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Thursday, August 23, 2001
I'm angry, NuSphere, a company whose distribution of MySQL, PHP, and Apache I've used and even helped support with a kind word in a press-release or two is playing dirty pool. Specifically, they're in violation of the GPL. You can read about it at MySQL.com. I should note also that NuSphere has bought the domain name to MySQL.org so it can put on a nice open source face while still violating one of the licences that makes open source possible.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2001
Still on the old movies kick. Recently watched To Catch a Theif and A Streetcar Named Desire. Too busy to note much more than that.
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Sunday, August 19, 2001
Yesterday was Jamkat's birthday. We joined him a JRs for a drink or two. Over the weekend, we hung out with him and his girlfriend Anne and watched Blackboard Jungle which was uneven but worth watching. Gina and I also watched An Affair to Remember and Waiting for Guffman.
 
I can remember when HTML didn't have a tag for underlining and you had to use _Underscores_ to simulate it. I'm getting old; that's all there is to it.
 
Cool open source goodness: the latest release of AbiWord is out. Grab it and quit using Word.
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Thursday, August 16, 2001
I've been reading Don DeLillo's latest novel, The Body Artist. So far, it's great. If you've never read DeLillo, check out White Noise. So now I can move one book from the list of things I should be reading to the list of things I actually am reading (and that's a good feeling).
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Sunday, August 12, 2001
Finished the Martin Scorsese documentary. Tasty quote from the end of it: "[movies] fulfill a spiritual need that people have--to share a common memory." Worked quite a bit on Tawn's site. The demo version is here (this is the IE5/Win version. It won't look as good on a browser that correctly implements the W3C standards).
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The entire promise of CSS (like the promise of Java) is that you can code something once and forget it. For the now hopelessly out of date 4.x browsers, there was no way to get your layout to look the same cross-browser and cross-platform without using browser-sniffing techniques along with separate pages or at least separate CSS files. The situation is much improved with the 5.x browsers (IE5 and NS6) but IE5 for Windows (the most popular browser in the world) does a really bad job with the CSS box model. Which means you still have to do browser sniffing and separate CSS files (one for every other browser in the world, and a special one for IE5/Win). This sux, of course, but it's what you have to do if you want pixel-perfect layouts without resorting to Flash. So I'm in the process of transforming my old JavaScript sniffer into a (much improved) PHP sniffer, which I'll release in the WheatApps section as soon as it's finished.
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Saturday, August 11, 2001
Cool things I picked up at the local public library today: Charles Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, Pat Metheny Trio 99 --> 00 w/Larry Greenadier & Bill Stewart, Various artists The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz Vol. 5 (revised), Martin Scorsese A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (two-DVD set), and Sham Bhangal Foundation ActionScript (cool book on scripting Flash 5). With all this good media out there for free, why do I ever bother turning on the TV? Answer: I shouldn't.
 
I will finish Tawn's project today or die trying.
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Friday, August 10, 2001
While cleaning out some storage space at work yesterday, someone found an Apple IIgs (the complete system with two floppy drives, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and printer). I tried to fire it up, and it does, but it doesn't seem to be able to find its operating system. I did a little research on the IIgs and on old Macs in general (since I've owned a few in my time). It's pretty facinating stuff, in fact. I also found an Apple IIgs emulator for Win32 that lets you relive the experience on your modern PC (you'll need a rom image and some software, which you can get here).
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Wednesday, August 08, 2001
Web designers who prefer hard coding to WYSIWYG apps tend to come in two varieties: those who really know their stuff (and hard code because the WYSIWYG app slows them down or limits them) and those who know practically nothing about design or coding but who just think it's cool to do things the hard way. It's possible to migrate from the latter to the former, but it takes a long time to do it. As for me, I prefer to hard code most things because when I started learning coding all the available WYSIWYG apps sucked (we're talking early versions of Netscape composer and FrontPage).
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Time to ramp up on Tawn's project and finish it (fear not, muchacho). I'm going to have a lot of extra time starting tomorow. So all is good. I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
 
Looks like the lab we've been talking about creating for over a year is not only going to happen, but is going to happen very soon. I (re)priced the desks, instructor's podium, and projection schreen today. We already have about half the boxes we need and a projector. So I'll price more boxes tomorow.
 
The other big work project has to do with the distance tutoring program that we're rolling out this fall. So far, we already have one school on board. Now we need two more. Shouldn't be too hard to get them to play ball. It's pretty win-win for them. We set up cool gear in their lab and show them how to use it. All we need is first dibs on it when our kids are in a (scheduled) tutoring session.
 
