inflight correction

:Archive Of January 2003:

Wednesday, January 29, 2003 - 6:35 PM -

Nooooo... Opera 7 does not work properly with my mouse gesture software. That I've used for years. That works in every other application. Goddammit.

Other than that, it interprets font size a little different from 6 in one instance so far. I'll have to look into that later.

But my god, I'm not giving up my mouse software. What the hell did they do to screw up such a simple program? (It makes a plain mouse act just like a wheel mouse. It's indispensible. And yes, yes, I made sure their own gestureware is off.)

Hard decision time ahead. I'm one of the Opera users who's put up with its crappy DOM/Mail/PlugIn support because it was so good at everything else. Been waiting for 7 to fix the last holes and give me the perfect browser. And.I.Can't.Scroll.

Monday, January 27, 2003 - 4:49 PM -

Interesting. There's a web standards Meetup on Thursday, Feb 6.

Friday, January 24, 2003 - 12:38 PM -

Speaking of the paypal begging-cup phenomenon, let's get wet.

Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 12:19 AM -

neglected mention:

Ian Lloyd has done a lovely thing at Accessify.com which must be placed in the unglued.
Dean Allen has created the brilliant Textile.
I like handmade audio extremism.
An illustrated "atlas" of the growth of the US from the original 13 states. Ten minutes that are immensely helpful in understanding a complex and important nation. Ten minutes that succeed where years of school fail. Hm. Nice tool.
Alongside, Celestia, vastly underdescribed as a 3D Space Simulator. Fire that up and run the demo. Then play with it. Then think about computers and education.
Have I mentioned Y.H.Chang and Hoogerbrugge lately? For pete's sakes, what's the matter with me?
"..." has an ASCII value greater than 127 and  should be used instead. Eh? Why have I never noticed this before?
Yikes. Big web exhibition of Eames at the Library of Congress. Also Ukiyo-e and Frank Lloyd Wright.
A pox on browsers that don't reload everything with Refresh. Won't someone think of the developers?
I often just look the other way and redesign rather than dissect and catalogue a new browser bug. IE6 is my favorite for this. The thing is bottomless.
If I can't have a world with browsers that work, could I have one where Amon Tobin makes a soundtrack for each bug?
Darn it, that is cute. I want a robot bear that sits placidly and rolls to get around.
Salman Rushdie on the mark, as usual. He also speaks as well as he writes. Never miss either opportunity.
Mistake-Proofing. I so have to read more on this. I particularly like when it's leading behavior rather than blocking behavior, like this one.
Yup.

Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 12:15 AM -

The big book.

Information fascinates me.

The table, for example, is a highly refined form. At some point I'd like to find a treatise on it, and to discuss how the blind deal with that x/y info meal.

And former blue babies, perhaps. Someone who is one told me they cannot visualize. (I was explaining the planned renovation of her neighbour's garage at the time.) I am baffled trying to imagine how else one imagines.

Information… "Any difference that makes a difference."

Wednesday, January 15, 2003 - 9:21 PM -

Silly things. Lots_of_silly_things. Yay!

- 1:47 AM -

And tonight, i am thinking of salmon.

Mmm, salmon.

I'm like that. Can't open a tin without wondering about this silver thread through our ecosystem. (Actually, everything forms a thread. The whole thing is a ball of yarn. But somehow people can work with the salmon concept, so the fish became poster-child for eco-education. Kinda like all the furry creatures put on your toddler things. Simple enticement for the young mind. That's where we are with biology as a culture. But shush, I'm on a roll here.) And wondering about the industry, all the human dramas in making decisions so that your job/factory/boat/city survives competing against a geographically removed mirror that would like to take your place.

And that overall, I like to eat them. Got a funny thing about meat: i'm healthy on it. Bright eyes, glossy fur, and wet nose. And I don't like eating my fellow critters because you have to kill them, and I particularly don't like the ghastly amount of grain/power/pollution/etc that goes with domestic meat on our shrinking planet. This is plenty to put me quite against eating meat. And forget the medically questionable stuff the industry puts in the meat. That is quite literally just gravy on the reasons not to eat it.

