31 December 2003

Should I have been driving from body shop to body shop getting estimates, just to satisfy someone else’s desire for convenience? I think not. Instead I went to the Washington Auto Show yesterday and learned that the hatchback edition of the Mazda 6 is due in April. While General Motors was blatant about its corporate holdings, labeling the entryway The GM Experience (featuring OnStar, Hummer, and GMC up front and relegating Saturn and Buick to the back), one had to know a little something to catch on that the displays for Ford, Mercury, Lincoln, Mazda, Land Rover, and Jaguar were all in a line. Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz were in separate halls.

Today I purchased the domain hannaher.net and obtained hosting for the domain.

29 December 2003

Given how easily the Quadra 610 connected to the Internet yesterday, the continued failure of the PowerBook 1400 to do so must be counted as some fundamental defect in hardware or software, so I’m giving up on it. My computer-related achievement then becomes today’s installation of a networked printer which allows me to print from either of the Windows or Macintosh platforms. I think we’re going to need a bigger hub. Thanks, Airborne Express, for dropping the new printer off at my front door a day early. It’s just possible I was still asleep when it arrived.

28 December 2003

Snif. Apparently being Egg Yolk Yellow (on a beautiful sunny day) isn’t enough. My Ford Focus ZX5 was the victim of a hit-and-run collision sometime this afternoon that left a dent in the fender and spilled windshield washer fluid. There is binding when the front door is opened. Pieces of a taillight were left behind and there is only a small number of suspects in the secluded cul-de-sac where the incident took place.

My mature OS X-using relative is fully Panther-ized. She is enjoying the new Serbian keyboard which finally makes Microsoft Word a usable proposition.

I am the recipient of a Dr. Bott MoniSwitch/ADB4 and I gave it a try today with the Quadra 610 as the second computer. Although it connected to the Internet using Ethernet and DHCP with no problems, Netscape Communicator 4.04 quit at the slightest provocations. Yahoo! Mail was barely usable in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01. The maximum number of colors is 256, and even this number drops to 16 at the highest supported resolution of 1024×768. But it may play with the minds of webmasters here and there if Netscape Navigator 3.04 comes a-callin’.

20 December 2003

I’m beginning to think this whole Hallie Todd was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High thing is a legend. I want to see a screengrab, people.

19 December 2003

What exactly is so difficult to grasp? I object to use of your membership in a non-profit club to promote your business.

18 December 2003

The first brand-name computer from Serbia is announced. (Via an article at Glas Javnosti.) The company’s dealers’ service login page demands Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer, and while the page can be induced to load in Mozilla using the User Agent Switcher, whether the alternative browser can complete the forms is a question I cannot answer.

14 December 2003

What are you waiting for? This is an unBeatable opportunity! At the Barnes & Noble in downtown Lowell (a town I’m led to believe is in Massachusetts) this afternoon from one to three o’clock, authentic Jack Kerouac Bobblehead dolls (the exact ones I wrote about in August) will be sold one to a customer for $35 each. This and more is found at the official site for Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! The effusive thanks for the success of the sixteenth fest don’t seem to include any for the director of last October’s conference.

Searching for information about the Italian television journalist Maria Luisa Busi solidifies an unresearched opinion of mine that it must be dispiriting for any vaguely pretty female to enter public life and realize that her name will very quickly be taken up by the depraved around the world as a come-on for their less-than-legitimate activities. The minus operator attached to each of a generous selection of words meaning less than fully clothed (in all relevant languages!) almost seems mandatory to obtaining any decent information. It doesn’t help that RAI itself doesn’t seem to bother with biography pages for its staffers.

Yesterday there was a repeat of an episode of Studio 360 from last October with a report on the work of artist Nina Katchadourian and her car alarms made from bird sounds. At work, I am constantly tempted to leave at the wrong floor because, even though the elevator bleats whenever someone crosses the threshold and screeches with each floor passed, there is no motivation to count the screeches any more than anyone would count the screeches of an alarm clock. Now if the elevator chimed like a grandfather clock, it seemed to me, I might be tempted to count those and then know when I’d reached my floor. Perhaps a similar effect could be achieved by a dove’s coo or a monkey’s hoot? More about the artist and her work.

13 December 2003

A family member who pays more attention these days to the Italian news than I do alerts me that the reporter I identified as Lilli (not Lilly) Gruber is really Maria Luisa. A close perusal of the many photographs available at a site devoted to the finest television journalists in Italy would appear to confirm that red-haired Lilli Gruber cannot be fairly confused with the blonde Maria Luisa Busi. Maybe that’s why that page of mine wasn’t as high up in search results as the other reporter pages here.

I was just telling someone at work the other day that while we toil, the world changes around us. At the time, I was referring to alleged fire codes as applied to new construction that held a veto power over furniture arrangement down to the level of a single room in the name of egress width. But the observation is equally valid for almost anything, of course, including the Super 8 film format first introduced in 1965 and generally abandoned by amateurs in the early eighties. There are still some cartridges in my refrigerator of Kodachrome and Tri-X, bearing expiration dates in 1994, left over from my arc through the hobby. The address I have for Kodak Premium Processing in Dallas is no longer valid, it turns out, because Kodak some time ago consolidated all of its developing of amateur motion picture film in Switzerland. But the bigger surprise is that there are new emulsions from Kodak for the Super 8 format and that there are labs across the country ready to develop the film, including local entity Bono Film. My biggest regret is that Kodak’s monopoly position in amateur film at the time allowed their choice to not place prestriped sound film in cartridges for silent cameras to stand, essentially forever, since Kodak stopped manufacture of cartridges for sound cameras some years back citing environmental considerations and lack of demand. This choice, in the absence of any reliable post-striping business, hobbled the amateur filmmaker by preventing the inclusion of any footage from a silent camera into a sound film and mandating the use of bulky sound cameras whenever a desire for synchronized sound was foreseen. These days, Super 8 film is shot primarily with a view to scan it directly into video (especially since negative films like Kodak’s Vision 200T cannot be projected) and the absence of prestriped sound film is largely irrelevant.

12 December 2003

The auction site eBay changed the URL for viewing the auctions of any particular seller and at least three links on this web space needed changing and a find and replace all procedure on 13 links on the Members page at the WAMALUG site was required.

A Metafilter post about Norbert’s Online NES Emulator led me to the Java Arcade Emulator at the same site and a treasure trove of nostalgia for the arcade games of my relative youth: the Defender which Matt Dwyer couldn’t get enough of, the Red Baron that appealed to Victor Lavenstein, the Tempest that I played quite a bit before I, er, obtained steady employment, and the Star Trek that I played after obtaining said steady employment. The local arcade’s installation of the Star Trek game was the sit-down variety even. My taste for games cooled as the years passed. An Atari 5200 purchased almost solely because of the availability of a home edition of the Star Trek arcade game amused for a little while, then got sold. I bought Tracon through several versions (I even have a T-shirt of the box graphic for this air traffic control simulator—a genre which seems to retain some interest) for the WYSE computers running DOS. The Atari Arcade Hits CD-ROMs 1 and 2, while enough to inspire the purchase of a joystick for the Windows box, and a second joystick in an attempt to try to play Battlezone properly, ultimately served mostly as a source of system sounds.

09 December 2003

Hooray, deleting all copies of Safari and running the 10.2.8 installer again has restored functionality to the browser. As it happens, versions of Safari 1.1 in Serbian and of Apple Mail in Serbian are now available. Safari 1.1 is only usable in Panther (10.3), too bad. Konica and Minolta may very well have agreed to a business combination earlier this year, but that doesn’t mean I have to like getting a shipment from Konica Minolta Photo Imaging U.S.A., Inc. with my new Compact Flash Adapter for SD Memory Cards SD-CF1 and Close-Up Diffuser CD-1000.

08 December 2003

Installing the 10.2.8 update on a mature relative’s Mac has hosed her installation of Safari. If only the Pinstripe theme for Mozilla was available for version 1.5, it would help the pain.

06 December 2003

Always thinking about my pals. This time it was the pal whose financial sites didn’t play nice with Mozilla I wrote about earlier. I located a User Agent Switcher for Firebird and Mozilla which may help. (That one company still insists on Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5!) I even took the time to inspect the monthly logs of the club sites to craft a suitable user agent string for this pal [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)] before remembering that Windows ME is the OS in use in that household. Checking this comprehensive list of user agent strings—do you suppose that 4.90 is Millennium Edition?

