More and more web sites and devices are using associative database programming to try and determine what you will like based on what you’ve expressed an interest in in the past. And what if the algorithms read you wrong? Article at WSJ about such snafus - you watch a movie about a guy whose wife becomes bisexual, and your TiVo immediately assumes you want a steady diet of gay programming. You try to psyche it out by counter-programming a ton of “super straight” content, end up overcompensating… is this the first example of artificial intelligence going wonderfully, terribly wrong in the home? We don’t have a TiVo, but if we did, I’m sure it would think Amy and I just l-o-o-o-o-o-v-e birthing babies.

CSS Joy: When the fun wears off, you’re left with a big pain in the nooners trying to make multiple browsers happy. Ultimately had to dig out and boot up a Win box at home — something I haven’t done for close to a year — just to test Explorer/Mac vs. Explorer/Win and to see just where and when that right-nav DIV tag blows up on the Win side. I think I’ve got it smoothed out about as smooth as it’s going to get. If you’re using Explorer and don’t see the right nav, try resizing the window a few pixels - as you can see, the problem is no longer related to content width being incorrectly totalled, but a redraw issue in Explorer.

Have been so busy at work I left this rendering bug hanging in public for more than 24 hours, painful. But no choice. Tomorrow will be worse - haven’t been this stressed at work since before personalStudio launched at Adamation. Literally all coming down at once.

Amazing how subtly different behaviors can have profound ripple effects through a site. Dan (in comments) described my dive into table-free CSS here as a “damn the torpedoes” approach, and that’s pretty accurate. CSS is a both a minefield and a cornucopia. Cross-browser testing becomes even more important than with straight HTML. But in the end, there’s so much good about it that the pain is totally worth it. Time has come to go all CSS. Someone’s got to be first on the dancefloor.

Dan is totally right : I can’t settle on a design because it makes the public happy - please don’t let the polls make you think this is a democracy - it ain’t. I just like taking pulse… and testing polling software. Click on.

Note to self: Don’t ever assume that the most popular web browser in the world, with the most amount of funding behind it, can be counted on to be standards-compliant where it counts. According to this page, CSS allows developers to use either 3- or 6-letter hexadecimal values. Some Moveable Type templates use the 3-letter hex values. But IE 5.5 for Windows apparently chokes on those, which is why Mikepop saw the poll table with a black background earlier - rather than ignoring what it didn’t understand, as browsers are supposed to do, IE chose to block out the sun instead.

With that problem “solved,” there remains the revelation that IE 5.5 for Win will shove all the right-hand nav content down to the bottom of the page if even one pixel of extra horizontal matter is present. In other words, if you have two DIVs, 70% and 30% width, and throw in a one-pixel left border on a bounding box somewhere, IE 5.5 / Win will freak out and think the content is too wide for the space, rather than including that pixel in the percentage tally for the overall page width.

Argh.

I have been invited to host a panel at this year’s MacWorld Expo on the topic of setting up OS X as an AMP-based (Apache, MySQL, PHP) web database development platform. If you plan to be in San Francisco January 7, come say hurro.

Miles working the expressions, experimenting with facial muscles and how they affect ma and pa. Watching Miles smile is like eating popcorn — once you start, hard to stop.

(Click) for 236k animated GIF

Citibank billboard on College Ave. a few days ago read:

“Try making time instead of money for a while.”

With the application of a small horizontal stroke of black paint by the invisible samizdat now reads:

“Try making time instead of money for a white.”

Absolutely astonishing report from the National Geographic Society on the state of geographical awareness among young people in the United States and elsewhere.

… fully 30 percent estimated the U.S. population to be a billion or more. … Worldwide, three in 10 couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean, which covers 33 percent of the earth. … Less than half the Americans could identify France, the United Kingdom or Japan on a world map. …

It goes on like that. Home schooling for Miles starts to sound like a better option all the time.

Went to the grand opening of the Emeryville Apple Store, which coincided with the grand opening of Yet Another Hugemongous Shopping Mall, this one like a little Disneyland world within a world - fake city streets lined with Banana Republic and Body Shop and Williams Sonoma and whatnot… The inside of an Apple Retail Store is precisely what one would expect - like walking around inside the Apple Online Store - all white diffused light bouncing off white walls and ceiling, brimming with oh-so designed Apple Toys and Apple Software… like stepping into Cult HQ, seductive and scary.