And yet i've tried a no-meat diet so many times without success that I really can't say but that I'm a meat eater. An omnivore that doesn't do so well when meat is not present. (--kind folks are not to write me with culinary advice. I tried. I studied. I can quote realms of dietary data and philosophy. It just doesn't work for me. Like "8 hours of sleep" is an average, not a minimum; some people need more to stay healthy.)

Which means I don't get to feel smug and superior. I get reluctance and regret, tempered by acceptance and a short attention span. Sorry, positivism.

But even that is something. Reluctance is better than savage innocence. We're evolving, though it's damn slow for some of us.

Tuesday, January 14, 2003 - 10:59 PM -

You know, all the buzz around XHTML 2 seems to center that things will be fine if only the W3C would give it a different name to establish that it is not the XHTML 1 replacement, as one would expect version numbers indicate. ...Surely an organization like the W3C has a procedural handbook, and something as pedantic as version numbering would be defined in it. Anybody know if that's available somewhere? It'd could provide useful assurance or distress.

Meanwhile we do have their definition of a Working Draft, and they mean it quite literally:

"Publication of a Working Draft is not an assertion of consensus, of endorsement, or of technical and editorial quality. Consensus is not a prerequisite for approval to publish; the Working Group may request publication of a Working Draft even if it is unstable and does not meet all Working Group requirements. Ongoing work: Once a Working Draft has been published, the Working Group should continue to develop it by encouraging review and feedback within and outside of W3C."

Sunday, January 12, 2003 - 9:32 PM -

Around 8pm the last cup was drunk. Autopsy reveals Mr Braun has a terminal crack across the heating element. Mr Braun was the last of the Java Coffeehouse coffeemakers, and had himself survived since the closing of the shop four years ago by many organ transplants from his siblings. End of an Era. Very fine coffee is being brewed in Hell tonight.

</personal for friends>

- 7:50 PM -

Okay, Konqueror 3.0.4 is not blocked by that method (thanks, Knoppix). Fortunately it doesn't make complete hash of my site, either.

- 6:49 PM -

All right. I'm finally digging into this Safari nonsense. Mark appears to have collected the kickass resource, bless him.

What I really want to know is if import with quotes and brackets [ @import url("css/real.css") ] hides the stylesheet from Safari?

I see from my notes that this method blocks Konqueror 2.1.2, but the resource that I'd thought I'd gotten that gem from actually lists 2.1.1, and claims it is not blocked by this method. Oh dear. Two mysteries.

Are you running either browser right now? Are you getting a plain page or a styled page?

Meanwhile I'm choking down real venom at Apple. Yes, it's a beta. Yes, the Apple team can do great things for the Konqueror browser. But they shouted it from the mountain of MacWorld and are pushing it to the planet on their marketing page. People are going to download it who haven't a clue what beta means. And I do not have OSX among the four monitors on my desk. Santa skipped this block this year.

So, yeah, I'm kind of peeved. Release an OS specific browser that doesn't have full standards support. Good one, Apple. Won't somebody think of the developers?

[And don't tell me it's fast. It's a crippled browser. Race it against Lynx.]

</grrr>

- 3:56 PM -

Augh! That's the sound of my printer cartridge evaporating under a site's print stylesheet putting out large text suited only to primary readers. Man, I miss 'Print Version' pages.

I've got to find time to look into this. I'm hitting it more often lately. Is it an Opera bug or a printer bug or are designers actually specifying that font treatment?

Opera does let you shut off CSS, but not for printing. Preview does show a ridiculously oversized P font. Hmm. A long time ago if you reduced font size in Opera, this would pass to the printer, but that was dropped somewhere around version 5. Too bad.

The junk I just ripped out of the printer is twice the size of what's on the screen, and twice the size I happily read in books and magazines and newspapers. Plus almost half the page width has been wasted on margins. Completely useless and expensive. I need more hours in the day.

Monday, January 6, 2003 - 5:33 PM -

Yow. Past exhibits at the University of California Art Museum. Found via gmtPlus9, which if it isn't a daily visit for you already, it should be.

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