Month: January 2004

Morning coffee notes

A few quick ones. I’m working from home this morning, waiting for the slick ice on our hill to melt enough so that I don’t kill someone trying to go down to the office. I may have to leave anyway, though, as the power has flickered here more than once already.

Real HRs and faking them properly

I finally got around to putting in proper HRs in my CSS and in the sidebar. The redesign uses a fleuron from the Cronos font (in which the other fleurons and my page title are set) where a horizontal rule would normally go. Of course, this looks pretty silly in Lynx. So I turned to Dive Into Accessibility to see how HRs should be “faked” using CSS. It turns out to be a pretty simple trick involving background images and HR display rules, though of course there are some hacks required to get properly degraded behavior in downlevel browsers. Anyway, the point is, it worked. You may need to refresh the page to get the updated stylesheet to load properly, but once you do, you’ll see the fleurons and downlevel and text browsers will see horizontal rules.

Snow? In Seattle? Quick, start a blog!

I just got a reminder that the amount of snow that has fallen is never the issue; it’s how the infrastructure deals with it. In the case of the Seattle suburbs, that would be: not well at all. We’ve only had a few inches of snow here, but there are no snowplows, no sand trucks, no salt spreaders, nothing. I made the mistake of leaving my laptop at the office, so I had to go in and fetch it—and see the madness first hand.

I think I’ll get out of here before things get too much worse.

In the meantime, I found this Snow Storm Blog at the Seattle Times pretty amusing.

Mind blown, courtesy the Guardian

Looks like I’m about to be published in another international newspaper. This time it’s the Guardian, who are doing a piece about the phoneblog exhibition I pointed to a while back. I’ll put the pointer up as soon as I see the article.

Just a side note: this is definitely another case where my participation in the blogosphere—by which I mean blogging, photoblogging, and reading other sites—has led me in some unexpected directions.

RSS luv

Two quickies and then I must sleep:

  1. RSS feed (scraped) for news updates from the Mars Rover landing. Subscribed, as Dave would say.
  2. I’m looking at the new feed: URL proposal. While I understand the technical arguments that a lot of folks are making—that this should be a MIME type, not a URL type, since the feeds are still fetched by HTTP, I can’t argue with the end result. One click subscriptions are the one feature I really missed after I migrated from reading RSS in Radio to other aggregators, and now it looks like there’s an emerging cross client consensus on how to make the feature work everywhere—for instance, in NetNewsWire. Right on.

Trackback and validation, and CMSes, and …

Scoble says that the Radio trackback feature (which is implemented identically to the Manila implementation on this site) makes his site fail validation. Frustrating when a useful feature like that has to be turned off, but I understand the pain; I’ve been working on validation myself.

At this point there are still a bunch of errors reported by the W3C’s validator, none of which I can do anything about. They all have to do with ampersands in URLs in my articles. Ampersands are commonly used in URLs when there are multiple arguments. Manila thinks that those ampersands should be represented by actual & characters (and enforces this in its managed content), while the W3C validator insists that, at least for HTML 4.01 Transitional, the ampersands must be represented as &, even in URLs. So there’s nothing I can do; the site is as valid as it’s going to get.

(Incidentally, if anyone has Manila spitting out valid XHTML, I’d love to know. It would be nice to get off HTML 4.01.)

For more info about CMSes and HTML validation, there’s a great interview with What Do I Know’s Todd Dominey over at WebStandards.org.

First ski of 2004

Lisa and I went back to Snoqualmie today for another half day ski. The difference is that we had our own boots and brought our rented skis with us, both courtesy REI. We are definitely getting into skiing as a serious lifestyle, and we figured ski boots were the right place to start investing in gear. Man, were we right. My feet feel so much better than they ever have after skiing.

The skis were a mixed blessing. On the plus side, we paid $10 less per pair than we would have at the mountain, and didn’t have to deal with the line (which cost us almost an hour on Monday). On the minus side, the skis were crappy. I don’t know if all Rossignols are bad, or just the ones we’ve rented. But then we did rent them on Saturday.

And, oh my goodness, it was freezing up there. Icy road conditions from Issaquah all the way to the summit, and about 7° F on the slopes. (Fortunately it warmed up. A little.) But good skiing, even a little fresh powder on the slopes, which for Snoqualmie is really saying something.

