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 September
28, 2008: Odd Lots
- A
chemical found in red wine may slow aging in mammals. Reservatrol
is a hot item these days, and whereas there probably isn't enough
in wine to have measurable effects on health or longevity, Big
Pharma firm GlaxoSmithKlein paid $720M for Sirtris, a biotech
firm doing research on the reservatrol family of chemicals. Thanks
to Frank Glover for the link.
- Larry Steckler, who had worked for the Gernsback organization
from 1957 until its bitter end in 2003, has published a
700-page biography of Hugo Gernsback. We've been waiting for
a decent biography of our man Hugo for a long time, and I'll post
my reaction here once I've read it.
- Bruce Baker sent me a link to photos
of a (more or less) scale model of the aircraft carrier Harry
S. Truman built entirely in Lego. The
story has been written up (in English) on the Make Blog, with
more photos here.
My big question with Lego (having grown up on Meccano, in which
everything is bolted together with real bolts) is how such monumental
Lego sculptures stay intact. Is it all friction? I've built small
things with Lego, but models that come apart in your hands don't
seem to me to be anything near as good as the (admittedly holey)
things you make with Meccano/Erector and their ilk.
- From Don Doerres comes a
link to a software
defined radio (SDR) on the Web, covering a portion of the
80, 20, and 40 meter ham bands. The "waterfall" visualization
is fascinating, and something that "real" radios just
can't do. We're good at matching patterns, and I was able to see
when a new signal appeared anywhere on the covered band out of
the corner of my eye. Contesters must love SDRs!
- Michael Covington suggested that unnecessary animations are
a far bigger distraction and degradation of the computing experience
than windowing, and I have to agree. This is one reason I continue
to use older software: Its moving parts don't move unless they
have to.
- Also from Michael comes a story from the UK about the fact that
2% of
the 1£ coins in circulation are counterfeit. This boggles
the mind: 1£ won't even buy lunch, and making enough coins
to be worthwhile must take a lot of time and work, considering
that you can and probably will do time if they catch you. (Does
anybody remember Bernard Wolfe's wry short story "The Never-Ending
Penny"?)
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September
27, 2008: Setting the Ether on Fire
I finally finished my attic shortwave antenna a few days ago, after
puzzling over how to do it for almost four years. It was both easier
and harder than I thought. The project took up most of my spare
time for a week, and required me to practice tossing a tethered
tennis ball around up there between the two attic hatches.
I had to get the antenna up in the attic, above the walls of the
house here, because the walls are stucco-coated chicken wire and
thus form a very effective shield can. Even a 40' dipole in my workshop
could pull in only some of the strong local AM broadcast stations.
The new antenna works extremely well, and scanning the bands on
Wednesday night with the Icom 736 brought in all the usual suspects
from Europe at 9 MHz, along with an amateur station in Costa Rica
at 7220 and another one that was (I think; copy on that one was
poor) in Argentina. The quiet sun means that the bands above 14
MHz are basically dead, but assuming that we're not headed into
the next ice age, they'll be back in a couple of years.
The wire was cut for 7200 KHz, and the measured SWR minimum was
at 7130 (with another potentially useful one at 21400) so I got
pretty close. Seeing if I could get a signal out was the next test.
I tuned around on 40M to find a quiet spot, pressed push-to-talk,
opened my mouth...
...and the fire alarm went off. I tore upstairs to find Carol in
a panic and QBit barking furiously at the cold-air return where
the siren lives. I didn't assume that the transmitter was at fault,
but took a quick run around the house and garage to make sure nothing
was burning, and by the time I reset the siren, the alarm system
had already called the fire department. Nothing was burning, and
with a red face I had to tell the firemen who came up in a truck
(not a huge one, fortunately) that my transmitter had triggered
a false alarm.
The garage smoke detector is perhaps 5' below the south leg of
the dipole, and I may have to have the company that installed the
alarm system run shielded cable to it. We think that the dipole
was inducing sufficient current in the smoke detector cable to trigger
the system, so the shielded cable may be enough. If the dipole is
inducing currents in the smoke detector itself, the detector may
have to go into a Faraday cage of some sort. The fact that the vulnerable
detector is in the garage is fortunate. Out there a Faraday cage
would be almost stylish; but maybe not so stylish on our livingroom
ceiling.
So amateur radio station K7JPD will remain off the air for a little
while longer. Damn. Hiram
Percy Maxim didn't have this problem. Ubiquitous computing—and
the wires that make it work—are a two-edged sword.
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September
26, 2008: Scarcity Leaves Its Mark
Whether or not an unexamined life is worth living, examining what
goes on inside your head is a lot of fun. I've become interested
in psychology late in life (after treating it with contempt when
I was a cocksure young rationalist) and identifying my biases and
tracing them back down to their sources has become a minor hobby
here.
