i really hope anil can keep the quality up at magazine. the latest bit on microsoft's weblog software is really quiet good:

"Picture the following scenario: Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It's browser-accessible from any 4.0 or higher web browser and doesn't require Windows on the client. It leverages their strengths by integrating with Office, and there's no per-user client access fee. Then imagine if this weblogging tool were deployed to millions of users, all before anyone in the weblog community took notice.

That scenario is real."

Portrait of a Blogger :

"As blogs (love them or hate them) continue to grow in numbers on the 'net, I thought it might be useful to have an easy guide to study the habits and mannerisms of the wide range of bloggers that exist in the blogosphere. So, without any further ado, I give you a quick guide to the types of bloggers one might encounter in the vast internet universe."

Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! gives a great peak at the thinking that goes on in at a big company that's thinking about the costs and benefits of a open and closed technologies. great read. [ via cam ]

i've been contemplating putting something like dean allen's refer up to give the curious a view of where people are coming from, but have been slowly noticing the growing list of referer spam links and wondering if it's really worth it, from a signal to noise perspective.

wired news recently wrote about the growing problem of referer spam exemplified by services [sic] like mastodonte . fortunately, due in part to a cogent letter from michael kelley, mastodonte appears to offer opt out.

unfortunately this won't stop the proliferation and it'll be a matter of months before the referer logs are rendered useless under the weight of relentless spamming. sigh.

at least mark pilgrim is getting creative gay porn spam.

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way:

"In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your technical questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the difficulty of developing the answer. This guide will teach you how to ask questions in a way that is likely to get you a satisfactory answer."

curious, indeed. today, i walked into a seldom used room in our basement to discover two unused rolls of 200 speed film, a walking stick and an empty bag that would appear to hold tent paraphenelia. i'm 90 percent positive that these items weren't there the last time i went into the room and 100 percent positive that they don't belong to me or my wife. i asked kris if she knew anything about it. she didn't. odder still, she told me that she went into the basement last week and discovered the door was open, but didn't think much of it at the time as she assumed that i had left the door open. i didn't.

i guess the only logical answer is that someone broke into our house - a house with two large dogs, on a cul de sac surrounded by elderly folks and stay-at-home-moms, and left some very peculiar items behind. we bought the house from the son of a woman who had passed away unexpectedly while returning from a biking expedition in europe. i have a wacky theory that someone, perhaps a family member or an old friend decided to return a few items.

maybe it's not true, but it'll help kris and i sleep a little better tonight.

wow. jeffrey zeldman has redesigned and done away with all traces of the trademark orange hues. i like the simplicity but that background color is verging on seafoam/aquamarine blue which tends to invoke my gag reflex. i've been thinking of doing a round of cleaning on this site, but it keeps getting pushed to the backburner.

well, who knew that my syndication feeds needed a proper ISO-8601 timestamp? not me, apparently.

ending what quite possibly could be the longest, most drawn out purchasing decision in the history of purchasing decisions, kris and i bought a new car today.

and the final decision will surprise anyone familiar with the whole ordeal that's coming up on a two year anniversary. it wasn't the toyota highlander which had been a top contender. nor was it the subaru forester . and despite our brief flirtation buying american, we didn't end up with the saturn vue . you didn't really think i was going to get the ford f250 diesel, did you? no. these and all other contestants fell by the wayside and were felled by a late entrant.

we're the proud new ownwers of a jetta tdi wagon . that's right, it's diesel baby! and it holds the promise of getting over 700 miles to a tank.

i gave up a little leg room [ at over 6 foot 4 this is no small compromise ], but i'll trade leg room for biodiesel and "chipping" engine mods. whoohoo!

i might wait on printing up the tdi club business cards . then again.

every wonder how the unwashed masses are using attributes of the 'a' element? sure you have. well, now you know :

"While thinking about linking, I was curious about real-world use of attributes of the A element in web pages. After considering various ways to gather sample data to churn through, I found the Google programming contest, which links to a tar.gz file with 162 megs of sample web pages. After John Cowan told me about Yahoo's random link (http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl) and curl I also wrote a script to have curl pull down about 7000 random pages from Yahoo for a total of about 62 megs. I then wrote some scripts to analyze the use of A attributes in the Google and Yahoo sample data and the results are below."

