Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Stuff

The ultimate wakeup

I have a task that needs to be finished tomorrow and am most likely going to be working all night, or close to it. The work is such that I can’t do it for many hours in a row, without getting frustrated, so I take breaks–such as the break to work on the new looks for the weblog.

To help me focus tonight, I pulled in the big guns: grande caramel machiotto with four shots instead of two. And Krispy Kreme donuts. The combination of extra caffeine and sugar is guaranteed to keep me going for 24 hours; after that, I’m a goner.

As effective as my ultimate solution is, a problem with it is that the strangest things enter my head when I’m so buzzed. For instance, I came this close to naming the Fire & Ice stylesheet Burningberg.

And have you noticed how slow everyone drives on Sundays? The roads haven’t changed, but you always end up behind some SUV or mini-van, with a couple of kids in the back, poking along at five miles under the speed limit. The rest of the week, Mom or Dad will haul butt down the road, but not Sundays.

I figured what happens is the family goes to church on Sunday and sings a rousing chorus of “Nearer my God to thee”; all the way home they think to themselves, “Nearer my God to thee…but not today! Nothing like church to remind you of your own mortality.

I also noticed today, when I went to get another cup of coffee, that you can tell an older man’s political affiliation by their hair and what they wear. You can’t always tell with a woman – well, unless she’s wearing heels and black leather and carrying a whip, and even then the same lady can be dressed in a demure cotton frock on Sundays. And you can’t tell with guys under, say 30-40. But guys over 40, sure enough.

Liberal guys almost always wear a beard. It’s gotten to the point when I see an older guy with a beard, I immediately think, “Yup, liberal”.

If they’re extremely liberal, they might also have long hair worn in a pony tail, though you have to be careful with pony tails – lots of real conservative folks in the back country of Missouri have long pony tails. Still, if you live in the coastal areas, or in most cities, the length of the pony tail gives away the degree of liberalness. That and the amount of cotton and natural fibers they wear. Wearing a button that says, “Anyone but Bush in 2004″ tends to give this away, too.

Now, conservative men keep their faces shaved as smooth as a baby’s butt–unless they’re a college professor or on the lecture circuit or in journalism, in which case they wear the beard as protective coloration. I wonder if this is a consequence of economics? Upper management in major western corporations haven’t worn beards since the 1800’s.

The extremely conservative men have a pinched look to their faces, as if they smell something bad all the time. Don’t have to believe me – just take a look at the current administration.

As for the libertarians? They wear black. Even when wearing white, they wear black. Oh, and sometimes they carry a gun.

Of course religion and culture and nationality and economics and education and marital status and personal choice changes all of this. And so does access to a razor.

I think I need to go get another coffee. And a Key Lime Krispy Kreme donut to go wwwwwwiiiiiiittttttthhhhhh iiiiitttt.

Categories
Burningbird

New look. Really new look.

I did testing of the new look in the validation engines, and several different browsers and it seems to work. I am aware of the float problem with IE 6.0 and will dig up the work around and add it. I’m getting to the point where if I no longer support Netscape 4.x, I don’t want to support IE 6.x, either.

But it is widely used so if you’re using it, be aware that I working the problem.

I have other new styles to add in addition to the ones you have now, but I’ll leave those for next week. I myself switch between Fire & Ice and Lemon Shake-Ups, depending if I’m in the mood for summer or winter. Shake-Ups is a bit busy, but it suits the photo at the top and is very cheerful.

Speaking of photos, yes I am using photos in the sidebar and yes it can slow load times. Hopefully once they cache, their bandwidth burden should be minimized.

The ice photos used in Fire & Ice are from the NOAA public libraries and they are lovely, aren’t they? The other photos that aren’t NOAA’s or mine are from Jon Sullivan who has generously placed most of his wonderful work into the public domain. (Jon has a weblog here. Read his disclaimer at the bottom for a giggle.) I will be using more of Jon’s work in upcoming styles.

I either created the clipart or downloaded it from the free clipart pages at about.com.

If you can try these different stylesheets in your browser and drop me a note and let me know what does or doesn’t work, I’d be appreciative. This is a very major change, and I imagine the site will be rough for a week, until I finish the transition.

