April 2002 Archives

Dave has put up a fast loading version of Scripting News, as their static server is down. I have to admit whenever I see this version of Scripting News, I’m taken back to 1996, ‘97 when SN was small and fast. It makes me want to rip the images off my site and strip it down to nothing. FAST FAST FAST!

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.
- Frank Zappa

Robert X Cringely is a tech columnist for PBS. This week his son died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), while lying in Robert’s lap as he did his email. It’s… horrible. My thoughts and prayers go out to Robert and his family.

Robert is starting a quest for a monitor that can help advance medical knowledge of SIDS, and hopefully one day lead to a device that can predict it. As he says:

The old, broken-down engineer in me says it is time to build something.

Looks like Macromedia has got their whole lineup out in the new MX form now. I know Dreamweaver now runs on OS X (that link also has all the other areas that were improved in MX).

Update: Dreamweaver and Fireworks MX are in preview now - they’e not shipping them yet. You can download trial versions however.

Apple announces the new eMac: the education iMac.

Of course, this is the iMac everyone wanted a few years ago.

Wow. Apple’s introduced new Powerbooks again:

Wow.

Ah.. Sunday afternoon. Nice lazy day. Jodi and I had a really full Saturday: we got up at 5 o’clock to go hiking at Squaw Peak. That about killed me, but I’m getting better. Squaw Peak is about an hour hike to the summit, but it’s all going up - with no respite, it’s like climbing stairs. By the time I got to the top I had almost vomitted, and my legs were so rubbery I about fell off the mountain (the top is all crags - you have to be mountain goat to stay put!) The view, however, is awesome - you can really get an idea of how huge the Phoenix valley is.

Afterwards we had a church meeting over lunch. Then we went home and crashed for an hour or so (boy did we need naps!) Then we got up and worked around the house - I finished running the new coax cable from the wall in the guest bedroom, through the closet, over into the office closet, and to the cable modem and router. We finished cleaning up the office and set up the desk and the old Mac tower (Blue and White G3 for those who care).

Today after church we finally bought a lawnmower, and stopped at the Chandler Fashion Center Apple Store, and bought a LaCie FireWire CD-RW drive. We needed a backup solution, which we’ve been living without for 3 years. Also, Jodi is really getting into iTunes and iPhoto, and this drive will be seeing a lot of action. -)

Well, I’m updating to Mac OS X 10.1.4 right now, so I have to reboot.

Oooooh, M$ has gotta HATE this, from IBM:

Together these two solve the problem of letting employees use Outlook on their PCs while connecting with their non-Microsoft e-mail servers.

Exchange is one of Microsofts biggest weapons in the war for lock-in.

I had to add a new command to Sid: “Add Markup” opens a window with a single field, where you can put a tagname (I use it for ‘blockquote’ a lot) and Sid will insert it, or wrap the currently selected text with that tag.

Ok, follow me here. Jenny at The Shifted Librarian asked why people use Google over the local library when researching.

Brandon commented:

[his students], strangely enough, find that availability on the net is a greater indicator of credibility than passing through traditional publishing gates.

Your Web of Trust is a network of reviewers whose reviews and ratings you have consistently found to be valuable.

The Web of Trust mimics the way people share word-of-mouth advice every day. Friends have a proven track record. If a friend consistently gives you good advice, you’re likely to believe that person’s suggestions in the future.

You know which preferences you and your friend share. If you both like the same types of films, you’re more likely to trust your friend’s recommendations on what to see.

So… what does that have to do with blogs and librarians? Blogs often include lists of links to other sites the user visits or likes - this is an implicit web of trust. Google uses this information (for all sites, not just blogs) for its PageRank™. However, Google’s algorithm is a bit shaky (for this idea) because a link doesn’t contain any context as to why you’re linking to the site - it could be becuasee you think the site’s authors are morons!

So… enter a blog-powered Web Of Trust where not only does one link to sites, but one can annotate that link with concepts or keyword for which the site is considered by the user to be a credible resource. Search engines could factor this information in when crawling sites, leading to more efficient topical information retrieval.

Can be seen on the Sid page.

Thanks to Iconfactory I now have a simple icons for Sid’s .conv documents. Cooool. It’s amazing how much more “real” your app looks with that little icon at the top of the document window…

Ok, I’ve also uploaded the new version of Sid here (Mac OS X disk image), for those of you brave enough to try it. That means, you, Jim and Greg. -)

Thanks to Iconfactory I now have a simple icon for Sid’s .conv documents. Cooool. It’s amazing how much more “real” your app looks with that little icon at the top of the document window…

Ok, I’ve also uploaded the new version of Sid here (Mac OS X disk image), for those of you brave enough to try it. That means, you, Jim and Greg. -)

This is the body. I’m tired of test posts, and i bet you are too!

