Up to Pioneer (near Tahoe) for late Christmas, joining Mom and Dad, brother John and his fiancee at Dad’s cabin. Slipped in under a major storm set to dump Saturday night. Mid-way through the day a dog followed us home from a hike - name of Faith, phone numbers on her tag but no one reachable. When the snow started we took her door to door in the car looking for an owner, no luck.

Snow tumbling furiously and sky cracking, made a makeshift home for her in Dad’s basement, then took off in his 4WD to move our cars under the snowline so we’d be able to get out next day. Bad timing. Took forever to get down the hill, cars spinning out all around us, snow falling so thick we could barely see to drive, even our 4WD w/snow tires having trouble and sometimes sliding.

On way back up, they closed the road in front of us. Too many accidents, too much risk. Got stuck eating bad calamari in a pizza dive while they plowed. Meanwhile Christmas dinner was getting cold at home. One of those moments that would be a lot more depressing if the adventure weren’t so ripe.

Three hours later back to the cabin safe, then an hour into dinner the power blew, leaving us with his pot-belly stove and candlelight to finish dinner. Didn’t stop us. Egg nog w/brandy and a whalloping game of Cranium by candlelight.

In the morning, found 18″ of snow on ground at 4,000 ft. Won’t get to snowboard this trip, but that’s okay. It’s Miles first snow.

More thinking about the disappeared content on Byte.com, more discussion with other Byte editors and writers, and I finally decided to go ahead and post complete BeView archives here on birdhouse. Left behind the new subscription curtain, the articles are effectively hidden from search engines and the rest of the world, and no one is going to subscribe to CMP just to read my crusty old nuggets. A piece of computing history will be lost forever if I don’t crack them open. So the archives are now open for all, in all their occasionally embarrassing glory.

Endless debate with audiophile friends over whether “perfect” or “CD quality” audio can be achieved via MP3, regardless of bitrate. R3Mix.net offers the best collection I’ve seen of facts, data, explanation, tests, and observations on the nature of “perfect” digital sound as it relates to compression and commonly available encoders/decoders, etc. I do disagree with the author on some points - I’m still no fan of VBR, which he advocates, and his Myths page would probably send chills down the spine of most hardcore audiophiles. Still, lots to learn at the site. Their Quality page points to the largest real-world MP3 quality test I’ve heard of, involving 300 audiophiles and conducted by c’t magazin. Conclusion: Transparency (inability to distinguish between CD original and compressed MP3 versions on $15,000 worth of audio equipment) happens at around 256kbps. Wish there was a good English translation of the test page.

Thanks to David Huff for the pointer.

Very scary first-hand report by an accountant on how he and his 7.5-month-pregnant wife got borked by the system while going through airport security: Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wife’s Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There?. It’s dire out there, and getting worse. Merry Christmas.

Came up with a fairly simple method to stick random quotes into Movable Type pages (requires PHP).

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It is astonishing to see the effect television has on Miles. We’re not even sure whether he can focus on objects across the room, but if the TV is on, he’s glued to the set. He has no language comprehension and no idea what the forms on the screen are doing, but he is absolutely mesmerized by the dancing pixels and shapes. We can even be standing in the kitchen with him and see him craning his neck to see the TV in the living room. It’s the primordial modern babysitter. No matter what our ideas are about shielding him from TV’s influence, one glimpse is all it takes. Heroin for babies.

We don’t really worry about this rabid attraction to the tube. TV’s negative side is its trashy programming. But it’s not about content for infants - they just like the light forms, and at that level, it’s no worse than watching his mobile, which he can also watch for half an hour at a time. We also have a lot of fun setting him on my lap and running the iTunes visualizer full-screen - he’s equally mesmerized (Daddy’s a sucker for that game too ;)

In the past week or two Miles has learned to grasp intentionally, rather than randomly. He now holds his pacifier in his own mouth, and can hold a stuffed kitty to his chest. He grabs Amy’s hair, buttons on my shirt, etc. He was doing some of that earlier, but now it seems very intentional. “I want that.”

Yesterday he started making raspberries with his lips, buzzing and flapping through the drool. The cool thing is we can do it call and response. I’ll raspberry and he’ll raspberry back, and so on. Drool volume is way up - we think he may be in the early stages of teething.

Lucky neighborhood, I guess… at around 10:45 pm Friday night Amy and I heard a loud crashing and grinding sound, followed by an engine revving high. Came outside to find two pickup trucks on their sides across the street from us. In the GMC a man was struggling to get out. Me and two other bystanders helped him out of the passenger door (which was on top), I asked if he was OK (he was) and went inside to ask Amy to call 911. When I came back out, bystanders said he took off running toward Telegraph.

