Monthly Archives: June 2003

Random Thoughts: Jukebox, Zen Garden, Bull

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Globecom Jukebox: Why use Globecom Jukebox. Since the GJukebox UI is entirely browser based you can run it on a Linux box and control it over the network, without needing to install strange software on the desktop machine. This is obviously useful when the GJukebox is shared by multiple users in an office. It’s also perfect for the average home user with a simple home network. The neverending quest to build a web-based MP3 jukebox continues. I’m looking for something that will run on a P-100 with 96 MB of RAM on Linux with a web interface–for free. This is the closest thing I’ve found (via Slashdot). ∂

Jai Brinkofski: Here we go again…. You�d think I�d be used to this by now… this being laid off gig… I know this job was only supposed to be a 6 week job, but it had turned into a 9 week job, and was supposed to turn into a 14 week job, but alas… the project is cut off, and so am I. Tommorow will be my last day here at Medco. Jai was actually rehired again a short while ago–no matter: hire this man. He’s a nice guy. He won’t break your project. He’s funny, too. ∂

Thinking: maybe I should be posting the Ironworks meeting notes from three weeks ago rather than blogging. Or calling my professor about our senior project. (Okay, I just did and got cut off mid-conversation). Speaking of our senior project, it’s pretty much over, but my team is awaiting evaluation. I’ve since archived the site in an attempt to clean up some of this suddenly-shrinking web space we have. ∂

Nickel Creek is offering a free, live performance at AOL Sessions. They sound okay, but there’s something about raw, unproduced music without an audience around that just doesn’t feel right. (Via Tom, who needs a blog). ∂

Looking: at Dave Shea’s excellent CSS Zen Garden for design ideas. There’s plenty of them to be had there. For example (and CSS-heads will scoff, but I didn’t know this), you can set up div’s around sections of a page to identify it and then control all of the HTML elements nested inside that section. What I had been doing is giving every tag in my markup a class or id that associates back to something explicitly declared in my stylesheet–very tedious. ∂

Speaking of Dave, his blog is quite good. I’ve been trying to do some research to try to understand layout and design and–while I’ll probably always be a layman on this topic–at least Dave’s insight will give me a head-start. ∂

I’m have excessive amounts of fun with the Mig software I downloaded recently. Three galleries have been posted: Bermuda, Katie’s Recital, and the Engagement Photos. A Googler emailed in asking me to republish the Engagment Story–it was consumed when I shut down our NetIdentity account. Whoops. :) New, MT version coming soon. ∂

And finally…Deloitte & Touche: Bullfighter–Stripping the Bull out of Business. Bullfighter is software that runs in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, within Microsoft Office 2000 or XP. It works a lot like the spelling and grammar checker in those applications, but focuses on jargon and readability. Download it for free, or order a CD-ROM/book package. Then install it. It works great and has a surprisingly good sense of humor. Even provides a scale that allows you to gauge your bull-level in your documents–very clever. :) (Via C|Net Radio). Update: For fun, try to come up with as much church “bull” that you can think of–you know, all those words that you feel guilty using because no one could possibly know what you’re talking about, like “transubstantiation.” ∂

Catching Up: Rewrites, Ximian, and Mozilla

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I’ve been spending today just getting caught up on all the cool stuff I’ve missed while we were away. Mike was right–I wasn’t totally jonesing to get back on the Internet while we were on the cruise, but I was excited to come home and get caught up on what’s going on in people’s lives and in the world of technology.

Joel Spolsky: Things You Should Never Do, Part I. We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds. It’s been a while since I’ve thought practically about project management, which is probably why my redesign has been a dismal, laborious process. Perhaps it’s time for me to rethink the rewrite.

I originally approached the redesign with the idea in mind of cleaning out all of the cruft from my first efforts–you know, stuff that caused that weird bug where you couldn’t see the comments in IE6. But, truly, refactoring (well, that’s a heavy word for modifying HTML and CSS templates, but, whatever) is a much more efficient and deliverable method of an overhaul. Writing stuff from the ground up is fun at first, but is almost never done. This is where I’m at with the beta. I think over the next few weeks I’ll work on integrating the good ideas into my current templates (props to Jai for fixing my bugs) rather than scrap them for a hastily planned design. #

Speaking of rewrites, Ximian (um, that’s zee-mee-an, not Christ-mee-an) ;-) released the new version of their Ximian Desktop product based on the Gnome 2.0 code. I’m happy to report that I’m actually blogging from a Ximian Desktop 2 configuration over top my Redhat 9 installation on my laptop. What’s even better: I’m also using an antialiased RPM install of Mozilla Firebird so my browsing experience is just as good as Windows–but more on Mozilla later.

I totally dig the new XD2, although this is definitely a more evolutionary release rather than revolutionary. That’s okay, though: their first release of the Ximian Desktop was groundbreaking enough. :) The fonts are beautiful, and the panels handy and intelligent. They’ve done quite a bit of work on the face of OpenOffice as well–including nicer menus and buttons and reported compatibility with Microsoft Office–but that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Just downloading the thing took almost three hours of trial-and-error. There’s a lot of demand on those 15-or-so exclusive download mirror sites. My advice for those of you feeling adventurous: download just the core components of XD2, and do it from a country outside of the US. Once you’ve got the core install, adding OpenOffice is a cakewalk in RedCarpet. #

