31 December 2004

Emily Browning > Emma Watson

My opinion of the operational quality of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows needs no repetition. But really? Not understanding the <![CDATA[ ]]> element?! The comment delimiter in the current default resource at the wamaltc.org domain, which is currently served to all requests for files at the former location because the nameservers have changed, is now the HTML version. I’m not saying that anyone should view-source. (I wonder if only Gecko-based browsers honor a CDATA element outside of the HEAD, as Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Macintosh and Safari display the element’s contents, too.)

There will be a Greenberg’s Train, Toy & Hobby Show at the The Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro, Maryland on February 26-27, 2005. Will there be a LEGO® train display at that show? Who knows? The programming at the PHP-driven website of an international organization of LEGO® train clubs seems to have taken a nosedive, losing its stylesheet and navigational options, so there’s no way to navigate to the version of WamaLTC found there which might be expected to plan a display.

The weblog I established at the WAMALUG domain is… broken. It never attracted much interest, and only two people besides myself even signed up for posting privileges. (Make that also broken… I wonder if the common host is having problems with PHP or MySQL.) Seems to me that the WAMALUG Members page should be getting less populated soon enough, but I wouldn’t hold my breath until it does. After all, Margaret Keys plans to give a presentation on the chronological variation in LEGO® elements at the January meeting, but you would look in vain for any notice of that on the WAMALUG site.

With the installation of an ATi 5YR VGA-to-Mac adapter, the lesser-known cousin of the Mac-to-VGA adapter, I am able to play DVDs on the first floor without the purchase of another monitor. The Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display only offers 800×600 at 60 Hz when supplied with video converted in this way from the VGA connector on the recently installed video card, but it’ll do for now. (The ATi adapter is actually a product of Wieson Technologies Co., Ltd., a connector and cable manufacturer headquartered in Taiwan.)

29 December 2004

I abandoned Netscape for Mozilla over 2 years ago, but some people can’t shake the habit of downloading the browser with the venerable brand name. But accepting the Recommended installation may not be the smartest move… unless you want a weather report in your Windows system tray.

The winner of the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation gets the hi-res treatment I usually associate with starlets.

27 December 2004

This is not a sales call or a solicitation. Whatever you say, Mr. 312-470-2620.

26 December 2004

Photographs by Abe Friedman on Brickshelf Direct link to thumbnail representing the December meeting. Notwithstanding what you might read at the WAMALUG web site itself or elsewhere, the next meeting is January 15, 2005.

The Seventh Army’s 532nd Military Intelligence Battalion mission in the postwar period was to screen (interrogate) refugees entering the US Zone.

The target date for the end of the transition from analog to digital television signals is December 31, 2006. Sites of the local federal government (including the FCC) are among the worst offenders for not behaving without the www. prefix. Even the Federal Highway Administration site doesn’t work without it. I wonder who I could complain to about that…

The change of computers in use on the premises means that I now meet the system requirements for using MSN Messenger for Mac.

24 December 2004

To be fair, the procedure for implementing the system recovery disc from Quantex Microsystems includes a Do you want to continue? prompt, but even supplied with the invoice, I was unable to make the disc work. Also, that Quantum ST Fireball hard drive? It took over an hour to format its 4110.71 megabytes, so it’s found a new home—in my wastebasket.

CNN wasn’t too impressed with the IBM Aptiva Series 2137 Model E84 but that didn’t stop the creation of a comprehensive support site for this top-of-the-line (at the time) offering in consumer desktops. I’m less than impressed by the fact that to access the banks of memory it is necessary to remove the power supply. It’s also disappointing that there are only two banks, which limits the total memory to 256 megabytes.

I’m having trouble reaching Radio Televizije Srbija no matter which ISP I use—or browser.

23 December 2004

The holiday message for 2004 went out today to addressees foreign and domestic. There was no incoming mail for me today.

The Quantum ST Fireball hard drive which began life in the Beige G3 Desktop just causes trouble wherever it goes… is it slow.

Did you know that if you have two computers running Windows 98 Second Edition, with a network interface card in each and a crossover cable between them, you can share a dial-up connection to the Internet?

22 December 2004

I have been neglecting the computers on the premises to tend to a visiting system. It’s a beige box from Quantex, which seems to have gone out of business a few years ago. One particularly nasty feature of the system recovery disc from that company is that it’s keyed to an individual serial number found on the invoice. Start a system recovery without that number and it’s already erased the entire hard drive including any partitions. With nothing to accomplish forensically once someone had already tried the system recovery route, I cleaned and vacuumed the case, replaced the two 32 MB sticks of RAM with a 128 MB module, inserted a NIC, established a single partition on the 20 GB hard drive, installed the operating system the owner supplied, equipped the Program files folder with Mozilla Suite 1.7.5, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, and various plug-ins and free media viewers, and, to cap it off, installed two spiffy, knurled aluminum thumbscrews to close the case properly. There were nineteen critical updates and service packs awaiting this fresh install of the operating system at Windows Update.

Aye, the haggis is in the fire fer sure. The holder of the wamaltc.org domain, which was last renewed in June when it was about to lapse, is planning to use that beachhead to start a new club. What sort of good and valuable consideration did people suppose would be effective to give up the domain once the membership of the holder in that other club was terminated? Maybe if you view the source and search for id="m05"… I have burned a CD of how the wamalug.org domain appeared at the beginning of the month, so I have no ego remaining in the appearance of the site from now on and my successors should feel free to change whatever suits them. I am shocked (shocked, I say!) to learn that lax stewardship of club assets seems to have left me in sole possession of the login and password to the domain! Mwahahahahaha!

16 December 2004

Did I miss anything? Photographs by Abe Friedman at Scrope Something tells me it’s going to get more difficult to find out what happened at a meeting.

I see that Beyond the Book has obtained a logo… but don’t see how it would make a good favicon.

13 December 2004

Too bad for the people clicking through on search results for HVC-2200 pointing to a page which used to be part of this web site back when it was hosted on my dial-up ISP’s webspace allotment. I tossed the Sony color video camera onto the pile in my municipality’s electronics recycling container today, along with a Sony Betamax SL-2700 video cassette recorder. I noticed that someone had tossed a Beige G3 Desktop! Obviously not knowing its capacity for accommodating upgrades! The Quadra 610 hadn’t moved from where I left it last week.

12 December 2004

In case any skeptic thought I might not have reestablished a working 10.2.8 partition. Creating an image of the desktop is much easier now that I know that the Preview application can open the PDF files created by Command-Shift-3 (use Command-Shift-4 to designate a specific screen area) and export those files to another graphic format like GIF or JPEG or PNG. Also, the sites for the music of young women like Hilary Duff or Lindsay Lohan work a lot better once the Macromedia Flash Player and Shockwave Player are installed. You bet, but you won’t figure it out from any error messages provided by the sites—there are no error messages. Stare as long as you want, I suspect there are no freckles to be found. Meanwhile the world is headed for ruin with a mandate-wielding imperator at the helm (via MetaFilter).