My recent study of CSS reminded me of one of those biases: I
hate windowing. I just hate it, and hate it so deeply I don't
even notice the hatred anymore. If you were to look over my shoulder
as I work, you'd notice that I don't use it. Whatever app I'm working
in gets the whole screen, and when you can see the desktop at all,
it means I'm in neutral and nothing useful is going on. I came to
the insight after practicing fluid layouts in CSS. BTW, If you're
interested in learning how to do fluid layouts, I haven't found
anything better than Nate Koechly's Web article "Intricate
Fluid Layouts in Three Easy Steps." Nate created the Yahoo
UI Grids CSS system, which I may begin using once I learn enough
CSS by building things from scratch. I like YUI because it supports
fixed widths. Fluid layouts are not mandatory.
This is good, as I find fluid layouts peculiarly repellant. Things
like this suggest a live frog nailed to a tree, squirming in
agony. (Drag the corner of the window around and you may start to
see what I mean.) Part of it is my long history with fixed page
layouts in magazine and book work, and part of it is a desire to
focus and not be distracted by things going on in other windows.
The bulk of the bias, I think, proceeds from the same reason that
the Greatest Generation were tireless savers and hated to waste
anything: They grew up in conditions of scarcity. I ducked the Great
Depression and WWII, but I followed personal computing from its
rank beginnings, when displays were 16
X 64 character text screens or
worse. I learned computers starving for screen real estate.
 The
IBM PC gave us 24 X 80 displays, but that was never enough. Text
windowing systems like TopView seemed insane to me, and back in
April 1989, when I was doing the "Structured Programming"
column in DDJ, I wrote and published an "anti-windowing
system" that treated the crippled 24 X 80 display as a scrollable
window into a much larger character grid. Full-page text displays
eventually arrived: The MDS Genius 80-character X 66-line monochrome
portrait-mode text display (left) sat on my desk from 1985 through
1992, when Windows 3.1 finally made text screens irrelevant. (Lack
of Windows drivers for the display soon forced MDS into liquidation.)
It wasn't until I bought a 21" Samsung 213T display in 2005
and started running at 1600 X 1200 that I first recall thinking,
"Maybe this is big enough."
And only just barely. People who were born with a 1024 X 768 raster
in their mouths may not be able to figure it, and I guess there's
really no way I can explain. It's just me. Starve a man for screen
space for thirty years, and he is unlikely to want to share what
he has with more than one app at a time. Scarcity leaves its mark.
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September
24, 2008: CSS Progress
I'm continuing my re-exploration of CSS in my spare moments, and
it's worked out very well so far. If you're doing static pages that
don't need Javascript or other fancy stuff, CSS can make very slick
layouts with only a handful of rules. The problem of many people
using old browsers that don't fully support CSS still exists (especially
for IE) but to some extent it always will. CSS-challlenged IE6 still
has 32% of the browser market, which means that at least 32% of
people will not see your pages render correctly, and that seems
like an awful lot to me. I thought I was alone in grumbling about
this, but
I'm not—and this guy does webstuff for a living.
Anyway. The browsers aren't there yet, but they do enough to support
my modest goals. First of these is to get rid of table-based layouts
in my Web articles. Tables are a kluge, but they were the best that
the Web could do for its first ten years. Another goal is to create
an "imprint style" defined in a single external style
sheet. I've taken my several articles about kites and have been
CSS-izing them to a common imprint style. These three articles work
off the same style sheet:
(The Hi-Flier article is the biggest and messiest, and is still
on the workbench.) The headers are custom-made images for the sake
of the decorative title fonts. One of the Web's biggest defects
is not having embeddable fonts. If you want to use fancy fonts,
you have to render the font text in graphics and treat the rendered
titles as images. I don't mind doing that at all; the page title
is present in the META information, so the Semantic Web, wherever
the hell it's hiding, will not be deprived of its due.
I'm still interviewing CSS editors. I've already gone through a
bunch of them. The biggest disappointment was Amaya, an editor/validator
that goes way back and was created by the W3C. Something
that old (it's been around since 1996!) should be much better by
now. Six of the toolbar icons are empty holes, and it crashes with
the same unenlightening error on Win2K that Kompozer does. It did
help me clean up my markup between crashes, but there are other
ways to do that. Another major disappointment was TopStyle,
an $80 commercial product with a downloadable trial version. The
trial version is a good thing, because the only supported preview
browser is IE. You can rig it to preview with Firefox, but there's
a three-year-old message claiming that the Mozilla embedding technology
is "experimental" and not supported, with warnings that
border on those against crossing the streams. No way to preview
in Opera or anything else. This is the kind of lazy-ass nonsense
I will sometimes forgive on free products, but it's most of the
way to 2009, and anything that costs money and claims a preview
feature had better do IE, Firefox, and Opera, or it gets the hook.
