Supplemental feature: prev/next

I’ve updated the navigation on several subpages, particularly in the Esta and Mothman sections, to add Prev/Next links via the Manila hierarchyPath macro. I’m still rolling those pages out to the static server, but you can see them in action on the dynamic server. In some places you may see two sets of prev/next links; I’m working on that.

You may also find cases where the paging occurs out of order; if you do please contact me so I can fix it.

Serendipitous music finds

Found online today, two interesting directions in music:

  1. Goodbye, Babylon, a six-disc compilation of gospel and other sacred music and sermons from 1902 to 1960, is available from the company’s web site (Dust-to-Digital) for a cool $100. The compilation is getting raves: it could be the next Anthology of American Folk Music.
  2. Vijay Iyer, a pianist and academic theorist whose music was available on MP3.com before its implosion (and is now available on his own site), just put together a song cycle with poet and hip-hop artist Mike Ladd called “In What Language?” that examines travel between countries in the post-9/11 world. Interesting stuff that is winning raves all over the place.

Culinary nirvana in Wallingford

Lisa and I have finally found a worthy Italian restaurant in this mostly Pacific Rim cuisine city. Wallingford’s Asteroid Café, despite its non-Italian name, has some of the finest Italian food and wine we’ve seen since leaving Boston. Just down the street from Dick’s, with twelve tables barely fitting in the storefront in front of the open kitchen, the atmosphere was nevertheless festive and the food was spectacular.

Perhaps because of the mad cow scare, osso buco was off the menu, replaced with rabbit in a white wine, sage, and rosemary sauce with tomatoes and olives over polenta. Knowing how Lisa feels about polenta, it will perhaps come as no surprise that I enjoyed the rabbit while she had the duck, which was served with a sauce made from stonefruits and berries over balsamic-tossed cabbage. With such divergent meals (I kept quoting Looney Tunes in my head: “Wabbit season! Duck season! Wabbit season!”), and the 125 Italian reds on the wine list, we could very well have fallen into vinicultural disaster, if not for the timely intervention of owner and sommelier Marlin Hathaway. He recommended a fantastic Nebbiolo from Lombardy that was made with part dried grapes for an Amaronesque slight sweetness that played off the rabbit sauce and the cabbage. We had a great conversation with him about Italian wines, the difficulty of keeping a good white wine list in a restaurant that’s barely big enough to have a bathroom (you have to go back through the kitchen to find it but it’s there), frozen desserts, and the neighborhood (he remarked that I looked familiar, but maybe it was just because I resembled Dave Matthews, who apparently lives a few blocks away).

I think we’ll definitely be going back.

What quake?

Looks like I’ve just slept through my third earthquake: we had a 3.6 just after midnight last night, centered at Bremerton (just about 20 miles away). For the record, the first two quakes I slept through were in the summer of 1995, when I was jet lagged and essentially sleeping with my eyes open in a conference room at Ridgecrest, California, during a 5+ magnitude tremblor; and of course in April 2002, when we had a 5.1 in Boston that almost woke me up.

Personal Firewall Day

This is smart: a coalition of computer software companies, including Microsoft, McAfee, ICSA Labs, Sygate, TruSecure, and Zone Labs, have put up a consumer facing site touting “Personal Firewall Day.” The site features information about why personal computer firewalls are important and links to how to get them set up, including a link back to the automatic firewall enabler on the Protect Your PC site at Microsoft. (Note: the link is fully automatic only on Windows XP.)

Why go to Mars? Let’s make the Northeast habitable first

Alarming, this finding from Cornell that the landing site of the Spirit, in the Gusev crater on Mars, was warmer yesterday afternoon than 14 major points in the Northeast. For the record, the landing site was 12° F, while the warmest city noted, Providence, RI, was only 9° F, while of course Mount Washington, NH, weighed in at -36° F.

Which is before wind chill.

Kind of puts Bruce Sterling’s comments about needing to settle the Gobi Desert before we go to Mars in the proper perspective. Maybe what we should really do is wait for global warming to make the Northeast habitable first.

On helping customers, or the questions we get

Joe Bork posted a hilarious list of real and made up questions that people ask him when they learn he works for Microsoft. My favorites:

  • How to use Word’s Mail Merge feature
  • How to use Excel’s PivotTable feature
  • How to use PowerPoint’s Slide Transition feature
  • How to use Outlook’s Journal feature
  • What that one error message means, come on, I know, the one with the buttons and the exclamation point thingy
  • Do I read Slashdot too, and how does it feel to be an assimilated corporate drone carrying out the evil, subversive plans of a massive, soulless company that is racing towards its own inevitable doom because of the undeniable goodness and purity of the free (as in speech, not as in beer) software movement
  • How much free (as in beer, not as in speech) pop I drink
  • Have I heard this one great Microsoft joke yet, it is really very clever, okay stop them if I’ve heard it

I think it’s pretty obvious why I like the last four items. The first four items? It reminds me (as if talking to people over the holidays weren’t enough to remind me) that each of us is an ambassador of the company, which for many people means that we are their one chance at a personal connection with software they try to use to get things done.

Which is why I don’t mind answering questions about Office features, if I know the answer, or helping people find their answers in Office Online or the Knowledge Base if I don’t. Generally I end up learning something too.