That is, there are no error messages about a missing or outdated plugin on the Macintosh. In SoftWindows98 an unupdated Mozilla install requested the Flash 7 player. Let’s not forget that a previous, Democratic administration attacked Serbia with such eagerness that one might be forgiven for thinking that the goal was to build the largest base constructed since Vietnam where peacekeeping is a 24×7 mission.

11 December 2004

I can resist the compact disc, but pass up a souvenir postcard? Apparently not. Scanning on the Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 6100C performed in 9.2.2 with DeskScan II 2.4, as the TWAIN Acquire option isn’t active in the Corel Photo-Paint 11 menu in system 10.

It pains me to report that the Teleport Gold™ II for Macintosh® Performa™ Model PL510P on the premises does not work (it does not detect, nor pass along, a dial tone). As a modem that relied on the Macintosh serial port for power, it would have eliminated yet another power supply beyond the two made irrelevant by the FireWire ZIP 750 drive and the internal CD burner associated with the Power Macintosh Desktop.

It’s somewhat startling to see the Macintosh boot on my Compaq monitor, but connecting a VGA monitor was made necessary by the installation of an ATi RADEON® 9200 Mac Edition (PCI bus version) video card and the desire to play DVDs in the new DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive replacing the CD-RW drive. The Pacifist program made simple installation of the DVD Player application possible. I haven’t succeeded in persuading the System 9 version, Apple DVD Player, to recognize the existence of any DVD hardware (even though Apple System Profiler properly reports the presence of a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive). The local thrift store has a row of VGA monitors of approximately the same vintage as the one from Compaq, none of them for more than $20. With the Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display restored to the built-in video port connection and taking over the menubar and mounted volumes, the Compaq monitor gets the Dock and any program windows I care to drag over to it… or the two monitors can be mirrored. A third monitor… now, there’s an idea.

07 December 2004

On this day of remembrance, it would be wrong to buy a compact disc from a troubled teen.

Woo-hoo! Thanks to United Parcel Service and Other World Computing the video RAM for the Power Mac Desktop arrived a day early. Much rearrangement of the Metro shelving ensued, and now the Desktop is ensconced as the primary computer, running at 1024×768 in millions of colors, playing a Susanna Hoffs CD from 1991 in iTunes.

The Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL with Transparent Media Adapter TMA 1600 looks like it’s just the ticket to consolidate flatbed scanning and transparency scanning in one machine, on the Macintosh with any one of three possible connections, while also affording the ability to scan laserdisc jackets.

06 December 2004

While the Office Depot recycling program I took advantage of last summer may have ended (an Associated Press article in today’s Northern Virginia Journal states that the program overwhelmed some stores) my locality offers weekly acceptance of electronics for recycling (from city residents). Therefore, the Quadra 610 is no more. While I identified it as a C.P.U. for purposes of registering my drop-off, I retained the actual 68040 chip. I’m sure that the floppy drive, the 2× CD-ROM drive, and the 160MB SCSI hard disk can serve as sources of fine, tested pieces of equipment for future sales of software licenses. Or not.

Just say no to cat-blogging.

05 December 2004

Not to worry. Had to keep repeating that this weekend. Like when the startup screen reported HFS partitionno bootable Can't open disk label package can't OPEN and so forth. Or when the SCSI symbol appeared instead of a startup screen on the PowerBook. Or when the Installer lost video in the last minute. Or when the subsequent install destroyed my account and I couldn’t login. Or when the Finder mounted the same volume from the Microtech SCSI card reader on the desktop seven times… and refused to eject them. Or when starting to verify the boot disk from the Disk Utility on Install Disk 1 led to partitionno bootable again. Or when Apple System Profiler no longer recognized that a CD-RW drive was attached. Or when the DiMAGE Viewer Installer ran without asking for my passphrase… and thus was rendered utterly incapable of moving files to Extensions (although based on page 13 of the manual for the domestic marketplace, excerpted here in a scan of a printout of the PDF found online, the actual destination folder is /Library/CFMSupport). Encouraged by the book Learning Unix for Mac OS X which I picked up in its second edition for the same price as a pile of clearanced first editions, I tried as sudo the command /developer/tools/cpmac filename /library/cfmsupport and this worked to copy individual files, but the program cannot initialize any of these files (I tried changing groups and permissions without result) and always quits.

The Performa has served for nearly 3 years now and if it is to be replaced this serves as a good time to re-evaluate the installed suite of software. Setting up the new Desktop machine (over and over and over it seems like…) I established a dial-up Internet connection in OS X as a nostalgic move, but installing old browsers like Netscape Navigator 3.04 and Netscape Communicator 4.8 and 4.x versions of Internet Explorer (either in the 9.2.2 partition or in Classic) seems much less useful. When I still had the Quadra 610 assembled and operational, I ascertained that Netscape Navigator 3.04 was especially vulnerable to JavaScript errors (because of its old interpreter), while Netscape Communicator 4.04 was unstable and quit at the slightest provocation. Internet Explorer 4.01 downloaded rather than displayed XHTML files. Even if Netscape Communicator 4.8 is stable, is it time to abandon its users? My answer will most likely be yes. SillyDog offers a comprehensive archive of Netscape browsers.

Even in System 9.2.2 (and 10.2.8, this post edited in both operating systems), I can’t use BBEdit past version 7.0.3 because the syntax checker doesn’t recognize Unicode characters.

What kind of Serbian keyboards for Jaguar don’t include the ж? Fortunately, I retained files I wrote in BBEdit some time ago (the date of the first such file is November 17, 2002) to generate Unicode keyboards for Mac OS and my Keyboard Input Menu now includes two new Unicode keyboards. Apple Developer Connection Technical Note TN2056 Installable Keyboard Layouts gave me the idea that the uncompressed contents of the SerbiankbdsforJaguar.sit file would prove useful for one feature: a simple renaming of the .icns files gives me the flags to appear in the drop-down menu.

03 December 2004

That didn’t take long… from satisfaction to despair required only one mistake. Let this be a lesson to owners of Beige Desktop machines: before attaching devices to the external SCSI port, attach a ribbon cable and a terminator to the motherboard connector! (The entry for a passive terminator includes an image.) The instructions for the PCI controller card mention the need for termination of the SCSI chain upon its installation, but in the context of removing an original internal SCSI hard disk drive. The Beige G3 machines (as they were known for their original processor) both Desktop and MiniTower were the first delivered by Apple with IDE hard disk drives, so disconnecting an internal SCSI hard disk drive just won’t occur in most cases (as it didn’t in mine). Here’s the upshot: I have a file in the System 9 partition ( Language Kit Preferences as it happens) which reports a file size of 23178.43 GB. Considering that the entire drive is 250 GB, that’s a remarkable achievement. The file cannot be emptied from the Trash. Disk First Aid in system 9, Disk Utility in system 10, Norton Disk Doctor, and Tech Tool Pro all stumble upon an unrecoverable error when examining the partition. The partition with 10.2.8 booted normally, and subsequent to the ministrations of the various disk tools, the system 9 partition stumbled through the startup process to completion with the one file occupying the Trash. Still, I purchased another drive, partitioned it identically, copied over the files in the system 10 and non-system partitions (about 5,000 files in the latter partition, and over 70,000 in the former), installed 9.2.2 on the second partition, and currently am reinitializing the misbehaving drive with all options (low level format, zero all blocks) effective. I have confirmed that the SCSI Microtech memory card reader will mount (using Software Architects DOS Mounter 3.0.5) and that the SCSI Hewlett-Packard 6100C ScanJet will scan in the new system 9 partition. Maybe I can place the troubled drive in a FireWire/USB enclosure… and aren’t I lucky that the Performa remains my working computer through this adventure.

