Month: August 2001

CSS Frustration!

The reason there’s not much posted yesterday is I spent most of the day, at least six hours, experimenting with Cascading Style Sheets. The biggest issue, and I know this seems terribly petty, is that while the margin seems to be taking around the top, right, and left it isn’t working on the bottom. I still haven’t found an answer for that one! Also, I decided to check how the page looks in other browsers. Opera is mostly okay, except for the bottom margin and also I needed to put in a hack to get it to show the right margin. Netscape 4.x is just a mess but I found from looking in the newsgroups that this is to be expected and I think most people will be using the newer 6.1 version anyway. Netscape 6.1 respects the left and right margins only and it uses only a small portion of the browser window, giving the page a ‘smooshed’ look. I think I will only worry about getting the look good in IE and Opera and Netscape can go suck an egg.

Definite weirdness 3

The techies are piling it up lately. Here is a specification submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force proposing a Digital TV Channel Changing Protocol from Richard Hodges. Checking out the website for his email address, Matriplex.com, I have to believe this is for real. The proposal is full of technical details and is justified:

Advances in video compression techniques and new technology for delivering broadband services are making digital television (DTV) services practical and marketable. One of the missing elements is a flexible and open protocol for DTV clients to request desired video/audio streams, or “channel changing”.

I suppose he’s right, but what is more needed is a good online program guide.

eBay: a stock worth its price?

Smartass Christopher Byron in this week’s installation of Back of the Envelope on The New York Observer explains why eBay, even though trading at a (high for these days) 83 times year-ahead earnings, is the one dotcom to survive the carnage; the short answer is they get money from real people and not other dotcom/tech companies. This column has an excellent, brief, precise explanation of the tech stock crash, one of the best I’ve read.

Note: there’s no permalink yet for this article, but an index of all his columns is online.

Evan Williams, Cultural Innovator

Wired Magazine is holding its 2001 Rave Awards voting now and Evan Williams, Mr. Blogger, is nominated as a Cultural Innovator against writer David Chase and James Gandolfini (Sopranos), director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), game/film developer Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy), and Thomas Krens, Director of Guggenheim Museums Worldwide. VOTE for EVAN!!

Dave Winer is nominated as a tech renegade; I voted for him over a couple of your kidding nominees (Dean Kamen, Ginger/”IT” and Dmitry Sklyarov, programmer/DMCA victim) and two real challenger, Princeton professor Ed Felten, author of a controversial SDMI paper, and Miguel de Icaza, open source guru and leader of the .NET for Linux Mono project.

Definite weirdness 2

Humorous prank piece or serious effort? People do some strange things and it can be difficult to tell when someone is joking, at least for me. So when I saw Working on a Unified Code for ‘LOL’ or 🙂, I wasn’t sure at first. Do we really need an XML standard for emoticons? But this story appears in press release form on the OASIS website so I’m guessing Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga, chair of the technical committee, is serious and for real.

Definite weirdness

In an article about Sinatra’s Beverly Hills house being up for sale, I saw the following and had a mindquake:

“At a party celebrating Sinatra’s 80th birthday, ‘he had Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen there, and the three of them were around the piano playing and singing,” he said. ‘And Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme were there.”’

Yowza!

Privacy? We give it away

Lots of folks argue that companies are stalking our right to privacy. But, as Evan Gahr writes in the Washington Post, too often for many people’s tastes we give away way too much information in the office, on a train, and definitely on TV. Civilized people used to be discreet, now they are simplay discrete.

The Wackiness continues

As previously reported, the marketing humanoids at Red Hat (the big Linux vendor) are continuing their comic series of beta update announcements with Roswell: the second sighting – available now. As ‘one scientist said: “I mean, this stuff just fell out of the sky! Any computer you install this on could start being used by THEM to construct sophisticated mind-control devices. Or, more likely, it would just catch fire and melt down. However, if that does happen, we’d want to know about it.”

An open source Clipper

You stumble around the web, looking for random things, and you find stuff you never expected. Just now I was looking up some old friends in Google and found the Harbour Project. Harbour is “a free software compiler for the xBase superset language often referred to as Clipper (the language that is implemented by the compiler CA-Clipper).” I made my living, and a good one at that, for the first half of the ’90s developing Clipper applications for telecoms, pharmaceuticals, and insurance companies back East until the Windows surge became overwhelming and I moved, at management encouragement, to Visual Basic. But there are still people doing Clipper for a living in 2001, otherwise why this project, which appears to have a large number of participants? Really surprising to me, but Computer Associates is still maintaining and selling Clipper! The web remains cool.

Good news, bad news day

The good news is that Jesse Helms, 79 years old and longtime ridiculous caricature of his younger anti-civil rights self, has announced he will retire in 2003. This follows fellow caricature Strom Thurmond’s recent decision to retire from the Senate after next year at age 99. These are two seats the Republicans will have difficulty holding even though Elizabeth Dole looks like a strong early contender to replace Helms as a Republican.

