Oh yummy, another server-side language, this one claiming to be faster than both PHP and Perl. Perhaps, but does it do anything?
Yearly Archives: 2002
New Schedule
I am very happy about my schedule for next semester. Get this:
- Earliest class at noon on Monday and Wednesday, 10 AM on Tuesday and Thursday
- Latest class ends at 4, well before traffic really gets going
- All of my classes are pretty close to each other physically, something I didn’t know about last semester
- I don’t have any gaps in my schedule, like the 4 hour one I have this semester
- Nothing on Fridays! Yes, that means three day weekends. All the time.
- I’m taking classes I’m more interested in, not just prerequisites
Next semester is going to be so sweet. 🙂
750 megabyte Zip Drive
Whoop dee doo. Maybe if this had come years ago before CD were as common as floppy drives. Maybe if it was priced significantly lower than CD technology is now. Maybe if everyone still used Zip disks and this was completely backward compatible. Maybe then I would consider this worth it. It’s strange to see a one-hit-wonder company struggling for relevancy like this.
Update: I forgot to say what made me really mad about this: I got seven emails from Iomega to the same address telling me this “wonderful new product.”
Macromedia Contribute
Macromedia has announced Contribute, which they look to be positioning as an editor for the mases. Everyone who has attempted to architect a client editable web page runs in to this problem early on. Either you just have them put in raw text, and maybe do a little fancy formatting to make it readable, or you invent your own “simplified” markup language, like many bulletin boards offer, or finally you just try and teach them HTML and hope that a missing end tag doesn’t turn your entire design into a link, or some other catastrophe. Taking a more robust approach to this problem are the editors which take HTML in a text field and put a WYSIWYG editor on top of this. Internet Exploder has a version of this integrated, but it gives such ugly code that it has been known to break mirrors. Mozilla (the meat behind the new Netscape) has a much more promising version which generates better code, but still has a lot of bugs to be worked out; I know because this is the solution I used for a recent client. There are also products like Editize which are quite nice.
It looks like Macromedia is trying to target the medium to large website developers who are tired of doing trivial updates and the managers who don’t want to go through said developers whenever they want to change text of some sort. Let’s say that this is implemented throughout an entire company, is that a good thing? I would say that just because everyone can have a voice on the company website, doesn’t mean they should. Also I’m suspicious of any product that says it’s “easy as Word.” The pricing point of this product and more importantly how it interfaces with the server will ultimately tell if this product is going to be the next big thing, a product as big as its vision.
Geeky Night
While browsing around two things have caught my interest. The first is a great collection of tips in PHP that has some extremely nice code in it. My only objection to anything he has is when he discusses $PATH_INFO, and gives the example:
<location "/products">
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</location>
This is a hassle because it forces you to have a file with no extension, which under most operating systems doesn’t use the same handler as .php files, and it adds a needless step. Why does it seem that no one knows you can have a file called products.php and use multiviews to access it just like you would above?
The other thing I ran into is a pretty neat little class called ezSQL that I think I’m going to use for a project I’m doing. I found out about it through an article called PHP and Working with Databases (for the Lazy Sod), which couldn’t have a better title, especially if targeting people like me. Interesting things to check out if you’re into that sort of thing.
Of course all this browsing was down to entertain me while I was trying to install Gentoo Linux, the most promising distro I’ve seen in a while. I wasn’t able to get it to work on either my desktop or laptop but I haven’t given up hope yet. If I run in to a roadblock however the problem is that I have rehearsals on Wednesdays now and wouldn’t be able to make it up to HLUG where maybe Mat could take a look at it. Worst comes to worst I’ll go to SuSE or something.
All this and I still need to clean up that mail script to send to Mike. Long day!
Of course now all this LDAP stuff is distracting me. I already use IMAP for getting to all my email so having a universally accessible contact list is quite attractive. We’ll see how that goes . . .
A Little Bit of Winter
I’ve done a little tweaking to go ahead and chill the look up here a bit. I’ve decided to forgoe Fall entirely as we really don’t get that season here in Houston, it generally goes straight from hot to cold.
New Links
My blogroll is starting to collect dust, and the only excuse I can give for not updating it recently is because I’m in the process of making a pretty comprehensive links page that will hopefully take my gargatuan favorites menu down to a manageable size and have all the links I’ve been meaing to add lately. Watch this space!
Evening Plans
Today has been incredibly busy and incredibly productive at the same time. Getting ready to head out, meeting Mike for some food then we’re hooking up with Christine, Elaine, and maybe others at Kaveh Kanes for some sweet sweet coffee. Of course it wouldn’t be a get-together without a digital camera, so hopefully tonight I’ll have some neat photos to put up. Speaking of pictures, there are quite a few up in the photolog, however I didn’t take them. I’m participating in a new “lend-a-camera” program for digitally underprivileged high school students ;). Anyway, enjoy the guest photographers, and if you’re looking for some comic relief you really have to watch this video. It has flying and dancing. I really need a red light or something on the camera to let me know when it’s recording.
Finally Paid
Yesterday I finally got my first check from the Musicians Performance Trust Fund, even though I should have been getting checks from them for almost three years now. The MPTF is a union thing that sends out the checks for “green sheet” gigs where the money comes through the union. I play with a group called Young Sounds which is a union band and I’ve been signing the green sheet for years. What I think precpitated this first check is that before, for whatever reason, I had never given them my social security number, because I’m hestitant to give that out very often, and I think that’s why they had never sent a check before. Of course the money has to be somewhere, I should probably check to see if any of it is still there. Chris said I should frame this, and I think I will. Here’s a picture for its full glory:
Gallery: 11-7-2002
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Satisfaction
I have made quite the discovery. I’ve been seeing Kristine post about naps quite a bit, so when I found myself with some free time earlier today I decided to try it.
