1. 20030131 ‹#›

    1. 2359

      Rolling ‹#›

      • blog

        Blogroll finally reconstructed and reintegrated. I've found quite a few recent distractions which have been grouped into a "recently" subsection at the top which should hopefully be quite volatile. Keepers will filter down into the other subsections depending on how often I end up visiting. Bold for pages that link here, and italics for recent references. Some semantic enhancement has taken place, but it's incomplete so I won't bother going into details yet. For now, the curious can always view the source.

        Comments:

        1. Simon Jessey
        2. Tim Brayshaw

        ‹#›

    2. 1939

      End of the week, end of the month ‹#›

  2. 20030130 ‹#›

    1. 2324

      Flat earther files complaint against having to think scientifically ‹#›

      • anthro

        Remember when I talked about keeping science and mythology separate and appreciating them for what they are?

        Here's a complaint from an idiot who doesn't know the difference. Actually, make that another idiot, another that is, in addition to the aforementioned Vicar who ruined Christmas for a room full of children. Found on Boing Boing.

        What next? I can see it now:

        • Flat earther complains that he wasn't let into the Navy because they require people to have faith in a spherical Earth. (Then again, a flat earther would probably be too afraid to join the Navy — too afraid he might sail off the end of the Earth that is.)
        • Geocentrist complains that he was rejected by the space program because they require people to have faith that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

        Join in the mad lib fun:

        ____<noun that describes a person who believes in a particular quack theory based in religious belief>____ complains that he was rejected by ____<name of occupation that requires knowledge of science which contradicts aforementioned quack theory>____ because they require people to have faith that ____<phrase summarizing aforementioned knowledge of science>____ .

        Fill in the blanks kids, let's see some more examples. Be creative!

        Comments:

        1. Jeffrey Szymona

        ‹#›

    2. 1946

      YAR ‹#›

      • blog

        No not Tasha. YAR = Yet Another Redesign. Brittney has also redesigned. I'm telling you it must be something in the air — er, wires, er, yeah, whatever. Nice Avril immitation BTW. Yes, I'm hooked on Avril's catchy tunes as well, even though I know it's programming straight from the Merchants of Cool. Clean white backgrounds (also at Zeldman's) are definitely making a come back. Do we yearn for simpler times?

        Comments:

        1. Simon Jessey

        ‹#›

    3. 1758

      La Crème de Café ‹#›

      • cafe

        I'd been to La Crème de Café years ago, before wifi, before I worked at Microsoft, when I was crashing at Vad's place just down the street*.

        Been meaning to check it out again ever since I met a friend of a friend** at a holiday party last year who mentioned it.

        And look at that, they have wifi.

        Already had an iced grande latte today, but I'm having an iced large mocha anyway. Sipping it now — and it's richness is drawing my eyes back into my head. What is the barista trying to do to me? Just giving me what I asked for I suppose — and with a smile at that. She earned her tip. Newly single guys are such suckers.

        Back to the heart of the matter — yes, another cafe with free wifi. About 850kbps throughput according to the MSN/CNET internet speedtest.

        Nice, very nice.

        If you happen to be stuck in mid-town Palo Alto that is.

        The truth hurts baby, the truth hurts.

        ‹#›

      • personal

        * Where I ended up after a particularly bad breakup (almost seven) years ago.

        Lesson learned: don't move in with your girlfriend unless you're on the verge of getting engaged.

        ‹#›

      • web

        **Don't get me started on the nonsense otherwise known as FOAF. Never have I seen such a lengthy and complicated format that is nearly always used to say so little (but then again I guess that's the problem with RDF in general). Not only that, even FOAF v0.1 is not a "simple" format and goes far far beyond its title-implied functionality. As Daniel Glazman said - FOAF is proof that people don't need drugs to be crazy.

        ‹#›

    4. 1608

      Whoa! ‹#›

      • blog

        was what I exclaimed outloud when I saw Zeldman's latest redesign. I like the military mint green accents — appropo in light of the recent State of the Union address.

        ‹#›

  3. 20030129 ‹#›

    1. 2356

      Whither Opera for Macintosh? ‹#›

    2. 2329

      HTML-Writers-Gate? ‹#›

  4. 20030128 ‹#›

    1. 1933

      Because lawyer jokes are so passe ‹#›

    2. 1511

      CSS 2.1 updated ‹#›

  5. 20030127 ‹#›

    1. 1310

      As expected... ‹#›

      • anthro

        As if this was unexpected - not. I have a feeling it would have been much worse had these "fans" not been suffering from post-sporting-event-loss-depression. I think they should all instead start blogging, and author DHTML/Flash of burning cars etc. Plus there is no end to the amount of smack-talk that can take place in a blog.

