be his role model.

The title had been updated as well, now to “Gadhafi hopes for new era of U.S.-Libya relations.”  Still no transcript.

Notice that in neither case was Gadhafi’s answer on the subject of the war’s influence actually quoted.  So in the absence of video of that segment of the interview, or else a detailed transcript, I’m left wondering just what the hell he really said, and whether or not I should retract some of the things I said on Sunday.

So I’ll punt on the whole thing, and just share The Hoser with everyone.  Merry Christmas, eh?

Out Of The Cradle

Published 21 years, 4 months past

As someone who studied 20th Century geopolitics in college, I’m quite fascinated by the latest news from Libya, which I had long assumed would only change course when Gadhafi left office (one way or the other).  To see a leader—any leader—take such steps is quite frankly astonishing; I feel like next thing will be Kim Jong-Il announcing that the whole nuclear-weapons inspection problem there was a big misunderstanding and he’d really like to get it all cleared up so McDonald’s can start opening some Pyongyang branches.

I’m even more fascinated by two things that will probably raise my Total Information Awareness rating for even mentioning them:

  1. The willingness of the Bush administration to support IAEA inspections in Libya (and Iran) when it denounced them as being useless in Iraq.  What’s the difference, I wonder?
  2. It would appear that, given enough patience, economic sanctions do in fact work, contrary to the administration’s claims when building a case for attacking Iraq.  You have to be in it for the long haul, but in the end they pay off.  After all, it seems that the sanctions imposed on Libya in the late Eighties were a motivating force in Gadhafi’s recent decisions.  Not the threat of attack, which Libya hasn’t faced from the U.S. since Reagan left office.  Just plain old exclusion from the global economy.  (Dissenters might point to Cuba as proof that this isn’t true, except Cuba is only excluded from the American economy, not the global economy.)

I’m not seeking to excuse Libya’s role in the downing of Pan Am 103, but then I could hardly do so: they admitted to it earlier this year, and explained their motivations.  Whether or not I agree with them is beside the point I’m trying to make here.  The real point, at least to me, is that Libya is on a course that I could hardly have imagined a week or two ago.  It gives me a smidgen of hope that humanity might be a little more grown-up than I tend to believe.

My deepest wish is that this starts a change in the way diplomacy is conducted in the future, and how nations choose to deal with the skeletons in their closets.  Right next to that is my hope that America responds to these moves positively and with a willingness to negotiate, to compromise if necessary.  We have to leave behind poisonous concepts like “unconditional surrender” and start working with leaders who want to act responsibly.  Given the increasing ease with which massively destructive weapons can be created, the future of humanity could very well depend on it.

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