By anders pearson 27 Jun 2003
the <a href=”http://www.webstandards.org/“>WaSP</a> has a new <a href=”http://webstandards.org/opinion/archive/2003/06/27/“>opinion piece</a> on microsoft’s recent announcement that MS IE on both windows and mac will cease to be developed as free standalone products.
now is probably a good time to mention that i am a WaSP <a href=”http://webstandards.org/about/bios/apearson.html”>member</a>.
By anders pearson 22 Jun 2003
for future reference, i’ve collected all the little sketches i’ve posted here over the last couple years in <a href=”/images/sktchs/“>one place</a>.
By anders pearson 20 Jun 2003
our gerbils managed to get mites somehow. not a big deal but annoying to the poor little guys.
so last night, lani and i instituted a little mite holocaust. we took the gerbils out of their cage and let them run around in the bathtub while we disassembled the cage and cleaned it thoroughly. then, before they went back in, we sprayed each of them with some kind of anti-mite spray.
in the process we’ve learned several things about baby gerbils:
i’ll post some pictures later when i have time.
By anders pearson 18 Jun 2003
i finally broke down last week and got a digital camera. i already have a really nice manual 35mm SLR that takes fantastic pictures. it’s just big so i never carry it around, setting up shots takes too long so whatever i wanted to shoot is usually gone by the time it’s ready, and i tend to just scan the pictures in anyway so i can put them on the web.
so my priorities for a digital camera were that it be small so i could easily carry it everywhere and automatic so i don’t have to spend a lot of time setting up a shot. with a little help from <a href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/“>peter</a>, i settled on the <a href=”http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxoptios/“>Pentax Optio S</a>. it’s 3.2 Megapixels, has a 3X optical zoom and is small enough to fit in an empty Altoids container.
so far i’m quite pleased with it. it really is tiny and light. i can just stick it in my shirt pocket and have it with me 24/7 in case i see anything photo-worthy (like the <a href=”/nodes/4601”>ass pizza</a>) while i’m walking around. the pictures that it takes are high enough quality for my purposes (i’m not exactly planning on doing poster size blowups anytime soon). i’m just worried that since it’s so small, i’ll end up losing it.
but until i lose it, expect to see more pictures posted here.
By anders pearson 16 Jun 2003
folks in the webdesign community today have been linking to and talking about this <a href=”http://www.alistapart.com/stories/accesskeys/“>ALA article</a> about <a href=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#adef-accesskey”>accesskey</a>.
i’m all for accessibility for web-pages and applications. but i have to ask if the use of <tt>accesskey</tt> is more or less obviated by mozilla’s “<a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/typeaheadfind.html”>find as you type</a>” feature.
i hate mice and strongly prefer using the keyboard for as much of my interaction with my computer as possible. until mozilla introduced find as you type, browsing the web was about the only computer activity i engaged in for any substantial amount of time that i actually had to use my mouse for. (<a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/bash.html”>bash</a>, <a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html”>emacs</a>, and <a href=”http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/“>ion</a> being my other main apps).
now, with find as you type, i almost never need to use the mouse except when i hit the occasional flash site or sites that use graphical elements for navigation in ways that make it difficult to tab to the link i want.
to me, find as you type just looks like a better designed solution to the problem of navigating the web using only the keyboard than <tt>accesskey</tt> does. the big problem with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that it requires webmasters to specifically add it to every site. in mozilla, find as you type <em>just works</em> on <strong>every</strong> site (well, every site that uses text-based links for navigation). no extra development work needed. with <tt>accesskey</tt>, users have to learn a whole new set of shortcuts for each site they visit. that means that designers must somehow provide visual cues for the user to let them know what shortcut is for each link (the ALA article gives some excellent advice on how to do that). find as you type works the same on every site that it works on. another subtle issue with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that someone has to come up with all of the mappings. this leaves a lot of room for overlap and confusion. does ‘h’ mean “home” or “help”? what happens when you have 100 links on a page? do you actually expect a developer to sit down and try to come up with a shortcut for each of them? they certainly aren’t all going to make sense let alone be obvious.
the only big problem with find as you type is that it’s only available to users of late-model mozillas. hopefully that will change someday.
as far as i can tell, just about everything that can be done with <tt>accesskey</tt> can also be done with find as you type and there are far fewer problems. so why do we still care about accesskey?