        Update:

        SFGate coverage, with some classic riot photos:

        I'll stay home and watch the carnage remotely thanks.

        ‹#›

  6. 20030126 ‹#›

    1. 1332

      Another redesign ‹#›

      • blog

        Leila has also just redesigned. Must be something in the air. The tightly set black text on light gray background with blue hyperlinks is a nice retro nod. I might have put half an em or so of padding inside the gray borders to give the nearby text a little more breathing space but that's just me. Hold on...

        Yes, just search & replace:

        "border:1px solid #999999"

        with

        "border:1px solid #999999; padding:.5em"

        That should do it.

        Comments:

        1. Leila Easa

        ‹#›

  7. 20030125 ‹#›

    1. 1134

      RAVE Act reprise ‹#›

  8. 20030124 ‹#›

    1. 1746

      Minimal style ‹#›

  9. 20030123 ‹#›

    1. 2359

      Lego Star Wars Episode III Trailer ‹#›

    2. 2352

      Volunteer mischief ‹#›

    3. 2318

      Citizen Cake ‹#›

    4. 1524

      The future of linking on the Web ‹#›

      • web

        The minutes of the W3C 16 Jan 2003 discussion on Linking have been published. This was my first time in a teleconference with TBL. Every time he spoke I got that weird feeling in my stomach that you get whenever you hear a famous/powerful person speaking in the same room as you. My summary of points covered in the discussion:

        • Linking involves presentation and semantics.

          I made this point, Tim Bray agreed, and no one disagreed.

        • Device/media/user dependent aspects are likely presentational and should be separate from the markup of content.

          Again, I made this point, Tim Bray agreed, and no one disagreed. Note that XLink fails badly in this regard, because of the way its 'show' and 'actuate' attributes conflate presentation and semantics, and encourage inline embedding of such presentation. In my humble opinion, this flaw alone is sufficient justification to avoid using XLink in any documents authored by or for humans.

        • Tension between "attributes on a single element may only be used for one link, multiple links should always use multiple elements" and "allow attributes on a single element to be used for one or more links, and encourage use of multiple elements for multiple links when more appropriate."

          XLink takes the former stance while HTML4 does the latter. E.g. in HTML4, you can do both <img src="..." longdesc="..." /> and <link rel="alternate" hreflang="tr" href="..." /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="..." /> .

        • Tension between "force linking semantics directly onto every element that needs them", and "allow linking semantics directly on an element, directly in a document, or external to a document".

          It became very clear during the call (and from the minutes) that some folks want to force everyone to specify linking semantics directly on elements (e.g. like only using the 'style' attribute for styling, or only using 'onload' etc. handlers to store scripts), and another group of folks that wanted to give authors the choice of directly on the element (as above), or directly in the document (like <style> element for styling and <script>...<script> for scripting), or external to the document (like <link> for styling and <script src="..." /> for scripting). I'm in the pro-choice camp.

        • Tension between "one linking solution only!" and "let multiple solutions proceed to better understand the problems and arrive at better answers".

          This is the "central planning" vs. "free market" debate. What the central planners don't get is that they're not playing in a strictly controlled market, and thus limiting themselves to one solution serves only to limit their chance of success in the market as a whole. Any one standard solution derived will still have to compete with proprietary alternatives. So it is only to the standards' advantage to pursue multiple solutions, each of which can benefit from the improvements of the others. Evolution and technological Darwinism will do a much better job picking the 'best' than any amount of 'a priori' architecting.

        Conclusion

        XLink is broken. At a minimum it fails to encourage proper separation of semantics/markup and presentation/styling, in fact it encourages quite the opposite — in many ways this is as bad as reintroducing a <font> tag. This is perhaps sufficient to say that XLink is in fact, bad for the Web, since the conflation of semantics/markup and presentation/style is known to hurt accessibility, device independence, media independence, content portability etc. etc. On top of that it failed to meet its requirements, and has ugly syntax (markupJunk from use of namespaces etc.).

        How do we fix what is broken? Either W3C can try again at a singular solution, or it can allow the pursuit of multiple solutions. Which approach do you think has a better chance of success?

        Comments:

        1. Simon Jessey

        ‹#›

    5. 1153

      R - E - S - P - E - C - T ‹#›

      • web

        • More XHTML2 commentary: Jeffrey Zeldman nails it.
          ... we get the feeling that XHTML 2's most ardent supporters think ordinary designers and developers are bad and stupid and backward and intractable, and that only brute force can deliver the semantic web. It's that disdain for ordinary people and that willingness to use brute force, rather than any particular technical aspect of the proposed XHTML 2 spec, that rubs us way the wrong way.