I’ve had the old colors and look for so long, when I come to the pages, it doesn’t feel like my site. But change is good. Thanks again for those who have commented and tested; a special thanks to Roger for helping me with the Burningbird title positioning.

Fixed the layout problem in Safari and IE – I had an unclosed DIV tag within my last post (my update block).

Rah!

Categories
Burningbird

Fire and ice

Though I work primarily with backend development, my start in writing was front end design and development, working with Javascript and CSS. I know, hard to imagine.

Lately though, I’ve been in a design mood, and have designed a new format for this weblog, which you can see at the test weblog. I’ve borrowed Michael Hanscom’s idea of a style switcher, and his Javascript, and have created three styles so far. I have five more in the wings, waiting to finish, but you can see what I have now.

The (F) and (S) designate fixed background image or sliding. So far my favorite design is Fire and Ice, inspired by a posting title by Rogi. Check out the sidebar that changes with each stylesheet. The photos change in and around the ‘floating cloud’ segmented sidebar, as someone named it, and a lovely name it is. The difference from the original design is that I am now going fully centered.

I still need to play around with the stylesheets, make sure it works with the browsers I plan on supporting. And I have one last challenge – the Burningbird title. I want it to right align with the box holding the post text, but haven’t figured it out yet. If anyone has any ideas, I’d appreciate hearing about them.

Found, thanks to Roger.

This has been fun. Much more fun than being a pain in the butt to the WordPress people. But not as fun as paddle-ball, Dave.

Nice safe, topic.

Categories
Political

We don’t need more heroes

I didn’t know that today was going to be a national day or mourning for Ronald Reagan until I took some books back to the library last night and saw the sign saying it would be closed today. I was surprised because it’s not as if Reagan was King or still president, and do we do this with all presidents? It’s been so long since a President died; I can’t remember.

My reaction to Reagan’s death this week was indifference. I was no more ‘mad’ about his tenure than I was going to jump on the wagon hailing him as our nation’s greatest leader. I don’t remember him as a particularly good leader, or a particularly bad leader. I do remember that many of us were uncomfortable with the the rumors going around towards the end of his presidency that his cabinet and his wife were providing more of the leadership of this country then we would like.

I hadn’t even planned on writing anything about Reagan’s death until I read a Christian Science Monitor article on Reagan’s passing. The article talks about the deep divides in this country, and how his death is providing a temporary respite from the acrimonious disputes:

While the bitter divisions in American politics circa 2004 do not reach Lincoln-era levels, they are much more pronounced than in Reagan’s day. Florida’s long ballot count, disputes over gay marriage and abortion, and widening gaps over the Iraq war have split the nation at every level, from the courts to the makeup of Congress. More than half of Americans now believe the country is on the wrong track.

Frankly, I think the divisions in this country are as strong as they were in Lincoln’s time; the primary difference is they lack the cohesiveness of that time because there is no single issue to rally around. No, not even the war on terror or Iraq is enough to cleanly divide the people and provide an impetus to act–other than vote this Fall. Frustrating, isn’t it? Having to wait to November.

I voted for Reagan his first election, but not his second. He was a good speaker, and did bring a sense of confidence into the White House. More importantly, being brought up to fear the great Communist conspiracy, I never felt ’safe’ with Carter. Happily, that election was the last time I let the boogie man control my vote.

Some are saying now that Reagan was one of the greatest presidents of our history, but I think these same people are forgetting all the controversy and anger and mistakes made during his tenure. I think they’re looking for a hero. And even people who don’t care much for Reagan are looking for something to ‘heal the rifts’, as if this is the most important thing we can do now.

Personally, I think we should face the issues polarizing us and acknowledge that on some issues, there is little or no middle ground. Though it does no good to get into a slapping fight, polite chit-chat in the interests of communal good makes me feel faintly ill. Does this sound confrontational? Confrontation is arguing with people you know you’ll never convince, just to hear your own lips flapping. Or getting frustrated because some people just don’t recognize the facts you find to be so glaring. People will see what they will see. Some people you can convince, some you can’t. Resolution does not equate to a national group hug, with kissing and making up afterwards.

But this is about Ronald Reagan and him dying this week. Folks are saying that Bush is going to benefit somehow from Reagan’s death. They say that Bush will tie himself to Reagan’s leadership style and hope to ride this uber-mourning to a victory in November. However, as I read in one opinion piece–it’s a long five months to the election.

