October 2006 Archives
So Firefox 2.0 went and got itself released.
I knew about this a couple of days ago, when someone else (was it Tim Bray? I don't remember) posted up a link to the final beta. I downloaded it, installed it, and thought to myself "it can't get any worse" while I fired up the application icon.
Well, fortunately, it looks like the folks at Mozilla have finally, finally, finally grown a clue. The interface is significantly improved. Fantastic. Short cut keys? They work. It's incredible. Speed? Yup, it's way faster. Seems as fast as Safari now, or at least really close.
My biggest gripe, and biggest headache, in Firefox was the "close window" button. For some (unknown) reason, that little "x" was all the way on the right side. This means that if I select a new tab, I have to travel allll the way over to the right side of the window to close that tab, and then alll the way back to keep surfing, select a new tab, whatever. It's frustrating. Dealing with interfaces is something I don't want to have to do - it's why I switched away from Windows. This improved Firefox moves the "x" to the place it ought to be... right in the tab. Safari got this right from the beginning, and it's something Firefox really should have had. Maybe not right off the bat, but learn from your competition.
Internet Explorer 7 has been released, and look what happens when you don't pay attention: you release a brand new toy, and it still lags years behind all the competition. I mean, kudos to IE7 for sort of/kinda figuring out CSS a little better, but seriously, why must it be the only non-standards-compliant browser out there? I understand that Microsoft has to be A Giant Among Men at all times, but people are getting smarter and much more educated, and Micro$oft's reputation is reaching new lows in a variety of arenas. It's a lost cause.
So Safari gets put away now, and I can finally commit to using Firefox without giving myself a headache. I love it. Lifehacker has a great article on additional ways to tweak out Firefox, by the way, that I think everyone should read. There's at least two tweaks in there that will help performance and usability (the memory allocation tweak and the tooltips removal), but there's some seriously useful stuff there. Go see.
So, a week after I announce (officially) that I plan on selling the TT in favor of a jeep, Jimbo went and got himself a '78 CJ7. And what a gangster little ride it is!
There's a few things that need care, specifically the steering and transfer case, but the body's in great shape, the tranny is smooth and works well, and overall it was a great deal at $2300. Thing sounds like a boat and tracks like a tank over anything. Way cool.
So congratulations to Jimbo on his new toy, I can't wait to get mine now. Seeing a guy this weekend about one; maybe it'll be The One. Then again, maybe not. We'll see. Not gonna lie, I'm excited to check it out. And if not, I can always steal Jim's.
And in case you haven't heard, yes, the TT is for sale. It's a 225hp Coupe, with Quattro all-wheel-drive. I'm asking $18,000USD for it, and it includes H&R coilover suspension, CPP (AWE Tuning) control arms, APR chip (fully loaded), Stratmosphere HXc diverter valve, short-ram intake, and a Modshack Boost Machine. She's red with a black top, 17-inch 5-point fatties on the hubs with brand-new rubber. Wanna buy it? Lemme know.
Some things are just wrong. Just plain wrong. But I just know most males who read this are chuckling into their sleeve... oh, you shystie bastards...
So for like, the ninth time since its inception, Jamesestout.com is launched. This time, it's pushing a Wordpress engine with a slew of juicy plugins and add-ons, and this time maybe, just maybe, Jimbo will keep up with it. The potential of his blog is pretty high as both a marketing tool and a communications tool, and he's got the content to push his site to the very top - it's just a matter of him devoting some of that time he has on his hands towards it.
Whatever he's got to talk about has to be more interesting that anything I've got to say, that's for sure, but on top of it all he's got a lot of experience in the mortgage industry and he's a whiz with the finances. Even if he only puts up an article once a week, if it's decent enough and has some information on it worth reading, people will tune in. As we all know, if people tune in, that's traffic, and traffic can be directed. Like I said - invaluable.
Wordpress has impressed me, though. The install was quick, painless, and very thorough. The engine is solid, the plug-ins are very easy to implement and work with. The whole experience has been pretty nice, actually, so far, and it has nice features like the email-a-post thing built right in. Very cool. The templating system looks good, and there's so many templates. I'll have to implement the previous "Pineapple Fields" template eventually, but for the time being it'll do the job.
Next up on that site, Coppermine! I'll be integrating it with Wordpress (another surprising, yet excellent feature that I wish Movable Type had) so Jimbo can reference his gallery pics. He's got plenty of 'em too. Which reminds me - I need to get around to re-installing Coppermine on my own site... sheesh.