          Note: In my experience, the W3C HTML working group is one of the few champions (at W3C) of the "ordinary web developer". What does this say about most of the other efforts at W3C? Evaluate the technologies and draw your own conclusions.

        Comments:

        1. Simon Jessey
        2. Pedro Palazón

        ‹#›

      • anthro

        • Anil Dash: diamonds are for never rattles off badness after badness about the diamond cartels, diamonds for despotism, and diamonds for dysfunction. Hey, anybody march in the peace protests wearing diamond jewelry?

        ‹#›

  10. 20030122 ‹#›

    1. 1509

      Remembrance in absentia ‹#›

  11. 20030121 ‹#›

    1. 1954

      Political quackery ‹#›

      • media

        Filed under media because of the amazing amount of apparent media manipulation that occured surrounding this past Saturday's "peace march".

        Yes, it's been a few days since my last entry. Originally I had mixed feelings about the demonstrations planned for January 18th, but that was before I read about who organized the demonstrations: a bunch of seriously whacked folks. See the Technorati Inbound Links list for more comments on the same.

        I know that lots of people went to these demonstrations, including at least two people I know. Did they have any idea what kind of nutcases they were marching with? No, not just who they were marching with, but who had organized the march in the first place? I found this entire event (and the fact that some friends of mine participated) so depressing that it has taken me a few days to get around to writing about it.

        And if the hypocrisy surrounding the so-called "peace" demonstrations and the organizers thereof wasn't obvious enough, a bunch of these so-called "peace" protestors trashed part of downtown SF. Presumably bridge & tunnel types, since they escaped via "the Powell Street BART station". Couldn't wait until Sunday to trash your own town huh?

        WTF is going on here?

        I have to wonder if this kind of nonsense surrounded the various protests in the 60s and 70s. I have to hope that they were more intelligent.

        But at least now we have the web. And we have blogs. This kind of political quackery can therefore be far more readily and quickly exposed for what it is.

        I'll leave you on a positive note however.

        What everyone who wants peace should have done is instead marched in the Martin Luther King Jr. tribute. Something to note for next January.

        Comments:

        1. John Robert Boynton (2)

        ‹#›

  12. 20030118 ‹#›

    1. 1323

      Talkin' smack ‹#›

      • brunch

        Just got back from brunch at Mel's on Geary with

        ‹#›

      • friends

        Rhett and Yuch. As usual we could not stop ourselves from entering into all manner of social/political/economic discussions with plenty of conjectures, assertions, and all out pronouncements. We did the same just three months ago. Already feels like a tradition, the natural evolution of what began many years ago as late-night/early-morning conversations/rantings in the hallways of our freshman dormitory.

        ‹#›

    2. 0302

      Prix-Fixe dining ‹#›

      • dinner

        San Francisco restaurants are in the middle of a Prix-Fixe dining special — an excellent opportunity to try out those restaurants you've heard of but never been to. Last night (mere hours ago) we went to Café de Paris L'Entrecôte which was absolutely delightful.

        Despite not having a vegetarian main course option on the Prix-Fixe, when requested, they gladly substituted one from the normal menu. Though I had the poisson which was quite good. The crème brûlée was delicious (though Amélie may have been disappointed by the lack of a solid shell to crack - any fan of hers knows what I'm talking about) and the profiteroles were nothing short of euphoric.

        To top it off they started live singing (a mix of French lounge, operatic, and musical numbers) around 9:30pm or so. Quite appropos for a date (even a first), just be aware that you risk being charmed right along with your dining companion.

        ‹#›

  13. 20030117 ‹#›

    1. 1847

      Privacy and media manipulations ‹#›

      • freedom

        ‹#›

      • media

        The very pretty (and perhaps innocent, dare I say, innocently naive?) Brittney points out Avrilution.com, a site which incites folks to unite in revolution against MTV:

        If you're tired of MTV telling you what's cool...

        If you don't like that there is music you never get to hear because your radio station doesn't get paid to play it...

        The marketing folks at MTV must be falling out of their chairs laughing, or perhaps just sitting back and grinning.

        Avril's popularity is in large part due to their precisely calculated manipulations. Think not? Read Merchants of Cool, especially the symbiotic relationship which is the cause of the giant feedback loop that results in the rebellious expression of such artists as Eminem, Limp Bizkit and even Insane Clown Posse being repackaged and sold back to teens.

        Avril, despite her gritty tunes and charming angrier-than-thou 'tude, is no exception. Why does it have to be so complicated? The better to manipulate you my dear!

