Ultranormal

Category: development

  • Whoops

    I need to write myself a to-do list when I do an upgrade of Movable Type. Since MT 3.2’s been in beta, I think this is the second time I’ve forgotten to rename the comments script. If you’ve tried to post comments the past couple days, I’m sorry!! It should be fixed now…\
    In other news, pain killers are good.

  • Safari, Javascript and Large Numbers

    Let’s say you’re playing with a dashboard widget that deals with some large numbers you might want to compare. For some reason, you’re not getting the result that you thought you would. For some reason really large numbers are breaking your if statements. Well, if you wanted them not to, you might want to wrap those numbers in Number() in the comparison. That seemed to work for me (yes, I really hope you’ll get to see this widget soon – it’s fun).\
    UPDATE: Apparently, I’m on crack because the above bug I mentioned apparently doesn’t exist. I was trying to prove it with some test cases, and I can’t recreate it, even with REALLY large numbers expressed as strings. So… ummm… sorry.

  • The Danger Of A Better IE?

    Roger Johannson is asking questions about the danger of a better IE, and it’s an interesting question. I’ve got no love for Microsoft. I long ago gave up Windows as my platform of choice, and I’m no fan of IE 6 (in fact, I’ve never used it as my default browser – went right from Netscape 4.7 to Mozilla).\
    But, I’m a pragmatist. Today, IE 6 is holding me back. I can’t use all the cool CSS stuff I’d like to, because I work for a really big mainstream consumer service. I have to use hacks, kluges and sometimes (heaven forbid) extra markup to execute the designs I’m given to build.\
    Do I like it? No. I positively hate it. Since I’ve been a member of the CSS Working Group, I’ve grown even more impatient. I want everything now, even stuff we’ve just talked about and not actually put down in a spec. I want to be able to use 24-bit PNGs and multiple backgrounds for more than Dashboard widgets (I built my first one last week, you should see it soon). I want to be able to stop using huge nests of descendant selectors to style navigation lists. I want to be able to use child, sibling, CSS3 attribute selectors, and all the other cool stuff we’ve been waiting years for, and can play with in newer browsers like Firefox and Safari, but can’t use in “real” products because IE is where most of the users are.\
    In the end though, I’m a pragmatist. I have to support IE and Windows, and I hope that IE 7 is everything we hope it will be (and that everyone upgrades right away). I’m willing to give Redmond the benefit of the doubt, and even help them. I want IE 7 to fix all of their problems and add all of the things from CSS2, and the CR’ed CSS3 modules so the web can move on. Will it happen? I don’t know. Even if they just finish their CSS 2.1 support and fix the box model issues, I’ll be satisfied (but not thrilled… no clapping from me).\
    If they fix their issues (security, standards support, stability, etc), good for them. I’ll clap louder than anyone. But, I’ll still use Safari and Firefox. I’ll still preach standards. I’ll still build for every browser that I can (within reason).\
    No one should delude themselves: we’re stuck with IE 6 for a while (my guess is three to three and a half years). It’s going to take a long time for people to upgrade to IE 7, even if it’s the best browser ever to grace the Windows world. It took at least four years for IE 5.5 to go (mostly) away. It took longer than that for Netscape 4.x to go away. There’s a large percentage of the computing universe that either doesn’t know how, or refuses, to upgrade anything: their computers, their OS or their software. If Microsoft doesn’t change their minds about only releasing IE 7 for XP SP2, I could be wrong, and it will be 5-6 years before we can stop worrying about IE 6.\
    Let’s put our prejudices aside for a minute and hope (selfishly so for those of us who build web stuff) that IE 7 is great. Let’s hope that it supports all of the stuff we want, and beats back the spyware/virus/adware scourge. Let’s hope they get it right, because the alternative is much, much, much worse than a better IE.

  • My Foot Is Busterated

    I love waiting when I know what the outcome’s going to be. I have to have surgery to repair the navicular bone (near the ankle). Well, not really “repair”, more like “remove”. Then they’ll reinforce the tendon. It’s “serious”, according to my doctor. He told me, “You’re about to do something very difficult.” Yeah, that’s exactly what I want to hear from a doctor.\
    Now, I’m waiting around for my insurance company to approve an MRI so we can find out how “difficult” this is going to be. After the MRI, I get to wait a week, then I see the doctor, then I get cut on. Oh, then the fun begins. I’ll be short a bone in my foot, in a cast for a while, then in physical therapy for who knows how long.\
    And herein lies the silence. It’s hard to walk in the boot. It’s hard to drive. It’s hard to sit at a computer. It’s hard to sleep. And it’s only going to get harder.\
    So, I write my presentations, I help my people, I talk to folks and I take a lot of ibuprofen. Oh, and redesign this site, read up on Ruby and thinking of building something worth trying Rails for. Oh, and I’m working on my very own microformat.\
    And tomorrow, it’s time to compile all the comments on the big CSS Question, sort them and start coming up with some concrete proposals.

