Chasing My Own Tale
Aug 25 Wed (09 AM)
From Amy and the Synchronicity Dept.:
“Some of Portland’s new streetcars will be coming from the Czech Republic! :)”
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/p/ap/19990823/wl/streetcar_comeback_g7r.html
For those of you who may not know, Amy and I traveled to Prague last September, fulfilling many long term goals and dreams. It’s nice to find connections between the two cities.
Aug 24 Tue (05 PM)
Oh My Goddess! It’s been Released!
http://www.byte.com/nntp/joncon?comment_id=1701
This is amazing. I never expected Xanadu to actually see the light of day. Xanadu has always been one of those mythical pieces of software. Ted Nelson actually releasing this stuff is like King Richard returning with the Holy Grail, Excalibur rising out of the Lady of the Lake’s hand, SETI finding The Message, and Ender returning, all wrapped up into one.
http://www.udanax.com/ http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/
This is amazing. I’m utterly astounded. Flabergasted. Nearly speachless!
Nelson has been working on this single piece of technology since 1964.
http://www.xanadu.net/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_64.html
But now comes the matter of living up to the expectation. At some point I’d like to set up a Green server, but I’m afraid I probably don’t have the time, nor the spare hardware to dedicate to it.
Wow.
Aug 23 Mon (11 PM)
I’m not sure how it happened but I cleaned out all the mail in my e-mail in-box at work. And I did it the right way… by passing the buck. 🙂
Now that I’ve got that box cleaned out I can get back to my personal in-box which is keeping just under 30 mails. I think I’ll leave that till tomorrow.
I’m not going to attribute it to my new found use of Acta as my To Do list, but my desk is just about as clean as my professional In-box. Credit for that particular feat needs to be given to the new pack of manilla folders. As long as I can keep from taking on any more new projects, I might start making headway in this simple existence.
Interesting Link of the Entry: http://www.moonpage.com/
I’ll be getting Flash 4 in at work tomorrow. And a big reason to get really good at it really quick. 😯
Wish me luck!
Aug 22 Sun (01 PM)
As a method of procrastinating, I edited, organized and expounded upon last week’s journal entry concerning Structured HTML and why it’s so important.
~rosso/webdev/structured_code.shtml
I’m happy with how it came out, though I still need to put a lot of work into my writing techniques. I rely heavily on Subheads and italics and bold face to make sure people are following the text. Perhaps I use them too much?
I so desperately want my ideas to be as plainly visible as possible. It causes me no end of worry when I’m writing. I try to be very careful about the phrases I use, particularly keywords that I can use like ideological icons throughout the piece, once they’re defined.
Well, I guess you can be the judge of that. If you do read the piece, please feel free to send me a ‘Good Job’ or a ‘Try Again’ via my Pager Respond entry below. Thanks!
Aug 21 Sat (11 AM)
Recently there’s been a sudden interest from part of the Net in antique software. I started with the release of Visicalc 1.0 and has recently stretched to encompass a number of pieces of Mac software. Macintouch had a great report and listing of the software:
http://www.macintouch.com/earlymac.html
…”Feel the leather, Sunny!!!”…
-ahem-
As I was saying, after picking through the various pieces of software, and not finding anything of more than curiosity, I came across Acta.
http://a-sharp.com
Acta is an outliner. It’s escentially a very simple text editor with the ability to group pieces of text, generally in hierarchies. Now here was something useful that fit in well with my needs and my philosophy towards software.
I’ve got tons of projects and as readers who have been with me for a while know, a couple of months ago I got on this kick of making single large To Do list that listed every single thing that I’m working on outside of work. I had been keeping this list in Stickies, a ‘virtual’ stickie note program that ships with Macs. It’s just a very small and colorfull text window, with very little adornment.
But by moving this To Do list to Acta, I can now go into more detail about my projects without sacrificing readability of the document. For instance when it comes to the car, I have this set of entries:
* The Honda
* Fix Brakes
* Decide to Repair/Sell
* Find another car
* Replace Dashboard lights
* Install New Antenna
* Front Right wheel berrings
* Patch Windshield
* Fix A/C
* Fix Cruise Control
* Replace Carborator
As you can see, the car is in poor shape, but the To Do list looks beautiful. 🙂
This software has also found it’s way to my machine at work. I’m now the toast of the department because I can very quickly paste my most recent issues/to do list from Acta into an e-mail, and quickly update everyone on every project I’m involved with.
This method of organization is just one in a long series of attempts, but it looks very promising. I might download and install the now free version of WordPerfect 3.5 that Corel has released to the public.
http://www.macintouch.com/wperfect.html
Off to Swagat we go!
