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.

Categories
Weblogging

Core Values

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Business Week:

With little effort, Arrington got dozens of sponsors, mostly Web 2.0 startups and VCs, to bankroll the party he held Friday at August Capital. So after a night of revelry, Arrington had pocketed an extra $50,000. Now that’s something to blog about.

Satire is dead in Silicon Valley

Exploitation 2.0

Categories
Just Shelley

Changing faces of Sci-Fi

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am a huge science fiction fan; have been ever since I was a little kid. I remember how excited I was that a whole channel devoted to science fiction was going to be appearing on cable. At the time, I lived in Phoenix, and was one of those that pushed the local cable company into carrying it.

The channel has always had a mixed bag of content, good and bad. Currently listed among the good, at least in my opinion, are: Eureka, Dead Like Me, Stargate, Dr. Who, and Battlestar Galactica. The bad ranges from wrestling (of all things), to stupid ghost chasing, to movies on Saturday so awful they can’t even be counted as camp. The reasons behind such a disparity in programming is that the Sci-Fi channel is run by people who really don’t care about science fiction, and only care about ensuring the network is profitable.

Stargate was probably the channel’s most profitable show, and it celebrated it’s 200 birthday last week. Through Les I found it was canceled this week. Not surprising, as the writers had no where to go with the story line, and even the addition of Claudia Black as the wonderful “Vala” wasn’t enough to save the show. It is disappointing, because I thought the 200th episode and it’s associated documentary, were a kick and reflected some of the old humor and quirkiness of the show before it started getting too caught up in Defeating Bad Guys.

As for the spinoff of Stargate, Stargate: Atlantis, all I can say is block that dialing address.

On Tuesdays before wrestling (which, unfortunately, has ended up being the most watched show on the network), Sci-Fi added an old and a new show to the lineup: Showtime’s canceled Dead Like Me and the new Eureka (you can currently watch the premier show online at Sci-Fi).

Why a show like Dead Like Me was canceled, I don’t know, but I think it’s one of the finest shows I’ve seen. The premise is that people who die with unresolved issues become grim reapers who walk the streets, releasing souls from the bodies of the newly dead. Not a particularly interesting concept except these grim reapers have human form. They eat, drink, have jobs, emotional issues, and so on. The lead character is an 18 year old woman who goes by the name ‘George’, with an “I don’t give a damn” attitude, who is killed when she’s hit with a toilet seat from a falling Mir Space Station.

It’s both funny and thoughtful, and received several awards before being canceled. I’m assuming it didn’t make it due to to the fact it couldn’t find an audience. (A dominant, strong female cast is rather risky in the science fiction business, unless your cast is composed of sexy, blonde teens who can kill 23 vampires without breaking a nail, all before cheerleading practice. PS, I liked Buffy, but no denying she was boy candy.)

Eureka is about a federal marshal who accidentally stumbles across a town composed of geniuses who are engaged in secret research for the government. It’s ripe for innovation, and the regular cast members are compelling and interesting. I was somewhat hesitant about the show at first, primarily because it made the marshall into the town sheriff and boss over the existing deputy who happens to be a woman. However, air time is nicely divided between men and women, and the women have relatively strong positioning. Besides it has the old Max Headroom, Matt Frewer, as a very oddball pest control officer–what’s not to like?

(Well, the fact that some of the roles are borderline gender stereotypical, and what’s with the sexual tension between the lead characters? Men and women can work together without wanting to jump each others’ bones. This is getting old, and is one area where Dead Like Me and Battlestar Galactica have risen above such cheap theatrics.)

Then there is Battlestar Galactica returning this October. The show staged a rather astonishing twist in the storyline as a season ender, and I’m waiting with a great deal of interest to see how it deals with it when the show returns. This show also has a very strong female cast, as well as not being afraid to dive into the darker aspect of being human–usually demonstrated best by the non-human characters in the show.

I’m still somewhat ambivalent about the show. I admired how the show handled the subject of rape, but was less than enthralled with the coverage of forced pregnancy–which seemed to be just plopped in in order to be topical. It made no sense that a group of ships with limited resources and in immediate danger of destruction would worry overmuch about future population concerns.

Still, I like the characters on this show. They’re remarkably rich and fascinating, and I have no idea where the show is going to go. After decades of television watching, it’s not often I can’t guess a future story line.

There are hints of other shows starting this fall on Sci-Fi that could be interesting. I actually started liking Dr. Who, with its campy special effects, and I believe it is returning in addition to Battlestar and the newer series. Because of the existing and possible future shows on Sci-Fi, I’m not quite ready to pull my cable, though I have canceled everything but basic service.

My biggest concern is that quality on TV never survives. Now that the Sci-Fi channel executives realize that “Who Wants to be a Superhero”, super cheap Saturday flicks, and wrestling are sure money makers, I’m sure they’ll drop Battlestar and the other shows that interest me. If they do, I’ll most likely drop cable. After all, I can download movies and television shows from the Net, and my Dell laptop has a better viewscreen than my smallish TV. Not to mention, I can connect my laptop to my TV in order to play movies or shows.

Which does make one wonder: when will the first internet-only video series be released?