03 December 2003

Here’s a screenshot of the new desktop wallpaper in use:

I have been running in 1600×1200 for quite a while now. Last week I got curious because I had espied the telltale image toolbar of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on the desktops of colleagues, so I checked and discovered that the baseline configurations at the office do not identify any version of Internet Explorer at all. Nevertheless, I made an inquiry and was told that 6 was pushed several months ago. Oh, well. So I don’t have IE5.5 handy in which to test web designs anymore, although there are now resources to install multiple versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer which I haven’t tried yet.

02 December 2003

No way. (Way. The compact disc is called Santa Claus Lane, and it’s $9.99 at Tower Records/Video. I was so positive the performer was too young to have anything in the Christmas music room. So much for my theories. This would be a bad time to draw attention to my list of recently purchased DVDs. At least her music-oriented business site acknowledges the prevalence of pop-up stoppers by letting visitors to the home page know that a new window was supposed to launch and including a link to follow if it was squashed. Great… it’s Flash. However the music is playing, it’s the best sounding streaming audio I’ve heard on this broadband connection yet.)

Mmm… obsolete video formats. I was idly following the links at the Internet Movie Database page for a certain television series and discovered that the actor who plays mother Jo once played, over 10 years earlier, the android daughter Lal in the The Offspring episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. Time to dig out the laserdisc; it was a bit like flipping through an old photo album—see how young everyone looked! I’m still trying to locate her in Fast Times at Ridgemont High… another laserdisc in the collection.

Well, well, well… it is the ninth item in the Terms of Use for the Paramount Digital Entertainment web site startrek.com that you may link only to the home page, and not to any other page, directory or subdomain of the Web Site. Seems a shame that Don’t Link to Us! site hasn’t been updated more recently.

I recently changed my desktop wallpaper at work to this image:

This very personal photograph may inspire some competition from the recent purchaser of a Ford next door. After all, surely the Canon EOS Digital Rebel and its 6.3 megapixel CMOS sensor can give ordinary Fujicolor Super HQ 100 film from a Minolta Maxxum 7 a run? Can’t it? Or does the right time of day and the right composition (I have scanned from the left edge of the negative to place the desktop shortcuts atop the trees, but the waist-level point of view was deliberate) and a clean vehicle count for something?

I recently agreed to an upgrade to my AOL Instant Messenger client on the Windows side and started to get prompts for scripts and ActiveX controls. Seems the program is using Internet Explorer to show its advertisements. That could have gotten real annoying, real fast, but the first No and the prompts do not reappear for that session.

26 November 2003

It took a night’s sleep to remember that retail stores have something called fitting rooms intended to head off just the sort of problem that I described in my previous dispatch. It has been a long time.

25 November 2003

Well, that’ll teach me to shop for clothing at a retail store, even if it is Lands’ End at Sears: I don’t know my own size.

I’m sure that the new BBEdit 7.1 is a great update of the Macintosh-only text editor, but I’ll have to stick to version 7.0.3 because on my System 9.1 setup, the Check Syntax command flags as an error every non-ASCII character even though the file is properly identified as UTF-8.

20 November 2003

Uh-oh, graceful degradation has hit my installation of Mozilla 1.2.1 on Mac OS 9.1. The last version of Mozilla to run on the Classic Macintosh operating system (also available using FTP) does not understand the pseudo-element syntax of double colons (for example, li#inlinenavgdepa::before { content: "<Prev"; } as found on my most recent television journalist page) which is planned as part of the CSS3 standard. Looks like I’ll have to leave the external hard drive on more often to test in SoftWindows98 and Mozilla 1.5 running on the same machine. Maybe I won’t switch from the previous syntax of a single colon at my other websites for a few months yet…

19 November 2003

Ack! Are AMC and Loews to merge?! Studio Briefing today highlighted published reports which suggested as much, and I found a few of those reports using Google News, but subsequently AMC issued a news release on the subject.

AMC Entertainment Inc. (AMEX: AEN), one of the world’s leading theatrical exhibition companies, confirmed today that it is engaged in preliminary discussions with Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation about a possible business combination.

Група Наше Писмо снашли су се после мало тешкоће на нови сајт, www.nasepismo.org, и сад имају вики, www.nasepismo.net.

18 November 2003

How dare the mozdev.org site relegate information about using plug-ins on older Macintosh operating systems to The Attic ! I was idly Googling a performer recently named in a dispatch below having learned from a recently purchased DVD that she was getting the full public relations treatment and, while Deutsche Welle allows listening to its emissions using RealPlayer8 as a plug-in or as an external player, MTV requires use of the media player as a plug-in and no amount of View Source and guessing URLs made any difference in trying to see the video segments offered at their page for this performer. Let the record show that copying the two files raclass.zip and RealPlayerG2 Plugin from System Folder/Extensions/Real to Applications (Mac OS 9)/Mozilla Folder/Plug-ins serves to enable RealPlayer8 as a plug-in in Mozilla. VH-1 has a similar page about this performer.

16 November 2003

The colleague has bought a domain name, obtained hosting, and outfitted himself with tools for FTP and image editing and begun to write pages for the site. Although my services are not for sale, apparently I can be swayed by a little feed and the opportunity to learn something new, so I have supplied some minor assistance. However, this client is keeping in mind visitors using Netscape Communicator 4 to the extent of spurning named entities like ’ in favor of the typewriter apostrophe ', so the channaher web design badge will not appear on the site. The version 4 edition of that browser was first released over 5 years ago, and it is my naïve theory that anyone buying a new computer with Windows XP pre-installed is not going to go to the trouble of installing that version with its pathetic rendering engine on such a modern machine—unless that person is a web designer, that is. I’ve placed a preliminary banner on the home page of this web space as a link to the new business. The latest crisis is the difficulty in displaying an image at actual size (it occurs to me later that we might have to resort to PDF) but the use of cascading style sheet rules to simulate a matted art work worked well enough.

I took the Focus on a trip out of state 2 weeks ago. I managed to get stuck in a massive backup, caused by a stopped truck along I–395 at South Capitol Street, which I joined in progress south of the Pentagon. That’s a stiff spring the Focus has got on the clutch. Oof! Other than that, I was able to maintain speed at the posted limits, especially on the return trip, and achieved 36 miles per gallon. While shy of the 39 mpg I used to get with the 626 on 65 mph highways, it’ll have to do. The Focus is still getting about 28 mpg around town. I miss the vent mode in the Mazda which blew outside air through the upper–level air conditioning outlets. There’s no air flow across the face in the Focus when the window is opened. However, the shift handle in the 626 used to vibrate with an insistent buzz at 65 mph, but the Focus maintains its aplomb. Although Egg Yolk Yellow is normally hard to miss, the color does disappear when viewed through amber sunglasses (and the car looks white).

Those pesky webmasters… can’t trust ’em. :-)

13 November 2003

So why don’t I have an uninterruptible power supply yet?

25 October 2003

When I wrote about collision damage to a 1988 Mazda 626 LX 5-door below, this is what I meant:

VIN: JM1GD242XJ1588267

As it happens, the clock in the databack of the Minolta Maxxum 700si was set incorrectly, so the actual date printed on the negative is wrong. So I pasted the 10s-place 2 over the offending numeral.

11 October 2003

The calls from Out of Area are coming more often once again.