01 December 2004

Yes, I have been preoccupied lately. It was an epic struggle to get 10.2.8 installed on the gift computer. That was after the purchase of a PCI controller card and new hard drive (which was partitioned and re-partitioned to placate the picky Installer) and repeated installation of system 9.2.2 in the second partition. Fiddling with the jumper settings on the CD-ROM drive seems to have been less important than having only a single bank of memory occupied, and dragging around the Installer window periodically, during installation. That, and reaching 10.2.8 through the 10.2.5 combo update (the oldest available at Apple Support Downloads) and the 10.2.6 update. The 10.2.8 combo update collapsed (complete with loss of video) with 5 minutes left in the installation which had already taken over an hour. Next time, buy the faster CD drive before installation rather than after… :-) But isn’t it pretty? Mozilla Seamonkey Navigator 1.7.3 has the Pinstripe theme installed (follow the link found in the May 20, 2004 entry in the sidebar to the beta version). It was just my luck, too, that the overpriced processor upgrade had been sitting on the shelf so long that the CD that came with it did not install Startup Disk X.

A certain photographer posted his photographs too late for inclusion on the wamalug.org site while I was still a dues-paying member. Here are a few links: Abe took pictures. …with Christina, Abe, Margaret, Judy, Mike, Todd, Steve DeCraemer, and guests from ParLUGment Jason Allemann and Paul Langille. Abe has pictures on Brickshelf and pictures at Scrope. Photographs by Abe Friedman on Brickshelf Photographs by Abe Friedman at Scrope

25 November 2004

I am so happy that the politics of my municipality have prevented the construction of another connector between Eisenhower Avenue and Duke Street. A water main broke Tuesday morning and closed Van Dorn Street between Edsall Road and Eisenhower Avenue. This leaves… uh, Telegraph Road (3 miles to the east) and I-395 (normally jammed with commuters headed south). Happy Thanksgiving Day, everyone!

23 November 2004

I’m really out of the loop by now, and I have to find out in an Associated Press article in the local free tabloid that a certain blonde actress with less-than-challenging choices of roles joined Mattel to promote the Fashion Fever line of Barbie Dolls two months ago.

22 November 2004

Sometimes it feels like more than one person has drunk the stuff, you know?

People are watching. The forum at De Bouwsteen noticed my upload of a photograph of the box for the LEGO® set City 7239 Fire Truck which I took at the November meeting of WAMALUG.

I wonder who this Chris is who joined Meetup.com some 4½ months after I added a link to the site from wamalug.org and who on the very day of the November thirteenth meeting specified a dinner meeting next Wednesday (the twenty-fourth). Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but it’s a fact that by Monday the fifteenth a dinner was scheduled for the seventeenth (last week, that is; there was a dinner on that day but there’s still no report on who attended). It would be far too conspiratorial to think that what Chris is looking for at this dinner meeting is new members who don’t know any of the other current members, who won’t have heard of this dinner. Chris also hasn’t joined the no-www bandwagon.

My photographs from the display WAMALUG put on this past weekend were moderated overnight.

21 November 2004

Once again the Performa came through. The gift computer with the overpriced processor upgrade, even with its hard drive initialized and with System 9.2.2 installed on the basis of starting with a 9.2.1 disc from AppleRescue, having made all too plain that the requirement of Virtual PC for Mac for a native G3 or G4 was meant seriously, continued to disappoint by refusing to copy Windows XP Service Pack 1a and Windows XP Service Pack 2 to my network attached storage. Downloading the second patch of 272 megabytes to my Windows computer proved problematic until I cleared space of twice the file’s size, but even so since the file size was larger than what a ZIP 250 disk could hold, and there are no FireWire ports on the 1998-era notebook to connect a ZIP 750 drive, and the network attached storage declines to be mapped, and my archiving (.zip) utility refused to work on the file, and my online account is not that large… there was no way to remove the file from the notebook’s drive. Finally I removed some files remaining from my failed efforts to install networked printers inside SoftWindows and started a download to the external drive. Both patches were downloaded from pages for IT professionals, and with each attempted download the transfer speed from Microsoft slowed. The download completed overnight apparently successfully, and a burn to CD-R of both service packs and the Windows XP Serbian (Cyrillic) Interface Pack and the Windows XP Serbian (Latin) Interface Pack (no longer available from the page at the national office I wrote about last year) was added to the box of Connectix Virtual PC 6 for Mac (the connectix.com domain no longer responds, either, now that the program was bought by Microsoft) that happened to arrive on the premises in the meantime. There’s no real barrier to installing the program elsewhere now, for no matter how long I hang onto the purchase, it’s never going to run on a G5.

16 November 2004

The amber turn signals were the first clue… it is now my opinion that the 8-wide HMMWV built of LEGO® elements which was seen at BrickFest in August is, in fact, one of the gray slopeback models seen in the LOWLUG display in Leiden earlier this month. Studying the list of BrickFest attendees (still available 3 months after the convention was over) and of those from the Netherlands discounting Casper van Nimwegen because his MOCpages account is mostly devoted to imperial Rome my suspect is Jan-Albert Van Ree. What couldn’t be seen in the photograph by Eric Sophie or the photograph by Abe Friedman was that this table held train models built by Van Ree and was even identified as a LOWLUG display: he photographed the table once, twice, three times over the course of the weekend. It’s not like there’s more than one degree of separation, either, in view of his photograph of Kevin Loch contemplating a computer or his photograph from 1000steineland this year of the then-Chairman of WAMALUG or an earlier photograph from when she was just director of public relations. I can just imagine Jan-Albert’s disappointment upon arriving in America and learning that I would not be in attendance at that premier gathering of AFOLs.

15 November 2004

Why would Matthew Mullenweg feel a sudden need to install Windows Media Player on a Macintosh? I wonder…

14 November 2004

I strongly deny that I repeatedly prowl the recent folders at Brickshelf looking for instances of my 8-wide HMMWV. As it happens, the LEGO® User Group of the Lowlands (LOWLUG) this past weekend had a 9 by 4 meter display at RAIL 2004 which seems to be an international model railroad convention held this year in the Groenoordhallen in Leiden, and the first image in the gallery of Brickshelf user oppienokki is unmistakable. Like the example that was seen at BrickFest, these Netherlanders have built their HMMWVs (yes, more than one is on the layout) with amber turn signals. I wonder if military forces in Europe equip their trucks in that manner? Those Lowluggers also built a four-door pickup version in dark gray and more than one of the light gray slopeback models. Should my personal constructions find a spot on the WAMALUG display at the Greenberg’s Train, Toy & Hobby Show at the Dulles EXPO & Conference Center in Chantilly, Virginia next weekend, it will be hard to convince others of their origin. (So far, I haven’t found one built in UN white, though.)