Oakland PD arrived in minutes and I gave a statement to an officer who did NOT believe the vehicle was stolen. Even for joyriding, he said it would be very rare to steal a rasty old pickup like that. Stolen joyride vehicles are almost always upscale. If the car was not stolen, the driver may be easier to track down.

The only way I can figure the two trucks ended up this way is if the GMC actually drove up the side of the Toyota at angle, pitching himself up and over as if rolling off a highway median.

So let’s see… there was the pickup that plowed into the side of the house farther down on 66th a couple-three years ago. The ramming of Cecilia and Mark’s car a bit ago. The similar incident outside of Sudi’s house a bit later. And now this.

Neighbors: If you must leave the house at night, wear helmet and pads. At this point, I think you have a better chance of being run over by a wilder than you do of being mugged.

And we’re going to raise our kid here? Right.

You’d think we would have had enough of Survivor after five seasons, but it’s a guilty pleasure. Once again, I come away from the season with two core observations:

1) Everyone (not virtually everyone, but everyone) looks better with a few days stubble, no makeup, a natural tan, their hair unkempt, a chilled out ‘tude, and no shoes on their feet than they do when they get back to the studio for the follow-up, when you see them in their hair-dos and Sunday-Go-To-Meetings.

2) Democracy is the ultimate leveling mechanism, shaving off both the weak at the bottom and the strong at the top. Trimming out the strong personalities, the good fighters, the smart puzzlers. The winner is always nice but not too nice, gentle but not too gentle, helpful but not too helpful, etc. The winner is, almost by definition, above average, not exceptional. Survivor is a microcosm of our own political system.

Web usability expert (I know he’s controversial) Jacob Nielsen has some good observations in a CNET piece on Flash usability:

Most mistakes are the results of designers and developers overestimating the average person’s familiarity with technology and trying to cram too much onto a Web page, Nielsen said.

“If we leave developers to their own devices, they create complexity,” he said. “It’s in their genes to love creating new features. You end up with software that’s mainly accessible to other geeks.”

Hmm… sound familiar?

In the past few weeks, Searchling has risen to the status of “most useful software on my computer.” Sits quietly in the menu bar. Responds while in any application to Cmd-Opt-/ hotkey with a small popup text field, cursor already positioned, ready to search Google, IMDB, VersionTracker, Dictionary, MacOSXHints, or pretty much any site (choosable with a picklist, configurable with a text editor). Search results sent to the preferred browser.

If there is such a thing as software Zen, this is it.

For reasons that are opaque to me, an inordinate number of people without basic grammar skills go into, of all things, sign-making as a profession. The result is the ubiquitous phenomenon of quotation marks used inappropriately for emphasis. I was on a Muni train today and saw a professionally printed sign reading:

“WARNING”
You are being videotaped.

In other words, the San Francisco surface rail system is not really warning you - just air-warning you. Pretending to warn you. Mock-warning you. “So-called” warning you. Got to joking with a MacWorld editor about this phenomenon and he turned me onto The Gallery Of “Misused” Quotation Marks, an archive of misused quotation marks in the wild. Hilarious.

Was also amused by the resemblance of this site’s name to my own Archive of Misheard Lyrics.

Reminder for anyone who signed up for Mac.com - you can have 100 free Kodak prints generated from your iPhoto collection if you jump on it before Dec. 31 - a $50 value. At the risk of sounding like an Apple shill, you should see Amy and I gathered around the digital hearth, poring over pictures of Miles in iPhoto, using all the fancy features like cardboard cutout consumers… almost saccharine. She’s even more hooked than I am. I come home daily to new rounds of Miles pix. You think I post a lot? You should see how many she takes! It’s kind of weird… she’s got such a long history in analog photography — an MFA in photography, years as a photo teacher… but she got so hooked on the PowerShot and iPhoto that she only shoots digital of Miles… has hardly pulled out the 35mm cameras since he was born. But we’ve had nothing to send to relatives, so we jumped on this tonight and selected out the best.

National Geographic has begun to place their amazing 114-year history of photographic images online in low-rez, watermarked format. I’ve always had a special connection to National Geographic — my parents subscribed throughout my childhood, and I took in much of the world beyond through its pages. This is the kind of database project I would love to have worked on.

I have a few problems with the site, such as the fact that they call the shopping cart the “Product Cart” (like the music biz, all the heart and soul of the artist is boiled down to simple “product”) and the server timeouts calculating totals. I like the concept of having a “lightbox” to store the images I’m interested in.

If you follow through to the shopping cart, you’ll find that you’re charged according to the kind of use you intend to make of the media. I told them I wanted to use an image for a Web editorial for up to five years and was asked to pony up $240.00. Which seems like a lot in the context of a web culture where everything is (seemingly) free, but is really not much when you consider the real and authentic art of the photographers and the integrity of the publication that makes it happen.