10 October 2003

The colleague deserves no mercy. :-)

05 October 2003

Why would I buy a used car? And why is it so yellow? Much like those who suggested I buy a Pontiac Fiero back when that tiny, low, mid-engined, plastic-bodied car was hot, those who ask these questions know me less than they think they do. The most fundamental fact in the chain of circumstances that led to my taking the Green Line to Greenbelt and a series of Howard County buses to the Carmax location along US-1 north of Laurel is that the car of my dreams, the Mazda 6 in hatchback form, is not available in North America. Oh, sure, in Japan, in Ireland, in South Africa, lots of other places but not here. I even mention the expected time range of availabilty for the Mazda 6 hatchback on this continent in a previous disptach. So, the issue was framed as one of what to do for the intervening 6 months. I could have pushed the car-free existence, but darkness, rain, wind, and snow would have taken their toll. I’m reminded that Click & Clack recommend buying a used car (encapsulated in the penultimate chapter of their book, Car Talk) and my brother’s pioneering purchase of a used Ford Ranger XLT gave me confidence. I’ve been saving up for a new computer, as it happens, so the financial spreadsheets had a bit of money in them which could cover the cost of a used car but not a new one—enough money to buy a car? what kind of computer were you saving up for?! Anyway. I did look at pickup trucks because WamaLTC is sensitive to its reliance on a single, ailing van to transport its tables, but the lack of planned shows, the non-cozy, bench-seat atmosphere inside them, and the 1 out of 10 emissions rating that the EPA gives trucks in that class gave me pause. We’d walked past the Focus on a previous tour of Carmax locations, but at the time its price was above the budget number I had on that day. I’ve driven four-door hatchbacks for 18 years and apparently it’s difficult to break the habit. As a 2002 model, it has so far escaped the blizzard of recalls that afflicted the first years of the Focus over here. As for exterior color, I was over my hang-up after the first car, a 1985 Mazda 626 with a neat dark gray exterior but an increasingly unpleasant red interior, and my next purchase, the 1988 version, was chosen on the basis of its interior color: a handsome blue. Now that most cars have the same interior color (gray, gray, gray) and one can barely see the exterior color from inside anyway, it just didn’t matter to me. Yes, most every other color that the Focus comes in is prettier (especially the metallic ones) but Egg Yolk Yellow has its advantages in visibility and distinctiveness (it’s available only on the hatchback Foci, although I imagine the drivers of Mustang GTs and Escapes wish for a bit more exclusivity).

Of all the things I did while I was car-free—commuting to and from work, shopping for groceries, refinancing my home mortgage, shopping at Tower, working mornings and evenings to refurbish the web site of WAMALUG, shopping at Micro Center—one activity I gave up was visiting the public library. Instead, I started re-reading the paperback Star Trek novels on my bookshelves. Wow. Most of them were really bad. The one that had the most minor sheen of appeal ended quickly. They’re piling up on the first floor, on their way to the garage.

Just say no to Hilary Duff (as a singer). Her So Yesterday was playing over the speakers of the AMC Courthouse Plaza 8 as I left after seeing Lost in Translation nearly 2 weeks ago. Please tell me it’s not true that her album and this first single are selling well. Shudder. How do I know the song? The Listening Stations at Tower Records/Video are there to be used, after all.

21 September 2003

I suppose I should have mentioned this earlier, but I procured myself a vehicle 2 weeks ago. It’s a 2002 Ford Focus ZX5 in Egg Yolk Yellow. Recalculating with the new month, the financial spreadsheet showed that I was not limited to a price under ten thousand dollars. The 1999 Mazda B3000 SE I mention below had become available again, but I got to wondering just how often I would be hauling the tables of the WamaLTC since we have exactly zero events scheduled for the near and distant future. This way, I get a nominally five-passenger vehicle with real seats for everybody and a trunk that’s an inch wider than the one in the PT Cruiser. Upon the first fill-up sometime after purchasing the Focus, I calculated just over 28 miles per gallon, so that’s nice. A taillight was out (upon removal, I discovered it was the wrong type—good thing I caught that before the Virginia safety inspection) and it took about three-quarters of a gallon of windshield washer fluid. When I finally checked the air pressure this weekend, the tires were low six pounds all around. I installed a passenger cabin air filter (its omission one of the cost-saving measures of the North American Focus compared to the European models) and ordered another Prestige Plate Cover from AutoSport. It’s definitely narrower than the 1988 Mazda 626 LX 5-door it replaces (which a certain car facts company claims is already registered somewhere in the Virginia Beach area, with no mention of its collision damage) but the headroom and legroom is good, the DOHC 2.0 liter inline 4 with 5-speed manual transmission is peppy in the low gears, and it’s nicely equipped with moonroof and in-dash 6-CD changer. Built in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, sad to say for my pals who care about such things. But I am reassured that domestic ownership and management still counts for something. It is funny to come across a page at Ford’s site that lists its brands, I don’t think I can remember them all (but upon checking I did): Ford (cars and trucks), Mercury, Lincoln, Mazda, Volvo, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover. Whew! What a list! I am waiting for the Virginia registration to arrive before taking any pictures.

31 August 2003

Someone beat me to the 1999 Mazda B3000 SE extended cab pickup at the Laurel Carmax location. Without the pressure of a daily commute that would rely on my own wheels, apparently I feel that I can afford to be picky and so I spurned the humble B2500 SX regular cab with vinyl seats at the Dulles location.

20 August 2003

The BrickFest™ organizers may be impressed with the mentions of the event and of themselves in the media, but they have nothing, and I mean nothing, on the director of the Jack Kerouac Conference next October at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. At tomorrow’s game between the Lowell Spinners and the Williamsport Crosscutters, the first one thousand attendees arriving will receive a free bobblehead of Kerouac. This small fact was sufficiently bizarre that it became an international phenomenon and the director and her quotes ended up in reportage on websites both big and small. The Andover Townsman offers a different selection of quotes in describing the local event.

14 August 2003

WAMALUG may have its difficulties, but we’re not in court! Seems that there was a contested election to the Board of Directors at the software company that sold me an emulator last month which included a copy of Windows. SoftWindows is gone from the company’s site, and the powerwindows.html file is also not found. I wasn’t immediately interested in OS X versions of their programs, anyway, so I have less reason to be upset than others.

11 August 2003

The madness continues… a page at one or another of my web spaces currently the #1 hit at Google for the search amc hoffman center and the phrase прилично ради. Do you feel lucky?

09 August 2003

What’s the sitch? Thanks to closed captioning, I get it now: it must be a contraction for situation. Well, BrickFest is this weekend. Whatever enjoyment I had at the event in 2001 and at the event in 2002, and the riotous amateurishness of its website design this year, I could not reconcile that with the management of the event and I declined to volunteer, assist, register, or attend this year. Absolutely nothing has happened to make me regret those decisions. I find most ominous the announcement that BrickFest will expand early next year to a second event on the other coast. WAMALUG is already struggling with the, shall we say, distractions that constitute putting on just one BrickFest a year. I think it might be time to revive the proposal that no organizer of BrickFest shall be eligible to hold a position on the Board of WAMALUG. That’s bound to consolidate my fun-loving reputation in the group. I was actually close by the BrickFest location today, heading along the Orange Line to Fairfax for a haircut (where I was headed when I had the collision), photographs of the location (the glass and skid mark are gone, but a stray bolt remains―I remember it from that afternoon but don’t think it was from my car), thanks to the service department at Brown’s Fairfax Mazda for eighteen years of satisfaction (there is a tempting loyalty offer to current―and former, I am assured―owners of a Mazda vehicle, but the hatchback version of the Mazda 6 is not expected until next winter; despite the quick remark about Rain-X from the young man, this is a deal breaker for me―if I had wanted just a nice four-door car, I would have bought a Millenia 5 years ago―and I have to reconsider my options), and a stop at Micro Center for an external SCSI enclosure just in case I come across a random loose SCSI hard drive somewhere and wish to experiment with loading 9.2. Oh, and will the madness never end? I am now the #1 hit at Google for the search dagny hultgreen.

05 August 2003

It wasn’t my first inclination, I can tell you, to think that Comcast would have useful information about how to access its Personal Web Pages feature using something other than its own applet tools. With the impending change of URL structure (from mywebpages.comcast.net/channaher/ to home.comcast.net/~channaher/) locating this information was necessary. I did eventually locate what I needed and more at Comcast’s page for its subscribers about the personal web pages feature including the fact that the web space can be accessed as a subdomain: channaher.home.comcast.net. Sweet! I’ve added counters to all of the pages at that web space, too.

04 August 2003

Can someone explain to me, what is the big rush to leave after a movie? Not only did those who left before the MPAA rating at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean The Curse of the Black Pearl miss the final scene with the monkey—but some were getting up to leave even before the credits rolled. I had but minutes to spare before the last subway train in the direction of home yet managed to remain seated until it was all over.

03 August 2003

If my PowerBook 1400 wasn’t in pieces sitting in a tray on the kitchen table waiting for the day I have the time and the interest to replace the PRAM batteries, I would find the fact that the b9 version of OS9 Helper available from the OS9Forever.com site works to install System 9.2.x on PowerBook 1400s more interesting. Sadly, the Powermac 6100 is still listed as No in the compatibility matrix.