[ via morelikethis ]

Introduction to CSS shorthand properties :

"One of the many great possibilities in CSS is the use of shorthand properties. It lets you specify several properties by using only one. If you have started learning about CSS and started implementing it on your web pages, you'll immediately see the benefit of using them. It makes it even easier for you to apply style to your markup, and it will make your CSS code shorter."

[ via glish ]

on a trip that found me passing through flint, michigan i noticed in the local rag that michael moore's latest creation, bowling for columbine , was playing at local theatres to dismal reviews. seeing the headlines took me back to my adolescent days when roger & me was opening in middle of flint's of decades long nadir . at the time it was a seminal moment and moore was a hero of sorts.

it's really impossible to describe the effect that roger & me had on me at the time, what with my father being in "management" and countless friends and aquantances being on one side of the fence or another. i mean, flint was ground zero for the 1937 sitdown strike and played an important part in the development of the american labour movement . these are powerful things to comtemplate when you're young and full of vim and vigor. so, michael held a special place in my heart over the years, rightly or wrongly. and so, it was with a sense of "when worlds collide" that i read joshua's charge that moore loses his heart :

"Now, the point of my piece here isn't to discredit Moore's flawed facts and arguments, but rather to point out what I think is a surprisingly heartless and disrespectful tack for him to take. No doubt Moore comes from an area that has its share of violence and gun-nuts. But this movie is a 180-degree reversal from the "old" Michael Moore who used to stand up for those hard-working men who enjoyed their hunting and supported the NRA. He comes across as snarky and vindictive, and leaves no room for his former base to agree with him without accepting his lopsided caricature of them. Since he started hanging out with the Hollywood and D.C. celebrity scene in the past five years, its been clear that Moore has lost touch with the common man. But the fact that he can sell out his base in such a snide, self-serving and imbalanced way; yet expect a good reception by opening it in Flint is making me think that he's lost touch with his senses, too (at least his sense of propriety)."

nope. dave doesn't like it , but there's some new xml icons makin' the scene. as per dave's repsonse, i'm leaning towards siding with olivier . then again, i'd prefer so see the whole rss icon thing slip into invisibility .

so, i drop by anil's site in an innocent attempt to get some more information on his latest project - magazine. instead, i find myself completely enthralled in the enfolding fiasco between anil and little green footballs .

i was going to write a long, rambling stream-of-consciousness style post, but then realized that rafe had already written exactly what i was going to write. only with better editing.

i stopped reading little green footballs long ago when it seemed to be getting a bit, er, unidimensional. just to be fair, i don't visit metafilter as often as i used to for similar reasons. ditto with unfiltered slashdot comments. and yet there's something unsettling about recognizing myself in anil's comments :

"I used to have strong opinions about current events and policy in my late teens and early twenties because, well, that's when those things are easy and everything yields to an idealistic world view. Today, the more I see of the extremes, and as I see every issue reduced to some binary us vs. them debate, I'm too disgusted to be engaged."

i suppose i should be happy that i'm getting my first headcold so early in the season, right? toughens things up. only the strong sinuses survive.

i'm constantly surprised at how market segmentation disguised as customer choice has reached such obnoxious proportions in the cold and flu medicine aisle. choices. too many overlapping choices.

after the upgrade to jaguar, bad things started to happen with my previously favorite os x instant messaging client of choice, fire, so i started scouting for a new messaging client.

ichat looks sort-of adequate, but lack of jabber support is a non-starter [ ironic, given the rumors that it uses the protocol internally ]. just when things were looking pretty dim [ jabberfox - i'm talking to you ], a friend points me to proteus , which is so good, it's likely going to get some money from after a few more days of testing.

did i mention that the ability to bring ssl and jabber makes me happy [ although i haven't tried it yet, so hopefully i won't be eating my words later today ]?