        Comments:

        1. Gordon Bonnar
        2. subaverage.com

        ‹#›

  14. 20030116 ‹#›

    1. 1530

      Street browsing and TV jargon ‹#›

      • web

        Browse London streets geographically or by name, and view an annotated photograph overlaid representation of those streets. You must see an example to get it. This is much more what the Metaverse is about. Not the silly virtual world stuff which is nothing more than a glorified multiplayer online game. Found on Boing Boing.

        ‹#›

      • language

        TV Jargon. My fave:

        effort (v)
        To attempt to get something. "We're efforting some aerials."
        Again, from Boing Boing.

        Comments:

        1. Gary F

        ‹#›

      • blog

        Back to primer white. You can still try on the gothic mourning cloak by using your browser's alternate style sheet selection mechanism. IE5/Mac users - your alternate style sheet mechanism is over here, titled, "Choose style sheet". Just drag it to your Favorites Toolbar to install the feature.

        Note: if your browser's alternate style sheet mechanism doesn't allow "unpicking" an alternate then you may be (appropriately enough) trapped in a Gothic hell. Choose and perish.

        ‹#›

  15. 20030115 ‹#›

    1. 2122

      Darkness ‹#›

    2. 1301

      Dyloot at Elastiq tonight ‹#›

      • club

        Elastiq is on again tonight at Il Pirata. They've added a $2 cover but it's more than worth it. Tonight's line up inludes Dyloot, Telene, and Joseph Lee. All top notch trance/house/progressive/techno DJs. I'm there.

        ‹#›

  16. 20030114 ‹#›

    1. 1345

      Why XHTML? ‹#›

      • web

        The question has been asked, why even bother with XHTML at all, why not just use HTML4.01? I sympathize with the question and was asking the same a bit over a year or so ago. I could see no benefits to the author to justify switching from HTML4.01 to XHTML 1.0. My reasons now — not many, but sufficient:

        • Tighter syntax means fewer errors and cleaner markup.

          XHTML (mostly through XML) has more explicit syntax requirements. These requirements can be mechanically tested by the W3C validator. As such, it is much easier to find errors in the markup/content sooner rather than later, and errors found sooner are always easier to fix (e.g. before they propagate to other pages).

        • Broader software compatibility.

          The vast majority of browsers today will eat HTML tag soup with only a minor burp or two. However, there are many software programs being written that consume well formed XML and do something else with it. I use XHTML as the bridge it was meant to be — it lets me author for today's web, while allowing these nascent species of XML consumers to also do interesting things with my content.

        • Future device compatibility.

          Many many devices in the future are expected to support a little known subset of XHTML called XHTML Basic. These devices won't even try to parse non-XHTML content, not even just for their plain text. Some of these may be future handhelds, some may be refrigerators or other home appliances. I want to be able to move my content to these devices as well. Using XHTML makes it much easier to support these devices - in many cases just sending them valid XHTML 1.0 will "work" just fine by having them ignore the tags and attributes they don't understand. Alternatively it is also easy enough to strip out the extra markup on the server.

        To be clear, I use XHTML 1.0 that follows the Appendix C. HTML Compatibility Guidelines, and as such, feel that it is correct to serve it as "text/html". I know Ian Hickson disagrees in general, but I did get him to admit on IRC once that it might be ok to send XHTML 1.0 documents which follow Appendix C as "text/html". Appendix C takes care of nearly all the complaints Ian has in the section he titles 'The Myth of "HTML-compatible XHTML 1.0 documents"'. And once HTML4.01 is errata'd to dump the unimplemented (at least by the vast majority of web browsers) "SHORTTAG minimisation feature known as NET", then we'll be all set.

        Jeffrey Zeldman mentions the book he is writing in his latest post, titled appropriately enough "Forward Compatibility" which will no doubt go into much more detail and provide many better reasons of this nature for using XHTML+CSS etc. I want that book now and so should you. No pressure Jeffrey.

        That's what's forward compatible about it. If you work with XML-based applications and web services, or expect to do so in your lifetime, it makes sense to use human-friendly XHTML 1.

        His post on XHTML 2 discusses many more of the problems, and offers some solutions such as renaming it to make it clear that XHTML 2 is an alternative to, and not a replacement for, the XHTML 1.x family of specifications. That could work, but naming isn't the only problem.