29 July 2003

My co-workers are having trouble seeing me in any particular type or make of car, let alone a Jeep of any description. If someone knows when the hatchback version of the Mazda 6 goes on sale in the States, I would find that information helpful.

22 July 2003

Low speed, no injuries. In the stop and go traffic of Main Street in Fairfax City, I did not stop in time. My car was 15 years old this month.

21 July 2003

Seems to me that there should be some humor in the fact that there is no version of Mozilla past 1.2.1 that will run on my NuBus-based, Classic OS-running hodgepodge of a Performa natively but version 1.4 for Windows will run fine in the SoftWindows98 program on the same machine. For the second time in a row, the local photofinisher gave me the Windows version diskette of Konica PC Pictureshow™, but with the emulation program installed there was no need this time to start the real Windows-based computer to extract JPEGs from the files.

16 July 2003

Although the current excitement is over the establishment of the Mozilla Foundation and AOL’s abandonment of the Netscape browser (currently at 7.1) if not the entire brand just yet, I would like to follow up on the commentary at Daring Fireball regarding the closing of Casady & Greene earlier this month. The particular software hasn’t been mentioned on their web site for some time, but Casady & Greene were the publishers of the Fluent Laser Fonts™ Glasnost™ Cyrillic Library 2, seventeen TrueType™ and Postscript® Type 1 Cyrillic Typefaces for Laser, Ink Jet, & Dot Matrix Printers. I still have the box for the PC Compatible version! These fonts, national keyboards, and related utilities were available for Windows (or the DOS version of WordPerfect 5.1 with the Russian Language Module and a PostScript printer, yup, I qualified for those requirements) and Macintosh (the Mac version included the Font/DA Mover for System 6!) and allowed my mature relative to continue composing documents in Serbian after her retirement using her new Quadra 605 running System 7.1 at a time when asking store clerks about internationalization issues just drew blank stares. Support for languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet was included at the OS level with Windows 98 (at least, I only used Windows 95 for 2 months) and its successors and bundled with System 9 and of course is now but one of many international options built into OS X, so the need for the Glasnost Library largely disappeared. Unicode keyboards can even be designed online for recent Macintosh systems, but in the face of the inability of Word v.X to understand Unicode, the need for a C&G Serbian keyboard to support WordPerfect 3.5e in the Classic environment remains. Who’d have thought it? Nine years later and still useful.

15 July 2003

Тотално лудило! Не само да сам пронашо Српски Сафари . Данас сам наишо на програм транслитерација за Мозилу, може у лету да пребаци стране од Српску Латиницу на Српску Ћирилицу. Већ сам инсталирао на оба платформа (Виндоус и Мек) и га испробо на сајт-а часописа Време и мој план сајт-а.

11 July 2003

When I adjusted the options at my Yahoo! Mail account today to retrieve the messages from my Comcast account, having long ago made the proper settings in Fetch to reach my webspace account with that cable industry’s ISP, I removed the last reason I ever had to visit the Comcast portal. That ActiveX-happy, Flash-demanding site just refused to cooperate for the last time. In case I forget to mention it, I went to see three films last weekend: Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, Whale Rider, and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Without going into details, let’s just say that the first disappointed, the second is a positive experience, and the third is weakly more positive than negative. I sure seem to be visiting this episode guide for a television series I do not admit to watching often enough, so I might as well link to it.

04 July 2003

I signed up for the (United States) National Do Not Call Registry on Tuesday and completed the registration without too much trouble. Wednesday, I had twelve Out of Area listings on my Caller ID display. I downloaded WebLog Expert Lite and have had a chance to analyze the logs from wamalug.org and wamaltc.org and I gotta tell ya, I am now, and have been for several months, those sites’ most frequent visitor. Not that that frequency means my convenience is any more important than anyone else’s. Reviewing the logs for this web space, such as they are, leads me to discover that visitors are discovering my small series of photographs of television reporters. Indeed, I am the third result at Google for the search Janet Peckinpaugh. Eek! With the delivery of SoftWindows98 for PowerMac from FWB, I gave Blue Label Power Emulator the boot and downloaded LDraw, MLCAD, L3P, POV-Ray, and LPub and while I am satisfied for the opportunity to try them out without endangering my real (real fragile) Windows box, I discover that the programs are even crankier about the parts I used in my small set of files than even BrickDraw 3D was. Sigh, I suppose the next step is to try Track Designer. Now that Microsoft Serbia and Montenegro has released Serbian interface packages for Windows XP Service Pack 1 in Cyrillic and Latin alphabets it is almost tempting to buy Connectix Virtual PC 6 for Mac OS and install it on a mature relative’s dual G4, eh? I’m going to try the dot-slash trick to refer to the root default file of this webspace as a pilot for implementing the technique on the other websites I work on. Doesn’t work so well on the local file structure.

30 June 2003

I did my bit for open source software yesterday by installing the Mozilla Application Suite 1.3.1 (sure enough, the day before 1.4 is released) on the system of a pal who had previously been satisfied with the performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5. While he and his spouse seemed happy with the pop-up blocking and the control over cookie writing that Mozilla offers, two of their financial sites refused to play nice. One company even went so far as to boldly state that the Browser Requirements to make use of their site were the following: Microsoft Internet Explorer Users - Version 5.5; Netscape Communicator Users - Version 4.72 to 6.0. So much for installing Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 6 Service Pack 1, the last version (released last year, I ordered the CD in October), on this pal’s computer! The suggestion that versions 4.72, 4.73, 4.74, 4.75, 4.76, 4.77, 4.78, 4.79, 4.8, and 6.0 of Netscape Communicator are somehow equivalent sounds profoundly ignorant (aside from the minor detail that the program was called simply Netscape at the 6 level and beyond to today’s release of 7.1). Not only was version 6.0 so bad that 6.01 was released while my CD order was being processed for shipping, it was completely different from 4.8 and all previous versions. Netscape doesn’t even offer any edition of 6.0 at its Archived Client Products pages. (Yes, I checked the 6.1x Client Versions page, and there’s no 6.0 release hiding at the bottom of the page.)

24 June 2003

Just one of many volunteers working on this event.

No comment.

Later today: I’m listening to the new album from the Bangles and life is good again.

20 June 2003

Someone visited my home page recently, having searched the Finnish Google for the terms extreme tracking xhtml and then clicking through from the search engine’s cache of my What’s New page for 2003. Seems that the lack of compliance of the HTML code supplied by eXTReMe Tracking with modern W3C standards is a concern around the world, and in the American version of Google, for now, I am on the first page of results for that search (currently the eighth in the Finnish search). Taking another look at what I had done to achieve XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance led me to think that the successful validation was partly due to the validator not looking inside the <script> element, so I made a few more changes to the web bug part of it so that the image has a class applied rather than unquoted dimension attributes stated. I seem to remember having bought the fourth edition of JavaScript The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan (O’Reilly) almost solely to understand the JavaScript included in eXTReMe’s HTML code, and my major intellectual contribution on the road to XHTML compliance was the if test (which sorted out the user agents—like a mature relative’s Netscape Navigator 3.0 at the time—which could not comprehend JavaScript 1.2) to replace the deprecated language= attribute. The last stumbling block to the script’s total modernity is the use of escape(document.referrer), as I suspect some server-side reprogramming would be necessary to accept the results of encodeURI(document.referrer).

19 June 2003

There is a colleague who reads my movie reviews and thinks that the colleague mentioned from time to time therein refers to him. This is not an unwarranted conclusion. What most irks the colleague is that the colleague is only ever mentioned in connection with bad advice. The colleague wants it to be known that the colleague advised against my seeing Bruce Almighty. How manipulative of me not to mention that the advice of the colleague led me to positive experiences in seeing Sprited Away, Frida, and S1M0NE. This paragraph is less comprehensible in user agents that do not comprehend the <q> element. As a follow-up to their abandonment of a stand-alone browser for Windows, Microsoft will release a minor update for Internet Explorer 5 on the Macintosh and then cease development on that program, too.

15 June 2003

A little over 7 months after I began building the site of the LEGO® train club WamaLTC I have caught up to the present and every page has some content. I have relied on the generosity of fellow club members like Stephen and Tom (for their posts to our mailing lists that described the first few shows and meetings), and also of Kevin, Dan, Bob, Christina, Abe, Roy, and Michael (for their photographs of the shows and meetings). I hope Dan can forgive me for shunning his square, letterboxed thumbnails and resampling his original images down to the 128×96 pixel, Brickshelf thumbnail size. Quite a workout for my Performa having AOL Instant Messenger 4.5.995, BBEdit 7.03, Mozilla 1.2.1, Fetch 4.0.3, and Corel Photo-Paint 10.480 all open at the same time but it’s been running without complaint since eleven o’clock, over 10 hours ago.