  • This One’s For Heather: Podcasts and Mashups

    This one’s for Heather. Max and I went to dinner with my mom, brother and sister last night and we ended up talking about mashups and podcasts. Heather wanted me to send her some links, but I’d hate to go through all that effort only to repeat it when someone else asks me. So, this post will get e-mailed around to folks (hi, folks) when they ask me what a mashup or a podcast is or how they can get some.\

    <dl>
    <dt>mashup</dt>
    <dd>Taking any musical work or works and turning them into something else. This isn’t a cover, which is someone performing a song. It’s usually taking the recorded version of the song and combining it with other recorded elements (usually other songs… you know, mashing them up!).</dd>
    <dt>podcast</dt>
    <dd>Recording an audio file and posting it to a website. I know, it’s more than that, but that’s it, really. The real hook to podcasting is syndicating those audio files and producing them on a semi-regular basis so people can use their feed reader of choice to download them automatically to their iPod (hence “pod”casting) or to their music player of choice.</dd>
    </dl>
    \
    I’ve only recently gotten into listening to podcasts, and have just a couple favorites:

    # Radio Clash: This is first for good reason. Tim puts together a fun show, with just the right balance of talk and music. He picks the best mashups out there and throws them together with interesting conversation about what’s going on in his world. Good stuff. Show 38 (the most recent) isn’t a good representation of a “normal” show, so you might want to start with Show 37

    # Coverville: Not mashups, but this guy is funny, and he picks some hilarious covers to play. Covers are another secret passion of mine. It all started in Tucson listening to KXCI (the best radio station ever) and hearing Social Distortion‘s cover of Ring of Fire followed by an accordian-laden cover of the same. I was hooked.

    # Odeo: They don’t make ’em, but they’re the easiest way I’ve found so far to find ’em and download ’em.\
    As for mashups, there are a few folks who produce world-class stuff (at least that I’ve found). Here are my faves:

    • The Kleptones – A Night At The Hip-Hopera is probably my all-time favorite mashup. I can listen to it for hours and hours.
    • Pheugoo: Some really good techno mashups, my favorites being La Naughty Femme, Dip It Joe and Roses for Lindy.
    • DJ BC (link not working at the moment): dj BC and The Beastles is priceless. He mashed Meet The Beatles with The Beastie Boys and it’s magical.
    • Pop Razors: They’ve got some stinkers, but Climbin’ Deeper is unbelievable. You will shake much booty.\
      Of course, the music industry hates mashups and it’s not quite sure what to do with podcasts. But, they hated the CD at first too, and same folks thought that the VCR would kill them. They don’t have a very good track record with being right, do they?\
      Enjoy ’em while you can!

  • The New My AOL: Feeds Are Cool

    I don’t normally talk about work, but I’m making an exception because this one was a lot of fun. It’s officially in beta now, and I can talk about it. Yay!! The new My AOL launched its first beta today, and I worked on it! I got to play with everyone’s favorite new javascript toy: XMLHTTPRequest, and did most of the CSS and a good deal of the markup. It was a fun project to spend a couple weeks on, and there’s a lot of potential for cool stuff with it.\
    It is still very beta (in the traditional sense of the word). It’s a little slow in Safari for some reason that we haven’t been able to track down, and there’s a really funny jumping icon thing in Firefox that, again, we haven’t been able to figure out (it jumps the exact width of a scrollbar, but no scrollbar shows up, so it’s double-weird).\
    Play around with it, try adding your own feed, and see how it goes. There are a couple odd things about how it chooses which feeds to grab, and which RSS fields to display (for example, if you have both summary and content:encoded, it will only use summary), and if you have multiple feeds in your HTML, it will choose the first if they all have the same link. Hey, it’s a beta.\
    There’s lots of cool stuff coming in subsequent releases, so stay tuned!

