I've been totally out of it lately. Alison and I decided to put in new carpet and hardwood in the areas of the house I haven't already tiled. so for a little over a week I've been moving all our possessions from one side of the house to the other. Then I decided to remodel my office once again, converting my closet into a workstation, adding a new circuit to the room, and building new cabinets for storage. Work is finally winding down so I should be back into my old routine soon.

For those of you who have sent me email, I apologies, and will be getting back to you ASAP. Well that is as soon as my PowerMac comes back from the shop. For some reason all my cooling fans decided that they only wanted to run at FULL Speed. Sounded just like a blow-drier.

"Dean Edwards has takenit upon himself to make Internet Explorer W3C compliant. How? Well, itisn't by patching the application, as you might suspect. He's created a stylesheet, dubbed 'IE7' thatuses DHTML to load and parse style sheets into a form that IE canunderstand. Just include the style sheet in your HTML pages, and thingsshould render correctly. The complexity of the CSS transformations isreally amazing and shows off the power of this stuff.""

"Tired of bland white conformity? Send your iPod to the folks at ColorWare PC, and for less than $50, they'll give it a shiny, seamless coat in your choice of 22 colors. For $19 more, they'll do up your dock to match. Easy, all iPods "

"When I started designing, bevels and drop shadows were the first refuges of a hack. Not any more. A brief history, with examples, of bevels and shadows. Emerging design trends. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]"

Pat and Gary got married the other day. If I only knew ahead of time I would have gotten them a George Foreman Grill. Hell, I recently got married and I got 3 of these things, I could have just given them one of mine. Oh well I guess I stilll have a year to find something. Although what do you give a couple that has already been living together for twenty-two years. A gravy-boat? Why even get married after 22 year? What more did they have to prove? they put in more time then most any couple I know.

Strangest thing about this is that I now feel better about Pat and Gary. While I felt that I was accepting of them before, in retrospect I had a sense that their relationship was more fragile than most, despite their many years together. But now that they have this, albeit symbolic, recognition from the state, and that they took a public oath that their union is permanent I think have a better understanding of them. They are now one and can be categorized, at least in my mind, in the same place as other couples I know.

So I must say congratulation Pat and Gary. I "grok rightness" with this situation.

Andy Budd points out what could be the greatest bookmarklet since. well CSS.

"I came across this handy user stylesheet and associated favelet the other day. The stylesheet basically outlines and names all the page elements with an ID or class.

There are a few favelets out there that do a similar thing (see my bookmarklets page), but they mostly use the border property. The thing that’s nice about this stylesheet is that it uses the outline property. Unlike borders, outlines take up no space, so using them for testing can be really useful as they don’t disrupt the layout of your page. Outline doesn’t work in the “usual suspect” browsers, but does work in Safari. As such, if your a OS X based web developer, this stylesheet and the associated stylesheet toggle favelet could come in useful..."

This bookmarklet could be a great tool for any beginner who wants to make changes to my themes, but doesn't know which class goes to what element.

Mezzoblue : Importance of Brand
"As has been reported everywhere this morning, Mozilla has renamed Firebird. The new Firefox trademark is the result of a naming conflict with another open source project, and the process has been written up by those involved: Ben Goodger, Steven Garrity, and Jon Hicks."

HicksDesign : branding firefox
Jon Hickstalks about the evolution the fireFox brand went through.

McSweeney : Quotes from either...
...President of the United States George W. Bush or Sanator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine From The Star Wars Movies by Jason McGregor

 A List Apart : Exploring Footers"by Bobby van der Sluis - With old-school table layout methods, vertical positioning is a piece of cake. With CSS layout, it’s a piece of something else. New ALA contributing writer Bobby van der Sluis shows how to regain control of footers and other vertically positioned layout elements via CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM."

I have a new and annoying habit of capitalizing the second letter of short words that start with "i". Apple's convention of calling their products names like "iPod", "iMac", "iPhoto", "iTunes", and "iMovie" has caused me to mistype other words like "iCon" and "iDea". This new habit is starting to make me "iRate". ":)"

Erin Clerico pointed out to me yesterday that the KCSOS sever was working much harder than usual. It was just plain slow. Erin noticed that one file was being called more often than any other. It was the CSS for our (very popular) home page.

Since the KCSOS home page is so popular we have Manila render that site to a dedicated static server. In addition all images and binary files (gems) are served from this static server. This setup allows our Manila server to focus on our client's web sites and our lower volume departmental sites. Apart from the creation and management of the KCSOS home page, Manila should not have any part of serving it to the public. However, the "stylesheet.css" was being served by Manila directly, due to my use of the "linkToStyleSheet" Macro.

LinkToStyleSheet is a new macro that allows for external Style sheets in Manila. Until its development, Manila served all CSS inline with the html. That system works fine but it's hard to shield Netscape 4.x and other non-CSS compliant browsers from the Stylesheet. Plus external style sheets are better since in theory they cache, and require fewer server resources to serve. The problem with "linkToStyleSheet" is that it serves the styleSheet directly out of the object database - it should go through the motions of writing the file out to the local static server and then the macro should calculate the URL from there.

According to Erin, these are the steps that Manila goes though to serve this simple text document.

"It retrieve a URL for the Gems directory of a particular site, add the file name 'styleSheet.txt' to the URL.

Then the browser makes a requst of that URL. Frontier builds a PTA for the request, then inserts a new "word processing" object in the PTA replacing the template, coercing a string in to it and returns the result.

So, a request for that page in Manila causes Manila to serve two pages."

After removing that macro from the site, and simply linking to a standard CSS text file on our static server, Manila returned it to its usual responsive self.

 Daring Fireball : OmniWeb 5 Public Beta
"Today the Omni Group released the first public beta of OmniWeb 5.0. Based on today’s beta, and the two alpha releases I’ve used for the last week, OmniWeb 5 has the potential to be a very big deal."

Doug Bowman has posted a specific example of the IE Factor

Found on slashdot:

"spacehug writes "In a recent Microsoft Knowledge Base article, they provide 'Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks.' These steps include always using SSL/TLS, typing 'JScript commands' in the address bar, and typing in URLs instead of clicking links! I have a suggestion that's not in the Knowledge Base: don't use IE!" "

That's a serious bummer. Wasn't the browser created to release us from the tyranny of hand typing addresses? They might as well tell people to download Mozilla and wait until the problem is fixed.

UserLand has posted a new docs page for the module macro that I used in my two newest Manila themes (1, 2). The Creating a Theme page was also updated with instructions on adding modules to a theme.

So I've noticed that the Clark04.com site ranked pretty high in my referrers listing yesterday. Buoyed by the thought that I was being talked about by the clark folks I visited their site to see what the rigamarole was about. But alas there was nothing, no mention of yours truly. So now I'm left wondering if the clark folks are "referrer spamming".