In any case, it’s great to see this archive become available.

Every year I forget how much effort goes into the holiday CDs - building the perfect playlist, burning a pile of non-coasters*, making the playlist fit onto a printable square, selecting cover images from old National Geographics, gluing playlists to backs of pictures, labeling discs, finding envelopes, writing notes, going to the post office… and I love it all. Great way to spend a rainy weekend.

* Never made coasters on the Mac before, but for some reason having a lot of trouble lately - I always liked Sony blanks best, but they’re crapping out now, one after t’other. Switched to Memorex and turned down the burn speed, seems fine. What the heck has changed between last year and this?

ORA blog: Our home printer sharing issue has finally been solved. As it turns out, CUPS has a nifty http interface, which becomes available as soon as you enable printer sharing - just hit http://localhost:631….

Taking the associative database concept one step further, Recommended Reading will examine your web site and recommend other sites you might like to watch … Did Bill Gates really say this? … Who can tell their arse from their elbow? … Careless use of fonts can lead to misunderstanding … Dancing Spidey renews my faith in the coolness of animated GIFs — and I’m not even a big Spidey fan … Was recently reminded that the wayback machine can be used to dig up truly ancient pages and sites - try visiting the site of an old employer or something - scary … Remember when the Incredible Hulk and friends were advertising Hostess cake products in the pages of your favorite comics? … Use Entourage rather than Mail.app (like me) and wish iPhoto’s “Mail” feature would export images to Entourage? You need the iPhoto mail patcher … The W3C has completely redesigned their site(s) with CSS, just as Wired did a while ago and I’m planning to do at the J-School this summer … This saucy vicar ruined Christmas for a bunch of kids, telling them that Santa would burn up from the friction of traveling so fast if he was real … A chair slips on a pile of spaghetti, which is great entertainment if your’re insane (nice Eno/Budd soundtrack though!) … Think the press is rightward-leaning? Right … America is having technical difficulties, please stand by … who is the single most influential media reporter in the world? … Swell rapping horsies (click on them sequentially) … A bar where the drinks are named after famous artists - I’ll take an Yves Tanguy, straight up - Nice Bosch sequence … Hunter S. Thompson: Dumbness deserves no sympathy (don’t settle for second hand hasish smoke) … You’ve never heard “YMCA” sung like this … One of the great things about moving from LiveJournal to Movable Type is that you get a lot more comments from nut-jobs.

A flag … flying free in a vacuum
Nixon sucks a dry martini
Ghosts of american astronauts
Stay with us in our dreams
      - The Mekons

I’ve always hated the industry trend toward capitalization of the words “internet” and “web.” The arguments in favor of capitalization are that one or the other are proper inventions and thus count as proper nouns. Other arguments maintain that because “web” comes from the acronym “World Wide Web,” it should carry the capitalization with it from the acronym.

I don’t buy either argument. Lots of things are invented but aren’t proper nouns. The internet isn’t a product like a Yo-Yo or a Segway. It’s a technology, like “computer” or “radiation.” These words are no more deserving of proper noun status than are “power grid” or “sky.” Heck, we don’t even capitalize “earth” in most contexts.

Nevertheless, more style guides and publications are formalizing the capitalization of these pedestrian terms, elevating them to a god-like or person-like or country-like status I don’t think they deserve.

Just attended a demo of Macromedia’s new product Contribute, which is designed to provide an easy way for non-web-staff people to add to or modify content on a web site. This could potentially be very useful to me at work where staff and faculty have a lot of plain content to get online - this could relieve a lot of the burden of tedious, repetitive conversion of text data into simple pages.

It does a lot of things very well, e.g. lets you drag a Word doc right into a template body and have its contents cleanly formatted and inserted into the template (rather than dealing with the rat’s nest of spaghetti that Word generates on HTML output). Allows for restriction of users to given directories. Lets you force no FONT tags, force users to title their documents, etc. Upload is virtually transparent.

On the other hand, it’s tricky to imagine how something like this could integrate with a fuller Content Management System, where content would be stored in a database and which would provide lots of other benefits but probably wouldn’t offer WYSIWYG editing, etc.

Oddly, there is no server component to the system - it all runs with keys that are sent to the user and interact with the desktop app to restrict access as specified by the administrator. Kind of weird to think of running security that way, but I can’t actually think of a hole in the system — it’s just weird.

Hmmmm… will have to ponder this one. I’m very shy of proprietary solutions, trying to do everything open source here, but damn, this is a good product for what it is.

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Odd how many people have commented that Miles “seems like an old soul” or has “ancient eyes” or similar.