12 June 2003

I was five and on an extended visit to my grandparents in the country where I was born and left in charge of feeding the two German shepherd dogs in the household when I noticed that the two had switched bowls. This didn’t seem right to me, so I approached with a mind to sort things out… well, this did not work out at all. Ouch! But I still haven’t learned the lesson that no one likes hearing that what they’re doing is wrong. Exactly how much research does it take to go to the LUGNET newsgroup page of an organization and see what Official URL it points to? Yet, sometimes, I can be utterly, spectacularly wrong. This post to LUGNET over 2 years ago captures the situation perfectly and would certainly leave me baffled. I’m shutting up now.

08 June 2003

The webmaster of the Building Instructions Portal has featured my file in the LDraw format representing a United States Postal Service Truck on its front page for a while now:

This truck is a great build! A highly realistic design, a basic parts selection, and easy to follow building instructions make this a great time to build.

06 June 2003

The son of my godparents and his wife have bought a house and had a second child and apparently that leaves little time to learn HTML. Ordinarily that should not be cause for complaint, and it isn’t, but they have relied on Microsoft Word to develop their (so far) lone page on the World Wide Web and embedded their grainy photographs in letter-sized PDFs which means… well, it’s not how I would do it, but sometimes it’s fun to imitate old-school web design. Be warned, though, that all of the links are (without warning) to not insubstantial PDFs. Yes, you (the visitor) have to click the Rotate View Clockwise tool in Adobe (Acrobat) reader in every file.

01 June 2003

As it happens, the certain company I mention in the dispatch just below responded to my e-mail on the first business day subsequent to my sending it, and they pointed me to the same directory that Google had already found for me. Hooray!

Quietly, very quietly, Microsoft has let it be known that Internet Explorer for Windows 6 Service Pack 1 of September 9, 2002 is the last version anyone using a current operating system from that company can expect to see. As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation… Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS. Don’t see any quotations marks around those sentences because you’re using a legacy OS and its default browser? Sorry, buy a new computer when they get around to releasing a new OS. Wow, it (Internet Explorer for Windows) really is the new Netscape 4. Users of the browser their legacy OS manufacturer gave them for free will never see perfectly ordinary CSS styles created using the first-child selector, and web sites all over will continue to deliver a 404 File Not Found for every style sheet with a media specified. Will web developers cripple their sites to accommodate the limited set of behaviors that this old technology understands (like they used to do with Netscape Communicator 4), or will they trust that users can choose free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer open-source technologies that can take advantage of standards as they are developed? The prospects on the Macintosh side seem just as narrowed, as it appears that the Tasman rendering engine will not be improved except for subscribers to MSN. Why do people hold stock in this company, again? There’s no guarantee that any alleged further improvements to Internet Explorer will include the tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, CSS compliance, application/xhtml+xml MIME-type handling that the Mozilla application suite and other browser technologies like Opera and Safari can offer right now. I recently downloaded all US-English versions of the Mozilla application suite version 1.0 and up for Windows, Macintosh, OS X, and OS/2 and burned a CD-R of them. It goes without saying that my two main computers run the latest Mozilla application suite release available to them (I suppose I’ll explore the Mozilla Browser when it reaches 1.0 status). My mature OS X-using relative has the Safari beta installed and loves it and I never hear of a Microsoft product being used in that house ever.

Oh, and I am so not admitting to watching Kim Possible.

I was recently informed that Microsoft had finally consented to localize Windows XP into the Serbian language with the Cyrillic alphabet. Checking the website of Microsoft’s local office reveals a proper identification of the locale as Srbija i Crna Gora (and a persistence of pathetic browser-sniffing to make sure visitors not using a Microsoft Internet browsing technology are shunted to some alternate home page—and a curious premonition of the demise of Internet Explorer in the use of the word for last rather than newest to identify the link to download the SP1 version of Internet Explorer 6) but no press release regarding any Cyrillicization. With a publication and date identified in the e-mail to me, I was able to puzzle out the frames-based site and identify the page with the article. In an exclusive report, the newspaper Politika reports that the localization took 6 weeks and 300,000 words but does not include programs in Microsoft Office. Microsoft Serbia and Montenegro is otherwise getting ready for Synergy 03. The website devoted to the Cyrillicization of Windows which I wrote about below has not had a chance to react to the news yet, either.

26 May 2003

See, this is why I don’t like to pay before downloading. I had learned that a certain company had rereleased an old emulator which ran under OS 9. The program was available either physically or by download. Since it would save a few dollars to download the program, I went through the purchase process and received the e-mail with the download link. Each time I tried the link, though, I got a zero-byte length file. When I tried the download on my Windows machine, I got a message that I had tried three times already, and an e-mail address. Naturally, that e-mail address was sent an angry message, which I suspect, like the one to Minolta earlier, will never be answered. However… I have heard a colleague say that Google rocks! and she’s right. When I made a Google search for the filename I was supposed to be downloading, the sole result was an unprotected directory (with no index file) at the domain of the software company offering the program. The 9.8 megabyte download was quickly made (on both Windows and Macintosh machines) and I have the program installed. The entire stock in trade of the particular software company would appear to be exposed to downloading from this directory! I did throw away most of my old DOS programs, right?

I went to see Bend It Like Beckham again Sunday night in the hopes of not being so stressed out while screening it. Although a younger woman sitting down next to me and checking her telephone did threaten to raise the stress level again, by the time the film began I was ready to understand the accents better, notice the details like the house decorations going up then coming down then going up again, and appreciate the parallels between the wedding celebration and the sporting camaraderie. My visit to the Landmark Theatres Bethesda Row earlier in the day found its exterior underwhelming (I drove by it without realizing it) but the stadium seating inside was the good kind like at American Multi-Cinemas.

17 May 2003

Argh! It’s hard to maintain a pose of sputtering indignation when the target… mysteriously… changes to correct each problem as it is mentioned here. Conincidence… or something more? However it happened, a tip ’o the hat to a splash page with two links to skip the Flash media, and an interior index page with a static image of the last frame.

15 May 2003

The website to which I devote some degree of criticism below has made a change to its home frameset. There is now a Flash movie in the home.html frame—with no Skip Intro link (a big usability error especially in view of the demand for the Flash 6 player). Then, it seems like there should be a JavaScript call made to force the hiding of the multimedia content (I saw it happen exactly once) but interestingly, Netscape Navigator 3.0 complains of a syntax error for this statement: var HideArray=['HideDiv1']; . The Flash file is first referred to in an <object> element. The alternative content is the same Flash file referred to in an <embed> element, that is, there is no HTML element between the <object> and </object> tags which could be displayed by a user agent which does not accept a Flash player plugin. What about <noembed>? Tag Not Found. But the brick background seems to be gone. In a poll, 70% of respondents chose the option to retire/eliminate it entirely and, see, they do listen.

14 May 2003

With the reduction in width of the right-most column at wamalug.org by one percentage point fixing the site’s appearance in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows NT4, I am reasonably satisfied that the layout is close to being done.

12 May 2003

Let there be no mistake. I am committed to the independence of the club WAMALUG and the quality of its website wamalug.org. It would not occur to me to ask some other, allegedly independent organization to please make some change to their web site design which inadvertently or otherwise was impacting the integrity of ours when my first instinct is to act defensively, decisively, and quickly. Especially when the solution is small and elegant, using the JavaScript 1.0 object location. Maybe not everyone realized that the change of webmasters meant that the work of web site design would be taken seriously. It would be so wrong of me to publicize some of the referrer pages in the site server access logs. As it happens, something very similar to the reverse image replacement I discuss below is found described at a page at the CSS Hub site of Edwardson Tan. Unfortunately, his suggestions for alternative box model hacks do not survive the BBEdit CSS Format command so I will have to continue struggling with the appearance of the WAMALUG site in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x Windows some other way.

09 May 2003

Making the wamaltc.org site congenial for Netscape Communicator 4 turned out to take a surprisingly small number of additional and changed style declarations. Although the unordered list serving as the navigation is still unstyled, it does appear side by side with the main content. Elements with a background color set now have that color extend to the full width of the element thanks to a work-around to get the old browser to do so.