13 November 2004

I built Bram Lambrecht’s model of the AM General HMMWV for my private personal use in contemplating its proportions about which I had previously speculated and displayed it at the WAMALUG meeting today (I have blocked out the background in the photograph for display on this page). That the model is listed among double-wide minifig scale vehicles becomes a curiosity given that the tires are taller than a minifig! Considering its exposed drivetrain and the height of the floorpan set above the axles, in my feebly researched opinion, it’s the monster-truck version of a HUMVEE compared to a minifig (conveniently posed for comparison’s sake). What with the computer running MLCad and the LEGO® elements being on separate floors, I was sore by the end of the building session. The instructions themselves are typical of the sort of file written by the big lights in the AFOL world… the less said about them (the kind of instructions that they write, that is), the better. A pleasant building experience, of the type generally offered by the company’s instructions, it was not. For your sand-table training needs an 8-wide HMMWV which nevertheless still seats four minifigs is, I might suggest, your better choice.

12 November 2004

It’s the sort of rainy, windy day that leads a cat, which has shown every sign of wanting to leave a house, when it gets a chance to see outside through the storm door, to turn around and scurry back.

Living in another country does not remove the requirement for male citizens of the United States of America to register with the Selective Service System upon reaching the age of 18. Just a note to potential future veterans.

11 November 2004

With a specific date in hand, it is a simple matter to visit the library and, in a neglected corner on the second floor of the central facility, pull out the rolls for that week of the two local daily newspapers in stock. The front-page articles in each newspaper confirm that the discovery of the crime occured on the Saturday morning.

09 November 2004

The location at Mount Vernon Plaza might be closed, but Roy Rogers Restaurants is the brand that will not die. I can’t prove that this example just east of Baileys Crossroads in Virginia of the once-numerous chain restaurant, seen as it was in 1997 before the turnover of the corner lot to McDonald’s, was the very first one that opened in 1968, but the drive-up carport section in back is suggestive. Back when I was eating out more often, I liked Roy Rogers for its roast beef sandwiches and Fixin’s Bar and the variety of convenient locations around the area. But the purchase of this chain of quick-service restaurants by Hardee’s (for the locations’ real estate) in 1990 was so ill-considered that in the reconversion of those locations back to Roy Rogers just two years later, Hardee’s locations in the area became Roy Rogers outlets as well. Proving that brand is more important than location, I’ve not been to any of the restaurants that replaced Roy Rogers at its locations.

The name of the restaurant is also associated in my mind with the word massacre because of the largest mass killing in Fairfax [County] history. Thanks to this retrospective of the career of Fairfax County prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. from last year, I can now date the weekend morning I was delivering the Washington Star in Orleans Village as emergency vehicles responded to the discovery a block away: March 6, 1976. (Or would it have been Sunday the seventh?) The restaurant remained in operation as a Roy Rogers for another two decades, and the location is now a KFC.

The Richmond Highway Express features specially branded buses bearing a purple and yellow REX lion logo, special bus stop signs, new shelters, improved schedule information at stops and signal priority measures. So even if the eleven stops along US-1 don’t give you the impression of a limited stops operation, the signal priority measures suggests that express may yet be a valid description of the renamed route 9A. No comment on the misfit between <title> and content on the linked page.

Something called Mozilla Firefox reached version 1.0 today.

Who would have guessed what it would take to induce me to download and install Windows Media Player 7.1 for Macintosh? Amy Poehler reminds us in the Only the Strong Survive featurette on the Mean Girls DVD of the lesson her character delivers during the course of the film: don’t get [breast implant surgery which is] so bad you can’t feel anything. Like your dress falling off…

07 November 2004

My cousin’s daughter has left the hospital and returned home.

04 November 2004

This photograph sure makes one want to ride the local subway again, doesn’t it? The operator of the train with passengers aboard (the train without passengers is the one that left its trucks behind and popped its body up and over in the collision) is reported to have said Everybody off this train as fast as possible—run if you have to! No word yet as to whether the training of a Metro Citizen Corps foresaw an emergency situation of quite this nature, or whether the program would have prepared its participants to respond quickly.

Local Democrats continue to assess their lot in life given the results of Tuesday’s voting (another map scanned from a newspaper at MetaFilter folds in population density) but I cannot assist anybody with the planned drinking. (I have no idea which is the closest ABC store, for example.) The Virginia State Board of Elections reports only two districts as favoring that party’s candidate. My locality used the Hart InterCivic eSlate™ Direct Record Electronic system.

I was channel-surfing Saturday and saw that the twins were on C-SPAN and alighted for a minute. The pronounced resemblance on the part of the blonde to the father, and her repeated smirking while giving the speech, was cringe-worthy, and I moved on to Brock Peters in To Kill a Mockingbird elsewhere in the channel lineup. Maybe the brunette could yet redeem this family.

02 November 2004

I wonder what I was up to today…

The WordPerfect for DOS Updated site now has a comprehensive page for the Macintosh version.

01 November 2004

The DCist reports that a local transit website has redesigned and the result at wmata.com seems to have taken its color palette from… somewhere. :-) But their description of the new look doesn’t even try to justify the low contrast gray text in use. There is now a Trip Planner feature (the site’s internal link to the feature betrays a ColdFusion installation) but as long as the Ride Guide still works, those of you who put together info for the web site of WAMALUG can leave the links to that predecessor of the feature as they are… Why would anyone use maj.com for their free image hosting once they had seen the features available at flickr.com? Plus there’s a favicon at the site even though it’s still in Beta … See, there was this other magazine that had a cover gallery, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, but that gallery is gone… :-( Three years after opening, the AMC Hoffman Center 22 has installed Descriptive Video Service and Rear Window Captioning. Currently, The Grudge is offered in the theater with these features…

31 October 2004

The tank in the Focus is down to fumes and I am not driving this weekend, which may have contributed to my less than charitable reaction at the movies yesterday… My municipality is behind the times in not choosing for its new backlit street signs the font that will sweep the nation (via Kottke and Typographica)… An atlas of New York City in aerial photographs… Another magazine celebrates its history by offering a gallery of covers but there must be a reason this issue never spoke to me…

28 October 2004

Now that’s more like it! Camino gets some branding. What is it with the non-standard sizes for badges and banners from the Mozilla Foundation, anyway? You don’t suppose they are trying to avoid users who have blocked ordinary advertising banner sizes?

Are mature Serbs more sensitive to artificially colored hair because they see so much of it on their state television? (Just a thought. I don’t know for a fact that any on-air personality anywhere uses a hair color.) Nataša Miljković reports today on the pressing political problem of drinking in the republic. Radio Television Serbia supplies some of its programming as downloadable or streaming files in the Real format on its Programs you have missed page.

If one were, accidentally, to visit the Apple Store online and outfit a Dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 with 4 GB of RAM, two 250 GB hard drives, a 30″ flat screen display and corresponding video card, a Bluetooth module and wireless keyboard and mouse, and an AppleCare plan… it pretty much would cost as much as a used car.