An interesting blog variant - commit to writing exactly 100 words - no more no less - for one month. This forces concision and a form of poetics you don’t often see in weblogs - sort of a long-form haiku. The sister of a friend of ours came up with some beautiful entries, mostly dream.

Funny how StarOffice gets all the press for being the best alternative to MS Office — compared to Gobe Productive, StarOffice is an ineffectual pig. Gobe was forged from old Claris Works engineers dissatisfied with Apple, who went off to develop BeOS software. I wrote quite a few glowing reviews of Gobe Productive during the Be years, not just to be a cheerleader but because Productive truly rocked. They were doing stuff with cross-app data integration that Microsoft hadn’t even dreamed of yet — one app to handle spreadsheets, word processing, graphics, illustration, and presentations, shifting seamlessly between modes in a single document. Awesome.

Be belly-flopped, and Gobe did Windows and Linux versions of the product. Then the dot-com teat fizzled and Gobe hit hard times. For a while there’s been talk that Free Radical Software was going to buy the Productive license from Gobe and open source the product. But they too are cash shy, so now organizations like BeUnited are going door to door to raise collaborative money (more discussion). An open source Productive would benefit users of all platforms (even Windows). Yes, there’s got to be a good Office alternative for the open source crowd. No, StarOffice ain’t it.

It is surprisingly difficult to get rid of old classical LPs. When I inherited the capiz shell stereo console, a couple hundred of grandpa’s old classical records came along for the ride. Most of them are very good, but neither Amy nor I are huge classical fans, and we have no place to store them (I’ve already consolidated my LPs to just what will fit in the console).

So I selected out a few keepers and took the rest to Amoeba and Rasputin’s. Each store wanted about 2% of the collection, and offered nickels and dimes. As in, $1 for a big stack of great old records. The problem is:

• This stuff was being pressed for decades - there are zillions of LPs out there.
• So few are in good condition today.
• Most people have replaced their vinyl collections with CDs.
• Classical music appreciation is at an all-time low.

Put these factors together and there are way, way, way too many classical LPs on the used market. My problem was not that I wanted money for the records - I couldn’t care less. What I wanted was to find a good home for them - I didn’t want them to end up at the dump, or unappreciated. It was the music collection of my grandfather’s life, the LPs I remember him listening to in the 60s and 70s. Amoeba said they would be willing to take them to the dump for me if I agreed to take less money for them. Rasputin’s agreed to take them all for free and put them in their discount bin. I just wanted someone to listen to them again, so left them on a counter and walked out.

It’s over. LPs are over, classical is over, grandpa is 15 years dead. Moving on.

Not all bugs are IE’s, and Chimera’s CSS implementation isn’t always perfect. Every CSS spec I read says:

An element’s padding is the amount of space between the border and the content of the element.

So setting padding:10px; should not cause the border of a box to move - it should cause the contained content to be pushed in, as with the padding attribute for table cells. But no… Chimera pushes the DIV boundary out instead, forking up the design. This is solvable by creating a new containing class and applying the padding on that. Not elegant, but seems to work in all CSS browsers.

Update: As far as I can tell, this is the official bug report on the issue. Scanning through the comments is an object lesson in just how difficult it can be for browser makers to interpret the W3C’s recommendations. The Mozilla team really cares, but even with the requisite will-power, some ambiguities are difficult to resolve. Kind of like Biblical or Constitutional interpretation — except that in this case the framers are still alive ;)

Since posting a couple of days ago about how Byte has erected toll gates around a decade’s worth of historical computing content (including two years worth of my own), some very interesting threads have been exchanged between Byte authors in private mail.

Everyone understands the advertising crunch, everyone knows that salaries have to come from somewhere, but no one likes the remedy, or is even sure that it is one. No matter how you slice it, Byte has broken probably tens of thousands of incoming links to piles of historical technical content. For virtually every person following one of these links, the “Please register!” page they meet will simply be a dead end.

The author’s rights are just what our original contracts say they were. As it turns out, we have the right to repost content as submitted on our own sites three months after it appeared on Byte. Of course, that would still leave the content hovering in mid-air, unconnected to the rest of the Byte and CMP empires, and without their masthead, without the Byte imprimatur. The meat without the dish.
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Byte.com just announced that they could no longer cut it on the advertising model alone, and moved to a subscription model. $12/year gets you into all of the CMP web properties. That’s all well and good, except for the fact that most of the best technical content I’ve written is now stuck behind the CMP tollgate, inaccessible to all but the most committed readers. This effectively punches a big hole in my resume, and I’m already getting mail from people wanting to know how they can read a copy of “Who Controls the Bootloader” and other pieces. There’s got to be a better way. And if I knew what it was I’d be rich.