Mars: US 4, Europe 0

mars spirit

You’ll have to forgive the highly Americentric tone of the headline, but when I saw that NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover “Spirit” landed safely tonight, just over a week after Europe’s Beagle 2 disappeared after its descent to the Red Planet, I had to let out a cheer. Just remember: I’m a child of NASA, and though my Dad had more to do with Aeronautics than Space, I grew up on tales and photos from Pioneer, Voyager (I was in an auditorium at Langley when the first pictures of Saturn came back from Voyager II), and the original Viking landers.

Tonight’s landing of the “Spirit” marks the fourth successful landing that NASA has managed on Mars, starting with the two Viking landers, going on through the Pathfinder, and (alas) the loss of the Polar Lander in 1999.

This was a heck of a landing, too—check out the 19 step plan posted here.

Update: Susan Kitchens blogged the landing from the Planetary Society event in Pasadena.

IE 5 CSS bug: fixed?

I think I fixed the CSS bug that was causing my site to crash IE 5 on Mac OS X. The offending rule was for list items inside unordered lists inside the .navContainerSide class, which are specified as floating—apparently having floated list items breaks IE 5. I used the Comment hack to hide the offending CSS from IE 5 and it now appears to work. Please advise if you’re still having problems reading the site with a particular browser.

RSS feed rankings

Dave is collecting RSS subscription lists in a new application on Scripting News. With an n of 51 subscribers giving their information, the top five feeds (out of 100) are Scripting News, Wired News, Scobleizer, Boing Boing, and the Doc Searls Weblog. This is what is meant by non-representative sample; still it gives an interesting insight into the people who are participating on the RSS-user list.

I’m less interested at this point in who is being read (we have plenty of other tools to tell us that) and more in information about peoples’ reading habits. How many feeds, on average, do people subscribe to? What is the blog-feed to non-blog-feed ratio?

New Years’ dinner: a new tradition?

Last night, Lisa and I took it easy on dinner (after a holiday week with ham, turkey, seven fishes, pork tenderloin, and stuffed flank steak), with a “light” dinner of lemon risotto and grilled shrimp.

Tonight, by way of compensation, we, um, went whole hog. I wanted to use lentils and pork, combining southern and Italian traditions. But I didn’t want to do pork for the main meat. So the final version: Leg of lamb, lentils with pancetta and prosciutto, and asparagus. The lamb was rubbed with garlic, rosemary, olive oil, lemon zest, and sea salt and roasted medium rare; the asparagus, steamed, then dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. The lentils took a little longer. I rinsed them in cold water and drained them, then cooked pancetta and some prosciutto (aside: prosciutto ends for less than $5? priceless), added onions, stirred in the lentils, then slowly cooked them while the lamb roasted.

With a 2002 Bordeaux from Rothschild: fabulous.

And, omiofriggindio, am I heading back to Weight Watchers after this is over. Although, I only gained a pound and a half over the holidays.

Agrippa makes it to the big time

The New York Times reports on a new exhibit of letterpress books from the 1990s at the New York Public Library. Among the books listed is William Gibson’s legendary (to some, anyway) book-length poem, Agrippa (a Book of the Dead). This collaboration between Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh, produced in an extremely limited edition, featured photosensitive prints and the text of the poem on a self-encrypting floppy enclosed with the book; the poem could be read once, in theory, and then never read again.

I remember at the time Agrippa came out, when I was in undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a habitué of Usenet, that it was fairly shortly after the publication of the book that the text of the poem was available on Usenet; in fact, it’s still on my hard drive, three Macs later. Gibson himself isn’t complaining: “there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don’t have one myself. Meanwhile, though, the text escaped to cyberspace and a life of its own, which I found a pleasant enough outcome.” His official website has an official electronic text of the poem, including my favorite section of the poem, the transition between the first two stanzas:

“Papa’s mill 1919”, my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of cut lumber,
might as easily be the record
of some later demolition, and
His cotton sleeves are rolled
to but not past the elbow,
striped, with a white neckband
for the attachment of a collar.
Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.
(How that feels to tumble down,
or smells when it is wet)

II.

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.