26 October 2004

I’m losing patience with some of the older Macintosh models on the premises. The PowerBook was able to dial a local number for my ISP when I was out of state recently, but just couldn’t stay connected long enough even to check my e-mail. As for the gift Desktop G3, after paying way too much for a 500MHz G4 processor upgrade card at a retail store (especially now that a 1 GHz model is available) I have decided that the 4 GB hard drive is too flaky to install any system higher than 9.0 and have it boot reliably. I struggled with this system (succeeding in adding a FireWire/USB card and connecting ZIP 250 and ZIP 750 drives) so intently, and was so disenchanted by the lame Weekend Update from Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, that I missed the alleged lip-synching incident which spawned a developing scandal among the pop-culturally obsessed even though the television was on and tuned to NBC at the time. An external SCSI hard drive works fine, but running 9.0.4 and with only 160 megabytes, it cannot support an installation of Virtual PC, and the particular ROM revision makes installation of system 10 problematic so the utility of this computer is vanishingly small. The latest disappointment is a Buffalo LinkStation 160 GB network attached storage device which appeared as a mapped network drive in Windows Explorer all of one time so far. What interested me in the product was the promise on the box that it supported Windows 95 and Mac OS 8.6 when other NAS devices insisted on 98SE and X. The documentation is utterly silent on how to mount the network drive to the desktop in the Macintosh system. Here’s how I did it in 9.1: from the Chooser, I clicked on AppleShare, clicked on Server IP Address… , specified the IP I had assigned to the drive manually (as it eagerly took the 192.168.1.100 position when allowed to use DHCP, but I like to have my primary printer at that location), connected as Guest, and highlighted the shares. I deny that I am flipping through Macintosh catalogs on a regular basis.

21 October 2004

When I ordered earlier this year the last elements LEGO® made in the old colors it had already been a year since my last routine visit to the company’s outlet in the Potomac Mills Mall and it served as a handy time to take a break from more purchases. If the action passed along in this message at LUGNET proves true, my attention to the brand will follow the pattern I took with Lionel. I’m not ready to give up electricity, however.

My evangelism for Mozilla is not having lasting results. Overseas, the very mention of Mozilla, two years after I started writing about it, is met with expressions of ignorance from ordinary computer users—even as they chatter for hours decrying their suffering under the onslaught of worms and other cyber ills. Maybe the publicity from Mozilla Europe so far has been inadequate? More startling is the reaction of an in-home computer repair service: installation of Mozilla will require study to see if it meets the users’ requirements but might be too complicated . Please! It’s not like it requires a class to figure out how to use a browser! Closer to home, the obliquely referred-to married pair allowed a change of ISP and the launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer upon activation of their new Dial-Up Networking shortcut to banish any memory of Mozilla’s pop-up blocking and cookie management tool. There’s no telling how long their new install of Mozilla Suite 1.7.3 will continue to be used but at least now I’m not the only person in their life reminding them of the need for online safety.

20 October 2004

I generally allow e-mail from Allume (formerly known as Aladdin Systems) to remain in the Bulk folder at my Yahoo! Mail account. Flipping through a MacConnection catalog, though, alerted me to the curious fact that the Macintosh edition of the CorelDraw Graphics Suite 11 is now Allume Systems Creative Essentials. This just gets more and more bizarre: on Thursday, Corel announced the acquisition of Jasc and its line of Paint Shop software.

19 October 2004

A conversation I started today about the flat-screen television which emitted a 121.5 MHz distress signal (there was a short article on the back page of the A section of the Washington Post about it) turned to the story of Sputnik 2 and the fate of its canine passenger. The references section of the Wikipedia entry on the dog Laika allows one to follow the course of the piecemeal revelations including the 1999 article at space.com and the BBC report on the Houston conference where Dimitri Malashenkov of the Institute for Biological Problems in Moscow revealed the details of the stray’s early demise. I first came across the Encyclopedia Astronautica during the hubbub over the discovery of a Buran vehicle in Bahrain last month.

13 October 2004

Isn’t it amazing how the web site of a local LEGO® users group just seems to work by itself? Activities are planned (or dropped), locations chosen (or not), timing established (or not), and yet somehow the default resource largely manages to provide current information. One is left to wonder how much longer that can continue… it is a completely unremarkable coincidence that the last meeting for which I am a paid-up member is exactly a month away.

12 October 2004

So it seems Dazed and Confused is the subject of a lawsuit, which is a good enough excuse to give it another try. Purchased on laserdisc sight unseen, the depiction of the last day of high school in a Texas town in 1976 was sufficiently alien to my own experience as to preclude much more reaction than recognition of some of the cast. This time around, at least I think I recognized Renée Zellweger. If Milla Jovovich has a Russian mother and a Serb father and was born in the Ukraine, which nationality gets to claim her? (Her birth name looks so ugly Latinized but Milica Jovović wouldn’t be comprehensible to most, let alone Милица Јововић).

10 October 2004

Really, I have no idea. But the earlier home of one of my movie reviews is the eleventh result in an Ask Jeeves search for what size clothes does naomi watts wear?

08 October 2004

Damn straight there is no comments problem here.

From page 318 of The 9/11 Commission Report:

Preparedness of Individual Civilians. One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike. Clearly, many building occupants in the World Trade Center did not take preparedness seriously,. Individuals should know the exact location of every stairwell in their workplace. In addition, they should have access at all times to flashlights, which were deemed invaluable by some civilians who managed to evacuate the WTC on September 11.

As someone who routinely wears a flashlight (the 2-cell AA Mini Maglite® flashlight which was once sufficiently menacing that I was asked to leave a theater at the AMC Potomac Mills 15 to allow the Prince William County police a look) I found this interesting to read.

Of course it’s going to stink. (Metacritic already gives it a 31, hey, that’s better than Taxi!) It’s been a few weeks since my last movie, though.

That’s funny. Put that in there. Director Mark Waters, in the commentary on a recent DVD release on the premises, states that he instructed Rachel McAdams to watch Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross to get an idea of the sense of ruthlessness he was looking for in the character of Regina. Baldwin, for his part, in the audio commentary to the DVD for that movie, relates that he was asked to watch George C. Scott in Patton as guidance for his character. He even indulges in a few impersonations from the opening speech. (Imagining Hilary Duff as Regina George is taxing.) Inspired by Lileks’ Bleat and its mention of Distort-O-Vision today, I wrestled with Corel Photo-Paint and its Distort mode to try to recreate what the Paramount Home Video poster might look like viewed at a normal to the plane.

See, I told you the 2005 look was a disaster. The Five Hundred, which I saw at Fall for Fairfax, is fairly blah as well. I backed into my garage recently and managed to snap a connector on the exterior mirror. The body shop manager said that mirror had been replaced before. Interesting.

The word minion has generated some excitement recently. I was thinking of sycophant actually, but looking it up and discovering that I didn’t even know how to spell it suggests I should maintain silence. Now that I’ve seen Glengarry Glen Ross choice epithets are far too close to the tip of the tongue in some situations anyway.

05 October 2004

Isn’t this the sort of thing we should have heard from our representatives to the relevant international organization?