The bad news is AOL Time Warner’s announced plans to layoff 500 people from iPlanet. This represents all, or substantially all, AOL employees working at iPlanet. Lots of friends of mine. People will point to the soft economy as the cause but from my perspective there were lots of executive execution errors early on in iPlanet’s history that are more to blame. For example, the application server team lost at least 12 months trying to figure out what to do with two application servers (Netscape and NetDynamics) and then how to manage the people side of the decision. Lots of pain and now it ends up like this.

$38 Million, plus or minus

Damn, that’s a lot of money the NY Rangers are giving Eric Lindros. And I guess it answers my question How much is your brain worth?. Lindros says that the lengthy time off–he hasn’t played since May of last year–gave him enough time to recover from the series of concussions he’s suffered over an eight year NHL career. Research is very unclear about whether time heals in this situation but they are very clear that concussions do cumulative damage to the brain. One of the holdups to this deal was the Rangers’ ability to find insurance for the contract; I doubt it came cheap.

Tonight’s movie: Rush Hour 2

Chan and Tucker team up again, this time in Hong Kong and Las Vegas, and deliver a bucketfull of belly laughs. Rush Hour 2 reuses most of the pieces that worked the first time around but intensified them or transformed them for the new setting or villain. Oh yeah, the villain is (mainly) Zhang Ziyi, the young hottie from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And Roselyn Sanchez, one time Miss America Petite, plays good girl (maybe) Secret Service agent Isabella Molina. Alan King has a nothing part as the American baddie and Don Cheadle a good cameo as Tucker’s Chinese speaking, kung fu fighting cousin.

Yesterday’s Book: Tell No One

Ha! Should be more like Tell Everyone One. The latest mystery novel from Edgar award winner Harlan Coben is a taut thriller unlike his previous novels, which were all great but funny mysteries. This one picks you up by the collar, shakes you around, punches you in the gut a few times. But you live. Here’s a good recent interview with the author himself. A book absolutely worth buying and reading.

Note: the author is another graduate of Livingston High School, like yours truly.

D’oh! Not again!

Am I going to lose my second high speed Internet Service Provider this year? Maybe, because C|Net is reporting that Excite@Home survival chances dim. Damn! My main option if this happens is Pac Bell and they’ve already tried twice to install their service here without succeeding. D’oh!

OLGA, she’s a sweet girl

Now, now, she’s not my new special friend! OLGA is The On-Line Guitar Archive, a collection of user-supplied chords or tablature files for songs. The songs cover pretty much all styles of music, from JS Bach to Springsteen to Linkin Park. Since the site depends on submissions, not all the files are complete or completely accurate but I’ve found pretty good material here over the years.

OLGA long ago ran into Napster-like opposition from music publishers and, in fact, lost it’s original academically-hosted home after threats of a lawsuit from EMI. Indeed, for some time in the late ’90s OLGA was completely offline. Recently, the organizers incorporated to better meet any future legal threats. I’m really surprised the EFF isn’t helping them out but I have pointed out the possibility to them.

Today’s movie: Shrek [again]

True, I saw Shrek not too long ago. But it was very good, funny, in terrible taste, and a very special four year old wanted to see the flick again. So we were there, laughing and loving it. Best version of I’m a Believer in years at the end.

Is dumping supposed to give you an ego boost?

Watching the season finale of Six Feet Under on HBO tonight, one of the main characters (the mom) was dumped by her boyfriend after he took her out for a nice meal. The woman, surprising him and herself, didn’t really react too much, taking the man’s decision (he met someone else) without any significantly negative emotion. The man was flabbergasted by this, expecting her to cry or beg him to change his mind, and when she didn’t he had second thoughts. She had none, moving right on with her emotional life.

I thought about this for awhile and wonder if the man was so upset be the lack of reaction because it was a blow to his ego. Was he expecting, even if subconciously, to get a power boost from the little drama? How have you felt when you broke up a relationship? When someone broke up with you and you didn’t take it too hard?

Yet another test post: Project Allison

Phil Ulrich has posted Project Allison, another tool to utilize the Blogger API. This one’s written in PHP, which I like, and he’s also planning a Visual Basic front end to it, which I really like as I’m in favor of a non-browser based tool to work with my weblog.

[After using] I think the code may have a bug in that I selected post & publish, but this entry was only posted…

This is another test: digiblog

Marcus Campbell has posted this basic but interesting Blogger input tool, although I wonder why the site is called NinjaKitten.

Inside Scientology

L. Ron Hubbard was a mediocre science fiction writer back (he wrote the novel on which last year’s bomb Battlefield Earth is based) in the ’50s when he realized that he could wrap his SF concepts into a nearly coherent hole and start a lucrative new religion. Somehow it worked. Hubbard is long gone but the folks running the Church Of Scientology are still pulling in the dough. Operation Clambake is a major effort by Andreas Heldal-Lund to make plain the problems with this so-called Church. Be careful if you cross them!