        The biggest problem that I have with XHTML 2 is not just its misnaming/misplacement as a "future version of HTML", but also the amount of the HTML Working Group's time that it consumes at the expense of what I think are imminently more important things for the HTML Working Group to work on. Here is my list of those more important things (in order):

        1. HTML 4.01 errata.

          If you check the current HTML4.01 errata, you will see that it quite out of date — over a year and half. Many many errors and suggested corrections have been reported since then, and the HTML working group really needs to produce an updated errata document — as HTML4 is still not only what most web authors (try) to use, but it is the semantic basis for all currently recommended XHTML languages. It's the foundation. In my opinion the errata should be updated at least every quarter, if not more often.

        2. HTML 4.01 test suite.

          When I started this blog nearly six months ago, one of the first things I announced was a HTML 4.01 test suite contribution, made jointly by several popular browser vendors. Just as the publication of the official W3C CSS1 test suite drastically improved the conformance and interoperability of CSS implementations (and helped flush out numerous errata in the CSS1 specification), an official W3C HTML 4.01 Test Suite is needed to do the same for HTML4.

        3. XHTML 1.x errata.

          XHTML is the fastest growing XML namespace on the web. The specifications that it currently depends on have outstanding errors, and their errata documents could also be updated more frequently.

        4. XHTML 1.x test suites.

          Similarly, we need test suites for XHTML 1.x languages to root out remaining problems in those specifications, and encourage more compliant and interoperable implementations.

        5. XHTML Basic 1.1.

          I think XHTML Basic can be simplified a bit more (like by removing the remaining presentational attributes from object and table related elements.). This will further make it clear to authors that many (most?) XHTML Basic devices will pay no attention to archaic presentational attributes, and make it clear to the implementers of such devices that in no way is such attention expected either.

        Speak up

        The future of XHTML is at its heart a conversation about the future of the web. Mark Pilgrim has posted his opinions on XHTML 2 on his blog. So has Jeffrey Zeldman. So has Eric Meyer. So have many many others as evidenced by the seemingly neverending number of referrers at the end of Mark Pilgrim's post. If you also think there are problems with XHTML2, or would rather see some of things I mentioned above happen first/sooner, speak up. And be sure to...

        Write your representative, and post on www-html & www-html-editor

        If you belong to a W3C member company, give your feedback on XHTML 2 to your HTML Working Group representative if you have one, and if not, to your W3C Advisory Committee representative, and ask them to pass it along to the HTML Working Group.

        Whether you belong to a W3C member company or not, send your feedback to www-html@w3.org and www-html-editor@w3.org so that the folks working on HTML at W3C receive your feedback, and so that it is publicly archived for all interested to see on the W3C's servers. Don't be afraid to speak your opinion. Be polite, but firm. W3C is listening.

        Comments:

        1. Mohd Jaffry
        2. Jeffrey Zeldman
        3. Michel Vuijlsteke
        4. François Nonnenmacher
        5. Joshua Kaufman
        6. Eliza Wee
        7. Shirley E. Kaiser
        8. François Hodierne
        9. Bob Kniley
        10. Todd Heasley
        11. Karl Dubost
        12. Jay Allen
        13. Mark Pilgrim
        14. Paul Freeman
        15. Dan Cederholm
        16. Mike Golding

        ‹#›

    2. 0427

      Pictures and drama ‹#›

  17. 20030112 ‹#›

    1. 1805

      Upstream ‹#›

      • art

        There's much more to see at a museum than what's hanging on the wall or sitting on the floor — there's all the people making their way room by room, offering up a wide range of facial expressions, reflecting their inner struggles as much as the art they're viewing. Not to mention their outfits. Perhaps a museum is a natural artistic filter, the assumption being that those that appreciate art make a bit more than average effort to either be, or look, interesting (or both). Sure, most of them are probably wearing what they would be wearing anyway, but I think a good lot are dressing up or for the occasion.

        Most exhibits are mere collections of a particular artist's or genre's works, without much attention given to the order in which they are displayed. I'm sure some curators are either pouting or laughing now. It's much more fun to start at the end of such exhibits and work your way towards the start. It's also easier to make your way through the forward flowing crowd who appear to naturally make way for you (since they see you oncoming). And you have the opportunity to appreciate not only the art hanging on the walls and sitting on the floors, but the art walking through the halls and wandering through the rooms.

        Comments:

        1. Murphy Horner

        ‹#›

    2. 1522

      Stanford Incircle ‹#›

    3. 1319

      Coffee and art ‹#›

  18. 20030111 ‹#›

    1. 2311

      Burgers and Turkish Coffee Shakes ‹#›

    2. 1533

      Ocean skate ‹#›

      • friends

        Vadim in the house. By the time I had dragged myself out of bed he said he was already late for Ultimate. It was overcast, which is typically expected in SF, but not recently typical. The streets were still darkened from rain the night before. I've seen worse.