TopStyle got the hook.
In the meantime, I'm using Kompozer every day downstairs on my
XP machine, and it hasn't crashed yet. It's got some thin spots—by
default it creates internal style sheets, and you have to manually
insert a link to an external sheet—but now that I've gotten
to know it, my productivity is way up. Kompozer is a cleaned-up
version of Nvu, and the French
chap who wrote Nvu is working on a successor. (Having a little
French helps here, though most of his posts are at least mostly
in English.) Kompozer/Nvu's heart is definitely in the right place,
and if I have to use it for awhile until M. Glazman releases its
successor, I should at least be able to get some work done.
Other odds and ends associated with my efforts to transcend Webfossilhood:
- I tried to upload WordPress to Sectorlink using a product called
ZipDeploy. Apart from the arrogance of having a three hour
trial period (!!!) the damned thing got partway through the longish
upload and...vanished. It didn't show an error dialog. It didn't
even beep. The app window simply disappeared, leaving the upload
incomplete. There was nothing running in Task manager. It Died
And Made No Sign. Hook!
- Sectorlink being unhelpful in this regard (and I will not be
renewing the contract for next year there) I went over to my Fused
Network account and installed WordPress through their Installatron
utility. It took 2 minutes and worked flawlessly. I've had difficulty
installing Gallery 2 there, but it's looking like the problem
is with Gallery and not Installatron.
- Contra will be moving to WordPress sometime around the first
of the year, depending on how quickly I learn it and how long
it takes to sort out trhe hosting equation. There is a plug-in
to do automatic cross-posts to LiveJournal, so I will be keeping
my LiveJournal mirror. But this hand-edited table monster will
(finally) be laid to rest. My
WordPress install is browsable, but don't bookmark it, and
don't expect it to be a mirror. It's just test posts. I have it
on junkbox.com right now, but it will be on duntemann.com when
it "goes live."
And so to work.
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September
20, 2008: More on John T. Frye
I just uploaded a new version of my Carl
& Jerry index, including an expanded bio of John T. Frye.
We know a lot more about him than we did a couple of months ago,
and almost all of the new material came to me from Lisa Enfinger,
whose parents were close friends of Frye's for many years. I'll
summarize here:
- John Frye was stricken by polio as an infant, and he could not
walk at all, throughout his entire life.
- That said, he was not immobile: He had hand controls installed
on all of his cars, and traveled extensively throughout the United
States. He owned a 1963 Olds Dynamic 88, but no word on whether
he ever had a Buick. (Legend holds that he was a Buick man, but
no one can tell me why that should be so.)
- Remarkably enough, he never attended Purdue University, but
instead studied at the University of Indiana, Columbia University,
and the University of Chicago. Lisa did not know if he ever received
a degree.
- More remarkably, he never studied engineering, but preferred
English, journalism, history, and psychology.
- Her parents both attended Purdue in the 1940s while earning
their degrees in chemistry, and John visited them there. He probably
knew other people at Purdue, and it was not a long drive to Layafette
from Logansport in any event.
- He is credited with close to 600 short articles, including Carl
& Jerry and Mac's Service Shop. His first publication was
supposedly in Hugo Gernsback's Radio Craft in the early
1930s.
- Her great uncle Gene Buntain was Frye's close high school friend
in Logansport, and the two of them discovered electronics and
ham radio together. (Could Gene Buntain have been the inspiration
for Carl?)
- John Frye lived much or most of his life at 1810 Spear St. in
Logansport, one block south of US 24. It was a little weird to
dive down from orbit on Google Earth and be staring at the roof
of Frye's old house. One wonders what the man himself would have
thought of it.
I dug through my smallish collection of really old radio magazines
(including a few Radio Craft) and did not see him there,
but if any of you guys can find any of his early articles, I would
like citations.
Needless to say, I'm still looking for details on John Frye's life,
especially concerning where he learned radio and TV servicing and
where he practiced it. Lisa said she never heard of him owning his
own shop nor even working for a shop in town, so that would be a
question worth answering.
Finally, I had written to Frye's younger brother Bailey Frye late
last year, but he was evidently too ill to respond, and I found
today that he passed away at the end of April, at age 90.
Many thanks to Lisa Enfinger for taking the time to send me all
the information, including the scan of a
newspaper article from 1962 that I first lined to a couple of
weeks ago, including a picture of Frye at that time, when he was
42.
