Month: December 2006

Categories
Just Shelley

Why I’m writing more on Missouri

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave Winer writes that Daylife is in business. I vaguely remembered hearing something about it once, and then remembered, “Oh, yeah. That’s that Jarvis thing.” To make sure it was that Jarvis thing, I looked it up online and discovered this phenomenally self-referential post at Valleywag, that perfectly explains why I now write more about Missouri and other things.

As ParenthetiGal wonderfully puts it, that was the most satisfying comment-sex i’ve ever witnessed on valleywag. thanks boys!.

Damn! And here I was hoping to get a job with The Man.

update

Ut Oh! Someone forgot to sacrifice to the Mikey!

update

I must provide a disclosure on Daylife: I submitted a resume when the company was hiring people, was consequently sneered at and treated with disdain.

As homey as that left me feeling (“Hey! It’s just like being on Techmeme!”), I can’t say I have the most positive feelings about any one damn person involved with this really useless site that took a year and half to create.

Categories
JavaScript

Best practices don’t win points

Roger Johansson sharpens his teeth and tears into Ajax/JavaScript/Web application developers with You cannot rely on JavaScript being available. Period. He poses a questions:

I have a question for people who label themselves as JavaScript developers: Have you forgotten about, never heard of, or never cared about the terms progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, and Hijax? If the answer is yes, then please tell me why.

I would also like to know whether you actually consider disregarding those best practice methods to be compatible with modern, responsible, and professional JavaScripting.

Following the question, Roger lists out several popular web sites with a description of what happens when script is blocked. I’m not surprised at Bloglines, but wouldn’t have expected Blogger to depend on JavaScript for login. That’s very limiting.

As to his question, this is a time of flash and sizzle, and anyone who programs cautiously, worrying about such things as graceful degradation or accessibility, is going to be left behind. There is a frantic need to prove that JavaScript and Ajax and the whole genre of tools is cooler than cool. This is a time of competition for eyeballs, and grabbing market shares, and wow factors, and pages so crowded with interactivity, frankly, it’s like trying to read or work with an ant hill. With angry ants.

It’s this way because if you go slow, or urge caution, or back off of some of the more ‘hip’ Ajax/JavaScript effects, you’re out of the loop–not a part of the ‘with it’ kids. This all means then you don’t get the opportunities, jobs, even the pats on the head and a well done. As for those who might provide accolades to those who do use the JS best practices, well, they’re too busy in their own world focused on web design, CSS, accessibility, XHTML–conferences here, web standard get-togethers there. The only time they might notice us ‘hacks’ is when we do something they don’t like.

So Roger, the answer to your question is: when was the last time you pointed out those who support the ‘good’ practices of JavaScript?

Categories
Photography

Biting the bullet: Cleaning a camera sensor

I couldn’t put it off any longer. Today was the day.

Today is the day I finally clean my camera sensors.

I read the instructions. Actually I read the instructions 40 or 50 times, as well as verifying such with several different online sources. After that excuse waned in usefulness, it was time to just find my ‘clean space’, lock up the mirror, and do it. Not only did my D70 have enough dust bunnies to start a farm, I noticed with the recent blue sky shooting that I had–horrors–picked up a speck on the D200.

I decided to start with the D200 and the sensor brush, figuring there hasn’t been any high humidity and the speck was most likely loose dust. A sensor brush is a well constructed brush with fine, even, soft bristles. The brush is prepared by blowing compressed air across the bristles, creating a positive charge, which helps the brush to pick up dust.

After finding my space (out of bright light and air flow, remember not to breath, and blowing nose first), I made sure I had a fully charged battery in my camera. The instruction manual warned me about the consequences of the power fading while the mirror was still locked up (“broke, brake, broken, to be broken, was broken, sukkarakan, will brake, will be broken, busted”). I removed my lens, locked up the mirror, charged my sensor brush with my handy air blower, and then *swoosh* *swoosh* lightly moved it across the sensor twice.

Quickly, I then turned the power off to unlock the mirror, placed the lens back on the camera and took a couple of test photos. I used a single sheet of white paper, using the flash to create a completely white, non-featured photo, which should show any dust. I then took other photos from throughout the room–just to ensure that the blank, white page wasn’t the only image I was going to be getting from my actions.

I hooked my camera up to my computer, and opened the camera’s USB card directly in Photoshop. Success! Careful perusal of the images showed nary a pesky little bit of foreign matter.

Before I could pat myself on the back too much, though, I knew that the D70 would not be as simple to clean. It had numerous dusty spots and had been changed in areas with higher humidity and I knew that some of the dust was ‘welded’ to the sensor. This means going beyond the brush to using the sensor swab and cleaning fluid.

The sensor swab is a piece of long handled plastic, like a small, thin, spatual. It’s covered in cleaning pads that are folded on to the swab just so. To clean, one barely moistens the swab, and moves it across the sensor a couple of times, using light, firm, consistent pressure.

The kit I purchased contained all the ingredients for cleaning, including a swab already prepared. It provided step by step instructions with pictures. I looked at the pictures, held the swab, and visualized myself making light, firm, and consistent strokes. I became one with the sensor.

Om.

Having again effectively delayed the inevitable, it was bite the bullet time. I removed my D70 to my cleaning space, had all the materials ready, and removed the lens. Locking up the mirror, I very carefully inserted the brush, but froze before making contact. All my muscles had become locked. I wasn’t one with the sensor–I was one with the mirror.

Repeating my secret mantra over and over again, I gradually forced my hand down, micron by micron until I was at that sensor. And then, as the instructions specified, drew the swab across the sensor, once, twice, three times. Each time I felt as if I were drawing the swab across the ends of my nerves–or fingernails across a blackboard.