        We snapped on our blades, negotiated the fringes of traction on my downhill street, and took off for the park. JFK drive is closed only on Sundays, so we stuck to the sidewalks and trails being that it was Saturday. The paths were similarly soaked, and covered with an inconsistent layer of leaves, branches and other park detritus.

        This meant nearly zero traction. No sharp turns unless you want to taste that aforementioned detritus. Downhill straight followed by a left bend? Set up near the outside of the turn, and clip the apex for maximum radius. We found an Ultimate game still going on, so Vad switched from skates to cleats and joined in — meanwhile I continued skating towards the beach.

        Golden Gate Park is one of the hidden emeralds of San Francisco, all but invisible among the concrete and asphalt gridwork until you are in it. There are miles and miles of biking/skating/running/walking paths which wind their way through all number of flora, which then serve to obscure the aforementioned gridwork.

        Go west and just after you skate by an old Dutch windmill on your right, you are rewarded with this view of Ocean Beach: photo of Ocean Beach and walkway.

        The uphill return skate is always a bit more challenging. Took me long enough that by the time I found the Ultimate game, it only took them a few minutes for them to finish up. A satisfying brunch at Gordo's, topped off with coffee from Coffee Tea & Spice (nice to meet you Rebekah with the purple hat and purple eyeliner) and the Saturday was off to a good start.

        I can't seem to blog (or even finish writing an entry) without being distracted into reading other blogs - the perils of blogging while connected. This time I found out about a hamburger dinner for local bloggers happening tonight in Noe. Could be interesting, could be fun, could be scary, could be all the above.

        ‹#›

  19. 20030110 ‹#›

    1. 2359

      Work detail ‹#›

  20. 20030107 ‹#›

    1. 1731

      MSN for OSX ‹#›

    2. 1132

      New Powerbooks and browser ‹#›

    3. 1030

      The scene ‹#›

    4. 0321

      Mr. Cyberspace starts a blog ‹#›

  21. 20030106 ‹#›

    1. 2359

      Something To Do ‹#›

      • work

        First day of the year back in the office and I...

        • Worked 12 hours — from 9 to 9.
        • Participated in a W3C CSS WG teleconference.
        • Cranked through the 260-something emails whose existence I had refused to acknowledge during my almost two week absence. Cleared out my Exchange Inbox by the end of the day, with only a mere half dozen unhandled emails making their way to the "I must reply to these" folder.
        • Wrote a brief blog entry which just linked to someone else's entry.
        • Left campus to have lunch at the Peninsula Creamery with the rest of my crew. 20oz. iced latte chaser at Torrefazione Italia.
        • Printed out the new schedule for the shuttle between the campus and the Mountain View Caltrain station. Looks like they restored the shuttles we lost last year — I may actually be able to take public transport to work again.
        • Noted a few brainstormings regarding the Principle of Minimal Constraint and meme propagation effectiveness.
        • Helped fix a nasty positioning related bug and track down some legacy rendering issues.
        • Did I mention that I left work in the evening with a completely empty work email Inbox?

        What did you do on your first work day (whenever that was) of the new year?

        Comments:

        1. David Engel
        2. Murphy Horner

        ‹#›

    2. 1109

      Semantic XHTML is just fine ‹#›

  22. 20030105 ‹#›

    1. 1750

      Plugged back in ‹#›

      • travel

        Flew back to SF from Claremont today. New procedures at the airport mean having to stand in two lines to check-in luggage. The first to get a boarding pass and have the luggage tagged, and the second to have the nice TSA worker take the luggage and feed it to the machine and wait next to it until cleared. Then off to a third line (did I say two? I meant three) — the usual metal detector / X-ray of carryons drill.

        ‹#›

      • friends

        Shortly after arrival in SJC, I had a wonderful brunch with Aytek & Steve. Drove home to SF, unpacked a few things, walked a few blocks and enjoyed several delightful hours with Derek & Heather and friends.

        ‹#›

      • perception

        Pleasant times notwithstanding, my return to the bay area feels like someone just plugged me back into the machine. All of a sudden I'm immediately reimmersed in the layers of routines, tasks, projects, priorities, deadlines that I had for the most part left behind almost two weeks ago. It is as if I can actually feel the buzz of energy and urgency that permeates the air around here (the City, my home, work etc.). The 5-CD changer preloaded with techno may have something to do with it as well.

