Ultranormal

Category: development

  • Blog Of The Day

    Hey look, we’re the blog of the day!

  • Microformats a Go-Go

    One day last week while the boys were watching TV, I decided to finally get this here blog up-to-date with microformats, especially since I’m all for them and keep telling people to use them. Might as well take my own medicine, right?\
    As of sometime last week, the front page has three separate hAtom feeds and each entry has an hCard on it. I’ve been trying to find time to redo my resume (no, I’m not looking, this is just an excuse to use hResume), but haven’t had time (working nights and weekends will do that to you, along with the fact that I really need a haircut).\
    I didn’t have time to remove the classes I had on there before and change the CSS, so the source looks a little cluttered, and nothing’s been done to the archives. I just didn’t have time (running theme, I know).\
    If you see anything wrong, please let me know so I can fix it.

  • I Know Something!

    Today is a banner day. No, it’s not because the cold I’ve had for four days has reached Biblical mucous proportions (if Pharoah hadn’t relented, it would have been the next plague: multi-colored, never-ending mucous). It’s not that I’ve had three days off in the last thirty. It’s not that I’ve interviewed two kids out of college in the last week who are actually curious and qualified. It’s not that I’ve forgotten how to sleep.\
    What is it? It’s that today, April 13th 2006, I knew something about javascript and the DOM that Mr. Javascript didn’t know, and I got to tell him what it was. What was it? Well, it’s this horrible little Internet Explorer quirk where it won’t let you update the text of a style element with the normal ways (you know, appending a text node, or gasp using innerHTML). You have to use node.styleSheet.cssText to get or change the text. Isn’t that crazy?

  • I’m Naked!

    Since I’m a CSS guy and am always preaching out this crap, I figured I should play along and go naked too. Nothing is broken. Really. I turned the stylesheet off on purpose. It’ll be back tomorrow.\
    I’m actually kind of happy with it. The main page of the blog stands up quite well without any CSS. The markup’s not perfect. I’ve been meaning to fix it forever, but it hasn’t changed drastically in almost three years, and it’s supported three complete redesigns without having to really touch it (other than splitting up the entries into two chunks).\
    I’ll put my clothes back on tomorrow.

  • Sweet Talk

    Remember when I said UPN could kiss my ass? Well apparently that is just the kind of sweet talk they like (I should have known they liked it dirty and rough, they are UPN after all), as I was invited to be on the cool kids list too! YAY! Who knew complaining could be so effective?\
    Here is the latest press release:\
    VERONICA MARS Viewing Party\
    UPN is offering its dedicated Veronica Mars bloggers a great opportunity to have your 15-seconds of fame! Every week, get a group of friends together for a Veronica Mars viewing party and shoot some video of your event. The tape can include anything you want: sound bites of your friends talking about their favorite characters, you saying why you love Veronica Mars, or a group shout-out to your friends and family in your hometown. But keep it clean, because your tape could end up airing on UPN during an episode of Veronica Mars!    \
    If anyone out there is interested, leave me a comment and I can get you the details and UPN’s contact info!\
    And guess what? Veronica Mars is on tonight at 9pm EST on UPN! YAY!

  • The Global E-Mail Economy

    The problem with the global economy is that there’s always someone awake and sending me e-mail. I get a couple hundred e-mails a day, and in the old days, I could be pretty certain that I wouldn’t get more than 10-15 over night, and they usually weren’t serious. Now? I get a good half a day’s worth of e-mail before I even wake up. How am I supposed to keep up with that?

  • Geek Conference Network Woes

    This is my third conference in March, and it’s the third one with serious wi-fi issues. What’s the deal? These are not quilting conferences. These are serious nerdfests, where the organizers are expecting lots of geeks with laptops sucking down bandwidth with abandon. If you don’t have that bandwidth, you will have a bunch of very unhappy nerds on your hands.\
    If you’re going to have a technology conference, please invest in good wi-fi, especially if people are paying to attend. Charge a little more, over-provide. Just please, get it right.

