Year: 2006

Categories
Writing

Fall cometh

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I just had two Starbuck’s Doubleshots and I see dead people! There’s nothing better to jump start your morning than an overdose of caffeine.

I feel good, didda didda didda doo.

This week is the last week of summer vacation and most of the kids return to school next week. This means I can finally go to the zoo again. More importantly, the weather has been dipping into the 60’s at night, which means that the summer awfuls are heading towards an end. I’ll finally be able to walk along the trails again without risk of more allergic reactions to the bug bites. Plus, the new light rail to our neighborhood opens this weekend, which will make it so much easier to go downtown. This all puts me in a fine mood, a fine, fine mood.

I started my new book for O’Reilly this last week. It’s called Adding Ajax. I wanted to wait on saying anything until I bought the addingajax.com domain, to go with my learningjavascript.info domain. For the book colophon, I thought of suggesting to O’Reilly a baby rhino on stilts. Wouldn’t that just get attention on the book shelves?

This is going to be a fun book, but between it, finishing up the proofs on the Learning JavaScript book, the second part of the tutorial on Planet Planet, and all the work I want to do on the sites, I’m not going to be able to post as frequently as I have been. I’ve set myself up a schedule: walk in the morning, so many hours on the book, so many hours on the sites and tech, and then, weblogging. Light on posting, unless an arrangement can be made– wink wink nudge nudge.

didda didda didda duh

If I can hustle, I can take a week off in October and spend time in the Ozarks and down in Arkansas; taking photos of mills and hunting down an interesting story I accidentally stumbled on. It’s a murder mystery of all things, and I have to spend time at the Historical society in Columbia, as well as the town and county where the mystery occurred. Eventually, it will get published on MissouriGreen–which is yet another site I need to finish.

Y’all are just going to have to nag me to behave myself, stop picking on the boys, and to write and finish my sites. Or not, but if you don’t, you lose an opportunity to pester me when you know I can’t snap back.

I feeeeel good. didda ddida didda doo.

Categories
Weblogging

Redefining

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Someone else who took a look at her weblog and decided to redefine what she wanted to write about online is Pascale Soleil. Pascale used to write at Both2and: Beyond Binary. She writes of her new site, Pascale’s Wager:

In keeping with a transition in my life, I’m moving on to a new site and a new focus for my online writing … So in future, if you’re interested, you can find me at Pascale’s Wager [http://wager.pascalesoleil.com]. Be warned: lots of “meaning of life” and God talk ~ not to mention seminary gossip. It could get oogy.

Pascale highlights one aspect of making changes in our online lives: they can be disruptive, as well as enriching. Not bad disruptive–the kind that says, “I’ve been going down this path, and I want to cut through the woods and try that path, now. You’re welcome to come along if you wish.”

Good luck at the new site, Pascale.

Categories
Just Shelley

Mama Africa and the poll

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

“But I thought things were hunky-dory…that we were all starting to get along?”

Her deep brown eyes softened and, taking my hand in hers, she sat me down at an upturned cable drum doing duty as a table.

“Mike, take a long, hard look at your people,” she said quietly. “You should be able to discern something from their behaviour.”

“Yeah, well,” I mumbled, “I know we’re pretty dumb, but if it wasn’t for us, you people still wouldn’t have the wheel. I mean, we’ve transplanted hearts, put a man on the moon…”

Like a musician — blacks have natural rhythm, she plugged in. “…colonised the world and killed hundreds of millions of people. All for fun and profit. And you’re still doing it. I know these things.”

She does too. A Rwandan refugee denied South African citizenship these past ten years, she’s packed in quite a bit of learning for a single person looking after sixteen orphans. I kid you not; as you know, I’m no bigot and would not resort to stereotyping. Mama Africa has this thing for children, so she looks after them.

No white kids, of course. Being a racist precludes that, I s’pose…

Mike Golby and Blacks are the Biggest Racists.

You just can’t keep a good black down, even when you try.

Categories
Web

Arch 2.0

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m trying a little behind the scenes recruiting to get O’Reilly to put on a scripting, Ajax, and web development conference here in St. Louis. After all, what can we offer:

Location: St. Louis is centrally located for every part of the country. Rarely do you have to fly more than 3 or 4 hours to reach our city. Even if you come from another country, chances are we’re closer than California.

Cost: California is not a cheap place to visit. It’s expensive to host a conference, and hotel rooms are usually pricey. St. Louis is city that’s ready to welcome the world, not bankrupt it.