06 May 2003

Sometimes the connections have to be spelled out for me. In The Lizzie McGuire Movie the character of chaperone Miss Ungermeyer is played by Alex Borstein who is… the voice of Lois Griffin on Family Guy. I must have seen the name only seventeen times as I played the episodes in the Family Guy DVD box set.

04 May 2003

I received a forwarded message today that there was a broken link at one of the pages at wamaltc.org. Imagine that! Here I had just last week discovered an automated online link checker that told me that the Building Instructions Portal likes that trailing slash at the end and my anchor didn’t have one. Plus I had been testing the site in an online color deficiency simulator where it seemed to pass muster for accessibility under that criterion. Nevertheless, the message was true. I had the file referred to locally but not uploaded. So that’s fixed. Say, who is it that places an aspnet_client folder in the domains? Maybe it is a routine aspect of Microsoft IIS server operations. Mighty annoying nevertheless to have useless files imposed. Can’t complain much as long as it’s free. I have continued with another unsolicited web page makeover over at my other web space. If it works only in Mozilla, it must be cutting-edge, right? Opera 6 for the Macintosh is so sad with its inability to find serif fonts and its wild mishandling of the positioning of UTF-8 text especially in the presence of the <q> tag and now I discover it cannot make use of a tab metaphor CSS navigation menu and improperly layers according to z-index. A good thing I’m not called upon for production work. Oh, wait, that’s right, I am. Hang on, side-by-side display of menu and content at WamaLTC in Netscape Communicator 4 is on the to-do list.

01 May 2003

With BBEdit 7.0.3 installed, launched, and in use I see that all of my Unicode keyboards are accessible from the keyboard menu. Добре вести! Моје тастатурске досије, врсту Уникод , се могу употребити са ББЕдит 7.0.3.

30 April 2003

I have recently re-read the Fair Play document from LEGO® and the language seems straightforward enough for me: We must, therefore, insist that the LEGO logo NEVER be used on an unofficial web site. But what if one were to have a client that, for its part, insisted it would use the familiar square red logo until advised otherwise. Thinking about this, I remembered that Douglas Bowman recently had an article (which I suppose I had learned about from the discussion by Jeffrey Zeldman) entitled Using Background-Image to Replace Text and I got to wondering. Could I do a reverse image replacement to display text and hide an image? The cute trick only works in browsers that understand the :hover pseudo-class on arbitrary elements and does require a second image to have the dimensions to stand-in for the hidden image but have the appearance of the background. Now that I am webmaster at wamalug.org, the continued existence of my imitation of the website is unnecessary. However, at least one person had already linked to the imitation site and I suppose it would be rude to break that link. Since RCN uses Apache on its servers, I was able to quickly write an .htaccess file to place in the /wamalug.org/ directory at my webspace to redirect visitors to any files in that folder that are missing to a file explaining their disappearance. Well, I guess the second never in the Seven-Up advertising slogan of not so many years ago ( Never had it, never will. ) didn’t mean quite as long a period of time as one may have thought. Making my rounds of Shoppers Food Warehouse, I discover that the bottles with the upside-down logo are caffeinated. As good a time as any to stop buying sugar water, eh?

28 April 2003

A day of interesting revelations. Don’t try to save any of my carefully hand-crafted XHTML+CSS pages using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows NT 4 (to be most specific) if you want to learn from the coding practices embodied therein. I tried this today and discovered that the program completely mangles the code, converting it to HTML4, removing the XML comment delimiters, and changing all tags to uppercase throughout. (Better stick to Mozilla for Save Page As… Web Page, complete from now on.) The author of the weblog I most recently added to the Diversions page, Douglas Bowman, turns out to have been the leader of the project that redesigned the wired.com site last year. We seem to have learned from the same people: Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman. Thanks for the inspiration. Also, considering my most recent dispatch below, seeing that Bowman has presented a redesign of the new Yahoo! Search page confirms that what I’ve done is not totally obsessive. The manual for the Professional HTML and Text Editor for the Macintosh which I sent away for arrived and I discovered that, whatever it says on the CD-ROM case insert notwithstanding, with the second point release the software company had quietly restored Mac OS 9.1 as a supported operating system with CarbonLib 1.5 or later. Yay!

27 April 2003

Ack! Another reader identified. I see that the main page at brickfest.com has been updated and that registration has begun. The site design is the same as the one I had the privilege to be invited to comment upon late on Friday. My reluctantly offered comments went mostly unheeded, so I feel released to lambaste the frames-driven, JavaScript-hobbled design in detail. I am comfortable with my choice not to participate in the planning of the event this year. In fairness, though, I should point out that there is a conspicuously blank line in the <head> of the home.htm frameset where the keywords <meta> tag used to be. Apparently, the phrase keyword spamming is not so familiar as I thought. Admittedly, the presence of the tag is utterly irrelevant to the operation of any self-respecting search engine. But through inertia and inattention (to be charitable) the site designer has always included a long list of keywords on every page under her aegis. Over a year after the corporate organization behind BrickFest was made separate from that of the club WAMALUG, there remained no justification for retaining the keyword wamalug in that tag. I salute its disappearance. Now on to the complaints. The site design uses framesets nested two deep. Maybe this was considered necessary because some pages are not even a part of the brickfest.com domain but are instead on the personal server of a Brick Events LLC principal. What, does the host for brickfest.com (and its mirror brickvention.org) not offer a PHP engine? This redirection might not even be apparent to naive users of the site but in my opinion raises issues of security and confidence. The background image of bricks might have looked spiffy in the era of 640×480 screens but looks like nothing at all but noise on a 1600×1200 display. This image is called for three times. The title graphic has been clumsily edited to refer to 2003 rather than 2002 . The menu relies on JavaScript so extensive that its loading time is apparent even on a cable modem, and so indifferent to an old browser like Netscape Navigator 3.0 that the blizzard of errors prevents the menu from loading at all. (This may be why there is a series of text links to the menu options in the home frameset.) The busy graphics invoke the 1+1=3 difficulty when lines are close together. There is, to my knowledge, no official badge for Brickshelf. But I have heard the principal of Brickshelf expound on the subject of the capitalization of the site’s name often enough to know that there is no longer any internal capitalization of the name. So the badge which appears in the Communtiy Sponsors sections cannot be considered appropriate. In doing an in-depth analysis of the site, I discovered that the badge for the personal web site wildlink.com is 88×31 only through presentational attributes. The actual, animated graphic is larger. The web site optimization guy I write about below would not approve. Sure, I can complain, but could channaher Web Design do any better? I offer the result of about 2 hours’ work at my other webspace.

24 April 2003

WAMALUG has a new webmaster. I’m going to be busy. My head almost hurt. To back up the site, I downloaded over sixty megabytes of empty folders, duplicate pages, abandoned pages (some of those in duplicate, too), draft after draft of Microsoft Word documents, numerous Microsoft Excel spreadsheets associated with BrickFest from years past, WS_FTP.LOG files (some as big as images: 25 kB), images which have never appeared on the site… One tiny bright spot is the precedence of index.html over index.htm when a visitor points a browser to www.wamalug.org so the site as it was on Wednesday morning can remain, for now.

20 April 2003

Perhaps you should choose another row. Go ahead, take it out on an underling on Monday, I bet one would love to get pushed around by someone who missed the 5 minutes of advertisements, 10 minutes of trailers, and 5 minutes of movie and still thought that because there’s five of us you were entitled to what you wanted in seating arrangements. Fine, call me names, but to the extent that Virginia is a right-to-carry state, I’ll take your threat to see me after the movie seriously. (Of course, he couldn’t follow up—he was late!—and left before the MPAA rating at the end of the movie.) Despite the interruption, I was eventually smiling and laughing along with the presentation. There really isn’t a bad seat in any house at the AMC Hoffman Center 22.

29 March 2003

It would be so tempting to use this analyzer of web site optimization on other people’s sites.