By anders pearson 11 Jun 2003
each user diary now has its own RSS feed. just append ‘/rss’ to the url. eg, mine is at <a href=”http://thraxil.org/users/anders/diary/rss”>http://thraxil.org/users/anders/diary/rss</a>.
since auto-discovery is cool, you may also want to add some code to the <tt><head></tt> of your diary template like so: <tt><link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”rss” title=”RSS feed for my stupid diary” /></tt>
By anders pearson 10 Jun 2003
the other week the sci-fi channel was showing a movie called <a href=”http://us.imdb.com/Title?0264508”>Dagon</a>, which was loosely based on HP Lovecraft’s <a href=”http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/works/innsmouth.htm”>The Shadow over Innsmouth</a>. as a Lovecraft fanatic, i had no choice but to watch. unfortunately, as i’ve pretty much come to expect from HP Lovecraft stories turned into movies, it really sucked. they moved it from new england to the coast of spain which seems criminal to me since the new england atmosphere was so important to Lovecraft. they added a few characters, changed the plot so it doesn’t really make sense anymore and destroyed what was left with bad acting and cheesy special effects.
why has no one ever been able to make a decent movie out of a Lovecraft story? more importantly, why has no one ever really even tried? all it would take would be a half-way competent director and a little bit of a budget to hire a cast that can actually act and slightly better than B-movie special effects.
thisBy anders pearson 02 Jun 2003
too much going on for me to post anything lengthy, but here’s the brief summary of the last week:
went to boston for <a href=”http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/“>OSCOM 3</a>, which was ok. stayed with kam out in mission hill. got to hang out with <a href=”http://www.goatee.net/“>joe</a> between sessions. tuck came down thursday night and we went out to see <a href=”http://www.prickmusic.com/“>Prick</a> play at the Middle East. i didn’t have very high hopes for the show since Kevin is notorious for not liking to tour or play live. i was pleasantly surprised to find that they are fantastic live. played almost all of the first album, including ‘Make Believe’, which i totally wasn’t expecting. i felt bad though because there were only about 200 people at the show. at $10/ticket, there’s no way the band was operating at a profit. hopefully they had more people at the (better advertised) long island show the next night.
friday night, through a miracle of organization, we managed to get me, <a href=”/users/tuck”>tuck</a>, <a href=”/users/emile”>emile</a>, <a href=”/users/kamden”>kam</a>, <a href=”/users/jere”>jere</a>, <a href=”/users/matti”>matti</a>, nigel, teri, and eventually <a href=”http://www.superultramega.com/“>jP</a> all together for vegan chinese food and drinks. those of us who were left at midnight went out and saw <a href=”http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/findingnemo/index.html”>Finding Nemo</a>, which was quite amusing after all those beers.
saturday tuck, kam, and i only left kam’s apartment to pick up some chinese take-out from down the block. the rest of the day was spent watching movies, playing GTA: Vice City, and working our way through a case of PBR.
sunday morning was dim sum in chinatown with jP, his brother, and some assorted other folks and then heading back to nyc.
while i was gone, lani and i’s gerbils gave birth to four little baby gerbs. i guess that answer’s the questions we had about what genders they are. we didn’t even realize that they were pregnant. the babies are tiny, hairless and have little stubs for tails. if anyone wants a couple, let me know in the next few weeks. leftovers get donated back to the pet store.
By Mark Boudreau 01 Jun 2003
Nullsoft, makers of the handy little mp3 program Winamp, released a pretty neat secure p2p/im client for a small secure network on Wednesday. They called it WASTE. AOL, who owns Nullsoft, didn’t like the legal liability that this application created, so they had Nullsoft pull the plug.
<p>Luckily, the <span class="caps">WASTE</span> site was <a href="http://www.freedomware.org/waste/index.html">mirrored</a>. I think it’s worth checking out. The source is available for anyone that wants to pick up the slack.</p> By heather mascianica 28 May 2003
email is becoing to cumbersome.
<p>i suggest a thread here for planning furture get-togethers. last time we comepletely lost jere. the time before we we hours late. so lets post all upcoming events here (including meeting places and times and cell phone numbers) and if you would like to joint the party or have alternative suggestions, just say so.</p>
<p>new year’s at jere’,s of course, is mandatary. and everymone must come. with booze. and the rest.</p>