Category: Technology

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Photography Technology

Camp

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Saturday I slipped out for a couple of hours in the afternoon to go to the first day of the new Metrolink extension. I went later in the day and missed most of the crowds. The LinkFest associated with the opening was pretty quiet, and aside from having to walk a gauntlet of candidates, there wasn’t much going on.

Inside the new St. Louis MetroLink

Curved tunnel

Reflecting at the Station waiting for a train

The Train! The Train!

One of the candidates was a very impressive woman named Barbara Fraser who waved a brochure to get my attention when I started to walk past her. She was strong, confident, and engaging. Updated: I originally listed the wrong name and party affiliation, but she is the right person: Barbara Fraser was the candidate, she is Democrat and will get my vote.

The new MetroLink is surprisingly beautiful and graceful. A strong hint of curves all throughout the line, with a lot of raised platforms and tunnels–most with some simple light-based sculpture. I was only able to snap a few photos from Saturday; I’ll try to get more, later, that really do the line justice. Some photos are posted to the side. They’re not FOO Camp or BarCamp, or WorldCamp, or even all that campy–but I was able to sleep in my own bed last night.

Speaking of *camps, I have my own variation of a Chumby. I’ll post a photo later in the week, in addition to responding to a couple of other posts from Christine at christie.net including Open Data Standardards Redux.

As for the number of women at FOO camp increasing to a whopping 16.97%, all I have to say is: better, yes. Good. Well done. Much better than other conferences I’ve read on this week. (Couldn’t get much worse than the other conferences I read about this week.)

HOWEVER, not good enough. Next year O’Reilly, you can do better. I know you can.

I can see that Jeneane has been out disrespectin’ the fastigium of weblogging again. Along with Jeneane, there were responses in the MacLeod/Godin interview that puzzled me. For instance:

2. QUESTION: As a cartoonist, I find myself quite surprised that very few of the more prominent bloggers out there are in the “Arts”. It seems we have lots of business thinkers, technologists, entrepreneurs, consultants etc, but why do we have so surprisingly few filmmakers, playwrights, novelists, musicians, painters etc at the top of the pyramid? I have a few theories myself as to why this is, but may I ask what may be your take on it?

ANSWER: They’re coming, for sure. Postsecret is one of the three most popular blogs in the world. I think mainstream artists are rarely the first to embrace a new medium (silkscreening, for example, took a long time to get its Andy Warhol), but they’re coming. It’s going to be a new generation of artists that embrace the nature of the medium, and they’re just getting started.

I don’t know that I would classify Postsecret as art, as I believe Hugh MacLeod was referencing the term. To me, the site is more of a visual aid for Catholic Priests. Regardless, Godin’s response was off on so many levels. Leaving aside the term, “mainstream artist”, and stating as fact that silkscreening needed Andy Warhol to become ‘big’ and this is proof that old artists can’t somehow embrace new techniques or media…well, no, these two pretty much have me stopped.

However, at the moment I just can’t work up the energy to do more than twist an eyebrow up, like Mr. Spock. Twitch. Twitch. Twitchtwitchtwitch… Makes me glad Jeneane is there to beat such hyperbole into the ground. We take turns at this, she and I; that’s why we’re known as the Tag Sisters.

(Tag…get it? You know, like weblogging and ta…oh never mind.)

I was also reminded today to remind you all that I no longer have a gmail account (nor a Flickr account), and if you want to reach me by email, use shelleyp@burningbird.net.

Categories
Technology

Noirland

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The first Office 2.0 Conference is organized by IT|Redux, and brings together vendors, investors, industry analysts, and journalists. The goal for the event is to collectively build the foundation for Office 2.0, investigate technical challenges, and showcase practical applications. Most importantly, it will be an opportunity for like-minded people to meet and network with an elite group of visionaries and industry leaders.

What is like-minded for the Office 2.0 conference planners? Here’s a hint: Michael Noir would be an excellent keynote speaker.

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.

Categories
JavaScript

A new look for Script.aculu.os

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The popular Ajax library, script.aculo.us has a new look. It moves away from the traditional Ajax pastels into earthier tones, and uses four bubbles to represent four main menu areas. The site navigation is quite clear, and the information you would want is immediately apparent.

Scriptaculous main web page

I tested the site and it validates, and looking at the source, it should be text-to-speech accessible. Rather than use H1 headers for every menu block and div elements for each item, it might have been better, semantically, to use one H1 for the main title, only, H2 elements for the four main menu titles and unordered lists for the menu items. Other than these quibbles it’s accessible and valid, easy to navigate, and a refreshing change from lime green and rounded corners if…

IF…

If you have JavaScript turned on. I have the extremely popular Firefox extension Noscript installed and enabled, which suppresses JavaScript at every site until the site is ‘whitelisted’–marked as scripts allowed. When I followed the link at Ajaxian to the script.aculo.us site, this is what I saw:

scriptaculous main web page with scripting turned off

Not much there, other than a “go away and come back when you have shirt, shoes, and tie on” message.

The content of the front page, as well as several other sections of the site (such as the documentation wiki) could easily be made accessible to people with scripting disabled. Why, then, shut the door so completely?

The script.aculo.us creators state in the message that displays when scripting is disabled that since the site is about a library that’s built in JavaScript, it doesn’t make sense for any of it to be available for those who have JavaScript disabled. I can understand this, but I think what the creators have forgotten is that they have to earn the trust of the web page reader, first, before the reader might be willing to open the gates. It’s difficult for trust to be earned if the reader can’t access anything other than a Paypal button, a link to a syndication feed, and credit for the company that built the page.

Of course, the script.aculo.us creators could say that everyone knows who they are and what script.aculo.us is–after all, look at who is using the library. That’s just it: you can’t assume that everyone knows the site, the library, or who the creators are. For those who don’t, the information is buried behind the NOSCRIPT wall. As for the list of sites that use the library, it’s also hidden behind the NOSCRIPT wall.

No one debates the necessity of letting people know they need to have JavaScript enabled when an application is dependent on JavaScript. However, I see little in the script.aculo.us front page that demonstrates that the use of JavaScript is anything more than just a way to add a little eye candy to the page. Eye candy is good, eye candy is fine, but eye candy shouldn’t be the only thing served for dinner.

Years ago during an acting class, I did a routine where I pantomimed being a bomb squad officer defusing a bomb. Afterwards, my teacher told me my acting was terrific and deserved an ‘A’. However, he also told me I had forgot to tie my hair back and he could only see half my face. Since he could only see half my face, he could only give me half my grade, and I got a ‘C’.

I like script.aculo.us and it’s one of the Ajax libraries I covered in the last chapter of Learning JavaScript. I like the new site and it’s rather innovative design. I liked that they made sure the site could validate. However, because of the NOSCRIPT wall in the very first page, I can only give the new web site a ‘C’, for Could have done better.

update Gucci was one of the sites that uses the script.aculo.us library. Try visiting that company’s main page with script turned off. Then try it with script turned on. I actually preferred the site with script turned off. I think it might end up being top contender for my Worst Use of JavaScript at a Site award.