03.11.02

More Strange Things

Posted in General at 10 pm

Strange things come to me on the internet. For instance, let’s examine this line in my website’s error-log:

[Sun Mar 10 01:31:13 2002] [client 24.169.217.148] File does not exist: /home/~rosso/dork.html

Who the hell was looking for this page… and why? At what point do log entries become insults?

Of course the Nick Cave related e-mails are always the most strange. I won’t bore you with the whole thing (I’ll put it in the Read More text.) Here’s one of the best lines:

But what is a chance and choice in a man’s life? And does it worth chasing persistently the firebird in hope to catch it?

I can’t make this stuff up…
Read the rest of this entry »

03.10.02

Extending MacOS 9 with Control Panels

Posted in General at 11 am

There are a few extensions and control panels that I nearly require for me to be able to efficiently use MacOS 9. Here’s most of the Control Panels:

Default Folder

This guy helps me navigate through my folders on my hard drive when I’m saving files. Being a web developer, saving files in *exactly* the right place is eccential to getting work done. Getting it there quickly saves me hours of navigation each month. This used to be performed for me by “Click, there it is!” back before most of my apps used Navigation Services.

Okey Dokey Pro

Not so much a time saver as a frustration saver. ODP hits the Enter key. (Remember we’re talking OS 9 here.) It generally does this for dialog boxes that take over your whole machine and won’t let you do anything until someone (or something) hits the OK button. This can be really frustrating when you’ve set your machine to do something and then walked away, and then the computer just sits and waits when a simple OK would take care of things.

Prestissimo 1.5

4 words: Double headed scroll bars. I use Prestissimo to place the little up and down arrows at each end of the scroll bars, an option that the built-in Appearance control panel doesn’t let you do. I hate that. I run Prestissimo *once* when I first install the OS. And then never again. Prestissimo lets you do lots of other stuff, but I don’t use any other function.

Super Save

There’s two things that Super Save does. One: It hits Cmd-S every 10 minutes. It’s Autosave for every single application I have. You do have to be a bit careful in Photoshop to always be working on Duplicated images of the originals, but that’s a practice you should be into anyway. Plus, you can set which applications to be active for.

Two: It captures your keystrokes and saves them to a file. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a browser crap out on me just as I’m about to send off a web-based e-mail or after writing a long note to a discussion board. Each of these times I was able to go back into my little key capture file and reconstruct the pearls of wisdom that fell from my finger tips. (Italics added for sarcasm.)

Tomorrow I’l list out some Extensions and Applications that I can’t live without. Finally I’ll wrap up with MacOS 9 built-in features that I’ve grown to love.

Your assignment: Tell me how to deal with each of the issues that each of the control panels take care of when I move to Mac OS X. The Discussion board is open.

Odd Mail Day

Posted in General at 1 am

Odd e-mail of the week:

I know that this field wasn’t your field of practice and that you made an exception for grandfather and for me. You have helped me by getting a better start on adulthood. Thank you for going out of your way to help my grandfather and me.

Attached to the mail was a file that had a .bat extension. If I was the reckless type I’d run it on my work machine, but as a few will know, I’m not reckless when it comes to computers.

And yet, the mail gives such a great setting – a look and a feel for a whole story.

Too bad I have *no* idea what the hell the person is talking about. Cmd-D.

03.09.02

Scarey Bo

Posted in General at 4 pm

Bo:

If I recall, your nickname in some circles is Bo-bo. I have *never* heard of any scary person being named Bo-bo.

However, there is a flip side to this question: *Could* you be scary? To this I have to give a whole-hearted, “Waaaah!” I have no doubt that with a menacing stare and the right pair of dark shades you could be the perfect dance-hall bouncer.

Except that you giggle.

03.04.02

Copyrights and Such

Posted in General at 8 pm

An interview between Negativland and U2’s Guitarist, The Edge.