Yes, each conversation document in Sid now has a working history. When you post to your site, Sid keeps a copy of the post. You can slide out the history drawer, load a previous post, edit it, and Sid will post the edits to the site, and save them back to the history as well.

I think I’m going to call this feature freeze, and try to work on 1) a better name for Sid, and 2) nice icons. -).

Well, ok, not quite feature freeze. heh. I want to add a button that lets you clear the form if you accidentally load a post to edit, but change your mind.

yes, again. this is an edit.

yes, again. edited. again

Mark Pilgrim describes his own, and my, gardening abilities:

My aptitude with plants can only be described in the negative. Take all the qualities of a good gardener, and negate them, and that’s me. … I have telepathic powers that can kill plants just by looking at them. I can burn out a lawn in a hurricane. I am the opposite of a “green thumb”.

sorry folks.

For any webobjects-developers out there who are irc-inclined, I (for the moment) am running #wodev on irc.openprojects.net. Drop in if you want. Not sure how long it’ll be up, as I haven’t managed to get it registered yet.

Sid now maintains a history of previous posts, and can load an old post into the form for editing. Next up is to re-jig the posting code to post an edited message as such.

ugh. DateFormatters are a pain in the butt.

unfortunately i can’t test Sid without posting a bunch of bogus messages to the site. I’ll delete them later. Sorry for the email clutter.

testing Sid

testing Sid.

foo

Well, our DVD player finally showed up! Woohoo! (Darn that cheap ground shipping. -)) So I’m reading the manual, and watching True Lies.

Tim Berners-Lee at the 10th International Python Conference:

His proposal created a native graph data type that looked a bit like dictionaries, but allowed for storage of triples to represent a graph. He proposed a syntax like:

x = {sky color blue,gray; madeof air. sea color grey. gray sameAs grey}

From the above, we would have five arcs: sky color blue, sky color gray, sky madeof air, sea color grey, and gray sameAs grey. We would then be able to perform simple queries on the graph.

This would be really cool to see - languages beginning to adopt the high-level concepts that will make it easy for developers to express complex information efficiently.

I’ve been working on Sid (obviously) for the last couple of days - I made some (finally) very nice improvements to the interface. In the last few versions, the settings for the conversation were done in a drawer. The drawer was almost as large as the document window, which was awkward and just not elegant.

So I decided to change the interface to a set of tabs: Post, Preview, and Settings. Post obviously has the form for posting, Preview gives you a preview of the body of your post, rendering the HTML, and Settings replaces the old drawer with a tab. It’s quite nice actually.

I’ll be releasing version 0.8 sometime today, so check back if you’re interested.

Woohoo! Sid now lets me italicize, bold, and underline, as well as link.

… of Sid’s weblogs.com ping. One ping only Vasily.

Ok, I took a little while to get Sid up and running again, and I’ve added a few enhancements. Sid now has the option to ping weblogs.com when posting to your Conversant weblog. Fun fun fun!

please ignore

Boy, wish our cable modem could fly.

Brad points to this cutie - the Cubik is the world’s smallest megapixel digital camera. Neat!

Could this be this century’s Brownie?

Yay! I managed to get Sid, my Cocoa-based Conversant posting utility compiled again. I lost some of the more recent work on it, but I’ve since changed the way I categorize posts, so the missing functionality is not missed.

Jodi and I have decided to get a digital camera. Specifically, we’ve decided on the Canon Powershot S30. We had settled on the Nikon Coolpix 775, but switched to the Canon for the following reasons:

So, now we need to find a good deal on it. Actually, I just found out that I’m getting a nice check from a client, so I may skip good deal and go for convenience. ;-) Still, I’d like to hear from someone with experience finding good deals with reputable retailers online.

For the Mac OS X programming weenies out there: Project Builder 2 is coming… This new release will be many times more configurable, and hopefully faster! [thx Jim]

Clark Venable, a client of Macrobyte’s, checked out my outline renderers, and reports:

Steve, Got it working. I’m writing all my grants this way now. Thanks!

Clark, you’re welcome!!

Ok, I got up this am to find that at 10:00 pm last night a co-worker had deployed my most recent app… gah! Fortunately, it’s a low-traffic site. However, later on I’m watching the logs and suddenly I’m watching the app go into an infinite loop. Akk!