at the risk of being branded as all-mozilla-all-the-time, i'm going to point out that "hidden mozilla prefs" has lots of good info on, er, hidden mozilla prefs. [ via diveintomark ]

a little of this and a little of that. the kompany has released a whiteboarding client based on the jabber protocol . for the life of me, i can't tell if it runs on os x.

and from the because-you-can department, there's a Experimental build of Phoenix for Mac .

so, in the middle of the chat session about an os x hotkey combination, a friend asks why exactly it is that i keep referring to the command key as the "open apple" key. for the life of me i can't remember, but a quick googling reveals command key truth and fiction and inadvertantly reveals just how old school i am:

"Old-time Apple II users will note that even on modern Macs, such as the iceBook I am using to type this article, there is an Apple symbol on the same key. Beginners sometimes call this the "Apple key" for this reason. Old-timers call it the "open-apple key," because on the old Apple II there was a dark Apple key ("closed Apple") and an outline Apple key ("open"). Eventually the second one was dropped."

Ldap Address Book Editor:

"LABE is a web application created to administrate a centralised LDAP directory, compatible with Mozilla, Evolution and Outlook."

[ via a frog in the valley ]

mozilla 1.2b has been released with many interesting enhancements , including the much talked about "type ahead find" . personally, i'm not so sure i see the benefits of "type ahead find" over regular ol' find, but maybe i just haven't played with it enough. thankfully, everything seems a bit more stable on jaguar and i'm back to crash-free browsing. the install broke my orbit theme , but that's o.k. because i installed the new version and was pleasantly surprised to see that it now comes with new and improved, smaller widgets. woohooo.

all this comes on the heels of me becoming more and more of a fan of chimera on os x. there's a boatload of functionality and components in the application that i just don't use [ i.e. composer ] and am slowly getting to enjoy the latest chimera nightlies . two points are keeping me from switching over completely. chimera now happily imports mozilla bookmarks, but doesn't easily export them back into the native mozilla format. import sans export always makes me nervous. i guess i don't understand why i can't define an url to my regular mozilla bookmarks and just share the same bookmarks between the two applications. secondly, despite howls of laughter from the peanut gallery, i'm going to admit to liking mozilla's e.mail component. i have high hopes for thunderbird - the stripped-down mail component which is being spearheaded by blake ross . why don't i just use the os x mail app ? because its support for message threading sucks.

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data :

"The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona."

how much can one malamute miss his best buddy in the world? and how mean can one neighbor be? well, i now know. the following is a transcript from an anonymous neighbor who left a note on our door today:

"You have such a beautiful dog & it's a pity to hear him cry + scream all day. If you don't love your dog you should not have him. someone might report you to animal abuse. It hurts to hear that dog cry so often."

needless to say, mauja doesn't seem to be dealing so well with the loss of harper.

i can understand a neighbor being irritated by a distraught malamute when they don't understand the extenuating circumstances, but it seems like if you're going to write a note like that you should at least leave your name.

mauja has been so sad lately. and if you know malamutes you know there's nothing more pathetic than a morose malamute. they don't bark. they howl like a very lonesome wolf. loudly. and very, very sadly.

Venkman, the new JavaScript Debugger for Netscape 7.0:

"A powerful new tool is available for web developers in Netscape 7.0. The JavaScript debugger, also called Venkman, has been a part of the Mozilla browser and the community of web and script developers there for some time. This article provides an overview and some practical examples of using the JavaScript debugger in web applications and web page scripting. This introduction is the first in a series of DevEdge articles on Venkman and JavaScript debugging. Even if you are already using Venkman, the features, procedures, and tips described here will make you a more confident web developer and debugger."

[ via glish ]

my eyes keep getting attracted to tinderbox reviews.

i'm such a cheapskate though. it's hard for me to get past the $145 price tag.

funny. "Google Needs People" has a central thesis that sounds mighty familiar:

"Like the fabled creatures of mud and sticks, Google is a golem, an inanimate jumble of algorithms and interfaces, held together by the connective tissue of links.

