04.12.04
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Finally someone has updated the whole “If cars were like computers” meme and brought it to be more than just humor, but actual lessons that can be learned by neophytes.
{{link http://mirrorshades.org/wc/archives/002796.php It’s an appliance, right?}}
People accept it as a given that in order to own and drive a car (and expect it to actually work), there are things to be learned, procedures to follow, and maintainance to be performed. You have to learn the rules of the road and how to operate the vehiecle. You have to get the oil changed every so often. If you see the “check engine” light come on, that probably means something is wrong. If your car is making an odd noise, that probably means something is wrong. You have to put gas in the car, and the gas goes in a certain place. If you want to avoid getting screwed, you should know a few of the very basics of how cars work, if for no other reason than you’ll be able to accurately describe the problem to the mechanic. The list goes on.
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04.11.04
Posted in General
at 11 pm
Today, thanks to the upgraded layout system, I added a significant function to OrderSomewhereChaos.
Along with the ‘choose a layout’ selector, there is now an option to show the Wiki page that has been attached to that web page. using an iframe tag, I’m actually pulling the page up using the same old link I used to use (that’s simply labeled “Read and Write Comments”). Now it’s in-line, on the page (or off!) with just a click.
There’s a ton of different pieces that make this happen:
A) JavaScript sets a cookie when the checkbox is clicked.
B) JS also re-loads the page when that happens.
C) When the SSI commands (at the proper point in the page template) see that the cookie has been set, they assign a couple of height and width variables and then
D) call the “commentary.shtml” file to be included.
E) This Commentary.shtml file makes an iframe (with the height and width set by the template) and
F) calls a special little tool called “wikilink.cgi”. WikiLink will take a URL (or a phrase) and convert it into a WikiWord.
G) The Wikilink script then redirects the browser to the actual wiki “wiki.pl” with the appropriate WikiWord tacked onto the request.
Here’s an example page that you can check out. Surf on over to OSC, check the “Comments” checkbox in the navigation bar, and you’ll see the comments box come up with the page when it refreshes the page. Some pages already have comments on them. Now more will probably have them as well.
Also note that the comments box may appear at the bottom of the page, depending on the layout you are using. (If you click on the link above, did you notice that you were set to the Aqua layout?) You can compare it to this version which is the Grey layout. It’s nice to be able to set a specific template to show up, even if it’s just for the first link.
The end result is that the Wiki will have much higher visibility on the site. I still have to consider whether I want to add it more prominately to this journal. Maybe next weekend.
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04.10.04
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Isn’t interesting that just as school starts up, I decide to go all quiet like on my journal?
In the mean time, a new layout is available over at OrderSomewhereChaos.com called DitDot. Just a new header and a background color change.
Less visible is the fact that there is a max-width attribute stuck on the main column of text. Compare and contrast the pages with a lot of text between the Aqua and the DitDot versions. I’m trying to decide if the DitDot version is inherently easier to read, and if I should expand the max-width to a size that feels just a little bit less than comfortable. Also note that the max-width gets wider if you have your fonts set to a larger size.
Which reminds me, since I’ve moved from the white backgrounds, I really ought to convert the images on the site from GIFs and JPEGs to PNGs with appropriate alphas. I did that on one image. Now that iBook image blends properly on all of the layout choices.
(Now that I’ve turned on “Check my spelling as I type” in Safari, I’m more confident about using my full vocabulary. Interesting… or should I say Intriguing? )
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04.02.04
Posted in General
at 10 pm
Sometimes life feels like it’s teetering on the edge.
The site this photo comes from has all sorts of interesting, scary, funny and awful photos, including one that I saw on Bo’s Xanga journal the other month.
Poor Kitty… The Joker… Landing on Lake Notsofrozen
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Posted in General
at 1 pm
Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism
By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
June 9, 2003
[…] a goodly number of folks wonder if they’re living in America in 2003 or Germany in 1933.
