njr 3.0

Transferred sabi.net from easyDNS to pairNIC today. easyDNS was once a good value, but is now quite overpriced. I was paying easyDNS $25 a year for registrar-only service, in comparison with pairNIC's full DNS service and optional mail/web forwarding at $16 for the transfer and first year, and $13/year for a 5 year extension? Given pair's proven reliability and constant improvement, it's no contest.

And in the brain-dead UI department (this example courtesy OpenSRS):

I wonder what would have happened, had I submitted the form after checking both boxes?

6:33 PM | Radio
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Why must so many Unix utilities mysteriously fail when you don't end the last line of a configuration file with \n? Why why why why why? The answer is not “because your text editor doesn't insert one automatically”. I finally figured out after several weeks of pounding my head against the problem that was the reason why my cron job wasn't running to remount the MO disc on calamity after my parents changed it, was that “00 04 * * * /bin/mount /mnt/mo” wasn't followed by a newline. (Someone remind me why cron's syntax is so obtuse, too?)

Maybe I should just give up and configure emacs and vi to add terminating newlines automatically. It just feels like giving into the user-hostile insanity of it all.

Actually, I need to get some sleep; back to hacking on gprof (it's research, really!) in the morning.

4:12 AM | Radio
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Yet another busy, productive week is just about over. Spent the vast majority of it on research. In the software corner, I made some small steps towards launch 1.0 and Pester 1.1, but not much to speak of—too little spare time.

Given my almost complete lack of creativity in the area, Web design is tedious, but necessary. I've been slowly redoing web.sabi.net and expanding rileys.us, removing hacks for old and non-compliant browsers. It feels so good to throw out markup with attached comments like this:

<!-- TOPMARGIN works for iCab (doesn't understand CSS, but at least
the same metrics as IE/Mozilla work).  MARGINHEIGHT is for Netscape
4.x, which doesn't understand CSS properly, and is just weird. -->

or this:

<!-- Netscape 4.x needs the extra align, or it gets confused.  Sigh.  -->

Everything I change gets tested on Camino and Safari, both of which I use every day. Yesterday I briefly tried IE 5 Mac, IE 6 Windows, and Opera 7 Windows, making a couple of changes to accommodate them. For any other Web browser (including Opera 6, which I notice mangled quite a few of my pages), you're on your own.

Porting my photo album generating script from Frontier's website framework to Python was the biggest part of it. Templating is now pretty ad hoc, but it works reasonably well, and works on the server, meaning I no longer need to support and maintain Frontier/Radio on my parents' PowerBooks so they can post photos. My original reason for picking Frontier for this job was its ability to run under Mac OS 9, but Python does that too, and it's still being updated for that OS (until 2.3 final is out, at least).

Since the last screenshot I had posted was dated 2001, I collected a couple more current and interesting ones here. Compare the new CSS-only (almost) design with the Mockups page, which uses an older HTML-styled template.

I still will move this site to PyCS some day. As UserLand's community server has been quite reliable over the past several months, I'm not in a rush.

1:52 AM | Radio
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There is no undo in Safari's text edit fields. I mostly use NetNewsWire to write these days, but I just wiped out an entire post that way. They just use a standard NSTextView—I know, because ICeCoffEE works! At least it'll be easy to enable. I just filed a bug.

6:21 PM | Radio
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Ray Ozzie is in C-U for a few days, and just dropped by the ACM office. We went around the office presenting our various projects, and I had a chance to show him 3DOSX, which he seemed to like. (Wish the current version were more presentable; the MWSF'03 version is usably fast.)

5:17 PM | Radio
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