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.

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 . . .

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.

Michael has some very cool stuff going on at his site. If you use Cafélog or just like seeing wicked PHP code, check it out. I can’t believe I just said wicked. If I get any free time tonight I’m going to look at the regex stuff he’s doing and see what’s going on with it. Not to mention the redesign, which I think is quite groovy.

I’m “watching” to Palm’s special presentation for PUGs on the Zire and Tungsten units right now. More when it’s over.

It’s just beautiful. Too often I see PHP dismissed for other more ‘mature’ languages, so having a little website with more than 1.5 billion pageviews a day and some of the smartest engineers on the web decide to use it is quite heartening.

Well, just minutes ago Palm officially released their new Tungsten T product. They really need to start coming up with better names for these things. This is bad, and Zire? What’s up with that? Anyway this unit looks quite good, it has everything Palm has been lacking for so long:

• Sliding graffiti area, so it should be pretty small.
• Voice recording and playback, which has been missing for far too long on the PalmOS platform
• High resolution screen (320×320), Sony has had this for ages. Again, long overdue.
• Bluetooth, this is a big deal, and a first in the PalmOS market. Finally, innovation!
• Multimedia Card and Secure Digital expansion slots. Groovy.
• OS5: evolutionary, not revolutionary.

What’s going to decide how this unit does in the market is how Palm markets this, and how the well the form-factor and screen is received. Most people don’t admit it, but the feel of a handheld is really the one of the biggest factors in making their decision. That’s why people think the Treo looks funny but love it once they hold it in their hand. Palm hasn’t been very consistent as far as screen quality goes, so I’d really like to see how this one looks, and how it compares to the ones Sony is putting out. The only real flaw I see with this unit’s specs is that it has the headphone jack and hardware to play MP3s, but it says “separate

Hopefully this will be the unit that keeps Palm afloat and reasserts the PalmOS over PocketPCs. There is really no reason to buy a PocketPC anymore: not for speed (try actually doing something on that faster processor), not for multimedia, not for working with Office documents, and certainly not for the price. If you did somehow end up with a PocketPC through some twist of fate, do yourself a favor and put GNU/Linux on it.

Update: There in a nice review on Infosync by Larry Garfield, an old PalmStation buddy, where he covers pretty much everything I was worried about, including the screen. His review is very favorable. Palm Infocenter as a pretty detailed announcement with some good discussion. PDA Buzz has hands-on reviews from a number of people who have one already. Brighthand also has a new review up, but I’m hesitant to recommend them because their design looks a little too familiar.

While I always see interesting things while I’m at Kaveh Kanes, today Barrett and Justin hacked together something where the public FreeBSD box can only be administered through the serial port, in their case using a old Radio Shack TRS-180, which Justin informed me was the “first laptop.” This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen, check out the pictures. I believe that Justin is going to put a HOW-TO online and I’ll link to it when it’s up.

This site looks different in different browsers; that should be a given. All I can do is offer the HTML up to the world and let people take it from there. Now I do some testing in different browsers mostly because I use a number of browsers normally, however on this site I write the code for the code itself, not with the presentation quirks of any particular browser in mind. That said, I think the overall design looks better in Mozilla than it does in Internet Explorer, which is funny because IE is what I used the entire time I was putting this site together, even though I coded some things into the CSS I knew IE didn’t support (yet). Speaking of which, is anyone else perturbed that with IE6’s service pack they didn’t fix any of the CSS bugs? I guess they’re doing all they can to keep up with security venerabilities. Back to the topic, if you haven’t tried this site out with Moz or one of its derivatives yet, give it a run, if just to see what things are intended to look like, and will look like whenever IE gets the act together. The reason this all comes up is I’m bopping so much to this Daoist groove that it is really painful to go back to commercial projects where I spend thrice as much time tweaking things in 5 different browsers on half as many platforms then I do on the actual design, which is not right. Now it’s a skill like any other, and I consider myself pretty good at it, but I hate it. It’s not what the web is about.