I mostly wanted to talk to the Apple Geniuses to try and find an answer to a hanging problem with CUPS printer sharing - a problem I know is not in the vendor’s driver but in Apple’s CUPS layer… but the Genius of course threw the onus for the problem right back on the printer vendor. For crying out loud, it’s an Apple bug but I can’t get tech assistance without paying for Apple Care (je refuse) and the Apple Geniuses just deflect the blame… an absurd comedy of errors resulting in Amy not being able to use our “shared” printer for the past two months.

Went into Body Time and was assaulted by no less than half a dozen moonies, er, employees all wanting me to slather myself in buckets of Body Butter, sugars, salts, aromatherapy, yoga incense, etc. I must be missing an appreciation gland for this kind of thing - I don’t know what it would feel like to come home and think, “What I want most is to slather myself in fruit-scented butter.” With them, it’s all about making one’s body into a great hunk o’ toast.

Bowling for Columbine (which I have yet to see) has put Michael Moore back in the limelight, and he’s using the opportunity to represent on fear-mongering in our culture. Fear sells, and so the media give us plenty of it. Issues that are statistically peripheral are put at the forefront when juicy. We end up thinking the world is about to implode, making ourselves sick (literally) with worry and paranoia. Example:

In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier; almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America’s youth? Why did nine out of ten believe the drug problem is out of control, and only one in six believe the country was making progress? Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story.

Moore is currently featuring a lengthy excerpt from Barry Glassner’s book “Fear” (from which the above excerpt comes) on his web site. Scary stuff. Or not.

Update: It appears that Michael Moore has been dipping his fingers into the revisionism jar — in an article on his site, he had predicted victory for Dems in the recent election. But rather than eating crow when everything turned out wrong, he took the essay down, vanished without a trace. Critics are having a field day.

My old girlfriend from Boston Pagan Kennedy wrote a piece for the New York Times, The Ballad of Conor Oberst (free reg required) about this scraggly 22-year-old musical / lyrical prodigy, pure, honest poet gone political, writing from “the Omaha of the mind” and now I very much want to hear this music.

“… if any generation ever needed a new Bob Dylan, this is the one.”

Amazon is hawking a highly-effective looking title designed to help combat life’s dark clouds through a truly unique scientific approach. Is this the book that could put self-help on the map at last? Haven’t read it myself, but feel like I’ve been exploring its methodology all my life.

Dreamed that I woke up with a note from Amy pinned to my chest:

“Scot - ran out of breast milk for Miles and had to pump yours. Took every last drop, sorry.”

The Rolling Stone is running an interview with Tom Petty in which the good man pretty much slams modern life on planet earth… or at least the music industry, rampant greed, decline of common sense and moral compass, and total lack of inspiration. Couldn’t say it better.

What happened between 1979 and now? How did we get here from there? More importantly, will music ever be good again? Will the industry just keep getting greedier and more apathetic? Ack packet via Weblogsky.

Today this amazing Flash cartoon / advertisement for Kikkoman soy sauce became the first cartoon Miles ever watched. Show Me / Show You / Kikkoman!

Spoiler: the “Souce” gets the girl.

Amy’s parents in town for a few days to meet Miles - we’re taking it slow, enjoying time together.

The common everyday EULA can become a prophylactic against prosecution for unscrupulous marketeers/virus vandals, who can take advantage of the fact that almost no one reads a word of any End User License Agreement — people just “accept the defaults” — click OK and move on. So now we’ve got commercial programs that have users agree to let them propagate, virus-style - to every user in their address books. The program / virus is not illegal, because every user agrees to its viral terms by clicking OK. We are punished for being busy and trustful.

Of course, this first incarnation affects only Windows users, and then only Outlook users. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t affect me - I don’t read the damn EULAs either.

In daringfireball, BareBones’ John Gruber posts detailed notes on how differently the W3C’s HTML validator works compared to the one built into BBEdit. In essence, both validators report different classes of errors, but that doesn’t mean that one is more broken than the other. The W3C’s will even let you set width=”fred flintsone” on a table cell without complaining. Neither validator reports false positives though - may as well use them both.

Validate? Sounds wonderful. I’m all about validation. Oh wait - I don’t have time to update 5-year-old designs, let alone validate new ones.

Finally went live with bIPlog (Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog) today - several months prep time to launch a blog, which sounds odd, but I think the quality of the posts will justify the up-front energy. More on the process here. Surprising amount of detail-y, nit-picky work behind the scenes to get ready for launch, in part a result of design by committe. Satisfying to see it go live.

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Music: Fripp & Eno :: An Index Of Metals

Count me among the growing throngs of Mac users heading for the greener pastures of Chimera. Faster and lighter than IE, better bookmarking, tabbed browsing, nice hotkeys for increasing / decreasing font size, not from Microsoft, and not subject to IE’s retarded stylesheet cacheing bug (which is murder for CSS developers) … what more could you want in a browser?