I liked what Roger Benningfield had to say:

He was also charismatic, and was capable of coherent –sometimes even compelling– public speech. As we’ve learned over the last four years, those are two absolutely vital characteristics in a president. For all his faults, he spoke to the rest of the planet in a way that made even the nuttiest policies seem at least tolerable, while our current Executive Employee couldn’t give a dyslexic reading of the phone book without setting off riots in four different countries.

…when you distrust all politicians as much as I do, “he could have been worse” is a flash-flood of praise.

I am both sorry and happy for Ronald Reagan’s family, because his death must in a way be a relief. If his legacy is to help increase stem cell research, then there is good attached to his passing. Other than that, he was from a different era. That was then, this is now. And we don’t need more heros.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

WordPress and bug databases and communication

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The folks behind WordPress have made a step in the right direction by first of all, not deprecating old functions without going through a formal deprecation process. This is to ensure that people have time for a release or two to modify a now deprecated function or global variable before it is pulled from the application.

They’ve also just started a bug database, and this could be good – if they understand that a bug system is a two-way communication process. It’s not always about code.

I entered a bug in the database yesterday about the fact that if you turn off magic quotes in your .htaccess file, but you try and edit a comment and save it, it causes the SQL to crash. The reason for this is that the text of the comment isn’t ‘escaped’ – slashes put in front of quotes contained in the text to tell the database to treat these are characters, not the end of the database string.

Well, the response was to point to a change record in CVS in the newest releases of the code an d say, ‘Does this fix it?’

Well, how the hell do I know? I’m using 1.2. What if I can’t read code? Wouldn’t an English description acknowledging my problem and the solution have been better? With a little note about when it will be released? Such as, “This fix will be released in the 1.2.1 bug fix release”.

Bluntly, the WordPress development crew is not happy with me because I’ve been pushing them pretty hard for the last month. What I’ve been saying is that software is only 50% code – the rest is documentation and infrastructure, quality testing, and communication. Particularly communication.

Oh, you don’t need these things if your code is used by hackers or a small group of friends. But if you want your application to be used by strangers who don’t code – you can’t force them into learning code to communicate, or having to beg pretty please in order not to piss off the development people.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack for my criticisms of past weblogging tools. I stand by these criticisms, every single one of them. I’m not, now, going to play ‘touch not the programmer’ just because the source code I’m now using is open source. If anything, I want the open source solution to work, so will be harder, not easier, on the team behind the product. Is this unfair? What’s fair? Not being critical because this just isn’t done in weblogging?

Unfortunately, the team doesn’t see that I’m attempting to help them succeed over time–by realizing that an application is more than just code. My own frustrations aren’t helping, and have led me to become increasingly confrontational. My bad.

What I’ve been trying to say is that a successful application is demonstrated by the trust of those who use your product, and based on understanding what the users are saying and making an attempt to communicate in their language. It’s slowing down development if it means that the end product is more stable or secure. It’s releasing bug fixes, and developing a plan for future development and communicating it. Most of all, it’s realizing that people can’t be grateful forever. Eventually, the product will have to stand on its own, not on gratitude.

(Six Apart is learning that one rather painfully now.)

In short: a successful application is only 50% code.

But I’m also not going to trade my ‘kicking the baby squirrels’ tag for one of ‘kicking the open source baby bunnies’, either. If I’m not helping and all I’m doing is making people pissed, then time to stop what I’m doing.

Disappointing, though.

update

I’m glad I posted this and had conversations offline and on. It helped me refine, at least for myself, why I’m pushing at the WordPress group so much.

Much of it goes back to the concept of the Coders Only Club, and having to put code down at the door in order to ‘purchase’ the right to be heard. I want this open source application to belong , as much or more, to the non-geeks as it does to the geeks. I think we could have a lot of fun together.

However, the project is young, the developers are trying, and they are most likely getting tired of ducking from me, and my beating about their heads with my ‘help’.

update
General agreement is that I was too harsh on the WordPress developers. Guilty as charged. It’s their project – up to them how they manage it.

As for myself, I’m just going to maintain my own code at this point, and doing my own enhancements.

Sigh of relief for the WordPress team and their so-loyal fans. One less pain in the butt to worry about.