It looks like AMD is going on the road again. I missed them the last time they came through Houston but I’d like to check them out this time. Some of the events sound like fun too.

The toolbar on my desktop just asked me if I wanted to participate in the Google Compute program and donate my spare cycles, a topic which has been covered in depth. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to run it or not; right now my spare CPU time goes to finding aliens.

Have you ever looked at your server logs and gone “Whoa s—“? Neither have I, but there has been a considerable spike in traffic from this article on Wired.com. The article deals with Apple’s viral marketing where they include a number of stickers or decals with every new Mac sold. The article is worth reading but if you’d like you can skip straight to the picture. I’d like to offer an extended caption: I’m sad to say that it is not my car, currently my car has a jazz sticker, a Free the Mouse! sticker, and a Redhat hat sticker. The picture was actually taken at my constant hangout House of Pies on Shepard, where I was eating with Julie, Rachel, and Josh. (Pictures) The car with that sticker was parked right outside of our window and my mind immediately went to my friend Alex who is an Apple enthusist, and how much he’d like it. So I snapped a picture (actually two) through the window. Leander Kahney found the picture through a Google search I mentioned recently. And there you have it. I just noticed that a thumbnail of the picture is on the front page!

I’ve seen some pretty good host files in the past, but this one looks like the most thorough. Not sure where the name comes from though. “. . . so quite simply this file tells your computer to try to access itself whenever a banner advert is requested from a server that is in its ‘black’ list, so instead of contacting the advert server your computer simply tries to request itself and as your machine doesn’t contain any adverts (if you are not running a web server on it) nothing will be shown.”

I’m still on my eternal search for the perfect editor I’ve come across Topstyle 3 again. Topstyle has always been my favorite CSS editor by far, but I’m not sure how it would work for other things. It is from the creator of Homesite, which has been my favorite editor thus far. What has really caught my eye is the 3.1 beta includes PHP syntax highlighting, which might be the killer feature for me. Like I’ve said before, I actually really like the PHP editing in Dreamweaver, but I hate the rest of the junk that comes with using that program. I might just end up using what I do on the server, GNU/Emacs in PHP mode. Or even better yet, Pico :). Does anyone have any favorite editors? I probably spend the most time with PHP code, but I like a robust HTML editor, and long walks on the beach. Will I ever be happy?

Well, now that I’ve gotten the Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed and running successfully. I think the main problem with my original installation was that I had Lilo loading the operating system rather than a Windows bootloader. When I tried to reboot after the SP1 installatiion I would just get an endless string of “40” on my screen, which is really hard to explain so I put up screenshots (taken with a camera) and a video here. I tried repairing the installation using my Windows XP installation disk, but that didn’t touch the bootloader. What I ended up doing was installing a fresh version of Windows on my second partition, which did recreate bootloader and redetect my installation on the C partition. I thought that would be all I need, but when I tried to boot to the installation on the C partition, it would go into an infinite reboot sequence, which, needless to say, was quite frustrating.

It became obvious that the installation on C was beyond repair, literally, and so I made the always tough decision to scrap it and start fresh. This was a very big deal for me, because I abhor having to reinstall programs and losing settings and such. On my last desktop it was actually upgraded incrementally from DR-DOS through early versions of Windows, all the way to ’98 when I was forced by a hard drive failure to start from scratch again. I used Windows before they messed it up with a graphical interface :). I’m hoping that like a phoenix this new installation will rise from the ashes of the last and turn my laptop into an ultra-efficency machine that is easy, intuative, and functional.

So I backed up everything important from the drive and did a “clean” install of XP over the current one, deleting all the past files in the process. Then I downloaded the 134 MB network install of SP1 just to be safe, and installed it on a almost perfectly fresh Windows. It worked fine, and I’m appreciating some of the new features already such as the Bluetooth, and the “anti-trust” addons.