29 September 2004

If the answer is so easy, why did contestant Kraft think it was -1?

26 September 2004

Now that I have a scanner attached to the Performa, I am always on the lookout for scanning opportunities. This small advertising placard picked up at Tower Records/Video has topped the stack on my desk for several weeks, but only now do I recognize that the Katy Rose depicted therein must be the Katy Rose whose Overdrive is part of the soundtrack of Mean Girls.

I’ve had the chance to watch my most recent DVD purchase *cough* a few times now. My first impressions of wit, pace, compassion, and general cuteness are confirmed, but to label the result as another Lohan-goes-to-high-school movie is unfair given that I have yet to purchase either Freaky Friday or Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Having listened to the commentary by director Mark Waters, screenwriter Tina Fey, and producer Lorne Michaels, I must disagree that the changes made to achieve a PG-13 rating were somehow harmful to the movie. By changing the question Jason poses as a lunch-time poll, for example, from Is your cherry popped? to Is your muffin buttered? his sexual advance is made less crude and thus less obvious to Cady and furthermore by inventing a slang the audience is afforded some share of the confusion that newcomer Cady is experiencing in her first week of school. The commentary itself is somewhat of a disappointment as much time is taken up with the three being silent, impressed with their efforts. From the sound of it, the commentary was recorded before the movie’s release, so it cannot address any of the issues that consumed the chattering classes after its release. Still, there are interesting remarks regarding some of the performers. The closed captioning folks outdid themselves in identifying the musical cues that accompany the chapters in the feature about the production of the movie using two adjectives each. The deleted scenes all are weak in tone or pacing and were properly omitted. The blooper reel is a highlight: Regina wriggling in her Hallowe’en costume and saying Do you like it, Daddy? is just sick. :-)

WAMALUG will be displaying at Fall for Fairfax this Saturday. If you are an adult fan of LEGO®, even if you’re not a member of this local users group, you are invited to contribute to the display!

If your printer stops responding, don’t forget to check all the connections.

Konica Minolta announces its new digital interchangeable-lens SLR. The new Maxxum 7D has a 6.1-megapixel CCD sensor and anti-shake technology inside the camera body but now I’m dubious about digital cameras recreating the film camera experience by using an optical viewfinder. I have very definitely gotten used to shooting at a distance by relying on the display on the back of, or just using the built-in angle viewfinder on, my DiMAGE 7Hi.

24 September 2004

Today Lileks, following up on the image in his 404 error page, discovers the soundtrack to the Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine by Sol Kaplan. Star Trek soundtrack albums on long-playing record dried up in 1989 with the release of the score to Star Trek V The Final Frontier, so this volume is only available on compact disc (which I purchased at Shore Leave 13 in July of 1991). The Bleat links to Amazon, but the album’s label GNP Crescendo Records has recently redesigned their site… and they sell for less!

22 September 2004

Breaking news not yet confirmed at the website of the Visions Cinema Bar Noir Lounge: the movie theater and eatery is closing on Sunday with a party, according to DCist… A published author of science-fiction novels derides judging an artist by politics… From time to time, I have heard the current head of the executive branch talk about the upside of one military adventure or the other, and thought of Sarek’s question to Kirk in Star Trek III The Search for Spock: But at what cost? I am not the only one asking this question… Sometimes you just need to know the status of a famous person, or a semi-famous person whom I decline to name, which led me to The Smoking Gun and the detailed report from the Los Angeles County coroner which made me feel more sympathy for the father…

21 September 2004

I wonder what I was up to today…

20 September 2004

I can’t prove that the camera Gwyneth Paltrow handles as unflappable reporter Polly Perkins in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is an Argus C3 because the shots-remaining counter on the top of the brick emphasized throughout the movie doesn’t appear to be prototypical. D’oh! The fact that the counter showed shots remaining should have been suspicious! Shh… it’s just a movie.

18 September 2004

You know, the Focus was handling somewhat poorly yesterday as I traveled the Beltway in the rain. This afternoon I discovered that the front right tire has no air pressure. The importance of tire safety was the subject of a nationwide public awareness campaign in 2002 using money from a settlement from my tire’s manufacturer but www.safetrip.org is not a currently operative domain. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offers a tire safety page.

16 September 2004

What does Aaron McGruder have against Haylie Duff? That is, what might he and Huey Freeman have against her that they wouldn’t also have against the sister named in today’s installment of The Boondocks?

The advertisement from Tower Records in the local free weekly newspaper promises a soundtrack compact disc release on the same day as the DVD release of that movie I keep mentioning. I guess that availability on iTunes is about to lose its exclusivity.

I don’t know what the fuss is about, but some people seem to go for that Firefox browser thingy…

Deutsche Welle for Klingons, in tlhIngan (English and German also available) (via Boing Boing).

14 September 2004

Someone has taken advantage of my free to a good home pile of electronics discards and reports that the Netgear wireless network card has given him better reception strength and increased range over his previous configuration… Some searchers landing at these pages have a negative attitude: overexposed teen queen lindsay lohan; as for what was cady s party song? mean girls that information is readily available elsewhere as the question gets asked over and over… The Veterans Administration offers a grave locator but seems not to have heard the advice about not tying URLs to specific server technology…

13 September 2004

The daughter of my cousin survives. She is undergoing a series of skin transplantations. Months of physical therapy, pressure therapy with compressive clothing and silicon inserts, and laser therapy await her.

12 September 2004

A LEGO® users group dissolves due to internal conflicts between the members… could happen anywhere, really.

I finally took the time to flip through AFOLs #1, a comic book about adult fans of the construction toy originally created for internal use to educate LEGO® employees but later printed and distributed to train clubs, users groups, and BrickFest™ attendees, and discovered that it depicted (in minifig form) only one real human and identified this non-fictional personality by position and name.

08 September 2004

Sean Kenney responds to the hubbub at Lugnet about the reviews at MOCpages. What I miss most in how MOCpages works now is the ability to respond directly. I don’t mean e-mailing the reviewer, since I’d rather not in most circumstances, but rather making a public comment on the review. Sort of like the forums at the Internet Movie Database. I left a comment on the page for Josh Jenkins’ arctic white H1 pickup along the lines of Your photos are huge but unfocused, a headache for sure, but at least my HMMWV creation and instructions as found here at MOCpages and at Brickshelf have allowed you and others to build this distinctive vehicle and within a day that page was gone.

Those Firefox fanboys still have work to do…

06 September 2004

Thanks to a Mac OS X-using relative I can show off how the website of my homeowners association looks in Camino 0.8.1 with the specification of an OS X-specific font in the stylesheet. Mac weenies will appreciate the opportunity to have the question What’s On Your Dock? at that user’s location answered.

WAMALUG will have its next meeting as scheduled on Saturday, September 11, 2004, as announced by the Chairman rather than the Director of Public Relations. Read the description of the meeting on September 16, 2001 which was expanded during the renovation of the web site last year.