I've had a gMail account for ages now - at least a couple of years. And I've used it about as much as I use my hotmail account... not at all. I got a hotmail account way back when it was still HoTMaiL, before it became a Microsoft juggernaught, and it had its utility, I suppose. Just like anything so fresh out of the gate, though, I wasn't terribly impressed with the speed, the interface... in essence I was unimpressed overall with webmail.
Since then I've looked at webmail with disdain, as a backup to my regular avenues of email communication, POP and IMAP through native clients. I've had friends swear by it, seen for myself that there are situations where webmail would be very convenient, and even used it a few times myself. Thing is, I take in a ridiculous amount of mail every day, from a wide, wide variety of locations. Then there's the ridiculous amount of space taken up by emails.
How ridiculous? Let's review. I use MailSteward (an excellent archiving program that sticks all my old emails into a handy searchable relational database) to store the 80,000 emails and attachments I've kept around since I first got my Powerbook (back in... oh, 2001?) Since my last bout of spring cleaning with MailSteward, I've still got 2014 messages in my boxes - using up about 3.1gb. That's right, three point one gigabytes. On this little Powerbook, with its measly little 30gb hard drive, you can only imagine the impact email has had. This isn't spam, mind you - this is legitimate correspondence. If we average about 3 spams to every one legit email (the actual ratio is higher , I think), that means three times that number has coursed through my email client. That's a lot. A lot a lot.
gMail's got 2gb of handy email space. It seems like so much... and maybe for the average user it is... and hey, maybe I should delete emails. I'm going to try it out for a bit and see what happens. Fact is, the whole decentralization of computing that we've been witnessing in the past couple of years (okay, okay, actually it's been like 15 years, but not to the general public) is pretty exciting. All those web-based apps, usable and responsive thanks to the magic of AJAX, web-based email, all good stuff.
A friend of mine said that I should be able to, at any time, get up and sit down at any given computer, and with a little bit of setting up, keep on working. Now, that's all relative - I often need some specific bits of software to operate - but in general that's really not a bad way to go (as much as possible.) So really, most web projects can be stored (including original templates and other graphics files) in a subversion repository (Google Code even provides that for you), so that takes care of that. These days you don't really even need Photoshop or Illustrator, what with GIMP and Inkscape being freely available and mostly cross-platform. Text editor or IDE? There's plenty of options available. Calendaring, spreadsheets, email, word processing, all handled with web-apps, and pretty efficiently too.
I'd say it's almost feasible to get up from my Powerbook and sit down at nearly any workstation, Windows, Apple, or Linux, and with a little bit of wiggling, get back to work. Hm. Let's find out...
A year after the first entry into my blog, and I'm still not making any sense. Just goes to show there's no improving on perfection. October 10th, 2005 I wrote about alligators and pythons, and today, I'm writing about... alligators and pythons.
Technically, I've been keeping a blog (in some shape or another) since 2003, but (for a variety of reasons) I never really kept track of the entries, deleted them, lost them, threw them out, ate 'em up, chewed 'em out, killed them, forgot them, and so much more. So yeah, there's at least a couple of years of lost random thoughts that nobody will every enjoy, but that's okay - I have so many more years to come up with new and exciting random crap for *everyone* to enjoy! Everyone being, of course, all 5 people who come around here.
So to these fine people, and the millions more that will no doubt find their way here and wonder "what the...?" I say "Happy Birthday!"
And how.
It's one of those debates that never ends - to Flash or not to Flash. And one of the big arguments against it is that Flash is difficult (if not impossible) to properly optimize for search engines.
Now, we all know that's not exactly true. Flash isn't impossible to SEO properly. But it's definitely more difficult to optimize, it's rife with accessibility issues, and people (frankly speaking) just tend to suck at it. Flash is a powerful tool, and adds whole dimensions to a browser's UI capabilities. There's no question about that. With all that power, though, comes a tendency for people to overdo their UI, trying to "be creative" and they end up coming up with - to quote someone I just read - crap. All very unfortunate, because it gives Flash a really bad name.
Personally, I avoid Flash unless a project has a very specific need that can only be filled (or is more easily filled) with Flash. Full-on Flash websites are a thing of the past, hybrid sites with Flash elements, a thing of the present (and possibly the future.) As SEO gets more complex, and the technologies surrounding it get more complex, the landscape may change. Until then, this very handy flowchart will help you decide whether or not to run the gun and use Flash:
Special thanks to The Google Cache for making me laugh so hard this morning I almost spilled my coffee. Almost. That stuff is worth its weight in gold...
There's something to be said for sifting through old pictures. Well, "old" is all kind of relative, of course - in this case a little less than a year ago (if even?) We were hanging out at the climbing gym, and decided that bouldering the overpass of SR-84 would be fun. And you know what? It totally was.