Sigh. I finally worked it out, but the fix involved 1) finding the right place to redirect the app to at a certain point, 2) make the fix, 3) commit the changes to CVS, 4) checkout and build the app on the staging server, 5) rcopy the built app to the deployment server, and 6) restart the application instances.

Ugh. Of course, all the while the terminal that’s tailing the logs is spouting log messages… hurry… hurry… hurry…

Rafe nails it over on rc3.org:

If you ask me, there’s nothing more unsettling than the idea that some person believes that blowing up others is so important that they willingly give their life in the process, and indeed, by design. That’s a sort of nihilism and fervor that I’m not really prepared to deal with psychologically.

There are a lot of other things about this whole Israel/Palestinian war that I don’t comprehend, but this has to be one of the hardest to fathom.

Thanks to the recent improvements in OmniOutliner’s scripting interface, I’ve managed to sucessfully write an outline renderer in AppleScript that outputs nicely structured HTML. Woohoo! My ability and motivation to write longer and more thoughtful pieces for this site just improved dramatically. Learn more here.

OmniOutliner Renderers has been moved to its own page.

bar

Morning notes… Got the first cuppa coffee, soon everything will be juuuuusst fiiiiine.

In other news, Jim mentions the Canadian soldiers that got bombed by a US F-16 pilot with an itchy trigger finger. This is so sad. My heart goes out to the families of the dead and injured.

It’s going to be hard for the Gov’mint to build coalitions if we keep dropping bombs on our allies’ heads.

Note to Dave - Mark may have said he does not like outliners; however, he DOES understand the power of an outliner:

I like to edit Python code in an IDE (or in Emacs in python-mode), which autoindents for me and allows me to “fold” code blocks (collapse an outline node) that I’m not currently using.

He’s already got what you’re offering him in Radio’s outliner (the one Frontier programmers all love)- but without the ability to easily edit that same script in some other text editor.

Paolo on the Semantic web (though he doesn’t know it):

Basically what is happening is that every piece of information, every idea, every concept, every document is getting its own url. You can access it and reuse it.

Mark Pilgrim investigates OPML. He makes some of the same observations that I’ve made in the past (unfortunately I don’t believe I published any of them, so go read his).

OPML is a nice idea, but is limited by Dave’s view that XML circa 1998 is all anyone should ever need, and his dislike for namespaces and subsequent refusal to update Frontier XML parser to support them.

For the record: having an xml-based outline format is an excellent idea! XML is perfect for describing hierarchies. Of course, an outline is often pretty boring unless you can also describe what the nodes represent. So Dave came up with nodetypes. Nodetypes allow you to say “this node represents an mp3 file” or “this node represents a Manila website structure”. This also is an excellent idea. However…

In order to be XML compatible/compliant, (and I DO mean XML circa 1998 or thereabouts) OPML needs to have a DTD against which strict parsers can validate the document. However (and I can’t find the reference at this time) OPML does not define what attributes can or cannot appear in an <outline> node. The only required attribute is the “text” attribute which contains the text of the outline heading. This is a problem because each nodetype uses a seperate set of attributes contained in the <outline> node to store information. This makes it impossible to develop a DTD for any OPML file because it may contain arbitrary attributes on a node.

The accepted solution to this problem in 98% of the XML-using world would be to break out nodetypes into their own namespaces. Define OPML-the-structred-document as simply as possible: <opml>, <head>, <body>, <outline>. Then, let applications thereof define their own elements and attributes, point those namespaces at their own DTDs, and then a parser that cares about such things can compare the OPML document to the included DTDs, and be happy. Meanwhile, parsers that don’t care could ignore the DTDs and keep right on going.

Of course, Frontier’s parser has not changed much since being “kernelized” a while back, and it does not support namespaces. So no Userland XML will ever make use of them, which is sad because I think XML Namespaces have “grown up” since their introduction, and are a big part of taking the web to the next step.

This afternoon the Coyotes beat the Nashville Predators to end at 6th place. I never cared about hockey (inspite of Jim’s obsession with it ;-)) until recently - having an NHL team in town is kinda cool. Still, where DO they get names for these teams? I mean, the “Predators”? Oy.

Well, we’ve been building a small DVD library, today we finally decided on a DVD player. Amazon is running a sale on DVD players, and we had a gift certificate (for Christmas last year) from Jodi’s brother. So we got this Toshiba SD4700. It plays DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, CD, MP3, CD-R/RW and DVD-R, so I think it’s going to grow as our system does.