More semantically correct page layout

I really should hang out one of those old “under construction” signs on this site. I keep finding new ways to tweak and optimize both the HTML and the CSS on the site. The under construction part? It may look funny unless you refresh your browser to force the style sheet to reload.

Today’s tweaks:

  • I cleaned up the style sheet, fixing some font inconsistencies (and incidentally saving almost a full kilobyte of file size). I did this by grouping all the CSS classes and other selectors that should have a sans serif font together and stating the font family name once and only once. (For the curious, the exact code is a comma-delimited list of class selectors, followed by this property listing:
    { font-family: font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", verdana, lucida, sans-serif; }
  • At the same time, I added a new selector that sets the size of H2 headers in my sidebar to 11px, and changed the markup in the sidebar so that each of the bolded headings are tagged as <h2> rather than <p><b>.

So who cares? My readers who use Lynx or other user agents (for instance, the wireless version of Google, which scrapes pages into WML). Now, the sidebar is defined as a series of headings with detail underneath, rather than as an unstructured bunch of paragraphs.

Next step of course is to make it so the content, not the sidebar, appears first in those other browsers, and loads first in modern browsers. That’s a harder job than it appears; more details to come.

RSS on the desktop

Some developments in some software I’m pre-alpha-testing make me wonder: where are the scripts to translate data on your desktop to RSS? On a Windows machine, I would want the security log as an RSS feed for sure. On an OS X machine, some of the system event logs. On both, my mail client.

I’d start hacking my own, but I haven’t seen good base classes in AppleScript to produce RSS. Maybe it’s time to learn Python…

The long hand of history

When I was writing last night’s item about Easter eggs, I linked to my old project, Procurement Desktop – Defense, without following the link. This morning, I clicked the link and was pleased to see that the last release that I worked on, as a developer, system architect, and requirements lead, has finally gone out the door as Version 4.2. Going down the list of system features, I recognize many that I designed, coded, and fought for. It’s amazing that they were released in 2003 when the code was complete and entering testing in late 2000, but that’s life with the government.

Speaking of Easter eggs…

jeff powers

Thanks to George for this tip:

On the random side of things… Jeff Bezos turns 40 today. Curious? Search Amazon.com for old fart. (Only works on 1/12/04)… [The Chang Journal]

Since the item is going to disappear after midnight, I’ve taken the liberty of reposting the image and text:

Happy 40th Birthday, Jeff Bezos
January 12, 1964

Much better than most of the Easter eggs I’ve ever put in software. Most, but not all…

There was a hidden Easter egg in an old version of the procurement software I worked on that invoked a picture of our development manager, Mike Stopper, head back, snoring, exhausted after an all night coding binge in Saudi Arabia. (Which is another story.) What can I say? It was before we won our contract. The Easter egg was subsequently, unceremoniously, stripped out. But it was probably the best one I ever did, with the exception of the one that I nixed partway through, which would have translated every error message in the system to Pig Latin. Er, Ig-pay Atin-lay.

What happens to abandoned nations?

When both BoingBoing and Slashdot have breathless writing about the future of a small Pacific island nation, you know something’s up. In this case, the island is Niue. You know, as in .nu, the top level domain of the hip. Well, at least of one hip person, Moxie.

The island leaders, in the aftermath of a cyclone that caused more than $50 million (NZ) in damage, are calling for the island nation to return to New Zealand governance and predicting that the island will eventually be deserted. While this might not seem such a big deal—after all, as the original snarky article in the New Zealand Star Times points out, Niue only has the population of a large secondary school—the island was a favorite of geeks for creating the first national wi-fi grid and for selling their TLD to all comers.

The question is, what happens to all those .nu sites?

Dave: Happy users or arcane buggy formats?

Dave’s morning coffee notes take a slightly grumpy tone this morning, as he sets up a strawman in the prickly area of data format support, and knocks it down:

I’ve heard it said that “He who is most liberal in the formats he accepts wins.” I say a couple of things in response. 1. He who says shit like that is probably getting consulting money from a BigCo. And 2. He who has the most happy users wins (and goes to heaven). Users love features, and developers who spend time supporting the most arcane buggy formats aren’t spending time on features that delight users. Formats are there to get the job done, not be pure, not be wonderful, just work, and shut up.

My counter-argument: Look at GraphicConverter. (You could make the same argument with most graphics apps, but let me run with this for a second.) The app started off, as its name indicates, as a tool to convert between graphics formats. And it supports every graphics format: old Amiga formats, JPEG 2000, microscope formats, Windows MetaFile, even graphics from Acorn computers. When it came on the market 14 years ago (!), it did one thing well: conversion of graphics files from one format to another. It’s subsequently built on that base and added neato features like magic wand selection, color correction, alpha channels, until it basically provided all the functions that Photoshop 1.0 or 2.0 had at a tiny fraction of the price. Today it’s my only graphics editor, and it’s immensely valuable. But it’s hard to argue it would have gotten where it is today without being very liberal in the formats it supports.

So what happens to a Web browser that only supports XHTML? Or a newsreader that only supports Atom?

Dave’s post is right: it’s about the users and their needs. But sometimes the users need software that is format agnostic to get the job done.