05 September 2004

For the searcher who loves Carly Schroeder: her professional and personal website. Oh, my, the photo on the index page right now makes her look like a certain hotel heiress. (I don’t like linking to a photograph directly, but Schroeder’s site uses iframes and there’s no other way to point to that specific resource. See the image in context on the frame from Sundance for her Scrapbook page.) The filming of Mean Creek during the summer of last year clearly meant a lot to her, and the final product rewards her participation.

The 17th annual Virginia Film Festival has chosen speed as its theme for this year. The oversize postcard I picked up at the Landmark Theatres Bethesda Row promises a tenth anniversary presentation of Speed with special guests, but the current state of the website does not confirm this. I know not everyone likes the movie starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in which a GMC fishbowl bus is driven at high speeds through Los Angeles, but its no-cutaways-every-shot-advances-the-plot editing was distinctive in the year that saw my movie attendance increase tremendously.

While MozillaZine commenter pbreit badmouths the Mozilla suite and badmouths Camino, Firefox is still annoying experienced users. Camino is a Gecko-based browser for Mac OS X which I have installed on the machine of a relative using that operating system in response to the repeated remarks about the ugliness of the Mozilla suite. There has at that location never been a user-based desire to see Firefox on Mac OS X.

04 September 2004

I wish the movie Tae Guk Gi The Brotherhood of War hadn’t shown a Hershey chocolate bar, for on the back of the wrapping was a Nutrition Facts panel. It was like seeing the penny in Somewhere in Time, I had to shake my head, I was so thrown out of the movie, which is otherwise extremely intense in the manner of Saving Private Ryan while omitting the dumb parts (like the whole saving of the private segment). For those having trouble keeping up, the presence of the Nutrition Facts panel on foodstuffs made for sale in the United States is somewhat after the action in Korea depicted, set in the fall of 1950. I braved a Regal Cinemas to see this film, very popular in South Korea from what I hear, about two brothers torn by the upheaval wrought by the war, for the first time since the über-disaster that was the screening of Gladiator at the Ballston Commons 12 on August 9, 2000. I was joined in the mid-afternoon screening by families and gaggles of young women who may not have been sufficiently warned by the R rating applied in these states. The particular example of the latter next to me was constantly calling upon her deity during the battle scenes and eventually resorted to covering herself with a handkerchief, whether against the chill air in the auditorium or the better to cover her eyes I could not tell.

Afterwards, I went right downstairs to Tower Records/Video #822 and bought the 293-minute version of Das Boot. How dare they! The whiteboard announcing upcoming DVD releases extends as far as September 21st and admits that besides some useless space fantasy trilogy being released that day that also Mean Girls is due, also, hmph.

My host Dr2 merged with Mesopia recently and for a few days the statistics reverted to those last run on August 24th. The logs are back up to date, and searchers reaching these pages have some very specific needs: alexandria metro blue and yellow lines photos images pictures; hilary duff multimedia download santa claus lane; and pdf files of service manual for 2003 mazda 6. The searches for giuliana depandi and wendy rieger continue. And someone was ticked off: procedure for sending a complaint to mazda about the b3000 trucks.

03 September 2004

After eighteen weeks, Mean Girls has left local movie screens, just over two weeks’ shy of its video release. Napoleon Dynamite advertises its fourteenth week (but it’s been on local screens only since June 18th so it’s only in its twelfth week here). I’ve had the Focus for a year.

02 September 2004

Seems like I am not the only person annoyed at the comments left at MOCpages by Josh Jenkins.

01 September 2004

The Brickshelf account holder using the moniker sdfg now has a MOCpages account identified as belonging to Josh Jenkins. Meanwhile, the undercarriage of the 8-wide HMMWV in the Brickshelf folder of darkdesire seems real. Both contributors to Brickshelf like large photographs!

29 August 2004

So, I was tidying up one of the spaces on the premises used for storage and came across a photograph of the sign at the entrance of the local planned unit development in which the residence was built and thought to myself, that looks typographical, I wonder if…. Flipping through the WordPerfect Office 2000 Libraries Catalog, I decided that Bauer Bodoni was a terrific match for the letters on the sign, and added these fonts to my Windows system. Scanning the photograph and importing the bitmap into a new CorelDraw document, I applied a text element, moving and stretching letters to match the arrangement on the sign. Exporting to an antialiased GIF and transferring to the Performa by diskette, I removed the edge in Graphic Converter to maintain the transparency. Image uploaded, templates edited, and the stylesheet reflecting a sequence of colors chosen to harmonize with the color of the stone (concrete) in the sign, and the makeover is done. The advertisement placeholders [and the favicon] still sport the lime and cream hues of the previous look, though.

The comments at my MOCpages account seem to have been edited recently, as I was convinced that sdfg was boasting of constructing a better (more minifig-proportioned, too) HUMMER, but only praise for my models is found in the comments from that individual now. Now that sdfg has the 25,720th account at Brickshelf we can only lament the inability to focus a camera in trying to discern the effort involved in adapting my design. The arctic white version compares favorably with my own rendering of a four-door pickup version of the HMMWV.

28 August 2004

They Lie. They Cheat. They’re Your Friends… Watch Your Back. As already reported, coming to DVD and VHS on September 21st. Still screening at 18 (weeks).

From time to time in these dispatches I comment on the innards of a web page design. I have found that being responsible for more than one site, each with a different look, has been a source of inspiration in which a problem observed and solved at one site might lead to a desire and the expertise to change an aspect of another site. Which, upon reconsideration, might just mean (I have way much) more time and experience. But, seriously, if you are working on but one web site design, you’re cheating yourself. I have continued to work on the secret installation of WordPress and one step towards eliminating numeric entities and achieving XHTML 1.0 Strict validation has been—saving the index.php file as UTF-8! D’oh!

French actress Sandrine Bonnaire is no stranger, as it were, to playing the role of a troubled soul. Almost twenty years ago, she won a César for her portrayal in Sans toit ni loi of Mona, an aimless drifter whose wanderings through France doing odd jobs for cigarette money end with her frozen to death in a vineyard’s ditch. As interest in the format waned with the introduction of the DVD, laserdisc prices were falling in 2000 when I ordered The Criterion Collection title Vagabond (as the film is known in the U.S.) for 40% off, sight unseen. Depressing, yes, for we learn of Mona’s unwitnessed death first thing, but a comprehensive look at a society nonetheless. Her sturdy demeanor belies her age which seems to have been just about 18 at the time of filming. It is also an intriguing coincidence that Bonnaire had a role in a 1994 film in French and Russian called Ispoved neznakomstu… otherwise known as Secrets Shared with a Stranger! (I wish I had a flatbed scanner capable of imaging a videodisc cover in one pass. I promised myself after The Hospital I wouldn’t try to patch together two scans again.)

Man, I should have taken a screen shot! When I searched for analysis early Friday morning of Gogol’s Dead Souls (I have started the second part) an AdWords box to the side of the Google results page included a link for Search for Dead Souls on eBay! but I can’t repeat the result tonight.