In June of 1992 U2’s publicist in L.A. contacted Mondo 2000 magazine on behalf of the group’s guitarist, The Edge, with the idea of doing a rare interview concerning the group’s Zoo TV tour and its use of technology. Mondo editor R. U. Serius then, without The Edge’s knowledge, contacted Don Joyce and Mark Hosler of Negativland with an invitation to participate in the interview. On June 25th Negativland joined R. U. Serius to await the following call from The Edge in Dublin.

03.03.02

Holoalphabetic Sentences

Posted in General at 10 pm

This is courtesy of Jonathan Hoefler:

You go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice.

Mix Zapf with Veljovic and get quirky beziers.

Baroque? Hell, just mix a dozen wacky pi fonts & you’ve got it.

Murky haze enveloped a city as jarring quakes broke forty-six windows.

A mad boxer shot a quick, gloved jab to the jaw of his dizzy opponent.

The jukebox music puzzled a gentle visitor from a quaint valley town.

02.24.02

Weepy Like

Posted in General at 12 pm

I get all weepy. You’re welcome Bo.

02.17.02

Linkrot Combat

Posted in General at 10 pm

It seems to me that the way we link to pages is a problem. You see the whole URL thing is way too specific and really doesn’t allow any room for error. It’s either right or it’s wrong and today linking across sites is a 50/50 chance, and it’s getting worse.

What I’d like to see is an expansion of the A HREF tag, or perhaps the URL format that would allow for a more ‘fuzzy’ link.

Step one should be the ability to point to an Alternate URL. If you link directly to some content in the archives of another site, and your primary link breaks, the secondary link should point to an alternate location for the content, whether it is on the calling server’s website or an alternate site altogether. A third option may be to link to a higher level in the target site. For example linking to the archives section of a site that may still exist even if the primary target’s URL has rotted away.

Step Two would be a search phrase. This phrase could be used to find the content in a random search engine. Google might be useful for it, though the target site’s own search engine would be better. If I’m looking for specific lyrics to a song that I have no title for, I’ll search Google for a quoted phrase, whatever words I can make out. (Of course that might not always work out.)

The search phrase could be a subject category like ‘Deep sea bass’ or ‘flavored leather products’. It would provide additional context for the link, potentially extending the usefulness of the link by providing more updated information than the original target provided.

To implement this system there would need to be some definitions written. Some examples of what I would see would be to take a link like:

<http://www.anybrowser.org/bbedit/grep.shtml>

and alter it to include a secondary link:

<http://www.anybrowser.org/bbedit/grep.shtml?altlink://www.ling.udel.edu/colin/tools/BBEdit/grep_tips.html>

The URL really looks a bit ungainly. But, it’s an option, yes?

Okay let’s try step two:

<http://www.anybrowser.org/bbedit/grep.shtml?keywords://bbedit%20grep%20tips//>

The nice thing about piggy backing the options into a single URL is that the target web server would be able to handle the processing needed, whether it would be a redirect to another page, another server or a search engine, local or remote. As well, the processing could be handled by the 404 Error page that the server would call when the primary link failed in the first place. And finally the URL request would appear in the server’s log files, alerting the webmaster to the needs of the user’s and identifying what they were attempting to obtain.

As well, I think that most sites would be able to ignor the additinal information without worrying about harming the flow of their current site.

[Please note: The above text was written while I was under the influence of heavy cold medicines.]

02.13.02

Changes Every Hour

Posted in General at 1 pm

Those of you who hit just my journal here on a regular basis may not pop over to my full website that often. I invite you to do so now.

And do so again in the next hour.

And the next hour.

And the next hour.

No, I’m not hastilly flipping all my pages around, I’m actually using XSSIs to completely revamp the laout each hour.

There’s even a special CSS/Non-Table layout that comes up twice a day.

02.11.02

Tagging Wild Animals

Posted in General at 12 pm

Kid’s watch with integrated GPS and PCS messaging lets you track where your child is:

http://www.wherifywireless.com/

Locks securely on the kid’s wrist, so you don’t have to go to the trouble of having it implanted. Plus it’s particularly accurate as a timepiece. $399.