        ‹#›

  23. 20030104 ‹#›

    1. 1249

      Comment markup, presentation and plumbing ‹#›

      • blog

        There have been a few comments on my new markup. Having comments meant I had to add the first instance of comment markup for the year. So now there is a <div> because I don't how better to wrap an <ol> ordered list and its <h4> heading into a single semantic unit. Like this: 

        
<div class="comments"><h4>Comments:</h4>
<ol>
 <li><a href="...">John Robert Boynton</a></li>
 <li><a href="...">Gordon Bonnar</a></li>
</ol>
</div>

        Flags for languages

        A few of my past entries have received commentary in languages other than English. I have marked up the URLs for those comments with the appropriate lang and hreflang attributes, labeling the language of the author's name and the author's writing respectively. E.g. 

        
<li><a href="..." hreflang="fr" lang="fr">
 Philippe Janvier
</a></lt>

        To point out to readers that some comments are in a language other than the current page, I chose to style those hyperlinks with just enough left padding to slip in the background image of a flag representative of both the country where the author was from and what language their comment was written in. E.g.

        1. Philippe Janvier

        I don't have a flag for every country/language. When someone writes a comment regarding my blog in another language, I research the respective flag, draw my own little GIF, and write the additional necessary style rules.

        I picked this practice up from seeing others do it on the web, and thinking that it was a very clever way to provide an immediately recognizable cue. Flags have been used to indicate the language of the destination of a hyperlink on the web for quite some time. Daniel Glazman says Tara was the first one to put those little flags everywhere, indicating the languages of a document targeted by a link.

        Daniel pointed out to me that flags of countries are not necessarily good representations for natural languages, since many countries have several common languages (e.g. Swiss French, Swiss German, Swiss Italian), and several languages are spoken commonly across multiple countries (e.g. Canadian French, Belgian French). I think Daniel is right. Yet, not having had any comments which fall into those categories, I have not had to deal with this problem yet. [Of course now that I've brought it up, I've doomed myself to its inevitability.] For now I'll stick with the flags because I think they look cool and add a visually pleasing sprinkle of color.

        Presentation vs. plumbing

        Many blogs have a built-in commenting interface/form which allows anyone to leave comments. I don't, because I'd rather see folks write comments on their own blogs, or possibly in newsgroups, or some other place that is archived on the web. Just as I was encouraged, I encourage everyone who has something to say to start their own blog.

        Clearly others agree, and thus we now have Trackback and Pingback to help automate generating comment hyperlinks to blog-on-blog commentary. While I certainly applaud these efforts at automating the plumbing, I must ask - why is there any distinction in the presentation? I ask because many blogs present separate and different interfaces for their comments, trackbacks, and/or pingbacks.

        A comment is a comment is a comment. Why should it matter whether it was posted using a web form, sent via email, entered into a blog, or posted to Netnews? From a blog reader's perspective, I'd just like to see a list of the comments, and not care (nor know) about how the comment got there. Presentation/interface should be designed to present the data (information), not the underlying plumbing.

        Comments:

        1. Simon Willison
        2. Sam Ruby
        3. Shelley Powers
        4. Aquarion
        5. Rahul Dave
        6. Paul Freeman (2)
        7. Paul Hammond
        8. Joshua Kaufman
        9. Jonas Voss
        10. David Engel
        11. Elaine Nelson
        12. Dan Cederholm
        13. Mike Golding
        14. Shelley Powers (2, 3)

        ‹#›

    2. 0210

      California Quarter ‹#›

  24. 20030103 ‹#›

    1. 1656

      Shape of Life, Everybody has a story ‹#›

  25. 20030102 ‹#›

    1. 2336

      Triumph of Love ‹#›

      • movie

        Note to self: always follow my actor sister Aysan's movie recommendations. Just finished watching Triumph of Love — a beautiful fairy-tale of a movie about romance, plotting, deception, philosophy, love and all the humor that results from such situations. I think it's based on a comedy first performed in France in 1793 or something. Perhaps a good rental for a second or third date with someone that you already feel like you have a good chance of clicking with. Yes, the title makes it a bit challenging to be subtle. So take a risk.

        ‹#›

      • game

        Off to play a game of Settlers of Catan with my parents. We've played two games together so far (their first two games), using the beginner's setup (map layout, and initial settlements and roads already determined), and my mom won both of them. Tonight we're playing the "regular" version with the settlement placement phase.

        ‹#›

    2. 2123

      Pasta Pro ‹#›

      • humor

        This is too funny. A few hours ago I also saw a television ad for the Pasta Pro ( Cook, drain & serve patsa [sic] as easy as 1-2-3! ), and had a similar reaction: "How clever!". Followed up quickly with: "Would I really want to encourage myself to eat a lot more pasta?" Uh, no thanks.

