Year: 2003

Categories
Just Shelley

More than a little down

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. It’s funny, but everything worked out. Yes, I lost most of my stuff in storage when I finally had to just sell the contents. And that still causes me to wince a bit. Not as much as losing my beloved Zoe, years later. The California tax person I talked to said, just don’t worry about it. It’s only a problem if I move back to California. As for the IRS? I actually went on the offense with the IRS rep and _she_ backed off. So there you go. 

As you can tell from postings today, I am in a seriously down mood. This is one of those days when I should just step away from the keyboard and walk away slowly, but it’s also matched with this perverse idea of wanting to just talk about it.

I’m lost in this never-ending spiral of worry that’s confusing me and leaving me with little energy. I am on the verge of losing everything. Everything I own. And the worry was compounded yesterday when I got letters from both the IRS and the California State revenue boards (synchronous bad news — there was a little beauty to the serendipity of it). Letters state, bluntly, that I’m in a world of trouble because of taxes paid, unpaid, and filings not made on time when I closed down my corporation in California. I misunderstood what I needed to do, but that doesn’t quite hack it for the IRS. My problem, but I don’t know what to do about it, and it’s scary because I don’t have the money to pay the state, and I’m not sure what kind of fines I’m facing with the IRS but they’re bad.

No, I am not passing the hat. I’m just talking. That’s all. Talking.

And normally I would walk to help with the stress, but every time I try it hurts badly in my lower back and all I can do is drag one foot along behind me with every step. And I refuse to start drinking for the pain at 10 in the morning.

Again, I’m NOT passing the hat, and wouldn’t take financial help if you offered (Tax help I’d take. And a spare job if you have it. Back rub would be good.) But these are things in my life now that are heavily influencing my interactions with you all.

I’m also not asking for ‘pity’ because pity should be reserved for those who have no control over their lives, and screwed up as it is, my life is still mine. That’s really something very important when you consider the alternatives facing all of us these days. And I still have a brain, as well as a keyboard, and Internet connection with which to do serious harm with said brain. I can still see and its a lovely sunny day outside, and the trees are full of birds. I still have my soft furry friend, Zoe, who has sensed my stress the last few days and hasn’t left my side for a moment. (And I’m pretty sure the IRS won’t want Zoe.) And I’m listening, because I can, to a new Creed CD, a late Christmas present from my brother. Tonight I start reading, because I can, Austerliz by W.G. Sebald, an on-time Christmas present from a friend.

And I still have my looks. Hee.

Writing about these things, and sharing them, makes them seem just a tad less overwhelming, which is why sometimes we write about the bad times in our lives. Oddly enough, just writing this post has helped me because what started out in despair, ended with an odd sort of peace. It’s a bit sucky right now, but it could be worse.

Best of all, I actually found that in all that moroseness that my sense of humor is still here. I just need to find someone new to pick on. That will make me feel better.

(And BTW — thanks for listening.)

Categories
Weblogging

Vote elsewhere

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

My life is going to hell and unless I can find an entertaining or profound way of talking about it, I can’t really weblog about it because we’re all nothing if not entertainment and profundity. That’s all this is — smoke and mirrors.

It’s about links and popularity and one upping each other, and posting and running around seeing who links to us and checking our ranks. How many of you check your popularity in the morning before you read your so-called ‘favorite’ weblogs? There’s no ethics or honor, friendship, pathos or beauty in the hypertext link; it just is. But we use it as a judgement of worth, and that’s the saddest thing I’ve seen since high school. And I quit high school.

Why does it frustrate me? I don’t know. Maybe because I thought this would all be different, only to find out it’s the ‘prom queen’ all over again.

There’s still a few, though, who don’t care about popularity and links and that’s why I hang around; because you write from the soul and could care less who links you. But on days like today, it’s just not enough.

Categories
XHTML/HTML

Fooflah

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Mark Pilgrim is a bit testy about the removal of certain elements within the XHTML 2.0 spec — specifically the *cite element. I checked around the forums associated with the XHTML working group’s effort. From what I can see, looks like the removal of cite may have been an accident.

Still, even if the removal was deliberate, if people aren’t happy about the XHTML specification and the direction it’s heading, why aren’t they talking at the W3C XHTML forum? The W3C isn’t going to go around our weblogs and look for our opinions. No offense but there’s probably 100,000 ‘regular web site’ pages for every weblogging page on the Net. Media darlings or not, we ain’t that big a thang …yet.

For instance, yesterday I found the following in the forum, which should warm Mark’s heart:

 

As it is in its 2002-12-11 WD, I think that XHTML 2.0 is far
away from both what the Web Authors are expecting and from what
could be done to “lead the Web to its full potential”.

The current WD makes some strategic choices (style attribute
for instance) that seem to me harmful.

I see no incentive for a Web Author to ever move to XHTML 2 from
a simple XMLized version of the actual transitional HTML4 (call
that as you wish). XHTML 2.0 does not contain ANY new key feature
and seem to get totally rid of all Authors’ requests between 1998
and today.

From my perspective, XHTML 2.0 as it is today is a failure and the
work of the HTML WG on this topic should be immediately and
totally reoriented.