All this emphasis on nationalism, the militarization of society, identifying The Leader as the nation, a constant state of fear and anxiety heightened by the authorities, repressive laws that shred constitutional guarantees of due process, wars of aggression launched on weaker nations, the desire to assume global hegemony, the merging of corporate and governmental interests, vast mass-media propaganda campaigns, a populace that tends to believe the slogans and lies it’s fed without asking too many questions, a timid opposition that barely contests the administration’s reckless adventurism abroad and police-state policies at home, etc. etc. The parallels are not exact, of course; America in 2003 and Germany seventy years earlier are not the same, and Bush certainly is not Adolf Hitler. But there are enough disquieting similarities in the two periods at least to see what we can learn — cautionary tales, as it were — and then figure out what to do with our knowledge.
The veneer of civilization is thin. We know this from our own observations, and various writers — from Shakespeare to Sinclair Lewis (“It Can’t Happen Here”) — have shown us how easily populations can be manipulated by leaders skillfully playing on patriotic emotion or racial or nationalist feelings.
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03.29.04
Posted in General
at 8 pm
Wednesday starts a new class:
Art 120 at Portland State
First time teaching a new class is always difficult, but I’m well prepared and I may sit in on one of the other teacher’s sessions earlier on Wednesday.
Of course this is the day after my Authoring Digital Media course starts up as well. If I remember right, this is the first time I’ve had two classes the same term. Let’s hope I can keep them straight!
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Posted in General
at 5 pm
Dear Metro:
Can I put my empty prescription bottles in the recycling? The translucent brown bottles have a triangle with a ‘5’ and ‘pp’ underneath. The white ones all have ‘2’ in the triangle and ‘HDPE’ underneath. I’d guess you would want them washed out well.
Perhaps you should have a list of items that can be recycled, with pictures of some of the items, on the Metro site.
Yours,
…Ross…
Dear Ross,
Unfortunately, the brown containers you mention are not recyclable. They’re just garbage.
The white containers, if they have a screw-top lid, can be recycled at the curbside. Throw the lid away and put it in the bin with other plastic bottles, tin cans, etc. It’s generally not necessary to rinse them out, unless there’s a lot of powder-y stuff left in them.
I hope this helps. If you have any further questions, please call us at 503-234-3000. We are here from 8:30am-5pm Monday through Saturday to help you.
– Metro Recycling Information Desk
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03.26.04
Posted in General
at 9 am
Decide, Describe, Design, Develop, Deliver. Is there any other way that projects really happen?
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03.24.04
Posted in General
at 12 pm
With my next rebuild, the older entries (Pre-2001) will have proper timestamps, no longer referring solely to 1 – 23 PM. (I have no idea what happened to ‘0’ as in ‘oh’ hundred hours, but I did have twice as many 12pm entries as any other hour, so I fudged a bit and renumbered about half of them.
Most of the time I tried to remember or figure out if it was an entry I would have written late at night or while I was at lunch at work. Best guess was the best I could do.
That was the very last piece of this whole migration thing. I promise, not another word.
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03.22.04
Posted in General
at 10 am
As part of importing nearly 400 older entries into GreyMatter, I have had to come up with a work around because of some poor planning and a poor feature set.
GreyMatter (the software that I use to author this journal) has URLs that are made up of serial numbers. If you are looking at a page that has only one entry on it, you’re probably looking at a page with the url of www.bad-seed.org/notes/archives/00000xxx.shtml where the xxx refer to the serial number of the entries. That’s all fine and dandy if you have started counting from 1 and never need to put anything before it, but it sucks if you haven’t thought that far ahead, because you can’t put in entry number 0 or enteries with a negative number.
So when I added my 400 older entries, the URLs for the the original entries now point to 000004xx.shtml, or 000005xx.shtml or 000006xx.shtml or 000007xx.shtml. (I only had 370 some odd ‘new’ entries when I started bringing in the older archives.)
The problem is when I have links to entries that should point to entries that have moved ahead 400 places in the serial numbers. I don’t have control over all of these links: Many of them originate from other people’s weblogs or from search engines or even other informational websites. These URLs were supposed to be Permanent. The URL should have always pointed to the content that was there in the first place. But since I needed to reorder the serial numbers in order to get the archives in place, I ended up needing to let visitors know where they can find those new entries //if they want it.// That’s the tricky part. In the future, people using serach engines and newer web site will be on the page they expect to be. But people who have followed outdated links need to get to the information they are really looking for.
Wanna know how I dealt with it, and how JavaScript came into play? Read on…
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