        Comments:

        1. Simon Jessey

        ‹#›

    3. 0602

      New year, new style, new markup ‹#›

      • blog

        The new year brings with it the tradition of taking a fresh, clean outlook. In that theme, I have stripped away the previous decorative paint job. For now you're looking at fresh primer. Enjoy some clean reductionism for the moment. But don't let the white primer fool you. Underneath I've made several changes in the markup which I hinted at near the end of After class last month.

        Consider that a typical blog consists of a time date ordered sequence (or list if you prefer) of blog entries (or items). I had been using <div> tags to group the entries for a day, group an entry's contents, and section off particular categories. In the afterword of A Touch of Class I said:

        ... I found at least two uses of divs with class where a more meaningful tag could be used instead.

        These more meaningful tags involved enough of an overhaul that I decided to wait until this year to take the leap. In brief:

        • There is no span.

          And no more divs either (at least for the moment). The hierarchy of vanilla <div> tags has been replaced by a more meaningful hierarchy of <ol> (ordered list), <li> (list item), and <ul> (unordered list) tags.

        • More classy refinements.

          Classnames that differentiated the <div> tags at each level in the hierarchy have been eliminated, as have many class attributes as well. The top level <ol> is detailed with class='month' to indicate that it is an ordered list for a month's worth of entries. The rest is implied and styled by context.

        • Items with value.

          The semantic value attribute has taken the place of classnames which were used for days and times.

        • Transitional change.

          HTML4 mistakenly deprecated the value attribute of the <li> tag, which was unfortunately propagated to XHTML 1.0. Sometimes to move forward you need to take a step back. I have switched my blog to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional document type definition. 
          <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

          However, I am going to continue to make sure my blog validates with XHTML 1.0 Strict plus the 'value' attribute. XHTML+value as it were.

        • But where's the radio?

          Some parts are still on the workbench — my "now" list has yet to be restyled and reintegrated. You can always check out my previous "now" list (I suppose that would make it a "then" list) by going to the previous month.

        Comments:

        1. John Robert Boynton
        2. Gordon Bonnar
        3. Stuart Langridge
        4. Douglas Bowman
        5. Richard Rutter
        6. Michael
        7. Dan Cederholm
        8. Lucian Teo

        ‹#›

  26. 20030101 ‹#›

    1. 1914

      New Year ‹#›

      • holiday

        Happy New Year everyone. Spent last night playing boardgames at home with the folks, watching the ball drop (live first at 9pm, and then again at midnight — the tape delayed ball drop has always seemed somewhat wrong), and capping it all off with a sparkling raspberry white grape juice toast (verb, not noun).

        Predictions

        2002 was the strangest year that I remember. I lost count of how many things happened that made me exclaim: "They did what?", "Yeah right, what's the joke?". Anyone who had predicted the events of 2002 a year ago would have been laughed at for their extreme unlikelihood. Who would have expected a religious cult that believes aliens seeded the Earth to announce the birth of a human clone named Eve? Still, however strange the events were, I have this inescapable feeling that 2002 presented us with the tip of the iceberg. The events of 2002 felt like an opening act — warming us up and setting the stage for far more dramatic changes in 2003. You have been warned.

        Resolutions

        Still working on my resolutions. Last year my one resolution was to reachieve some semblance of balance, which I last remember having back in 1993. I was partially (mostly?) successful, but not necessarily in all the ways I expected to be. Resolutions are like wishes in that way — beware what you resolve, lest you actually succeed.

        More importantly than achieving overall balance, I have put myself on a path toward achieving and reinforcing balance — a stable rather than unstable equilibrium. This process will continue into the new year, and there is enough momentum, enough inevitability, to not bother with a general renewal. But specifically, I will:

        • Continue sleeping cyclically and eating properly.
        • Continue yoga, skating and other fitness routines 4-7 times per week.
        • Continue reading, writing, creating and publishing regularly.
        • Achieve closure on several long term projects.

        For 2003 I have decided to go with the flow. Or, more appropriately, strike while the iron is hot. My primary prediction for 2003 is change. Lots of it. Thus my primary resolution for 2003 is change. Lots of it. To start with, I will:

        1. Reduce my coffee and sugar soda intake by at least 50% each.
        2. Spend more time doing the things I like with-and-for the people I like, rather than the things I don't like with-and-for the people I don't like.
        3. Change my company or change my job.
        4. Let go of pain to make room for love, while remembering that sometimes a crush is just a crush.
        5. Anticipate, predict and shape the changes that approach my path.

        What's your new year's resolution?

        ‹#›

now... ben chey david daniel doug dweller eric grant gretchen holovaty jimmyg joshuaa karl kottke nick paul poeticgeek rik saschac simon stuart zeldman

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