  • MIX06 Reactions From Day One

    I’m here in Vegas for . It all started with Bill Gates’ keynote in the morning, and it soon became clear that I was in a different world. I was in not in my world, I was in MicrosoftLand, where everyone has unlimited resources to build web products for everyone else and then build a special IE-only one. Better yet, a Vista-only experience using the Windows Presentation Foundation (for a platform that hasn’t been released yet).\
    Windows Presentation Foundation should make Macromedia very nervous. It’s a Flash-killer baked right into Windows. It looks like it has a lot of really cool features that will suck advertisers in. If I were them, I’d start coming up with some marketing about Flash’s install base and cross-browser/cross-platform attributes.\
    They showed off Atlas, their new Javascript framework that smells a lot like Dojo. That whole presentation, and a lot of the others, felt disingenuous to me. They touted them as innovations when other products have been there first and Microsoft is just taking that work and adding a special Microsoft twist on it. That twist may be innovative, but the ideas aren’t new.\
    There wasn’t enough detail about what’s coming after IE7. IE7 is now layout complete, so if you haven’t gotten the latest beta, go get it. We can be pretty confident that the layout problems we see in the latest build will be the layout problems we see in the final version of IE7, for better or worse. I went to the future of IE panel and got very little new information. It was too generic, too little new info. I want a roadmap for IE that shows when we can expect what new standards support features. I don’t even want dates, because I know that dates are like handcuffs. I just want to know what’s coming. If the IE team doesn’t know yet, tell us.\
    It’s weird being here, at a one-company conference. I’m used to the kind of friendly competitive tension of other conferences. Here? It’s all Kool-Aid all the time, well, except for Marc Canter. Somehow, the guy is the first to ask question (or something that’s more like a rant but might contain a question in it somewhere) in any panel he’s in. Not sure how he does it, or why… but he does.\
    There were some highlights. The new Expression web site creator is very very slick. It creates standards-compliant code and has some amazing CSS refactoring features that should allow relative novices to create really interesting sites fairly easily.

  • Dear Everyone At Work

    Please stop sending me mail. I haven’t caught up from yesterday’s 330 to get to the 100 that have already come in since 8AM. Just stop. Whatever it is, it can wait until tomorrow.\
    I would ask you to call, but since I just moved to a new desk, I don’t have one. So, just sit there and do something productive until I get out from under the weight of all these useless bits.

  • Blogging While Black Revisited

    Like last year’s Blogging While Black, this year’s did not disappoint. It is my favorite panel so far, and I left with a lot of interesting thoughts in my head and a lump in my throat. It expressed, through the lens of what it’s like to express your cultural identity as a black person online, my absolute favorite thing about blogging: that blogging allows me to get a glimpse into lives, cultures, situations and events that I would never have to opportunity to otherwise. The panel is that same experience as an “out of browser experience.” I don’t know what it’s like to be black, or the challenges faced by minorities in coping with what feels like being stuck in two worlds: the black community and a society dominated by white culture. It was just fascinating to me, and I thought the panelists did a fantastic job of expressing their individual issues, their internal struggles, and the larger questions raised.\
    I especially love George Kelly. George and I don’t get to spend enough time together, but from the moment I met him, I loved him. George is one of the most beautiful people you will ever meet. He is kind and deliberate in everything he says. He glows with kindness in a way I’ve never seen before, and love being around. He is whip-smart, eloquent and inspirational (the “out of browser experience” line is his, as were several other winners in today’s panel). I think he takes great pains to make sure that the people around him feel included and a part of his space (which I don’t think makes sense, but I don’t know how else to express it). George, you are a prince among men, and I hope you know it.\
    I wish I could express how great the panel was today. It was more than the sum of the words spoken or the people in the panel. Last year, I felt a little uncomfortable, sitting there feeling like an intruder in what looked like a private discussion among a community I didn’t belong to. Today, I felt like I was being drawn into a discussion, an open expression of what it means to be black. I wasn’t being talked to, I was being talked with, and the difference was subtle, but everyone in that room was involved. About halfway through, almost all the laptops were closed and everyone was jazzed. We were all awake (even though it was the last panel of the day), and participating. There was laughter and some challenge, and some pain. But it was all done together, as a single group. I don’t think anyone left that room feeling left out or alone. We left having experience something together.\
    I’m really really tired now, and that probably made no sense, but Blogging While Black encapsulates what makes SxSW so special. Even though it’s huge this year, and I’m hobbled and stressed out about my panel, I felt that attraction, that feeling of belonging, that recharges me and keeps me going for another year. Thank you, George. Thank you, Lynne. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Tiffany. Thank you, Tony.