Once swabbed, I turned the camera off, unlocking the mirror, and putting back on my lens. I took a photo of my test paper and again checked it in Photoshop. No dust! At least not that I can see, and only a f22 sky shot will show for sure. I must be off to the park with both cameras to test.

Whether this has completely eliminated all problems, I don’t know, but the important point is I have finally did the act. Frankly, I would rather dig a bullet out of my thigh with a hunting knife than do this on a regular basis. I’m told, though, it gets easier over time.

(For more on sensor cleaning Copper Hill.)

Categories
Web

Microsoft does not want us to use IE

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Writing Learning JavaScript and now Adding Ajax, as well as creating web page applications such as my photo popup has led me to an epiphany: Microsoft really doesn’t want us to use IE. No, I’m not being facetious–the company would probably prefer that people move to another browser.

Let’s look at the facts.

First, web developers must add additional tweaks in scripting code and CSS in order for web applications to work with IE7; yet no specialized code or CSS is required for other web browsers. Now, why release a new version of a browser that’s guaranteed to be incompatible with all other browsers? It’s not as if any of the technologies are new: most have been out for five or more years.

Backwards compatibility doesn’t explain this deliberate nonalignment. One can continue to support something like attachEvent while adding support for addEventListener using application wrappers. Developers have been providing backwards compatible wrappers in code for years. I can’t believe that the Microsoft developers aren’t familiar with this technique. It shouldn’t be a burden within the code, yet keeping something like a proprietary event system just continues to add developer aggravation, as well as adding to the number of sites that break.

IE7 is also a nag. So much so that I’ve finding I can’t load applications, visit pages, do much of anything without some warning or another popping up. It nags constantly, and much of this can’t seem to be turned off. It’s wearying to use IE7–it is not an unobtrusive element of the web browsing experience.

Then there’s the new, ‘helpful’ way to test in both IE 6 and IE7–Microsoft is providing a Virtual PC image preloaded with XP and 6 just so you can test your pages with IE 6, while having IE 7 loaded on your regular installation.

No need to buy a license for XP within the VPC image. How sweet. But you do have to load an application that loads another version of the operating system in memory, just so you can test a web browser. A web browser! I don’t know about all the people who are tossing flowers at Microsoft’s feet for this ‘kind’ gesture, but this ‘workaround’ is an insult to web developers, and a mockery of the concept of a browser–you know that simple yet powerful application that opens the world but leaves a small footprint? Yeah, that browser.

According to the IE weblog, this VPC image will only function until April 1st, 2007, but I think the April Fool’s joke is getting people to reserve both memory and disc space–as well as having to go through Microsoft’s validation process–just to test against a browser. What happens after April, then? Are all the Windows 2000 installations going away? There will be no need to test for IE6?

Add it all up, and I think the facts equal Microsoft making a strategic decision to phase out Internet Explorer.

Microsoft was challenged back in 1994/1995 by an upstart company that said the web and its browser would eventually replace the need for an operating system like Microsoft’s Windows. Microsoft couldn’t let that slide, came out with IE, and proceeded to blow the doors off of Netscape’s Navigator.

Once the house of Netscape began to crumble and fail, and more importantly, once the browser space began to develop an open source following with the Mozilla effort, Microsoft lost interest in the browser space. The company’s bread and butter is based on operating system, Office and entertainment applications, and developer tools–not browsers.

IE has also been plagued for years with security flaws; flaws costing the company time and effort, true, but more importantly, costing the company credibility. The security flaws associated with Windows do not get the media play that security flaws with IE get. As such the issues of security associated with IE potentially could impact on the perception of the company’s new golden goose, Vista. There is no such thing as a 100% secure browser–so why take the chance? Drop the browser, and push the burden off on other browsers, while the company touts the security of it’s new and improved operating system.

You can see the seeds of IE’s growing lack of fit with Microsoft global strategy in the choice of Ray Ozzie as lead tech architect for the company. Ozzie is not a web man. His background is in distributed computing, not web services; his focus is going to be on applications built on Windows OS, based on Windows development architecture, and locking customers in to Windows OS–not the free for all that is the web.

Microsoft doesn’t need to prove a dominance in the browser space anymore. If it needed to do that, it would have released a more complete browser–and it would have issued new releases more regularly. It definitely wouldn’t have released the application so encumbered that one has to load a VPC image just to test new browser releases.

IE is an anchor now. It brings in no accolades to the company, and gets little respect. It costs money, though, and associates security problems with the Microsoft name. Solution: get people off of IE, and for those that stubbornly persist in using IE, put so many security roadblocks in the way that there is absolutely no chance the company can be held accountable for any security violation through IE.

Why else would the company release a new version of the browser with so many glaring and obvious incompatibilities with other browsers? Why else make it virtually impossible to visit any web site, without running against multiple warnings and blocks? Why else make it so difficult to test existing and new versions of the browser, that you have to run a completely new OS image?

Microsoft management must want people off of IE.

Categories
Weather

Again, one of the lucky ones

Again, just like with the summer storms, we were one of the lucky ones. Over 30% of our zip code is without power, and over a half million people all total are without electricity. Ameren says this is the worst storm to hit this area–following on the worst storm to hit this area last summer.

The phone goes in and out, and I’m posting this during an ‘on’ time. I just finished chiseling my car out from the block of ice that contained it. Well, I chiseled enough to get into the car and then with the door open so I could see, drove it over to a sunny spot to get a little solar help.

I gather last night we had blown transformers (and that was a strange and rather unnerving sound all night–like big bugs getting caught in even bigger bug zappers), but we also had thunder and lightning. Lightning with this kind of weather–it’s unnatural.

Anyway, if the power holds, and my arms can continue to be raised up to my keyboard, I’ll post a few pics. They don’t do the surroundings justice, though. It is so beautiful.