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September
19, 2008: Odd Lots
- Do not—I repeat—do not buy the Greenlee
Cablecaster if you're faced with running wires through difficult
places. I'm running a 65-foot shortave antenna in our attic, basically
throwing cords for stringing two wires from the center of the
structure to each end along the long axis, and the unit was a
total botch. In every single case, the fishline tied to the nifty
glow-in-the-dark dart broke under the force of the spring that
throws it. (I wisely tried it out in the street before I took
it up in the attic.) After narrowly resisting the urge to stomp
on the damned thing, I drilled a hole in a tennis ball, threaded
a contractor cord through it with a large cotter pin, and lobbed
the ball myself. It worked. And here's
what I was dealing with. I got the ball through that maze
with my own right arm, though it took fifteen minutes of bad throws.
I now know what pitching practice must be like.
- Alluva sudden, egg and onion matzo crackers have simultaneously
vanished from all the local supermarkets. I have not seen any
for two months, after reliably seeing them in all kosher sections
throughout the five years we've been here. They've been my favorite
soup cracker for 25 years. I cannot figure this; if there's been
a change in kosher rules or something like that, it has not reached
Google yet.
- An article in today's Wall Street Journal reports studies
indicating that atheists are four times more likely to
believe in Bigfoot, ghosts, and the Lost Continent of Atlantis
than people who go to church at least once a week. (31% vs. 8%)
Faith appears to be inborn, and if you don't believe in God, well,
there are plenty of other things to choose from in the marketplace
of unprovable phenomena.
- I'm not sure this is proven, but I sure wish it were: A study
indicating that eating
vegetables shrinks your brain. (Thanks to Brook Monroe for
the link.)
- And if broccoli-induced brain shrinkage isn't enough to scare
you off the Whole Foods wagon, consider that organic
soils are often just as contaminated with heavy metals as soils
used in conventional agriculture.
- Off-brand 16GB SDHC cards are now down to $35 at NewEgg, and
even name brands like SanDisk are in the $60 range. Three of those
will carry every bit of data I have except for ripped ISOs, and
according to a friend of mine who works in the industry we still
have no crisp idea how long the data will last.
- Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I dunno; it seems
mighty quiet somehow. Wait a sec...the pirates all had
subprime mortgages on their ships—and they're all now underwater!
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September
16, 2008: Gritting My Teeth over Kompozer
I've been re-learning CSS over the past week and change, and it
hasn't been hard because I didn't learn all that much of it to begin
with. Back in 1999 and 2000, CSS was mostly proof-of-concept in
Web browsers. The spec itself is a work of brilliance, but it wasn't
until the release of IE7 at the end of 2006 that it was possible
to make even fairly simple pages render identically on IE, Firefox,
and Opera. IE6, which an amazing (appalling?) number of people still
use, will not render the max-width property correctly, so
fluid and even flexible layouts are still problematic.
No matter here. I'm a page-oriented, fixed-width kind of a guy.
My 25-year publishing background has taught me to think in textual
spaces that don't change shape. This is in part my webfossilhood
showing, but in truth it's not a new argument, and the discussion
pivots on how you use your UIs. I display only one thing at a time
on my screen, as an inducement to personal focus, and so I maximize
all windows that I use except for those belonging to small utilities.
There is sometimes a need to show two or maybe three windows at
once, but it doesn't come up often for me, and when the need arises,
I know it.
So what I've been exploring are table-free fixed-width CSS layouts
that will render on an 800 X 600 display (as you find on some of
the smaller netbooks) without kicking up a horizontal scroll bar.
I haven't tested this on all browsers on all platforms, but the
magic number is probably 775. If you don't insist on total fluidity,
you can make a very nice 2-column layout with no tables and very
little CSS. Here's my
learning project. It's not an expert job (I'm not an expert)
and it's far from finished, but considering how few lines of CSS
it took to do it, I'm pretty happy. I'm going to try to center the
material as my next step, and from my reading that shouldn't be
hideously difficult.
It's worth a little time here to describe my experience with Kompozer.
Overall, it's a nice little item, especially for simple table-oriented
layouts. Its CSS features are limited to what CasCadeS
can do, and as best I can tell, CasCadeS was abandoned in 2002.
I'm still shopping for a good CSS-capable Web editor, but in the
meantime Kompozer has been a reasonable learning platform. It has
some weird gaps—for example, I see no way to make it insert
an em dash—but that's not my major problem. Kompozer does
not work reliably on Windows 2000. It crashes frequently when
you click the tabs to shift between the different views (text, tags,
source, and browser preview) and sometimes when you click the Save
button, egad. Then when I went downstairs to my XP lab machine,
I edited for hours and suffered no crashes at all. Whose fault that
is, well, I won't pursue, but it feeds into the difficult ongoing
decision process I have here over moving to XP for my daily work.
These days, alot of media stuff, even free software, won't work
reliably (or sometimes at all) on Win2K. I have to force myself
not to grit my expensive new teeth when I think about it.