Aug 19 Thu (09 AM)
July 31st, 1999
Constructive Criticism Found Dead; Authorities Suspect Foul Play
Pittsburgh, PA (Reuters) – At approximately 3:30 this afternoon, police found the body of Constructive Criticism dead in the computer room of his apartment in suburban Pittsburgh. Although authorities said it was clear that Mr. Criticism had not died of natural causes, no suspects were named in his death.
“Although we know that Mr. Criticism had received several threats from various internet users over the past several years,” a police statement read, “we are unable to single out a single suspect at this time.”
Friends of the deceased aren’t sure that one person is necessarily to blame for Mr. Criticism’s premature death.
“Constructive had been coming under fire for the past several years from people all over the world.” said one neighbor who wished to remain anonymous. “A new generation of uneducated people were given access to forums where, uncensored, they were able to drive him to the brink of despair.”
Constructive Criticism is survived by a brother, Respect and his daughter, Articulation, who has been in a coma for the last 3 years.
– From a forwarded e-mail.
Aug 19 Thu (06 PM)
(This is the start of a new WebDev article I want to write. Your comments are appreciated.)
Today I read an article about XHTML on http://www.Builder.com that was pointed to from http://www.scriptingnews.com which discussed (in a very short article) some of the major points concerning XHTML, what it is, why it is, and why web developers should know about it. It was a nice little article. Then I read the ‘Feedback’ message board.
http://buzz.builder.com/cgi-bin/WebX?13@@.ee7b2bd/0
Good god. I didn’t get through the whole archive, but what I saw gave me a good scare. And it reminded me of something I had noticed before. A deep, untold secret that most people don’t know, and most web developers desperately need to be told: Poor HTML Code Crashes.
This is what threw me for a loop:
Does anyone else go “ick” at the idea of well-formed HTML? I mean, HTML escaped the rigidity of SGML, and got rid of the concept that every tag was a container and needed a close tag.
It actually made me sick to my stomach. Closing tags and well formed HTML are so very important. Very very important.
If you pick apart the pieces of a web browser, you’ll find that there’s an ‘engine’ that tries to figure out what each character in an HTML text file means. It’s called a (parser). For a great look at the pieces of code in a web browser, see this article http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1999/03/gessner/ on Gecko from WebTechniques magazine.
Imagine you were trying to follow a recipe for a cake, but the steps were out of order. Now imagine that you’re really stupid and have no idea how to cook, but all you have is this recipe. I think you’d fail. You might come out with a lump of flour, chocolate and eggs, but few would call the results of that recipe a cake.
In the same way, poorly formed HTML is like a mixed up recipe. But programmers have done their best to make parsers that will interpret these poorly written (HTML) recipes.
However, by making guesses and assumptions (something computers are _not_ cut out to do.) the parsers don’t always get things right. Now this may not be a problem when it comes to displaying things on a screen, but a parser is more than it’s graphical output. It’s a computer program that manlipulates _lots_ of data and bits and bytes.
My theory is that parsers are written by humans. Given this premise, I logically deduct that since humans are fallible, their parsers are fallible as well. Everyone with me?
If the parser doesn’t work perfectly, those bits and bytes might get loose, and get scattered all over your RAM. This is technically known as a ‘memory leak’. What happens quickly after this? Crashes. Big ol’ honking Crashes.
I noticed a few years ago that when working on certain pages of HTML, Netscape would crash. It wouldn’t crash the first time the page was rendered, it might happen the eighth or twelveth time. Similar problems would crop up with frames. Sometimes the page wouldn’t crash the browser right away, but the browser would crash later on some unrelated web site.
However, once I cleaned up the HTML, the crashes stopped. I imagine that the parser was no longer running into bugs in it’s programming. The amount of programming that goes into rendering a structured HTML document is _miniscule_ compared to the amount of programming that a browser has to have to clean up poorly coded HTML. Percentages say that the bigger pieces of code have more bugs. Since these bugs don’t necessarily raise their ugly heads in the displayed page, they are overlooked. But they’re there. And they’re wrecking havoc.
No piece of software should crash. But since we don’t live in _that_ perfect world, web developers need to take responsibilty for their code. HTML may not be programming, but poor HTML can be just a hazardous as poor programming when the two are brought together on a computer screen. Keeping your HTML code correctly structured is being a responsible web developer.
Aug 17 Tue (11 PM)
Getting a letter from the Circuit Court of The State of Oregon is quick to send a shock through your body, drop your jaw a bit.
This morning when I got mine, my second thought was, “It’s not a supeona”, so I figured I was safe.