Facilities: St. Louis has one of three top rated botanical gardens in the world. St. Louis has one of the ten top rated zoos, as well as top five rated art museum. That’s in addition to the Arch, Forest Park, the waterfront, the rivers, and so on. We have a light rail system, conference facilities, plenty of hotels including a terrific one at Union Station, which is actually wrapped around a wonderfully funky shopping center that used to be the main train station here.

Weather: Summers aren’t great in St. Lou, but we make up for that with the weather we have the rest of the year. We have beautiful springs and falls — we can rival New England for fall color. We have so many spring flowers, you’ll think you walked into a florist shop. Only better. As for winter, rarely do we get snow above a couple of inches, and then it usually melts within a day. We’re sunny, and even when it rains, the rain comes in, does its thing, and moves on.

History: Mark Twain, Truman, Lewis and Clark, the westward expansion, Sprit of St. Louis, you name it, and St. Louis and Missouri have been a part of it.

Things to do: Where do I start? I’ve already covered the zoo, Forest Park, the Botanical Garden, and the Art Museum. Then there’s the dozens of parks and trails, Katy trail where people can rent bikes and ride gently along the Missouri river. Tower Grove is this country’s last Victorian walking park, with its pagodas and faux greek ruins. St. Charles for walking, LaClede’s Landing, the old Chain or Rocks Bridge. About an hour away is one of the world’s largest underwater lakes, where you can ride a boat, take a walking tour, OR do a little fresh water diving. There’s Laumeir Sculpture Park, with its outdoor works of art, nestled among trees, deer walking here and there. This is in addition to the Basilica with its world class collection of tiles, or the wonderful Fox Theater, with its ornate moulding and rich red tapestries. This is a city that was once the third largest in the country, and one of the most cosmopolitan. Much of the architecture from that time is still standing, making it an amazing place to explore.

As for night life, honey you ain’t heard the Blues until you’ve heard it in St. Lou. As for food, well, there’s Italian at the Hill, amazing southern food practically everywhere, not to mention world class gourmet restaurants such as Puck’s at the Museum. Then there’s toasted ravioli, gooey cake, and Ted Drewes frozen custard. This is Anheuser-Busch’s corporate headquarters, where you can go visit the horses, and sample the brews.

Did I happen to mention that St. Louis was, I believe, one of the first, if not the first city to have the downtown wired for free wireless?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I for one am getting tired of conferences held only along the coasts.

Arch 2.0. It works.

Categories
Technology Web

IE7 locked down

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Microsoft has announced the IE7 code lockdown, which means the company is preparing to send out a release of the browser. The site has listed all of CSS bugs fixed, as well as those not CSS related (such as PNG alpha channels).

Will IE7 satisfy all the critics? Unlikely, and the announcement addressed this by acknowledging that not all of the MS proprietary extensions were ‘fixed’:

We understand that we are far from being done and we know we have still a lot of work ahead of us. IE 7 is a stepping stone in our effort to improve our standards compliance (especially around CSS). As an example, in the platform we did not focus on any proprietary properties – though we may try out new features in the future using the official –ms- prefix, following the CSS extension mechanism. We also work very closely with the W3C CSS working group (which I am a member of) to help clarify assumptions in our implementation and drive clarifications into the spec. I really like to thank everyone who helped us here.

This is an important update, and if all the bugs aren’t fixed, it is an improvement over IE6 by orders of magnitude. I can’t tell you how long I spent on the Creeping Text bug before I discovered what was causing the problem and how to fix it. And that’s only one of the CSS problems that used to make me long for tables and FONT. For better or worse, IE is still one of the most dominant browsers and anything to improve on its support for CSS is a step in the right direction.

What’s next will probably be a series of release candidates, and then, eventually, a production release. As for rollout, Microsoft’s intentions are to make the IE7 an automatic update for Windows 2003 and XP. The only problem is there are still many Windows 2000 installations for which there are no IE7 upgrades. We can’t get rid of IE 6 until people are moved off of (or forced off of) Windows 2000; people using this operating system have no choice, other than to go to Firefox or Opera or some other browser. They need to do so because if the number of IE6 users decreases far enough, web sites will no longer provide the ‘quirky’ CSS in order to support this browser.

I thought the team’s announcement was honest, and I liked the explicit listing of what’s fixed, what isn’t, here’s where they’re going, and here’s some tools to help. That’s it: no marketing, no ‘better than sliced bread’ hooplah. If I fault MS on any thing it’s this: they should have focused on IE as browser, not IE as operating system extension. If they had, we could have pushed for an across the board IEx update. However, what’s done is done, and time to move on.

The IE7 team also warned that pages are going to break, and have provided a set of tools to help people going forward.