Anyway. CSS reminds me a little bit of PL/1.
Both technologies tried to bite off way too much at one time,
especially considering the state of the underlying technologies
when they first appeared. CSS would probably have been accepted
more quickly if it hadn't been such a huge challenge to the developers
of HTML rendering engines. As with PL/1, different groups with different
emphases focused on different features, with the result that identical
rendering on all the major browsers still isn't quite here, even
though CSS is now ten years old, with roots going back another five.
A simpler standard intelligently incrementalized and expanded every
three or four years would have been better.
The lack of genuine WYSIWYG tools for CSS bothers me, but I keep
reminding myself that hand-futzed CSS/xhtml is not the future.
The future is turn-the-crank Web apps that manage content. Tweaking
those requires that you know PHP and especially CSS, so I'm cracking
the books here and brushing up. I will shortly have a Joomla instance
to play with, and Drupal will be close behind. I won't be redesigning
Contra because it's all going into a CMS as soon as I can manage
it. Hand-coding is addictive, but in the vast majority of common
cases, machines do it better and faster. I'd rather be researching
and writing articles than hand-formatting them.
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September
15, 2008: Why I Don't Use LinkedIn Much
From time to time I get notes from people who have asked me to
connect to them on LinkedIn
and then didn't have their invitations accepted. I need to emphasize
right here that it's not because I don't like you, though I wonder
sometimes just how useful LinkedIn actually is. I've done a few
introductions, but that's about it. I don't have the paid version,
and thus most of the system's features aren't available to me.
No, the problem with LinkedIn is purely technical: Most of the
time, the damned thing goes into the bushes after I try to respond
to an invitation or other communication from another member. The
browser spinner spins and spins, but for whatever reason the progress
bar gets about three-fourths of the way toward the finish line and
just stops there until the connection times out.
I get this behavior from other sites now and then. I've been very
interested in the CSS WebApp IStylr,
but I have yet to get anywhere with it for the same reason: Click
on a control, and the transaction stalls without going to completion.
IStylr may simply be on an overloaded server. It's a one-man project
and it's not located in the US. LinkedIn has no such excuse, and
I see this problem only very rarely on other large sites. Sometimes
logging in very very early or very very late seems to help—but
if I have to log in at 2 ayem to get it to talk to me, well, ain't
gonna happen.
Every so often I go up to LinkedIn to try and work on the stack
of invitations and other things I have waiting, and every so often
I get a few transactions to go through. It seems like a lousy way
to run a cloud computing site, and I wonder if there's something
weird about my own system configuration that LinkedIn just doesn't
play well with. If you've had this kind of problem with LinkedIn
(or if you have any thoughts on where I should look for possible
incompatibilities) I would fersure like to hear about it.
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September
12, 2008: Odd Lots
- Greg Singleton sent me a pointer to an English translation of
a
Russian short story done in comics format. I'm not a huge
fan of comics, but the wizardry in this piece is mostly in the
drawings: When I saw the large pane in which the man stands behind
the boy he once was, reading the same Jules Verne book against
the backdrop of Captain Nemo's ocean—the very same exact
copy of the same book—I shivered.
- Another sunpot, albeit
a very small one, has appeared, so we're not likely to break
the 1913 record of the longest time without an observed sunspot
any time soon. Also note the article on Martian dust devils, which
have been dancing around the Phoenix lander and have been caught
on video.
- This
article on Intel's current research into programmable matter
(but not the quantum dot kind, fortunately) qualifies as the worst-edited
Web article I've seen in a month. Don't these people proof their
work before they post it?
- The
Large Hadron Collider went live the other day, and people
died. Strange physics has nothing on strange psychology.
- Particle Accelerators of Unusual Size (PAUSes) loom large in
a number of apocalyptic SF novels, and here's
a summary collection, courtesy Frank Glover.
- Here's another reason I rather like Good Pope Benny: He's
cracking down on nutcase apparitions of the Blessed Mother,
which have gotten weirder and weirder and fuller of God-stomps-the-shit-out-of-everybody
apocalypticism in the last sixty or seventy years, and are making
the whole idea of Catholicism look bad.
- And to round out this this discussion of Apocalypses of Unusual
Stupidity, I give you a
list of thirty ends-of-the-world that never happened. Here's
hoping that the New Agers will become so dispirited when nothing
happens on December 26, 2012 that they will take up a more productive
hobby, like woodburning, or breeding planaria worms.
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September
11, 2008: I CAN HAS CHEESBURGER GREES!
...because that's just what it was. We were eating lunch in the
RV yesterday, and I had microwaved a buffalo burger grilled the
night before, with a cheese single atop it. After we had finished
eating, QBit jumped up on my lap and pretended to be CuddlyDog for
a few seconds until he thought I wasn't looking, and then The Tongue
came out. Carol quick grabbed her camera and got the moment just
right.