26 August 2004

I thought that the web site statistics provided by Wusage 7.0 for the homeowners association were broken in some way but a direct examination of the logfile in BBEdit reveals that user agents and referrers simply aren’t recorded. The host is so lame that it expects monthly payment for turing [sic] on the referrer log which is described as providing the ability to view regular domain names in [the] traffic report rather than IP addresses which led me to think that it must refer to some reverse DNS lookup for REMOTE_ADDR rather than for HTTP_REFERER values (which aren’t normally logged as IP addresses since they’re URLs). Wusage already does this sort of reverse DNS lookup for the visitor’s IP address (the option to view them is labeled Top Visitor Sites ) but a quick search suggests that this sort of extra charge for referrers is routine (with agent logging thrown in). Ridiculous! User agents, operating systems, referring pages, and searches are the most interesting data, far more so than time-of-day or other such nonsense. :-( Additional monthly payments are also expected for PHP and MySQL! I have finally figured out how the advanced_search template gets used and brought that file and the file returned for 404 errors into the style of the rest of the site. An id="summersgrove-org" attribute allows a per-site user stylesheet.

It’s not my fault that the WAMALUG archives page is the third result currently in a Google search for lego tysons after two results from shoptysons.com for the new LEGO® Brand Retail store opening at the huge regional mall tomorrow. I suppose I should update the WAMALUG links page… Argh, another domain (lego.com) that has adjusted its site structure.

25 August 2004

The default body color of #808080 that was in use at the website of my homeowners association has been replaced by #333. Also, I prepared some blank GIF images in standard advertising sizes and adjusted the templates to include them. The community involvement is very low, but perhaps someone will see the images and step forward to either have the site participate in the Google AdSense program or otherwise sell advertising.

I suppose I should be grateful that my HMMWV image survived the upload process, then. The president of Brickshelf explains today in a post to the WAMALUG list that folders with a title image (no matter how creative) especially those that use words are moderated as having the category Avatar [clearly Mozilla does not implement inner quotes yet] so the folder does not display in the recent view. Not only is this a quirky aspect of Brickshelf, but I suspect it is undocumented as well… I was just looking at the site’s homepage today and thinking the cluttered look cried out for a makeover. I also checked the site in Netscape Navigator 3.04 and Netscape Communicator 4.04 on the 68k Macintosh on hand (Quadra 610) and while each browser attempted to download show_ads.js neither crashed when the download was cancelled and the page displayed with a blank spot where the Ads by Google would have been.

My instructions to build a M1026 HUMVEE don’t include amber turn signals on the back! Something tells me that’s not prototypical… oh, great, AM General changed the structure of its web site.

23 August 2004

More goofiness from the Firefox bunker—a plan to remove the style sheet switcher from version 1.0! A helpful commenter points to the relevant Bugzilla thread and to be fair if the feature is buggy then maybe it should be removed… temporarily. (The site navigation bar was removed from Mozilla upon reaching version 1.0 for performance reasons and returned in version 1.1 beta, after all.) But the phrasing was most unfortunate. Add the site of WAMALUG to the list of sites which offer a plurality of style sheets with no page-based UI for switching between them. :-) A special treat for club members who read these dispatches. Discuss.

22 August 2004

It’s nothing I want to place my web design badge upon, but I have wrestled with the templates in the content management system installed at the website of my homeowners association to the extent that I can take a pause and not be embarrassed. Aside from the favicon implemented last October, and the link hover color and external style sheet added earlier this month, I have significantly reduced the number (and degree of nesting) of tables (one table was used solely to draw the thick gray line under the green banner, this is now a border-bottom declaration) and adjusted URLs to avoid the www. prefix (through the inclusion of a <base> element, for example), but I cannot avoid the unencoded ampersands created by the CMS so the site’s pages will never validate. Although the external style sheet is currently linked it is largely ignored by Netscape Communicator for unknown reasons which is just as well. My initial impulse was to duplicate the earlier appearance (as if anyone would notice a change) but discovering attributes which only Internet Explorer parses (bordercolor) and invalid attribute values (valign=center) and attributes which simply don’t exist (borderwidth) tempted me too much. The side columns have been adjusted for clarity in the default and hover states. The Main Menu include even had a template cell to distinguish the selected category; by placement of a class on the paragraph enclosing that category name, stylesheet declarations are now used to highlight that category. The colors #9C6, #FFC, and #808080 have been used throughout. The printer-friendly style of article display has been completely overhauled to banish the small margins and tiny fonts.

The previous template wrangler denies a default resource at his personal website and attempts a redirect to a family site which fails (the domain no longer exists) but Google locates a new index page abandoned in 2001. The site of the gourmet dog treats business that he started with his wife is a compendium of ancient techniques despite the more recent copyright date: capitalized element names, document-level styles on elements with a class attribute, text size specified in pixels (which prevents resizing in Microsoft Internet Explorer), JavaScript to disable browser functions, <table> and <font> elements like there’s no tomorrow, links opening in a new window (using target="blank" and frustrating users of tabbed browsers), and an ilayer element which only works in Netscape 4! A positive note: the logo links to the default resource / rather than a specific index file. Reality check: Mozilla 1.7+ has a preference to prevent a web page from disabling or replacing context menus. People using a browser under constant development have a choice and they don’t like ham-fisted attempts to control the browsing experience. My BugZilla searching skills are inadequate to find out if a fix for a script-based denial of selecting text in the web page is under development. When the homeowners association approved the expenditure to buy a license for the content management system late in 2001, the supplied templates were the latest word in cross-browser compatibility written at a time when Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape Communicator 4.7 were the latest and greatest, but even the software company has moved on. The freshening of the templates looks especially good on Safari and Camino on Mac OS X because I specified Lucida Grande as the default font.

That’s just splendid. Having enabled the troublesome PowerBook 1400 to access the Internet over an Ethernet network earlier this year, now I discover that it won’t access the Internet over dial-up. The Global Village card will dial out and connect, but the connection is immediately dropped. Guess I won’t be needing that Starpower access number in Lancaster, Pennsylvania after all. Grr.

21 August 2004

I am now definitely maxed out on the SCSI chain from the Performa. With the internal hard drive and bus controller taking up IDs 0 and 7, the external hard drive using ID 2, the internal CD-ROM drive at ID 3, the external CD-R burner with ID 4, the external ZIP 250 drive at ID 5, the external PC Card reader using ID 6, placing the flatbed scanner at ID 1 exhausts the available locations. With DeskScan II v2.4 installed under System 9.1 and the preference for resolution of the path to screen set to 96 dpi, the scanner works, as is apparent from the image of the most recent souvenir of a visit to Tower Records/Video #195. Hewlett Packard does not support the use of DeskScan II v2.4 under any version of System 9 (also see a chart of minimum and recommended system requirements) but my speculation that such restraint was a cover for a reluctance to explain the difference between NuBus and PCI Macs paid off. TWAIN acquire does not work, however.

I leave links to The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times on my Diversions page even though I never visit anymore due to the requirements for registration at the newspapers’ sites. BugMeNot.com is a site devoted to bypassing compulsory web registration (and currently the Post and the L.A. Times are the second and third most actively requested sites right after the New York Times) and it disappeared last week. The story is that their host dropped them and the service was unavailable until another host was located.

I continue to use Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey) even though I only install the Browser component because Firefox is not available for a Macintosh running System 9 and