Such good times. This was back when Nat and Marky and I used to climb together all the time. There's always a happy memory on the walls.
"I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -Bill Watterson
So true. In the meantime, I'm going to install Markdown into Movable Type - I just really like it. I've never been a big fan of the whole replacement-syntax paradigm, but I've found that in this case it really saves a lot of time and energy. When you're writing for fun, saving time and energy is A Big Deal. Kudos again go to Daring Fireball. Happiness.
I promised J. that I'd occasionally talk about little tips or whatever in commonly used software, because it'd be useful information. I asked him "Sounds great, but how little?" He described what he thought would be nice to see (being the non-technical monkey he is...) so here's the first tip. Ready? You must be...
In Firefox (the Mozilla web browser available for download here), you can easily reposition the tabs in a single window by dragging them to the desired location. This allows you to organize your tabs in a way that makes sense to you (and is a feature unsupported in other tabbed browsers, like Safari). But here's a bonus (related) tip/feature you might not know about: you can move tabs to other windows. There's a few caveats, though... in order for it to work, the tab bar has to be active - otherwise it will simply replace your current page in the window with whatever page is in the tab. When you drag your tab from the original window and onto an existing tab, it will replace that tab, but if you place the dragged tab on the bar next to the last tab in the new window, you'll have yourself a spiffy new tab with the new page loaded in it. Then you can reorganize it to taste. Neat, huh?
Funny thing about it is that these aren't features supported in The Others. It's particularly absent in Safari, and I can't imagine how difficult it would be to code this in, but considering they've based themselves on the KHTML (Konquerer) browser (a mature, well-developed, really high-performance browser) I'm a little surprised that it's not there. Just one more reason I've dumped Safari in favor of Firefox. And there's just so many of them...
Ever call up Papa John's and gotten their famous "Can you please hold?" It's freakin' hilarious - I'm convinced it's part of their script (no business as corporate as Papa John's could possibly exist without having a script for every bit of interaction with a human, especially one so dependent on phone transactions.)
Phone rings... "Thank you for calling Papa John's can you please hold?" *click*!
That's it. No room for a response, no reason to even ask. It should be "Thanks for calling, you're on hold." Or maybe a call-center approach would be more efficient, with proper routing of pizza orders to the respective branch/franchise/whatever nearest the address on file? I mean, with computers being as cool as they are for this sort of thing, why not set up a centralized database based on phone number or whatnot that stores addresses (much like they have now) and just dispatch orders?
What a fantastic idea. Until then, I guess we'll just have to stay on hold. Or call Domino's.
Back to Movable Type.
Typo was great while it lasted, but it had/has too many limitations and niggling little errors for my taste. Some of these are Typo issues, some are Dreamhost issues, and some are just my own impatience, but the overall experience has been lukewarm. The Movable Type engine has so many great features and is so... operational, there's just no reason not to use it. It really just works. Now they've made the personal edition free (although paid customers get technical support), it's even more attractive.
Typo is a really neat engine, and the admin interface is nice and clean. It's (mostly) fast, has some really nice utilities and features, and definitely Does The Job. But it's still not up to par with Movable Type and WordPress, which are both significantly more mature.
I'm a big fan of any and all Ruby on Rails-based software, and try to be especially forgiving of any faults, but there's times when I'm especially adamant about the "It Just Works" paradigm. Call me a spoiled mac user, I just don't feel that things should be difficult to get working, or require smacking around. Radiant is a pretty good example of this - great CMS, awesome interface, what a freakin' *pain* to get working. The unfortunate truth is that this is pretty much the truth of most applications, but particularly true when speaking of Rails apps. If you've got limited experience or knowledge with Rails (never mind web development) then there's a really good chance that you're going to end up growling at your computer at least once, and the likelyhood is that, without some help, you'll just can the whole project and look for something else , something that isn't going to trigger a headache.
This isn't to say that Rails isn't awesome and fast and cool in many ways. I'm a huge fan, and will continue to use it, use Rails apps, and develop in it. But in the face of unnecessary stress, I'd rather just go with something that I know "just works", and will give me a featureset that will work for me. Rails will mature, Gems will (hopefully) become more ubiquitous and easy to implement on any host, and life will be good. No doubt.
I scored my first hole in one on the 15th hole at the Tradewinds disc golf course. An Ace! On one of the longest holes on the course (if not the longest!) This matters to few, but man, what a feeling... 450 feet of perfect arc and a thick *ching* at the end of the flight. Too freakin' cool. It's been almost 10 years in coming (ever since I learned to play on the courses in Austin.)
So kudos to me. An Ace it is.