We got home a little earlier today from our 6-day wander, refreshed
and ready to get back (more or less) to the normal run of things.
I spent maybe a little too much time with my nose buried in CSS
books, but we did get a few quality hours in down at Mt. Princeton
Hot Springs (see my
entry for August 17, 2004 for photos; it hasn't changed much)
and a few nice light hikes.
And boy, there's nothing like campground Wi-Fi hotspots to make
you appreciate residential broadband!
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September
8, 2008: Fetishes
The original Star Trek premiered 42 years ago today. Feeling old,
I went for a walk and tried to identify another pair of three-syllable
homonyms and got nowhere. Viritrilbia, we need ya down here for
a bit—and bring McPhee if you've got him.
Also on the word front, I got a note last night from a reader asking
me how I define "fetish", as my use of the word in yesterday's
entry puzzled him. I think he's young, and maybe he's thinking latex
or bicycle seats, but not so: A fetish is a morally-neutral opinion
held with peculiar force. The words "bias" and "prejudice"
are now generally considered pejorative, so I had to think of something
else. "Fetish" seemed to fit. We all have them, and as
we get older and more willing to consider the possibility that we
are not all-wise, we often begin to admit it.
My best-known fetish is the contrarian reaction to the well-known
(and pretty silly) tech culture aversion to upper-case characters.
Talk about a fetish: EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT UPPER-CASE CHARACTERS
MEAN THAT YOU'RE SHOUTING, SO NO ONE ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE SHOULD
EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER USE THEM FOR ANYTHING EVER AGAIN!!!!!!
well guys in just spring when the little lame goat-footed balloon
man begins coding far and wee (in pretty-how towns like palo alto)
even e. e. cummings cant figger out wtf hes trying to do especially
if he does it in c {heh}
My fetish is this: Upper-case characters should be used for the
framing members of program code and content markup. In Pascal, things
like BEGIN, END, WHILE, REPEAT, UNTIL, IF, THEN, and so on give
the program its shape. They should stand out against the general
landscape of functions and variables like kleig lights. Ditto content:
Markup tags should be in upper case. They need to stand out. Statistically,
ordinary content text is lower case, with a sprinkling of upper-case
characters so thin as to barely be there. Not being able to spot
a tag in the thick of your text can make errors so hard to see that
you start flip<p>ing out, whether you're in Palo Alto or Pa<hr>ump.
The whole idea is to make the structure of your work easier to see
at a glance, especially when there are pages and pages of it to
go through and keep correct and-up-to-date.
I know I've lost the war, but I and others with the same fetish
may have fought it well enough that the lower-case fetishists had
to build the prohibition into what amount to the physical laws of
content markup: XHTML absolutely will not allow upper-case
characters in tags. God help us all if somebody somewhere perceived
our HTML tags as SHOUTING!
And we give these people Ph.D.s, mon dieu.
(The only rational argument I've ever seen about this involves
HTML
compression, which gains you a mind-boggling 3-4%
in markup file size. OMG, PONEZ!)
My other major fetish is about visual development. As our tools
get better, hand-coding is increasingly a waste of time and an exercise
of pure hubris. I know it's fun, but how much will you bet that
you can write better assembly code than gcc? I'm sure that I can't,
and I may know maybe a little bit about the subject. This goes triple
for CSS/XHTML, which compared to modern x86 machine code are almost
trivial. The field is newer than native code generation, and the
tools are less mature, but the day will come when you draw
the screen you want, and correct, optimized markup and styles come
out the back end. We may be closer than you think, and halleluia
for that!
It's downhill from there on the fetish side. My off-dry wine fetish
is well known. I'm increasingly sure that high-fructose corn syrup
lies behind most of our obesity problem. I worry that the Pope will
become a serious danger to the Catholic Church, if he hasn't already.
Etc. The point is that we all have our obsessions. We may have reasons
for them—or think that we do—but certain ideas put down
roots in us, and after awhile it's difficult to set them aside.
The wise person watches his/her own fetishes closely, lest they
become damaging in some way. Shoot for moderation in all things,
especially your obsessions!
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September
7, 2008: On Being a Webfossil
Carol and I bundled up the puppies and took Otto (our Bigfoot RV)
down the road about 100 miles to Buena Vista, Colorado, and we're
kicking back here amidst the mountains for a few days. We're not
doing much—that's the idea!—but reading and gathering
our thoughts.