No people. No links. No Google. "

maybe it's because i wrote about a similar idea over a year ago in response to cory doctorow's evangelism of "implicit metadata" in metacrap :

"in fact, the author seems to be arguing that automated "implicit metadata" is the way to go. but who decided that there was a complicated and reliable relationship between linking and relevancy?

a warm body. "

interesting. the best IA tool you never heard of is tinderbox?

"Tinderbox does an incredible job as a note-taking, brainstorming, information-gathering tool, working much like your brain does to allow you to capture, link, and organize ideas in a flash. It really shines as an IA tool. It allows you to quickly prototype maps of information, establishing links between ideas (or pages or nodes), sites, or other files. Tinderbox is the perfect replacement for those "sticky note" sessions so many information architects are used to. Just start brainstorming, get all the elements that need to be on your site in one place, view them in one of five different views, arrange, link --and you're ready to go. Tinderbox even exports as HTML, so it's possible to create entire prototype sites from your Tinderbox sessions."

"XP distilled": Customer and management practices:

"Roy Miller completes his review of XP practices by exploring the customer practices and management practices. The customer practices address the issues of determining which features should be in each release. The management practices help management give business direction to the entire team and keep them focused on the problem at hand. With the programmer practices and joint practices discussed in previous articles, you'll now have the complete picture of XP practices."

don't mind me, i'm just installing jaguar after doing my best to pretend i'm a laggard.

i just did the standard upgrade and things went o.k. for some reason i feel like i should do a clean install though.

[later that same night: hey. that wasn't so bad afterall. took me longer to back everything up. you know, just in case. everything seems smoov.]

hey, arts & letters daily closed up shop.

Old-boy network's power exposed:

"By considering various possible networks in a board of ten members (a typical size for a corporation), the researchers show that each network can be assigned a 'force' which measures the likelihood that the board will approve the CEO's proposal. If the board has, say, three links between members (a link indicates that they sit on an outside board), then 40% of the possible networks have at least a 75% chance of approving the proposal. For a non-interlocked board - one with no old-boy network - this chance is close to 50:50, as it should be. In other words, even a small amount of cliquiness can make a big difference."

following cam's lead, i decided to see if the vast wasteland was being filtered in china. indeed, it was for most of the day today, but has recently become accessible. my china filtering sources tell me that this is completely normal day in the life of a web access to us sites in china.

congratulations and a hearty happy birthday movable type! it's amazing that it's only a year old.

today harper went to the vet and didn't come back. after almost a year after we discovered that harper had epilepsy, we decided to have him euthanized.

even though i could rattle off the rationale for why it was best for everyone involved, it was impossible to stay composed as i opened the car door and let let him jump in - seeing how utterly and completely overjoyed he was at going somewhere, anywhere, in the car. turning left onto a main street, just a few miles from the vet, from the back seat harper sticks his head out the driver side window - his big, floppy ears flopping in the wind right behind my head; i catch a driver stopped at the cross street light crack a giant grin at the sight. harper pulls his head in and vigorously licks the back of my head and ear just like he always does when he's really, really happy.

i tend to think of myself as a bit of a modern man. i do dishes. i get a little misty eyed during certain movies. i don't think i have a problem crying in public. and yet, i was hoping that i could muster a modicum of composure while talking to the vet and her assistants. i had grand plans of maintaining a cold, clinical distance from the actual specifics of the situation. of course that's not the way it turned out, and before i knew it i had the assistant and the vet crying.

i don't remember much of the conversations. mostly everyone just reassuring me that i was making the right decision. that there really wasn't anything left to do. that i somehow hadn't put much thought into what i was going to do with his remains. that cremation really isn't that expensive. that i had to decide if i wanted to see the procedure. that even though i'd probably regret it later, i couldn't. that if i wanted i could stay with him as long as i wanted.

