Ghost of the Machine

When I started working primarily out of my home, last August, I faced a small dilemma: the ancient Dell desktop machine (1.9Ghz, single processor, 1G RAM, 75G hard drive) I'd been using as a testbed for web technologies couldn't come with me. This troubled me, not because it was a great machine or because officially retiring the hardware meant filling out paperwork, but because I had the development environment set up just so*. Also because I knew from painful past experience that the moment the old workhorse was out of my grasp, someone would send me an impassioned email, wanting me to do some of the C++ mainframe integration work or PHP scripting that it had been set up for.

So, before I turned in my paperwork and turned over my equipment to become part of a plastic-wrapped cube of dead electronics waiting on a pallet for transfer to some Chinese landfill**, I did some reading and figured out how to make a virtual copy of the machine's hard drive, which I could then use something like VirtualPC or VMWare to create a virtual machine, once I found a server on which to do so.

Which I never was able to do, because, apparently, a company the size of the one that employs me makes money by not giving anything away, not even to its own employees. It's never in the budget. So old FOORIDER-D4400 (not its real name any more than FooRider is mine) sat quietly on my external backup drive for the better part of a year, not compiling anything, nor accepting Windows updates, nor serving up documentation from its local IIS server.

That is, until earlier this week, when the dreaded words, "Say, we need you to do some mainframe COBOL work for us." For that, I would need my old terminal emulation software (the installation disks for which I'd pitched when I cleaned out my cubicle, last August, and so couldn't install on my current laptop), so out of storage came the image of FOORIDER-D4400. I had to spend a few minutes with VirtualBox (apparently, the major VM players can all read one another's virtual hard drive formats) to set up the machine, but then it came right up, like the hologram of Arnold Rimmer, minus the chrome "H" on his forehead.

Upon reflection, maybe I should have let old FOORIDER-D4400 rest in pieces.


* Translation: "everything was more or less working together in relative harmony" – a rarity, in my line of work.
** I have some lingering doubts about how the recycling of electronics is really conducted, you see.

Fontish self indulgence

I know that I sometimes veer a bit too far into the realm of geekdom for the tastes of some, but I hope you'll bear with me today, as I share a couple links.

Scratch, Chicken. Scratch.

Sometime between when the nuns gave me poor marks on my report card for holding my pencil “wrong” and my twenty-something years, I developed an artish passion for handwriting and calligraphy. The most significant result of this was the not-infrequent comment from others that my handwriting looked like a girl's – their way of saying that my script was, at the same time, pretty and legible. Later, I took an interest in the study of graphology and became reasonably adept at it (but that's another story).

Over the years, the advent of e-mail and an increase in the amount of time I spend keying computer code have taken a toll on my handwriting. While still arguably feminine-looking, my script now appears less like that of a sophisticated Jane Austen type and more like that of a psychotic ex-girlfriend who provides the inspiration to pack everything in the car and just skip town in the middle of the night.

It seems the folks at Smashing Magazine share my nostalgia for the bygone days of handwritten correspondence. Check it out.

Got Grunge?

At the other end of the spectrum are those fonts that have been created to intentionally create the impression of crud and untidyness. You see them everywere, from the handbills advertising bands at the local rock clubs to the titles for televised sporting events.

While I was at the Smashing Magazine site, I just had to check out the link for one of their earlier postings, “63 Must Have Grunge Fonts”.

I can tell the available hard drive space on my home computer will be decreased by several megs, because there are more than a few of these I'll have to have.

IE8 on Acid(2)

In a move that almost certainly had nothing to do with Opera's lawsuit [cough], Microsoft has announced that an in-development version of Internet Explorer 8 has successfully rendered the Acid2 browser test.

Taking this announcement at face value (no pun intended), one might be tempted to think that Microsoft's browser development team has finally seen the error of its non-standard rendering ways. But... I've been verbally abusing Microsoft for a long time and can't just turn on a dime. I'm skeptical.

True, it seems that years of pressure and ill will over the debacle that was IE 6 have convinced Microsoft that it can't just run rough-shod over the W3C recommendations that standards based browsers follow. The IE 8 announcement makes some pleasing noises in this regard, but it seems to me that there's also quite a bit of tap dancing going on:

When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”

Which, to me, reads a bit like – and I'm quoting my internal paraphrasing here – “We see Firefox's market share increasing and feel Safari and Opera nipping at our heels, and we admit that there's a demand for standards compliance. But we're Microsoft, dammit. We'll comply with the W3C standards where doing so is to our advantage and continue to push our own where it isn't.”