As it turns out, I was right. Here’s the first part of the letter itself:
“GREETINGS:
Your are hereby summoned to serve as a Juror in the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon for Multnomah County for a 2 day period begining on September 07, 1999.”
Looks like I get paid $10 a day to be in on this thing. Hmmm… I think I can squeeze in some hours at work, but if I get picked to be a a protracted trial or something, this could seriously hurt our income.
I’d like to take part, just for the experience, but they can’t possibly expect someone to become destitute in order to serve jury duty. Can they?
My friend Bo said that he got picked for Federal jury duty. I wonder how far he’ll have to travel. I’ll be able to take the bus down to the courthouse. They even included a one day free bus pass coupon in the summons.
I guess it was lucky that the URL http://nowscape.com/fija/fija_us.htm came up on Memepool the other day. It’s information for jurors. I’ll probably look around the net for more info as well.
Always a new adventure waiting around the corner. 🙂
Aug 14 Sat (03 PM)
Remember that thing I said at the begining of the week? That thing whereI said, I could rest, maybe catch up on some things?
Nope.
As you can tell from the derth of entries this week, it’s been a non-stop ride again. Gango wants more features. ESCO brings up an old issue, people out of the office. Damn, it’s been busy. Did I mention the car breaking down? Out of commission for 3 days?
It’s been busy enough that I forgot to send out e-mail announcements about the Web Coffee early enough in the week. I just got them out the door around 1:00pm on Friday, and I think they didn’t get into people’s in-boxes soon enough. CLV, I guess.
However, I did get a few people there, and I had a great talk with one of my company’s clients. That was cool, and I think it was good for our respective company’s relationships.
Thursday night I went out with Kam. She’s been doing some massive remodeling on her house: taking out walls, putting in doors, covering up doors, etc. It amazes me how much she has had done on her house. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to get your own house, so you can go nuts with it. Making every detail your own. Though on the flip side, she says she’s done nothing _but_ the remodeling.
The latest issue of Computer Bits to hit the stands finally has my letter to the editor in it. It reads horribly. I should have stepped back, and written a letter that addressed the entire event rather than a horribly structured piece that required previous knowledge of the situation. Bleh. http://www.computerbits.com
I wrote a poem.
It seems strange now. I haven’t really written anything of any personal meaning for a long time. This journal has been a way for to keep up on my general writing skills and keep track of thoughts and ideas, but actual… artistic? writing has been lost on me for a long time.
The last time I wrote a real piece was back at RCC, the second year that I put together the literary “magazine”. It was a good collection, and I found it quite enjoyable. My piece about windmills I hid towards the back. I think Amy’s the only one who might remember it, because I found the copy I had recently.
Out of the way-back machine and into today, the piece I wrote ended up being a response to the wanton rage and destruction that our media has brought into telephoto focus for us. I feel a real sense of depression taking hold, even in this time of great economic success, it seems like our country keeps getting stabbed in the heart.
[Image of a wounded American male, a thick wallet with stacks of cash, but bleeding from a gaping hole in his chest where his heart used to be.]
The poem combines for narration, some direction and word mixtures of the seven deadly sins and the seven phrases that the FCC has forbidden broadcasters from using.
If I polish it up, I may make an Extra out of it. http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/notes/
It’s really amazing what getting projects done and off my mind can do for my well being.
The past few weeks, it’s been more and more difficult to get out of bed at 7:30am, my current target time for getting on with my morning. Last Monday was the worst, with my struggle to geet out of bed not being won until nearly 10:00am.
Most of this I blame on stress and personal feelings of not quite failure, but more of impending doom. This ‘Doom Gloom’ really wears me out, causes a strange version of insomnia (where I don’t want to go to bed, not the usual kind of insomnia where a person can’t fall asleep once they’re in bed.)
A hallmark of my stress-out chemistry is when I easily get canker sores in my mouth. Hepatitis A, I think. Anyway, whenever the trimuverate of poor diet, high stress, and no orange juice take over, I end up getting these painful sores.
Lately, I haven’t been drinking much Orange Juice. (except for the occasional splurge for ‘Sun’ from the Snapple ‘Elements’ line of chiled drinks) Normally this would be a sure thing to bring on the sores, but they haven’t appeared.
Add that to the fact that I got up at about 7:35 this morning and it makes for a cheary, energetic, and yes, even playful Ross. I’d like to keep it that way.
Note: This Saturday at the Millenium Cafe on SE 20th I’ll be hosting a Web Coffee, open to all web designers, developers, professionals and beginners. I’ll be there at 11:00 am, and start discussing my topic, (My summer class at PSU) at 11:30am. Come join us!