27 March 2003

Another round of tweaks and I think I am coming real close to a final design over at WamaLTC’s site. The page design looks reasonably similar in Mozilla, IEMac5, IEWin6, OperaWin7, and OperaMac6. It occurred to me today to place a link on the image of the club’s logo to a page with only the navigational menu (unordered list) and minimal styling. This move accommodates the crippled performance of Internet Explorer 4.01 on the Macintosh, as users of that ancient browser (the object of searches in 2001 and 2002 to accomodate old machines and operating systems) can see and click on that logo even though very little of the rest of the menu is visible or usable. Some people like the old way of coding, with preloading of rollover images, as many bytes of JavaScript code as HTML source, and horrendous problems getting DHTML effects to work in even a reasonable number of browsers. Then along comes Opera 7 for Windows and its View –> Small screen option to imitate a telephone/PDA browser and what happens? Those popup menus are well-nigh inscrutable. True fact: with the mouse pointer hovered over a menu selection, the popup part of the menu appears in the on-screen flow before the entire menu, which pushes the image-based rollover menu down, which with things positioned right creates a new rollover event under the pointer, which pushes the menu down again, until eventually space for all of the pop-up menus is allocated between the site navigation and the section navigation. Five hundred pixels and no content can yet be displayed! Just today I found that this guy Mark had recently posted a pure cascading style sheet menu with the appearance of tabs. Ok, the tabs can only be rectangular using border, but it seems like a trapezoidal image could be assigned to each list-item by declaring background-image: url(filename.gif); . Why struggle with the old way? Be that as it may, I am encouraged that at least one person in the LEGO® fan community is expressing an interest in cascading style sheet coding for their heavily used resource of a web site. I hope it is not a temporary infatuation with the styling possibilities, but the first step to semantic markup in a well-formed XHTML document on each page generated by the site.

26 March 2003

I’ve had a breakthrough in the design of the train club’s web site, and the repercussions are still not fully exploited. Previously I had the HTML source laid out in what at the time seemed like a logical order of <div>s: navigation, main, and footer. I had things looking pretty sweet in Mozilla on both Windows and Macintosh, but Internet Explorer for Windows, and (to a lesser extent) Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh and Opera on both platforms, was having great difficulty with the float and clear declarations. Because the navigation <div> came first, a buggy implementation of clear meant that elements were pushed down the page to clear the menu (rather than just past any element in the main <div>) leaving a big blank space where a visitor might expect content. A tortured sequence of style sheets to hide the float declarations left content in Internet Explorer hugging the left side of the viewport in a skinny column. Those stuck at work with Netscape Communicator 4.x had each page display identically, as only the first part of the unordered list serving as a menu was visible, making for frustrating browsing. The breakthrough came when I took another look at Wired News and its multicolumn layout and reread the style sheets for the site (which I had printed out when it redesigned last year). By rearranging the <div>s into the order main, navigation, footer, I could style the placement of the contents of the main <div> without Internet Explorer knowing about the navigational <div> (which arrives later in the flow of the HTML), then use { position: absolute } to bring the menu up alongside. Consequences? The appearance in Internet Explorer is now much closer to that in Mozilla, with images and text appearing side-by-side as intended. Visitors using Netscape Navigator 4 get to see a <Skip to navigation> link, the styled <h1> heading with the page title, and the rest of the content in the main <div> first thing as the page loads, so they can immediately see that they’ve reached a different page. I continue to evaluate the style sheets to see what can be dropped or consolidated now that many of the tricks to hide declarations are no longer necessary. The prospect that anyone will visit using Internet Explorer of version 4 is remote, and I only have Macintosh versions installed to test with, but I hope that quoting the file name of the style sheet in the @import statement will hide the most troublesome declarations. It is a cruel thing, indeed, that a page making extensive use of cascading style sheet technology is best viewed either with a modern browser (IE5+, Netscape 6.1+, Safari, Opera and the like) or with an ancient one (IE2, Netscape Navigator 3.0) or, lest I forget, with alternative technologies (a text browser like Lynx or one for a PDA or telephone). There were some remaining difficulties, like how Internet Explorer for Windows took any width attribute on a <table> and applied it against the viewport rather than the container, and the footer is now partially hidden on the pages with little content. As we develop a selection of photographs and text for those pages, the footer will become fully visible again. As usual, though, the incompetence of Internet Explorer for Windows compared to the version for Macintosh is breathtaking and frustrating. I should just carry my CD–R of Mozilla releases with me everywhere I go.

24 March 2003

I haven’t been able to keep to the plan from earlier, especially the part about being quiet. The director of public relations for the LEGO® users group of which I am still a member seeks a replacement for herself as webmaster. Since I have had an imitation of the web site for some time now, with up-to-date versions of the list of members and page of links, for example, it has not been clear to everybody why I am not already webmaster there. In posting a message to the club’s e-mail list, I may not have made it as clear as I could have that it is not so much a matter of that I want to be webmaster. Rather, I hope that it is more true that the responsibility of keeping the web site current is an important one, that someone should take it on if our director cannot continue, and that we shouldn’t let months and months and months go by without finding someone willing to do so. It should come as no surprise that it would be my preference if that someone were to embrace the standards-based, technologically forward-looking approach I try to embody. I would have little patience for a site that traded the boatloads of table cells and <FONT> tags that are there now for pages half-full of JavaScript code so ossified that a change in a navigation menu item takes months because of the plurality of images involved. (Completely coincidentally, I discover today that I have competition in the matter of documenting the meetings of our LEGO® train club.) More craftily, I remember that we usually give jobs to the person(s) who make a complaint, and there are two members who recently faulted the website for being incomplete or inconsistent… one even has a demonstrated ability to put together a web page…

22 March 2003

The one sheet for View From the Top is so unfair! To the best of my increasingly hazy memory, Paltrow never wore the orange flight attendant's uniform in the movie. Orange was the color of the dresses for the flight attendants in coach on Royalty Airlines. The uniforms in use on the commuter subsidiary Royalty Express and in first class on international flights on Royalty Airlines, where Donna’s career ends up before she throws it away for the love of a controlling part-time law student with a conformance enforcing family, are in blue or a greenish blue. From the sound of it, they’ve had 2 years to get the marketing of this movie just right.

20 March 2003

D’oh! The reason that Netscape Navigator 1.1N didn’t display images inline when I tried it earlier is because the folder arrangement on the diskette did not match the path in the src attribute of the img tags. Once I fixed that, the images displayed fine. I’d downloaded JPEGView already, so I installed it anyway. I have joined the rest of the civilized world and obtained CallerID.

18 March 2003

February 2002 is done. I see that Agent Cody Banks did well at the box office last weekend. Not that I would admit to stopping my channel-surfing at the Disney Channel when The Lizzie McGuire Show is on. Nope, not going to admit to that. (The movie starring Hilary Duff based on the television series opens May 2.) Might as well mention that last week, confronted by the choice of action comedy (Shanghai Knights) and something more romantic, I went for the symmetrical blonde and watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. I see now that in reviewing Almost Famous I found no opportunity to mention Kate Hudson. Some interesting cascading style sheet layouts and web standards commentary. It turns out that the Novell version of WordPerfect 3.5 for the Macintosh came with the tools to explore the Information Superhighway which at the time, apparently, meant Netscape Navigator 1.1N! Although I’d installed the program on a Quadra 605 which I’d recently restored to its original 8 megabytes RAM, System 7.1 configuration and which had no CD-ROM or Internet connectivity, I did find a diskette with an intermediate version of a page at the train club site and set the ancient browser to the test. Without a plug-in (which I don’t have but which must be equally ancient), though, the browser was unable to display any images inline. That still makes it a better performing browser in visiting the page than Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 Mac. What prevents the latter from seeing more than the first image of the train club’s logo and one or two of the items in the unordered list making up the navigational menu is still unknown (and not the subject of further investigation).

12 March 2003

December 2001 and January 2002 are done. I consented last week to attending a screening of Lost in La Mancha , a documentary following Terry Gilliam and his doomed effort to film the story of Don Quixote. Maybe because I had recently watched Living in Oblivion (again) or the documentary that accompanied the Signature Collection laserdisc of 12 Monkeys (a somewhat more successful directorial effort by Gilliam) my reaction was less than vigorous. You don’t suppose it can have anything to do with the pathetic venue offered by Loews Cineplex, do you? I had a free ticket (received for participating in a touch-tone telephone survey) so I treated myself to The Life of David Gale but the skinnier Kate Winslet gets, and the fainter her accent, the less interesting she gets as a performer. I kept thinking, though, Madonna wishes she had had this much talent.