I've been tearing at what I call my "Webfossil" problem
for some time now without saying much about it here. I've been posting
content to the Web since 1995, and way back then I tried all kinds
of things. However, for the past seven or eight years I've been
using basically the same toolset: Dreamweaver 3/Fireworks 3. These
were released in 1999 and are pretty creaky, but they work and the
content gets posted. Periodically people message me and tell me
that my HTML is a little bizarre, and it is, because I don't write
it—that's what software is for. (Newcomers here should keep
in mind that I'm the Visual Developer Magazine guy, and that
WYSIWYG design, whether for code or for content, is one of my major
fetishes.) I've become a bit of a Webfossil. Yes, I know, I need
new software.
But if I'm considering new software, shouldn't I be thinking about
entirely new approaches to the basic challenge? I keep a blog, and
I write Web articles on various topics, both using 1999-era tools.
LiveJournal has been a useful mirror, and I adopted it almost entirely
to provide an RSS feed for Contra. (The comments have been fun,
and were something of a surprise.) I don't really need LiveJournal
for that anymore, as hosting services with preinstalled and house-supported
instances of blogging tools like WordPress are common and cheap.
(I just got an account with one and am testing a few things. More
on this in coming weeks.)
CMS packages are one alternative approach that I'm looking at very
closely. Blogging is either built-in or supported by plug-ins, and
management of static articles is basically what CMS systems are
for. It's an embarrassment of riches out there; my biggest question
now is which one to choose. Drupal is more secure than Joomla, but
from what I've seen it takes a lot of work to change anything, most
of which is hand-coded PHP or CSS. Now I'm no expert at either,
but I've played with both and I'm a quick study when I know it's
worth my while. What I barf on is what I always barf on: Too much
work per unit result. Hand-coding is fun (and addictive—definitely
been there!) but it wastes my time, and at 56, you reluctantly
start counting the years you have left.
I know less about Joomla, but it looks like it has more visual
tools, more plug-ins, and more available themes. The themes are
CSS and thus easily altered by a very cool sort of object-oriented
programming for content markup. CSS is fun, if you don't get deranged
about seventeen-box fluid layouts. I tried it back in 2001 or so,
and set it aside because the spec was twenty miles ahead of the
rendering engines. There are still some weird little issues—the
CSS greasy eminences do not like the HR tag at all, and deprecate
it mortally in favor of peabrained hacks like making the lower edge
of a paragraph box visible—but b'gosh and begorrah, you can
render the same code in the major browsers these days and it all
looks pretty much the same. I guess I really should abandon table-based
layouts.
My fundamental objection to CSS remains: There's no reason not
to drag text boxes around on a display and then have the software
compile your design to XHTML and style sheets—except the software
to do this doesn't exist yet. I still have a couple of things to
test, primarily Style
Master and especially iStylr,
but even the formidable Dreamweaver CS3 is still basically an HTML
table-basher. I've been doing that for seven years now and it's
a nuisance.
I may hand-code a fluid equivalent to my canonical table-based
Contra layout for practice if nothing more, but the ultimate solution
is probably an all-purpose turn-the-crank Web content management
system, even if what I want doesn't quite exist yet. Sooner
or later, it will. Time to crack the mold (as venerable and useful
as it's been) and stop being a fossil.
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September
5, 2008: Odd Lots
- Stumbled across a
spectacular site devoted to WW-I era military aviation. These
guys restore and actually build faithful replicas of things like
the Sopwith Triplane. Go through the photo albums if you have
any least interest in such things.
- Harry Helms asks
if Götterdämmerung will occur on September 10. Maybe
in Europe, but not over here; Americans can't even spell "physics"
much less Gotter...well, you know, Wagner's Really Big Show. Hey,
I survived the 70s—strangelets don't bother me.
- Owen Shurson sent me a link to Magic
Angle Sculptures, and forsooth, I have never seen anything
quite like it before. Basically, you have bizarre 3-D sculpture
things that cast morphing shadows under bright light. Watch the
video.
- Don Lancaster reminded me that a "spandrel" (see my
entry for September 1, 2008) is a medium-sized
hunting dog that comes in two varieties: Crocker and Springy.
- Mike Reith told me about a free
alternative to Camtasia Studio, for recording on-screen activity
to use in demos or tutorials. I really need to study video—yeah,
I know, I told myself that four years ago—and this is high
on the list of video things to play around with.
- So far, I've run across only one voice-training product, Singing
Coach Unlimited, a $99 item that may or may not teach harmony.
(Doesn't look like it.) Many thanks to Larry Nelson for the pointer.
We still may need Harmony Hero.
- I was contacted by a woman whose parents were very close friends
of John T. Frye. She sent me a scanned
newspaper clipping from 1962, showing Frye at his typewriter,
and ferdam if he doesn't look like a grown-up version of the canonical
drawing of Jerry. More on this as I digest all she sent me. I'll
update the
Carl & Jerry page sometime this coming week.
- Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a
page of Photoshopped Far Side tributes. Alas, no sign of "Welcome
to Hell. Here's your accordion."