I was looking through my referer logs today, and noticed a new entry: turns out it’s a new blog by an old buddy - Chris Ruzin is another designo-geek I knew back in my days in Germany. Looks like he’s back in the states and looking for work: if you need such a one as him, check out his resume.

One of my co-workers is somewhat of a lyricist/songwriter/singer. I’ve been listening to his demos for a few days now, and I’m pretty impressed. The demos are rough, to be sure (and “Johnny’s voice is an acquired taste”), but his stuff gets in your head and doesn’t leave. Esp. check out 3 Days, Bookworm, and South Mountain.

While I think it was a great idea, I can’t help but think that it would have been very easy to make this a lot more flexible.

weblogData.callbacks.rssFilterDescription could have been weblogData.callbacks.rssFilterField; then the callbacks would be put in rssFilterField.[fieldName]. Then users could filter the item titles, links, or descriptions (or whatever other fields Dave’s adding to RSS these days).

[via the Google Blog] Yay! Google announces a new SOAP-based api for programmers to write applications that access Google.

[via Dave] This joke is for Jodi… Love ya hon!

[via Anita’s LOL] Adam Felber, comedian and regular panelist on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on NPR, has a blog! A sample:

Last night’s Academy Awards ceremony, one of the longest in recent memory, showed us a Hollywood that was forced to take a good long look at itself and its priorities in the wake of September 11th… …and came to the conclusion that they were even more important than they’d previously thought.

Eric Olsen (via Dave) on blogs:

As the volume of blogs has ballooned well into six-figures, the need for links from “star” blogs has become an absolute requirement to be noticed.

Many bloggers I know, including myself, started before “blogging” was, and did so for the joy of having a voice, NOT because they got noticed. I would probably keep doing this even if no one ever read it. (Heck, practically no one does now!)

Boy my brain is tired. I’ve spent most of today trying to comprehend the Charlie Foxtrot that is my company’s main database. The business rules involved are insanely complex, and are giving my a Grade-A headache. Oy.

On another note, Mark has put up his pics from the BBQ. Cool.

Anyone who has done a modicum of software design is familiar with use cases - (usually) short blurbs that describe all the ways the software can be used.

In an article on evolt, the author presents some interesting use cases for blogs. (The zope-specific parts are only moderately interesting to me.)

If you have a mind to implement a blogging system, check this out.

This article in the NYTimes includes a comment on the origin of the name of Google’s mystically powerful PageRank™:

The cornerstone of Google’s search technology is something it calls Page Rank (after Larry Page, not Web page).

Heh. I learn something new every day.

Brad got his photos from the AZ(+NY) blogger bbq (“blog-b-q?”) up online. My vote for best pic: Damien wows us with New York mouse pads (“3D!”).

Damien and Brad finally showed up. After a great dinner of teryaki chicken and (slightly tough to be honest) steaks, we’re sitting down for a bit o’ Taboo…

Update: Oh my god. What a gas. Kenda (local friend who was over and stuck around for the party) rocked us all in Taboo, and we had such fun. What a bunch of freaks.

I have one word for you, Brad: screw.

Damien is working on his email… Mark just posted a picture of our BBQ (call the fire department!)

Well, it’s started! Mark and his wife Kim got here first. TiBook count: 2.

Esther Dyson is quoted on Evhead:

“A conference is always an attempt to orchestrate. Now, it is also something to annotate.”

I’ve been using Launchbar from Objective Development for a few weeks now. All I can say is… DAAamn. That’s a FINE pice of software. Launchbar indexes all your applications and documents (all configurable) and then gives you access to each of them in as little as 3 keystrokes.

Cmd-shift activates LB, then usually typing the first two or three letters of an application will select it. Hitting enter launches it. Didn’t get the right app? Next time, instead of hitting enter, pick the right one from Launchbar’s dropdown menu, then hit enter. After that, LB will launch the one you want. It learns, in a surprisingly efficient way, what you want it to do. Rock on!

I totally ripped the title off from some other blog, or movie. Anyway, my life has been too dominated by work, and a few other things, to post lately. But here I am.

Our AZNY blogmeet has expanded once again! Welcome to Angie, hostess of the very blue blue shoe diaries. Now Jodi and Kim (wife of Mark) won’t be the only gals. Yay!

I’m really stoked about this. Yesterday I was about to hang up my blog for a while, but today I feel re-energized and ready to post! Of course