28 February 2003

Did you know that May 3, 2003 is Free Comic Book Day? I only enter a comic book shop these days, especially after the Geppi’s near where I work closed over a year ago, to see if the latest issue of Liberty Meadows has arrived. (Issue #30 should be arriving any day now.) I got dragged to see Russian Ark on Wednesday. The theater managed to misspell the second word in the English-language title on the sign board with the show times and on the tickets. There’s something about shooting in real-time that is antithetical to story-telling. I did find the Russian film, shot as one take for its entire length (excepting the credits and one scene created in post-production), to be slightly less sleep-inducing than I found Waking Life. October 2001 is done, too. My e-mail account at Erol’s is completely compromised. I get about ten unsolicited commercial messages there every day. It’s just as well I do not have any e-mail client software installed on any computer, as with RCN’s Webmail service, I can log in, click Select All, then Delete and be done with it without ever downloading anything. Because the client I mention below is so demanding, I have hesitated to admit responsibility for the HTML coding in a public way. (I did name myself in the <meta> however.) But I’m toying with the idea of including a badge like this one:

24 February 2003

I had a chance to give Safari a spin tonight. That’s the new KDE-based browser from Apple for Mac OS X currently in beta. I was in a CompUSA and came across a PowerBook connected to the Internet and started typing a few URLs into the location bar. After observing its rendering of a few of my sites (this site, the site of my demanding client, the train club’s site, and my imitation of the users group site) I was busy clicking on the bug button. Sad to say, it is not like Gecko as asserted by its user–agent string, but renders more like Internet Explorer for Windows, and its inability to handle the unordered list I use as a menu at the imitation users group site is crippling. The favicon files I supplied to the four sites sure look neat in the History menu of Safari, though.

Midge is pregnant? When did she marry??? See how time has flown after I let my subscription to Barbie® Bazaar lapse. Indeed, this would appear to be the second child to issue from the marriage of Midge and Alan. A startling sight in the local Target.

I have uploaded a file in the LDraw format: my adaptation of Kevin M. Loch’s MOC Metrorail car in the style of the Breda manufacturer. This file is for your viewing pleasure, and no one is under any obligation or pressure to try to create instructions from the file. Seriously, the bitmaps making up the set of steps to build the little spine car I designed to carry the containers that the LEGO® Train Clubs swapped last summer barely fit on a ZIP 100 disk. But there’s only 50 parts in that model, about eighteen steps in all, and the Breda_Pair.ldr file is 1,514 lines long. Some of those lines identify the model, its original designer, the accolade the original received last year at BrickFest™ 2002, and some lines merely separate one step from the other, but that has got to be over one thousand parts! Okay, I have included two cars in the file, but since the prototypes are operated in pairs, this seemed only fair. How many CD–Rs would be needed for those bitmaps? From 2001: August and September are done.

17 February 2003

Ok, so it did snow. When I came out of seeing The Guru on Saturday it was easy to think this winter event did not even qualify as a dusting. How did an R-rated comedy see the light of day in this age, anyway? I knew the director from a previous effort which I had recently revisited on the archaic technology of laserdisc, Party Girl with Parker Posey. It is so funny that the producers of Heathers were considering Heather Graham for the role of Veronica but were prevented from doing so because her parents thought the script was too unwholesome. Of course, Graham went on to do Boogie Nights and Winona Ryder was hired for the role instead. Graham is on my list of pretty actresses with no charisma, but she tries hard in the role of a porn starlet in Manhattan who allows herself some professional empathy for a recent immigrant from India who wants to be a star but is a little confused about what is expected of him on set. It’s funny. Plus Marisa Tomei is in it. I have otherwise spent this wintry holiday creating files in the LDraw format of a number of creations in LEGO® which have received some appreciation, the United States Postal Service van and step van in 4-wide (which received kind words from Lindsay Frederick Braun, the master of the gargantuan, last year at BrickFest) and the United States Postal Service truck and c.1930 Studebaker in 6-wide (which tied for a certificate of Outstanding Creation in the Category of Highway Vehicle in the Train Room competition at the same event). A file to document my imitation of Martensson’s Willys Jeep is also publicly available. I also made a folder of instructions out of the individual bitmaps Tom made for my container carrying spine car segment. July 2001 is done.

14 February 2003

Is Google going down the tubes, or has something gone horribly wrong with their PageRank algorithm? Not only do many of the returned results bear the whiff of link farms or of just plain stolen content (how many places do you suppose that Dan and Jennifer Boger have mirrored their Peeron.com content?) but pages from this very site are coming up on the first page of results for searches on, for example, the names of members of WAMALUG or WamaLTC. I suppose I now have a greater responsibility for what I post here. Geekshelf is supposed to disappear tomorrow. I only ever posted one image to it, a photograph I took of my Performa (presumably running System 9.0 at the time) running the application SoftWindows 95 in which I had the Windows port of Basilisk II, the open source 68k Macintosh emulator, running System 7.5.3, and in which Netscape Communicator 4.0.4 had managed to connect to the Internet (yes, through the two layers of emulation) and visit a page at this site. The only reason I might doubt the veracity of the notice is that Majestic Research [maj.com], another site from the same herein unnamed webmaster, also recently made an announcement (that the monitor of solar x ray activity and geomagnetic field activity would be discontinued, hence the disappearance of my proposals for XHTML compliance for including the two images on a web page) which, with the passage of time, has turned out to be inoperative.

06 February 2003

To the two sites I mentioned earlier devoted to Apple Macintosh computers in my possession, I can now add a third which is self-admittedly obsessed with the Quadra 605. Indeed the site claims to be served from a Quadra 605 running on Linux. I supported an end-user on a Quadra 605 since its purchase in 1994 through its connection to the Internet in 1996 (including the search for a browser upgrade in 2001) until its demise late last year. The Greenberg’s Train Show is scheduled for this weekend, and with the snow falling and the temperature dropping a tenth of a degree (Fahrenheit) at a time, I hope that the road situation will allow us to set up tomorrow and display this weekend without too much trouble. A drowsy subway ride this evening resulted in a minor reworking of my rendition of Martensson’s Jeep. April, May, and June are done.

02 February 2003

The movie review file for March 2001 is done. This past week, I have been studying intently the LDraw site and especially its subdomain devoted to the Macintosh. There was recently on LUGNET™ an announcement by Mattias Martensson of his attempt to build a World War II Willys Jeep and, like with the small vehicles of Christian Lindblad Rasmussen, I was inspired. I spent some time sketching the vehicle from the photographs in his folder on Brickshelf (this was before he posted instructions) and tried to build my own. Not knowing what construction technique he had used on the interior of the model, I found myself making different choices in the assembly and wound up with something that was two plates’ worth taller and one stud’s worth shorter. I liked it enough to build it in three colors and brought them to the train club meeting. At that meeting, I proposed that others might wish to extend my small spine car with which I hoped to display the containers that LEGO® train clubs swapped last summer, but since I did not have a file in the LDraw format to allow others to understand what pieces were needed and how to assemble them, what was the point in making the proposal? Especially since I was a Macintosh user, and everyone knew that the original LDraw executable and its successors ran on DOS and Windows. Well, there was a challenge. My study of mac.ldraw.org led to me to download BrickDraw3D by Eric Olson and I spent more hours learning to use the program and first create a file to document my imitation of Martensson’s Willys Jeep. I ended up in a cycle where I would use BrickDraw3D to select a part, give it a color and orientation, and position it close to its intended position, then I would use BBEdit to edit the coordinates to place the part in its final location. I also created a file to document my spine car and passed it on to potentially interested parties, one of whom showed off the advanced capabilities of programs written by authors working in the Windows world by creating step by step instructions and a final rendition in PDF. The site of my demanding client has yet a few more pages added to it. I managed to restore some dignity to the display in Netscape Communicator 4.x and the photographs no longer overlap the text, the client’s indifference to this notwithstanding.

28 January 2003

The movie review file for February 2001 is done. Last Saturday, the LEGO® train club had a meeting at a member’s house and I managed a few photographs with my digital camera of Greg’s layout and a few of my constructions. Unfortunately, the one shot I took of a sculpture I had built, in LEGO® elements, of the WAMALUG logo I designed last year was blurred. I must not try to hand-hold those long exposures any more. We plan a display at the Greenberg’s show the weekend of February 8th, so if you’re in the Upper Marlboro area then, feel free to stop by (there is an admission charge). I have been changing the entities at the