The other other big work project is the new Online Learning Center. But I'll riff about that in another email.
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I know it's trite, but here is a list of my favorite things (to be expanded, of course). Along with it, I'm also putting together a reading list of things I'm reading or shoud be (and if the fifteen or twenty minutes of Big Brother II I watched last night isn't motivation enough to find something better to do with my time, I don't know what else could be. I was overwealmed with disgust. This is what we call entertainment? I'd rather watch a car rust. I feel I'd benefit more from it. Don't get me wrong: I watch a lot of crap tv. But maybe I've just had my fill. Or maybe Big Brother II is crap even compared to the run-of-the-mill crap).
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I'm trying to get the old archives (from July -- October 2000) up and linked, but something's not working.
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Monday, August 06, 2001
Clever: An anonymous hacker with a good sense of humor hacked one of my pages recently. The page is a guide to Linux. He added an entry called "Hacked" and defined it. True to his (her?) word, no other files were touched (in fact, the intruder didn't even upset the pattern of indents in the code for the page). So here's a sincere thank you for the security heads up. I'll try to learn from it.
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Sunday, August 05, 2001
PB's quotation gallery has always been one of my favorite islands of sanity on the web. Read and grow wise.
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Do this now, you won't regret it: It took a long time, but the folks at Mozilla have finally released a web browser that beats the pants off of Internet Explorer. Run out right now and download a copy of Mozilla 0.9.3. It rocks. (For those of you who don't keep up on open source computer things, Mozilla is the development version of the Netscape web browser. Every once in a while, a version of Mozilla is farmed off as a new version of Netscape. But the Mozilla versions are cooler and always more up to date. So why bother with Netscape when you can have Mozilla?).
 
Happiness is an updated homepage. I spent the last hour tweaking up wheatdesign.com. There's still more to do, of course, but I'm liking it better all the time. The main change was to farm off the offsite links onto their own pages. I think this keeps it better focused.
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If it's too loud, you're too old: The only bad thing about playing with Nancy is that it screws up my sleep schedule. Headline shows in Fayetteville start late (typically 12:00 a.m. to 1:45 a.m.) and by the time you get paid and load out gear, it's 3:00 a.m. Tack on an after-show trip to Denny's and it's 4:00 a.m. :) When I was younger, and had chronic insomnia, none of this would have been out of the ordinary. But now that I've (for the first time in my life) started getting up early (which has been great, actually, and a real stress reducer), it's harder to work in. This is a small gripe, of course. The show last night was great and the crowd was wonderful.
 
Tawn came up from Texas to catch the show, which makes the first time I've seen him in person. We had a nice visit, though I was too busy with the show to talk much. Gina kept him entertained, and we did have a late-night meal (the above-mentioned Denny's exeperience)_to catch up on things. Hopefully, we'll have many chances in the future to talk and catch up.
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Friday, August 03, 2001
I've been up late coding Tawn's site (advisornews.com), but I still haven't uploaded anything because the server that hosts his accounts (cihost.com) has been down since around 5:00 p.m. today. I have most of the content ready to go with the exception of the buyer's guide section (which I couldn't access due to the server outage). I've also been working on a little PHP browser sniffing code to work around some problems with MSIE5/Win's interpretation of the box model. The first browser detection script I ever rolled was done in JavaScript. Jesus, it's so much easier to code things in PHP that I just can't express it fully.
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Thursday, August 02, 2001
I ended up staying home yet another day to fully recover from the tooth extraction. But now all is well. I spent today back and work and had my hands full but in a good way. I spent a good part of the day making sure our machines all have the latest virus definitions (thank you Norton). I also cleaned up the lab PCs and installed the latest Mozilla browsers on them. I discovered that the newest version of Mozilla supports the JavaScript scrollto function, which means I can start working on my design gallery again (I couldn't stand that it would only work in IE5), though I'll have to add a bit of browser-sniffing code to warn people with older versions of Netscape/Mozilla 6).
 
Gina and I are going out to dinner tonight with my friend Page and his mother. We're eating at a restaurant that hasn't officially opened yet. I guess it's the dining equivilent of beta testing. Should be fun. Page, by the way, plays in a great death metal band called Vore (if you're into that sort of thing) and has been one of my best friends for fifteen years.
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music writing computing life design