Yep, it’s now running Typo. I can’t seem to get lighttpd and FastCGI running, so it’s just CGI for now. I’m going to be screwing around with things a bit, so if anything is broken, relax, I’ll get to it.

I haven’t watched much CNN or other major network news since they started putting way too much data on the screen. I’ve maintained that if you think you’re getting more news faster that way, you’re wrong. Now there seems to be data to back that up. From a recent Kansas State University study

“Our conclusion has been that if you want people to understand the news better, then get that stuff off the screen…The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content”

Steven Johnson drops an excerpt on us from his book. It’s meant as a thought experiment about playing video games vs. reading books, and succeeds. Here’s a snippet…

“Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.”

Sorry to bother y’all again, but I’d appreciate it if you would stop listing trackbacks at the end of every blog post. In many cases, the most interesting parts a post are found in the comments, but wading through the trackbacks is as annoying, and usually less useful, as wading through a half-dozen Google ads. On this site it would go something like this…

I say “foo” in a post and it is well-written and terribly interesting…

Then come the trackbacks….

Hey, Jack said “Foo” (link to someone’s site here)…

Guess what, Jack said “foo” again (link to another someone’s site here)…

“Foo” seems popular, as Jack mentions in his weblog (yet another link here)…

And so on for about 3 screens. Any valuable commentary regarding a given post will show up in the “sphere” on its own. And besides, you don’t need to show me links to your article. Since I just read it, I’ve likely already found it. There are, I suppose, arguments that these links are helpful in some way, but usually it’s simply the circle-jerk vanity fest we bloggers love so much.

I’ve seen a number of rants recently complaining about HTTP misuse, many of which were triggered by Jon Udell’s End HTTP abuse. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong, the problem is that much of the real world doesn’t care. I’ve written APIs which use HTTP GET to alter server resources. Guess what, it worked! It’s not technically correct (at least not read-the-RFC correct), but it got the job done, and continues to do so. The folks a Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us did the same thing - and those services and APIs work also - for a whole lot of folks. From the Udell article…

“GET’s purpose, however, is only to retrieve information. When you offer a service that updates a resource, you should disallow GET and require clients to use POST”

It’s not a matter of right or wrong. I think it’s an issue of solving today’s problem vs solving tomorrow’s. Besides, when’s the last time anything great resulted from using something in only the way it was originally conceived?

Please don’t highlight table rows on mouseover.

Thank you very much.

I don’t think the Adobe buyout of Macromedia has anything to do with Flash. Does Flash actually generate any significant revenue? I admit that I don’t really know, but I doubt it. I don’t think Adobe gives a tin shit about Flash. It’s not like they’ll ignore it, I just don’t think Flash is the reason they’re here. Same for Dreamweaver. They were never that interested in making GoLive any better, why will it be any different with Dreamweaver?

I think they’re after the enterprise customers that Macromedia is likely much closer to. Flash is probably part of the plan, especially when they stir the PDF and Flash soup for a bit. This is not an original thought, but one I agree with.

And for all of the designers out there crying about the shaky, unknowable future of Dreamweaver - get over it. If Dreamweaver goes away, there are only 10 or 20 viable alternatives you can use to hack together your web pages. Besides, it’s all been downhill in dedicated HTML editors since Macromedia bought Allaire (and so also, Homesite) anyway.

Update: Please ignore most of what I just said. I really have no idea what I’m talking about and I’d hate to confuse those who might mistake me for someone who does.

Well I’ve narrowed it down at least. It went like this: I’d used Firefox on Windows since it was like Phoenix 0.5 and never even considered IE after that. It kept getting better and better, with oodles of extensions to keep me busy. No problem. Then, I switched to a Mac, thinking Firefox would follow me along, and it did - for a while.

Funny thing about Macs is they remind you that software that “feels” good is more fun to use. In this respect, Firefox on the Mac fails. Non-standard widgets, no (built-in) spellchecking, no services, and so on. I then tried Safari, which was faster and looked better, but it seemed a little feature poor. Then I tried OmniWeb and loved it. Try the thumbnail tabs for a day and you’ll never want to go back, especially to the bland, monochromatic bla in Safari. I had my services menu, workspaces, text area editing additions, draggable tabs, you name it. I also had a number of problems. It crashed pretty regularly and was generally slow. Having nothing better to do late last night, and hearing that 1.3 was released with the latest OS X update, I decided to try Safari one more time. Still not enough features, but very fast. This was good. A quick Google search or two found what so far have been some of the missing pieces for day to day browsing. Saft, for draggable tabs, workspaces, auto save, control-drag and other goodies. SafariStand for history search and a few other goodies. The developer tools aren’t quite up to the wonderful developer toolbar for Firefox, however.

So for now it’s Safari for general browsing and Firefox for development. Of course the new version of Opera is almost here…

I started using OmniWeb instead of Firefox a couple months ago and so completely missed GreaseMonkey for Firefox. In case you’ve been living in my neighborhood (ie a cave) then you should really try it. From the site…

“Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a webpage’s design or interaction.”

First thing I did was check out the extensive list of scripts at the GreaseMonkey Script Repository. So far, my browsing experience has improved in the following ways…

• GMail’s inbox now has a “Delete” button (which Google should’ve put there from the get go)

• Flickr’s Flash presentation of images (and notes) are replaced with the original jpeg and a lightweight AJAX interface which loads much faster

• CNN no longer has a column full of Ads (especially the slow-loading, browser-crashing Flash ones)

There are about a hundred more that I’ve not yet tried, but many of them look very useful.

For as long as I can remember, 90% of my meals have included ketchup packets and a less than heartfelt “have a nice day” from the young person smiling blandly through a drive-through window. Not good. Recently I’ve been trying to turn this around by actually cooking my meals. So far, it’s been fun and somewhat successful. I have cookbooks and there are plenty of helpful websites. Pictures help! One thing that many cookbooks lack is practical instruction on the actual food preparation. They tend to assume I’m not an idiot with a knife or other utensil. This assumption could get someone killed. Today, Kottke pointed me to a great, illustrated article on handling a knife and using to cut things (that don’t bleed afterwards.) Very helpful.