Wednesday, 14 May 2003
Wish I wasn't so busy this week, so I could play with this some more.
6:44 PMTuesday, 6 May 2003
The Mac is certainly gaining visibility as of late. On the way back to school a few minutes ago I passed a man walking his dog with the same OS X T-shirt I was wearing. We exchanged the obligatory “Nice shirt” comments.
I got on the bus, and the driver immediately commented on seeing two people with the same T-shirt in the space of 30 seconds. More amazingly, the bus driver couldn't stop talking about the music and spoken word recordings he'd bought at the iTunes Music Store in the past week.
As if the sales figures don't say enough, I think it's pretty clear Apple has a hit on its hands.
Sunday, 4 May 2003
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?
Saturday, 3 May 2003
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.
Friday, 2 May 2003
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.