- There will apparently be an
all-electric version of the Smart Fortwo to go nose-to-nose
with GM's Volt. Let's hope they call it the Ohm. Resistance is
Futile.
- Eggs
apparently are much healthier than we thought they were—but
just tasting sweetness may cause metabolic disruptions.
Crap, how will I live without Diet
Citrus Drop? I shouldn't worry; by next week eggs will be
deadly again and diet sodas will get a clean slate.
- I've pretty much decided that Contra and much of my other Web
content will go into a CMS over the coming year. So far Drupal
is the top contender. In the meantime, I'm brushing up on my CSS.
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September
1, 2008: St. Peter's, and a Miracle Voice Teacher
It's been a low-energy and off-my-peak couple of days here for
reasons I won't bore you (or gross you out) with. Had to take a
run up to Denver, but mostly I've been sitting quietly and reading.
I finished a book that I don't really recommend unless you're chained
to the potty and need to kill time: Basilica by R. A. Scotti
is a popular history of the construction of the second St. Peter's
Basilica in Rome, the one that we all know and love, which supports
the largest church dome in the world. The book is competently written,
but it's a little thin on details of the construction itself. Ms.
Scotti is much more interested in politics and personalities, and
in truth I did learn a lot about Bramante, Michaelangelo, Raphael,
and Bernini (and more than a few popes) that I didn't know before.
But she has no good head for architecture, and does not define any
 terms.
I kept flipping into a wonderful DK book called The Visual Dictionary
of Buildings to clarify certain elements of church architecture.
Now that book I recommend, especially if you're a writer
trying to set a scene in a complicated building and aren't entirely
sure what an oculus is. (Or—quick, now!—define a "spandrel".)
There are some factual errors in Basilica, one of the worst
of which suggests that poured concrete was used in some places in
St. Peter's. Not so—poured concrete was an ancient technology
that was lost after Imperial Rome came apart and was not recovered
until the 19th Century, or pretty close to it. St. Peter's was built
almost entirely of mortared masonry and sculpted stone.
If you're interested in the peculiarities of St. Peter's Basilica,
a better book is The Bones of St. Peter by John Evangelist
Walsh, which speaks of the excavations under the main altar just
before WWII. The Basilica was built over a Roman graveyard, and
there was a lot of fascinating stuff under the floors. More about
the Shroud of Turin than about the Basilica is Holy Faces, Secret
Places by Ian Wilson, of which I reread a considerable chunk.
However, Wilson speaks of the countless weird little crannies in
the Vatican complex, in which a lot of interesting things, and not
only relics, may be hiding. Secrets are not good in religion for
many reasons, but mostly because secrets are a power thing, and
power corrupts spiritual organizations mortally. (See Encountering
Mary by Sandra Zimdars-Swartz for a good discussion of this
problem.) Wilson is a marvelously engaging writer, and potty reading
doesn't get a whole lot better.
I also reread several sections in Peter Ochiogrosso's fascinating
1987 book Once a Catholic, in which a number of famous Catholics
and (mostly) former Catholics explain what sorts of marks their
Catholic upbringing left on them. The book is not explicitly about
the gulf between Tridentine (i.e., Latin) Catholicism and Vatican
II Catholicism, but the demographics of the people the author chose
to interview almost guarantees it. Like them, I grew up Tridentine,
and like them, I know what we lost, and why. (Not all that was lost
was good; in fact, a good deal of what we lost was desperately in
need of losing.) The book is secular in approach and intent, and
does not preach, in either direction. It's a character study, of
real characters. (One of them is George Carlin.) Highly recommended,
and I think I've spoken of it here before.
All these books but Basilica are currently out of print,
but cheap on the used market. Reading them was research for a current
project of mine—Old Catholics. (Nothing makes you a
better writer than simply reading, and reading a lot.)
Finally, I'll throw out an idea I had yesterday, for an invention
I wish someone would get to work on. I want something I might charactize
as a Miracle Voice Teacher. I want a program that will put a musical
score on the PC screen and listen to me try to sing it. The program
should average the frequencies that come in from the mic and put
a line above or below a note in the score, telling me whether I'm
high or low. It should have a metronome, and the ability to play
the score as MIDI. It should be able to record what I sing and play
it back for me, showing me on the screen where I botched the melody.
And if that's possible, then the program should be able to teach
me how to harmonize, by isolating one of the melodic lines and allowing
me to sing it, and then gradually adding in the other lines in the
headphones while I try to stick with my own line and not get confused.
Scarily, such a thing would allow me to sing four part harmony...with
myself. The world may not be quite ready for that, but at this juncture
I think I am. I went looking for the product and didn't find it,
but if you know of something along those lines, I'd like to hear
about it.
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