then his lease comes off and is neatly folded and handed to me, replaced with a green, cloth leash. the door opens and an assistant calls for harper in an oddly cheery tone, presumably to not get him anxious. the vet hands me his leash and says she'd like to walk me outside. we walk down the hall, as i make clumsy attempts to gather my wits. the door opens into the lobby and everyone looks up. i see the other customers slowly put the pieces together. teery man with neatly folded leash. and no dog. immediate sadness on faces and quick looks to their own dogs.

i come home and mauja is very upset at having been left out of the car ride fun. and then he looks puzzled when he sees harper's leash in my hand. i see him quickly deduce that he's been tricked and harper is either upstairs or outside. he runs everywhere and then gives up and decides that he's going outside to guard his rawhide that he likes to tease harper with.

it's natural to try to draw some lesson from all this. this wasn't the first pet that i've seen killed or put down, so why was it so difficult? i think it might have been because he was so young - not even three years old - and so, so completely devoted to you when he wasn't having seizures. his sole desire in life was to be as close to you as possible. and because of that near infinity of love that almost could vibrated from harper, you wanted to do everything you could to make him happy. but in the end, we learned that disconcerting lesson that everone learns the hard way.

sometimes everything you can do isn't good enough. and that's o.k.

somehow i missed the news that mozilla's usage share is rising. suuure, microsoft may still dominate the browser scene, but it's nice to know that a few people are exercising their right to choose.

harper's epilepsy is getting bad enough that it might be time to take him in to be euthanized. he had another seizure last night, after only going seven days seizure free. before that he had 4 seizures over eight days. his motor abilities and disorientation are getting worse in the post ictal phase. mauja is getting more and more upset at harper's seizures and it's possible that he'll do something to harper if he has a seizure and nobody is home. and to make matters worse, he has started to vigorously shake his head after a seizure as if he's trying to get water out of his ear. he did it continuously last night from midnight until 5:30a.m. the vet has pretty much said that there's nothing more that they can do and that more he has seizures, the more he'll have seizures.

somehow, i guess i need to bring myself to take harper to the vet tommorrow, which is such a shame for a dog so young.

slashdot picks up wired picking up the changes in the pagerank algorithm that lay at the heart of google. mark pilgrim's excellent writeup figures prominently in the emerging story.

i have no doubt that google will continue to tweak the tweaks to reduce the collatoral damage that some are complaining about. i think it's a bit premature to begin speculating that this is the begining of the end of google.

ben hammersley has been pointing to some interesting apps, such as peek and pick, for java-enabled phones:

"PeekAndPick is an application that runs on any MIDP device. It allows you to browse news headlines and story descriptions, select stories that interest you, and have their links e-mailed to your desktop.

PeekAndPick helps you get more out of your day. It gives you the opportunity to sift through news headlines, wherever you are, whenever is convenient to you. After you select the stories that look interesting, links to those stories are e-mailed to your desktop. At your desktop, simply open the e-mail and presto, you have a highly targeted set of links that you can follow to catch up on the news. "

it looks like a fine time for me to dig out the the data cable for my nextel i85.

Genetic algorithms, the next generation :

"Ted takes you another step towards working with genetic algorithms in Perl. He picks up where his first column on genetic algorithms left off, working with a listing that looks for a set of dictionary words in an individual's DNA."

yeah. there's nothing like ripping up carpet. that your epileptic dog has urinated on. repeatedly. ugh.

intrigued by bill humphries' description of inluminent as, "the world's only non-work-safe Mac blog", i just had to take a look. proof once again that sex can sell just about anything. i guess i'll stop there before i dig myself a gargantuan hole.

the new jabber.org site sure does look purty. congratulations to peter and everyone else for putting in the hard work.

so, i'm cringing at the absurd levels of superdorkiness as i glance at yesterday's oh-so-earnest post on the peculiarities of my own site's url structure.

and then, with impeccable timing, i stroll over to rafe's discussion of url aesthetics, which is far, far dorkier. but in a good way:

"Some of the things I'm particularly fond of are URLs that include a query string immediately after a slash, without a filename. For example, a URL like /stuff/?do_something is always interesting. Only slightly less interesting are pages that include query strings after what look like static files, like index.html?id=100. "