Hand me my pith helmet, Livingston...

...I'm on Safari.

Ever since I became interested in developing standards-compliant web content, using semantic mark-up and CSS, I've tried to keep a representative sampling of browsers and different versions of those browsers on the various computers to which I have access. All well and good, as long as we're only talking about Windows boxes; but what about the bunch of you Apple devotees?

When Emma first posted about browsershots.org, I rejoiced. Finally, I'd be able to see my pages as they rendered on Safari and other non-Windows browsers. The catch is that lots of web developers (and wanna-bes) rejoiced, as well, the result being that there's usually a long queue of other sites waiting for their screenshots.

This morning, I learned that Apple has made available a public beta of its Safari 3 browser for Windows XP and Vista and, although I wouldn't quite say I rejoiced, I did promptly download and install the thing to add to my collection.  It probably does not render XHTML/CSS in precisely the same way as earlier Mac-only versions do, and so doesn't replace browsershots.org in utility, but how can I pass up another weapon in my standards compliance arsenal? 

Attention, entities of the earth

My fledgling attempts to learn HTML and create a web site came 'way back in 1995. My goal was to create a web presence for my family's genealogy research. Since much of that research is riddled with German, I frequently found myself in need of umlauts but never often enough to justify the mental real estate to memorize the HTML entities for the decorated characters.

Enter Leftlogic's HTML Entity Character Lookup tool. Now, instead of Googling all over the web for a long list of HTML entities that may or may not give me what I'm looking for, I can now enter a character that kind of looks like the one I want, and the tool shows me a list of candidates. For you fans of the forbidden fruit, there's even a dashboard widget you can download.

Sweet.

A time for Heroes

...and Chuck.

I've been seeing the amusing and slightly mysterious teases on NBC for the last week or so. Tonight I finally took the bait and wandered over to the www.chuckssecret.com web site to see what the deal is.

The fact that I'm now eagerly awaiting the Fall premier of this show probably reveals more about me than I'd like, but I can't wait. Based on the preview, Chuck looks like Get Smart meets Gotcha meets Clerks, with maybe a bit of The Office (if The Office took place in Best Buy and if it was funny).

The flip side of Mac & PC

No matter which side of the issue you come down on—or if you're like me and don't really care—you've got to admit that as spoofs go, these have the originals dead to rights.

Now playing: Spock's Beard, The Kindness of Strangers

Ahhh...

The first week back to work after the holiday trip was reasonably calm; but after being off work for ten days and quite a few days during November, as well, four days seemed like a very long week. I'm getting back into the swing of things, though.

Turtle and I have been chipping away at the task of getting our new laptops set up the way each of us like things. Unlike Bret's new baby, ours aren't the fanciest or the fastest of Dell's line (or anyone else's), but they're nearly as fast as the four-year-old machine I use for my daily development tasks at work. That's a huge improvement over Turtle's old Toshiba, which had a pronounced tendency to lock up while trying to load just the antivirus software.

Aside from the speed increase and the ability run applications that were unavailable to us with the old Win98 machine, the most pleasant surprise is how much more sensitive the internal wireless card seems to be than the Linksys wireless-g card we were using on the old laptop. Add to that the relative simplicity of connecting to a new wireless network under WinXP using Dell's wireless connection manager, and life is going to be much easier for Turtle. One of the main reasons for her getting a new laptop was so that she could use it from her rented office space and... oh... the sort of upscale coffee shops where she tends to meet with prospective clients and collaborators. She never could get the old laptop to connect, because the process was just too fiddly.

For my part, I'm quickly becoming spoiled by the wide, crisp LCD display that at the same time is sharper and brighter than my flat screen monitor at home and handles wide content better than my cathode ray monitor at work. The Synaptics pointing device was a bit awkward, at first—I was used to the old laptop's "nubbin", which I could use without moving my fingers from the home position—but I'm getting used to it. Enabling the scrolling gestures and modifying the hot spots to my own preferences helped.

The new machine's battery actually holds a charge, and with that comes previously unexplored mobility. Unless it's during the day when I'm at work, you'll never know where I might be blogging from. This has been quite handy, this weekend. We've kicked off the new year for the Ride of Silence™, which means that I've had a torrent of e-mails from event organizers confirming their information. Each of these must then be update in the database and activated for display on the site. I've been hauling the laptop with me wherever I go in the house so I can keep working. Sweet.

And the heat generated by the thing keeps my lap warm.