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Music: Marc Bolan and T.Rex :: Children Of The Revolution

If you put a blank CD in your Mac, you can drag files onto it, eject it, let it burn, and get a nice cross-platform ISO9660 CD out the other end. Do the same with a blank DVD and you get a Mac-only HFS+ DVD. There is apparently no way to make a cross-platform data DVD from the Finder. Of course, Apple doesn’t tell you this - doesn’t even mention it in their Knowledge Base. You just waste a bunch of money on $5 blank DVDs, thinking something else must have gone wrong, since you’ve never made a coaster with this technique before.

The solution turns out to be Toast. Hooey.

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Music: The Ethiopians :: Hong Kong Flu

Next person to say “boxen” when they really mean “computers” gets a wedgie.

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Music: Pink Fairies :: Portobello Shuffle

My dad lives up in the mountains. His life is not like yours and mine.

Thurs, I finally got a day off and planned to do so much. What happened? A major wind and rain storm came through. At 2.30 am I am buck naked on the deck tieing down tarps on my woodpiles. Swing, bar-b-q etc. It was blowing 30-40 mph, heavy rain and pine needles pelting me like arrows. Just as I finished the power went out. I cooked breakfast on the coleman stove, meditated in the dark and tried to read in the gloomy light. Thank goodness for the wood burning stove.

I read stuff like that and wonder if I’m going soft, wonder whether city life may have run its course. Wonder what I’m missing by having cushy comfort handed over on a platter day after day.

Any way you slice it, my dad rocks.

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Music: Son House :: Government Fleet Blues

Young boy next-door swinging a tree branch like a sword and making Star Wars sounds with his mouth.

“Is that a light saber?,” I asked.

The boy stopped and looked at me. “How did you know?”

“Because The Force is very strong with you.”

He made a “Pppphhhhzzzztttt!” sound and pumped his fist in the air, smiling big.

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Music: Babatunde Olatunji :: Oba Igbo

I’m not just making stuff up — foobar is a real word. … Flash doesn’t get much more Hi-Ho than this. … DecafBAD explains the Semantic Web. … The Guinness Book of World Records now discourages gluttony and foolhardiness. … Bummed that no one says “Hang ten!” anymore. … The ultimate hand-drawn digital clock. … Propaganda machine got you down? Try some remixed propaganda on for size. … From now on, any software or scripts I publish will be released under The Free Object-Oriented License. … Conclusion of this cutting edge analysis of contemporary advertising: Ads are stupid. … Don’t let your left hip know what your right hip is doing - learn the Black Bottom Dance. … These Burning Man pix are so good I regret missing it… for the 7th year running. … Bored of a Sunday afternoon? Don’t miss the Colossal Colon Tour. … How the Seattle waterfront has changed over the years. … The Best Page In the Universe. “This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.” … Step-by-step instructions: how to be Electroclash. …

“Erase the vision which has trashed this planet.”
- Michael Brownstein

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Music: 13th Floor Elevators :: Slip Inside This House

Miles won’t be two months old for another two weeks, but what the hell - he’s well into his second month and becoming more engaged by the day - everything we do, he’s involved with his eyes, with his voice, with his little body. He even offers mini-reviews on the quality of the day’s breast milk: “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm!”

So we have a new gallery of amazing Miles pix: Shades, slingshot, thumb grab, stim-mobile, naked, comfort…

Also, little Simone Micah was born to Andrew and Gina a couple of days ago - went to visit them last night - so tiny so precious. Congratulations to the Shapiro/Golleges! We’re just swimming in babies all of a sudden, and Paula/Roger’s baby is still to come.

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Music: New Air :: Apricots On Their Wings

Not sure whether to be afraid or ecstatic — Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band are reuniting after 20 years (without the good cap’n, of course). One show in LA, two in the UK. I just pray it doesn’t become an embarrassment for them, although I have confidence they wouldn’t be doing it if they’d lost their thang in the meantime.

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Music: Fess Williams And His Orchestra :: Eleven-Thirty Saturday Night

Trying to figure out why I have less than 2GBs of space left on my hdd at work — was trying to burn a DVD and didn’t have enough swap space for it. Found OmniDiskSweeper and started burrowing through hidden subdirs. Found the culprit : 650 core files of 22MBs each hanging out in /cores, totaling 21.5 GB. Deleted them all to get my drive back, but the question is, which app is dumping core so often and consistently without me even knowing, and why isn’t the system cleaning these up during daily/weekly maintenance?