  • Help The CSS Working Group With Backgrounds and Borders

    At our last CSS Working Group meeting, I volunteered to ask the design community what y’all want as far as backgrounds and borders go. We spent some time talking about the CSS3 Backgrounds & Borders module and we need some feedback (because none of us are designers).\
    If you’re a designer, is this what you want? Is there anything missing from the module that should be there? Is there anything there that shouldn’t be?\
    Some ideas to get you going:

    • Gradients: They’re really popular. Would it be a good thing to have simple gradients as a part of the spec even though you can do them today with graphics, SVG, or proprietary CSS filters?
    • Multiple Backgrounds: Everyone I know is clamoring for these, and a lot of people add extra markup, or “appropriate” other elements to do this now. What would you like to see from multiple backgrounds? Is what’s in the spec now sufficient, too much, too little, etc?
    • background-origin and background-clip: Are these useful?
    • More atomic background positioning: I could see a use for a background position for both the image and within the element. For example, if I had an image sprite, I might want to get to position “-50px 0” of the image, position it “left bottom” within the element.
    • border-radius by corner: Do you want to be able to specify border-top-left-radius instead of just border-radius?
    • Anything else…\
      So, bring it on. I’ll collate all the comments and send them to the group. If you don’t have javascript turned on (thank you, comment spammers!), and you still want to send comments, please send them to lawver at gmail.com. Trackbacks are on, but not displayed (thanks again, spammers).\
      If you know web designers who could help us out, please share the link.

  • Upgrading to Betaness

    I’ve upgraded almost all the blogs in the Lawver Blogging Network (didn’t know I had one of those, did you) to the new beta version of Movable Type. So far, it’s awesome. New interface, especially for plugins. The new icons are much nicer than the old ones, and the interface seems a lot snappier. I like that you can do almost anything to one of your blogs from the main screen, and well, it’s just better, OK?\
    The only problem so far is that MarsEdit is saying I have a bad password, when I know it isn’t. Not sure what that’s about, but I’m sure it will get fixed shortly. Ok, there’s another problem too: The FlickrPhotoset plugin no longer works, which is sad, because I love that plugin. Now, I’ll have to start using GetXML to get my list of photosets too (that’s how I get the recent photos).\
    I’d been flirting with WordPress for a project at work, and I just hit a brick wall. It’s not that WordPress is bad. It’s not. It’s very good, but you have to know too much PHP in order to tweak it. So, it’s back to MT, and talking folks into buying a license for it.\
    The power of MT comes not from its technology, but from the template system. I love the fact that I’m not locked into a programming language to use it. I can have my templates spit out PHP, Tcl, or anything else. With most of the other blogging gigs out there, you’re stuck with PHP whether you like it or not (and I’m ambivalent at the moment… I never have enough time to spend getting to know it).\
    If you see anything funky, please let me know.\
    Update – A Couple Tips:

    • If you created a new user for yourself and deleted Melody when you installed, you’ll need to go into the database and tweak your record in mt_author. Set the author_is_superuser field to 1 and update that row.
    • If you use something like MarsEdit to post to your blog, you’ll need to edit your user and add the xml-rpc password. You can do this by clicking your user name at the top right corner of the regular Movable Type admin screen.

  • Think It Through

    Before Jen started blogging here, every post was written by me (or, in one or two cases when Brian was born, by Heather). I was talking to someone yesterday about Jen posting here, and they were surprised. This is someone who reads this site through a feed reader… and then it clicked. Oops.\
    I didn’t think it through. Now we’ve got multiple authors here. I compensated for this on the main site by making our posts different colors (Jen’s are orange, mine are blue). In the feed, I wouldn’t do that, and honestly didn’t think about it. So, as of this post, you should get the right author of each post in the feed, so you can see who the author is. If that doesn’t work, let me know (sorry if it makes all the posts in the feed unread, but it had to happen sooner or later).

  • Jen Joins The Fun

    Now that I’ve kind of got Jen to join the fun here, I figured I needed to find a way to show when a post was written by Jen, and one that was written by me. I’ve always had the “posted by Kevin” thing at the bottom, but that’s at the bottom. So, I’ve added a class to the entry body, so posts by Jen are orange, and posts by me are blue. I may change that, and do it in a less-obtrusive way (I don’t really like background colors other than white for text, but I’m going to try this out for a little while).\
    In other news, avoid malaria pills and the typhoid oral vaccine if you can. I don’t know which one is to blame (and it could be something else entirely), but I’m not feeling so hot at the moment. I’ll spare you the details.