Now all I need to do is delete the installation of Windows from the D partition, because it’s just taking up valuable space that could be better used for some movies or music. Also in hindsight I probably should have just formatted the C partition because now I have a Program Files directory chock-full of stuff that isn’t actually ‘installed,’ though maybe when I reinstall programs they may pick up their old prefs. Cross your fingers.

Well SP1 installed just fine, and a number of other updates did as well. Now the tricky part is going to be getting all the Sony laptop goodies back into everything, then the long and arduous process of reinstalling my software. My email is groovy though, because IMAP works like a charm, so I actually had no email downtime. I also discovered that Outlook Express works better with IMAP than Outlook XP does, so that might become my primary email client. There was also another one someone recommended to me that I’ll try, but I have to dig its name out of the archives. Outlook XP has a number of quirks when working with IMAP, and installing the second service pack for Office didn’t seem to make anything better, in fact it got a little worse. When sending and receiving the program doesn’t respond to any input, and it seemed to randomly disconnect from the server, and the only way to get it back on was to restart the program. Also it even have a button for purging deleted messages, I had to make my own. Outlook Express seems to do everything that doesn’t work with Outlook XP pretty well, and it just feels cleaner since it just does email. I keep all my organization things in Palm Desktop, which I would recommend people trying out even if they don’t own a PalmOS device.

It’s too late now to do anything else meaningful on the computer. Hopefully I can get everything taken care of tomorrow and get back to actual work, plus I won’t have to post from the ‘music’ computer anymore. (Yes, I do have a computer whose sole purpose is to play music. I still haven’t figured out why it needs a multi-gigahertz processor and a 3D accelerator card to do this. I keep telling myself I’ll play games on it sometime. Where’s the time?!)

The good news is that I got my laptop working again, and I found a Sony Support page that has all of the drivers I need. I’m going to give SP1 another try. (I want the Bluetooth stuff.)

The better news is I saw an amazing concert at the Wortham with Roy Haynes, Kenny Garrett, Nick Payton, David Kokoski, and a bass player. It was really, really good. More on that later, with pictures!

Julie sent me an excellent article which I have to pull one quote from:

“In the next fifty years, computer science will give birth to a delightful new vernacular art form that combines the three great art forms of the twentieth century; cinema, jazz, and programming.”

Isn’t that great? I began investigating who wrote this and it turns out it’s the same guy who helped brainstorm the great movie Minority Report. His name is Jaron Lanier and I’m going to be on the watch for some more of his writing. If only he had a blog!

Don’t you hate it when you read a blog or web page where there aren’t proper paragraphs, just one huge one (or none at all) with a million <br /> tags, no semantic meaning at all. Also no opportunity to implement typographic styling using CSS concerning indents or paragraph spacing, much like is done on this site (but you won’t see it without Mozilla or a similarly standards compliant browser).

Well it’s not really the fault of the person, often it’s a symptom of the publishing system. Most don’t go beyond simply converting line breaks into a break tag. Just like curly quotes, the system should take care of it. So I wrote a little function which allows you to format your text into paragraphs using only the enter key. I’ve already put this on a couple for my client’s sites where I was using straight nl2br and I’m very happy with the result. Check it out and let me know what you think.

I used a neat tool to compare the features of b2/cafelog and Movable Type. As someone who currently uses b2, used to use Movable Type, and deals with MT on a daily basis, I don’t think I could say which was “better,” they’re just different. I think MT has a more robust archiving system with nicer URLs, but with b2 I can post to the blog with email, which has got to be one of the coolest features I’ve ever heard of. In terms of hackability, which I mean in the best way, I like how everything is updated live without having to rebuild anything, but of course that has a trade-off in speed. It really comes down to personal preference and experience. If Michel stopped developing b2 tomorrow, I would still use it because it just does everything I want it to do, plus I have a pretty good familiarity with the code, which helps a lot. Of course just knowing about something helps, for instance Kathy just switched to pMachine, which until she talked about it I hadn’t even heard of. I think what we need is a good google fight.

Since I wrote this I began developing my own software, WordPress, which runs this site and what I believe (having surveyed everything out there) to be the best blogging software available.