 

Tantek Celik posted a link to Mark’s rant out at the XHTML forum and others who have responded have also agreed with my interpretation — it looks like the element was dropped by accident.

Regardless of ‘accident’ or not, the very fact that Tantek can post to this forum (which is monitored by the working group) demonstrates that there is communication paths to the W3C. Have a beef with XHTML 2.0? Then take it to the source, because there’s no guarantee that the W3C have even heard of Daypop much less read it with the breathless anticipation webloggers exhibit.

If you do choose to post out at the XHTML forum, a word to the wise: Just don’t have a hissy fit if you find that the people in the forum don’t agree with you, and have valid arguments to back their opinion.

*Personally, I’m more concerned about XHTML 2.0 dropping the style attribute than I am the cite element, though I understand the reasoning. And also note, the working group hasn’t dropped support for H1-H6 headers — they’re considering this based on issues raised.

Update:

A search on ‘cite’ in the W3C-html (XHTML) forum.

Second Update:

We were correct — the cite element’s drop was an accident. A member of the W3C working group just posted to the forum that it will be put back in the next draft.

Third Update:

Fooflah. Mark has decided to continue with his snit about XHTML 2.0. I believe that his interpretation about the reason for the return of the CITE element is a bit self-centered — there was discussion about this before Mark’s post (as I pointed out in my post, linking to the relevant HTML forum news item), and general acknowledgement that this was most likely just a drafting error. And Let’s hope he doesn’t mind if we don’t choose to follow in his golden ‘well-linked’ footsteps about the direction we’ll take when it comes to technology implementation. I’m heading towards XHTML 1.0, not ‘back’ to HTML 4.0.

Categories
Weblogging

Competition

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Jonathon Delacour writes about the recent fooflah with Mark Pilgrim, but also brings another topic to the table — Apple’s Safari browser. He has this to say about it, after finding out that it currently renders part of his web site incorrectly:

 

Rather that—just at the point where the Gecko-based browsers are starting to give Internet Explorer some real competition—Apple goes with another rendering engine. How stupid is that? Could someone explain the Byzantine politics that went into the decision? Do you really find it inexplicable that I can’t quite bring myself to buy a Macintosh? Despite all the effort that’s gone into establishing a realistic alternative browser, Apple goes off on yet another ego trip. As someone I know would say:

 

How about some fucking payoff now? How about some fucking compatibility?

One of the concerns about Mozilla has been and continues to be its infrastructure, and the overhead associated with it. This is one of the reasons I like it — it provides a terrific cross-platform UI development system. However, this cross-platform capability has always come with a small cost: Many of Mozilla’s components are not optimized for specific tasks as much as they are optimized for compatibility, interoperability, and extensibility, first.

According to an email from the Safari engineering manager, posted at the kfm-devel forum, this optimization is one of the main reasons why Apple went with KHTML rather than Mozilla’s Gecko:

 

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web
browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus.

(Thanks to rc3.org daily for link)

Personally, my preference would have been that the Apple folks work with Mozilla and use the Gecko layout engine, adding their expertise to improve the product, but I am still pleased that they are using open source technology in their curious ‘open-commercial-semi-source’ mix.

Additionally, I think it’s essential to have competing open source browser products even though this ‘looks’ like the open source community is giving browser share to Microsoft and it’s IE. Any product that has monopoly on a specific market, regardless of the altruism of its founders and developers, is not healthy for said market.

Case in point: I may think there can never be another web server as good as Apache, but I hope there always is web servers other than Apache.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Tracking the backing of backtrack on trackback

Say that three times fast…

I’ve made a minor change to the Backtrack code that should allow any weblog that supports a variation of [ping)?__mode=rss to work, and that returns valid RSS. This is implemented by default with Movable Type’s trackback, including the stand alone TB server. And, this also now includes Sam Ruby’s weblog, which was one that wasn’t working previously, as you can see from the following post: http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/000766.htm, as well as this one.

(Click on the Sticky Strand for Sam’s post to see it in action.)

Sam implemented his own version of Backtrack, but his also allows one to ‘drill through’ to the backtracked items for each level, through the “back” link. In some ways I’ve stolen this functionality because when you backtrack one of Sam’s postings, his implementation of backtrack comes along, so to speak.

I thought about adding this support to my variation of Backtrack. What it would take would be to follow each link that’s returned within Backtrack, and use RDF/RSS auto-discovery to find the trackback link for the posting. For example, following one of Ben Hammersley’s posting, such as this one and looking at the source shows the block of embedded RDF/XML that Trackback uses for AutoDiscovery. I can then pull out the trackback ping and add this to my entry.

I could, but I won’t. I’m not interested in incorporating the expanded processing, and if people are interested in following a thread, they should follow it directly from each level rather than skip around. From the lack of interest shown in this functionality at Sam’s site, I don’t see that this is something people necessarily want.

At this time, Backtrack also does not include support for Pingback because I don’t see that this implementation of sticky strand supports an HTTP GET with parameter “?__mode=rss”, which is what I’m using. However, I may have missed this somewhere, though. because there is a tangle of messy threads about pingback, trackback, and variations thereof.