Oh. My. Gosh.
The rest of the day I was refreshed and on the ball, it was like a whole other world. The air was fresher; the sky was bluer; the chocolate was sweeter. I realized that there has been a huge gap in my life of about fourteen or fifteen years where I took no naps, maybe even longer since I seem to remember messing around during naptime in kindergarten. This has got to change—no longer will I sleep only in a large block (actually usually a small block) at nighttime. If you haven’t tried this nap thing lately, you really should. Anyone else recently discover the joy of naps?
Yellow Lights
Ever have one of those days where you seem to catch all of the yellow lights?
Gallery: 11-5-2002
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New From Happy Cog
It’s no secret to many people that Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the fathers of the web and was in fact my first inspiration once I got into web design. The busiest man in NY, has recently “launched” two major websites, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. Now to be completely honest, when I saw the Searchlight site, I was dismayed. Was this the same designer whose writing I have followed for years? Every other site he has done is unmistakably Zeldman, not so much in a particular aesthetic but in the attention to detail and functionality, both of which I think the Fox site lack. However the AIfIA site is absolutely gorgeous. Check it out for a wonderful example of cutting edge CSS design and a sublimely superb user experience.
UPDATE: Well thanks to some helpful comments I have noticed the serious mistake I made with confusing Zeldman’s endorsement of the site with his actually being behind it. My apologies to those who this mistake slighted and I hope they take this as an honest mistake which, in a way, is also a strong compliment. Time to give credit where it is due. Christina, author of a book I have heard about in different circles but haven’t gotten to yet, points out that Erin Malone is the designer behind the new AIfIA. In a roundabout way, one of the things I realized when writing this correction is I know very little about this “Information Architecture” thing everyone is talking about. Even my evaluation was relatively superficial because even while I looked at the underlying code behind the site, I didn’t really attempt to quantify what made the site so pleasant and usable, which I wrote of to the “Zeldman touch.” I see my ignorance on the subject (of IA) as an opportunity for growth, and to that end the AIfIA site has been a great resource so far, I guess a testament to its purpose. Also a little googling led me to, amoung other things, an interesting tutorial at Webmonkey. More on this as I learn. I’m also very inclined to check out the two books written by the two kind enough to point out my earlier mistake.
Weekend Roundup
Well, now that it’s officially over, I must say that was a really excellent weekend that even the amazonian weather couldn’t dampen. It got started strong on Friday with a little car dancing, good food, a sarcastic ATM, and a trampoline.
Saturday got a late start, and it turned out the gig I was looking forward to got rained out. However I did get to meet some new people out in Spring Valley and had a wonderful homemade dinner. There are pictures too but someone *cough*Sarah*cough* absconded with my digital camera, so I’ll have to wait to see if any of them came out. Also got to help someone with their computer, which is always a good feeling. Sometimes I have bad streaks where people seem to come to me with the strangest problems that I really don’t have a clue how to take care of. Then I drove through the rain to hear “the group Mike sings with,” otherwise known as Lager Rhythms. The show was really technically excellent and entertaining, and I got to sit by Christine which was excellent because I got the feeling we both had been similarly exposed to Schoolhouse Rock, we were cracking up at the same times. Afterward I tagged along with Kathy, Elaine and Kenny, Hanna, Robert, and the blog-less Joe and Mandy to a neat place called Catbirds, where they had really excellent music. They were playing really classic jazz stuff, mostly stuff I had heard before but a few gems that were new to me, including one I know was Ella Fitzgerald but I forgot to ask the DJ what album it was off of. Our relatively large group was seated outside, which was fine for the cool weather but a little inconvenient once it started pouring again. I’d like to see them some more but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it out to the Renaissance Festival next weekend because of HPUG. However, if you are going to be in town though, be sure to check out the meeting at 1 PM next Saturday because we’re going to have almost every kind of Treo known to man and a ton of cool Bluetooth gadgets that Jason is bringing.
Where does that leave Sunday? Recovering. And it’s already almost four in the morning!
Gallery: 11-4-2002
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Tweak Tweak
Well a little bird whispered in my ear that Google was starting its monthly crawl again, the major one, not just the update one, and so I thought it would be a good opportunity to tweak some of the more egregious errors on this site. The URL system throughout the site is now more consistent, and the header stuff has been optimized a bit. TODO: fix login system, jazzquotes, add “new photos” thing, update MTCurly.
Don’t Give Them Any Ideas
RIAA Wants Background Checks on CD-RW Buyers
“I was alarmed when I heard that children had the ability to burn CDs right on their computers,” said Senator Strom Thurmond, “We’ve tried to educate parents on the dangers of children playing with fire, and now these death merchants sell them that ability in a shiny metal box.” Other Senators voiced their concerns about the possible violations of privacy in the proposed legislation, but since it was called the Copyright Patriotism Act they are unable to oppose it.
Gallery: 11-3-2002
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Gig Rained Out
Well the gig was rained out today, but if you want to hear some more really good music check out “Lager Rhythms” at Anderson Fair tonight at nine. More details here at Mike’s site. Please excuse any typos, I’m on a QWERTY keyboard. (yuck!)