Ah, Mozilla Firebird. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

# Darin and I were discussing some of his chief issues with using Firebird, and he brought up the fact that he’s been unable to use his Intellimouse the same way he can in IE. A quick Google search pulled up AutoScroll at mozdev.org, a project specifically devoted to recreating the Intellimouse experience in XUL-based projects. As we chatted, I installed it on my laptop casually. It wasn’t until today that I realized how pleasant it was to have the middle-click scroll feature in Firebird. An extra bonus came when I was screwing around in Linux: AutoScroll works the exact same way in Firebird/Linux as it does in Firebird/Windows. Because I use an IBM trackpad 90% of the time, I’ve never been able to enjoy the AutoScroll feature anywhere in Linux–until today, and I get to use it in my most scrolled-around application: the browser. Well done!
# F11 means full-screen mode. It was a great idea when IE4 introduced it, and it’s implemented well in Firebird.
# I’ve also become infatuated with another plugin: the Web Developer toolbar. Resize your Firebird window to 800×600 with a dropdown menu, see the source code of a page in a new tab by pushing a button, validate a page on the fly, disable JavaScript or CSS on a given page. And it’s fully customizable with a right-click. A must have for the webpage designer or blog template hacker.
# An antialiased fonts build for Firebird in Linux is available here: XD2, RH9, and Firebird make for a sweet OS experience.
# Freecell as a tab within my browser.

Remember, too, if you’re going to install plugins in Linux that you may want to run this command on your Firebird folder: chmod -R 777 firebird. I don’t know if this carries with it severe security risks, but at least plugins will install without error. #

We’re Back!

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Seven days, 1,320 miles, 400 digital photos, and at least five pounds later, Sarah and I arrived back in New York City on Saturday. We had a great time in Bermuda and saw lots of great stuff. The stories are long, but sleep is short, so here are the highlights:

# We’re still rocking back and forth from the movement of the ocean. Going out and coming back was a bit rough due to the turbulent east-coast weather we’ve been having.
# We took a catamaran tour and went snorkeling–very fun.
# Tanned, but not burnt: seeing the sights and staying active kept us from spending any time at the beaches.
# Helmet-diving was very cool. We’ve got great underwater polaroids to scan.
# It’s hard to be a “deep” person when you’re constantly surrounded with the pressure to consume, consume, consume!
# Did a walking tour of St. George where we found really beautiful Anglican church ruins.
# Sarah had a great time at the Spa, while I discovered that I like running on a treadmill.
# Should have taken the 8:30 PM dinner seating rather than the 6:15 PM.
# We finished the second half of the first season of 24.
# Using the Internet was somewhat tempting, but not at $2 a minute.

Pictures can be found here, courtesy of Mig, a simple-but-it-works PHP-based image gallery package (props to PlugSocket technical support for finding an alternative to the configuration-heavy Gallery).

In a Nutshell

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Things you may want to know about Ken & Sarah today, abridged because we’re packing our bags in eight hours and being clever takes too long:

* Our anniversary is Sunday, so this weekend marks the production rollout of Husband 2.0, though, as Pastor Todd noted, our warranty is up. The fortune cookie version of my deep intellectual and spiritual insight from the past year is as follows: being married is a lot of fun, but be prepared to find out what kinds of buttheads you both are. ;-)

* We bought a digital camera (details here, here and here), and we totally love it. Sarah and I have been toting it with us everywhere we go to capture all those “special moments.” Watch this space for artsy, Dooce-inspired digital albums. :)

* The transmission blew on our ’93 Sunbird today as Sarah was driving through Chester. She was parked at a red light when the tranny disengaged, forcing her to coast into the Wendy’s parking lot and call AAA. All in all, it was about the best experience you could have as far as car break-downs go. We’re going to junk the “Mighty White Llama” if the garage wants to charge us any more than $500, which means Sarah gets my Accord and I ride the bus (at least for a while).

* In celebration of our anniversary, we’re going on a cruise to Bermuda. We board our ship at about 1:30 PM Saturday, so Our Story will be a bit quiet here until we get back. I thought about promising Sarah that I wouldn’t use the Internet while we were gone out of principle. Lofty ideals aside, I’m really just not going to use it because they charge $25 per day for 56K access. Lame.

Be back in a week!

w.bloggar

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So, I was finally, finally, finally getting down to blogging about the Matrix. I’ve been sitting here on the couch for the last three hours, writing in my own, brilliant, inimitable style. ;-) The ideas were flowing, my markup was precise, and I was just getting down to publishing the first draft for all the world to see. But, just before I get down to clicking that “Save” button, I decide to open a new tab and watch the Reloaded trailer just one more time to catch a quote that I wanted to include.

Now, I love my browser. Anyone who reads Our Story is quite aware of the fact that I think you all should download and install it now. :) But, Mozilla—as with any browser, or any software for that matter—is bound to fail every now and again. Less than 10 seconds into my trailer, an error message pops up and the Mozilla crashes, taking all those hundreds of hard-wrought words with it into digital oblivion.

After shouting the required explitives at the computer, beating the couch with my fist, and some good, old-fashioned pouting, I decided to go look for blogging client software that would—if nothing else—be able to save my posts with some degree of security greater than an HTML text-entry box. After some brief searching in this directory on Google, I rediscovered w.bloggar.

In addition to a “save” feature, w.bloggar can auto-highlight HTML code, provide me with a completely customizable preview of my entry, let me adjust my editing text size to a much more comfortable 14 point MS Trebuchet font, and even do some spell checking. It also features button-based HTML editing so I can auto-insert less-often used tags without looking them up or using trial-and-error. The software is quite stable (though with some very minor UI glitches) and, better yet, free.

I’m going to try to recall my Matrix entry and recover my sanity now. Happy blogging. :)

UnBroken

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Okay, I don’t know what I did with my template to make it break MT Macros, but, what’s done is done. Our Story will not be featuring this decidedly wicked cool MT plugin until the increasingly desirable redesign rolls out. In the meantime, I leave you without auto-generated graphic smileys or acronyms. ;-)