dannyman.toldme.com

I must recommend this New York Times article about Microsoft’s attempt to develop a Google-class search engine. It pokes fun at Microsoft with dry wit. Some highlights:

The new look consists of an empty white screen that loads blissfully quickly, even over dial-up connections, and an empty, neatly centered text box where you’re supposed to type in what you’re looking for. The search page is ad-free and, except for the MSN logo, even devoid of graphics. (On July 4, however, MSN added a waving-flag graphic, an imitation of the way Google’s witty artists dress up its own logo on holidays.) In short, MSN Search couldn’t look more like Google if you photocopied it.

…

Unfortunately, Microsoft calls the separation of advertising an experiment, not a permanent change in policy. It seems to be trying on honesty in the mirror to see if people will find it attractive, rather than realizing that running a principled business is the way to win customers’ trust.

If you read the whole thing through, you’ll discover that Microsoft has a long way to go to achieve its search-engine dominancy.

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I recently installed WordPress, mostly out of curiosity. My web site has evolved over many years from static files, to using stylesheets, and some lightly-templated formatting to facilitate the creation of an RSS feed. While I have maintained a “log” for a few years now, I’ve always been wary of the whole self-important, vapid, “blogging” stuff.

Well, I saw Keith Garner using it, and I liked the idea that it was a rewrite of some previous software, and had a plug-in architecture, so I thought I would try it out. The install was easy enough, and then I got hooked in to the possibility of importing my data from into via an RSS file. There was some wrestling involved to hack the migration script to eat my raw HTML, and a bit more to get my scraping script adapted to output the appropriate HTML via RSS, but lo and behold, everything made it in.

And I got to tweak the look and feel a great deal with the stylesheet, and by editing the index.php directly. It has all the bells and whistles. Like, comments, which I’ve never had before, but a few people have asked for. And then all this gay backtrack stuff and pingback and backflip and blogflop and whatever. Okay, it promised to be easy to install and support all the silly jargon that I don’t care about, personally. Yay.

And for the most part, it has been comfortable. I get to put things in categories. The categories can be organized hierarchically, but any given item can have more than one category. I can maintain a list of links that can be displayed in the side menu bar. No really serious god-awful, show-stopping bugs …

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I really really enjoy using Firefox as a web browser. It is a stripped-down, development version of Mozilla, which is what Netscape became. Among the best features of this web browser are tabbed browsing, where you can keep several navigation panes in one window, and click among them by selecting them via tabs at the top of the window. The browser also tends to do a better job at standards compliance than MSIE.

Firefox also has a plug-ins architecture so programmers can add features to the basic web browser, and share them with users who might enjoy those features. I just reviewed an article from Wired News that talks about some of the more popular plug-ins. From reading this article, I have now got BugMeNot and Dictionary Search installed here at work.

Other plug-ins which I use and love:

Tabbrowser Extensions

Gives you more flexibility in managing tabs. With this plug-in, I can middle-click links into new tabs, force web sites that open new windows on me to put those windows into tabs, and configure Firefox to save and reload tab sessions when I exit and re-start the browser. Tabs means fewer windows all over the desktop, and saved tab sessions means I can pick up where I left off with all my web browsing without leaving the computer running at night.

Adblock

You know how pleasing it is to put commercials on mute, or better yet, fast-forward them with the TiVo? Well, the web works the same way. The basic Firefox already has an option to block images by right-clicking on them. With Adblock, you can right-click on an annoying image, and you get a little window asking you to edit the URL, so you can put a * on the filename, and block all ads that match a particular pattern. Some folks just adblock stuff like */ads/* but I only turn ads off when they annoy me. The slickest part might be that you can block stuff like shockwave animations, which normally give you a shockwave menu when right-clicked.

I think I should also give a shout out to Moji, which will someday help me learn Japanese. With the click of a button, you can get a web page set up so that you can hover over words and get their English or Japanese translation. Yayoi was impressed when I showed her.

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You know that feeling after a long weekend where you’re too full of food and relaxation to bust your butt doing work?

I’ve had that feeling all day. Half hour ’til I can go home, relax, and hop on the bike with Yayoi and we can get our metabolisms back.

I started writing metabolia, but the only hit returned by the dictionary was:

0-12:30 djh@ratchet ~> dict metabolia
1 definition found
 
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
 
  Metabola Me*tab"o*la, Metabolia Met`a*bo"li*a, n. pl. [NL.
     See 1st {Metabola}.] (Zo["o]l.)
     A comprehensive group of insects, including those that
     undegro a metamorphosis.

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Last night, while trying to get some sleep, past midnight, bangbangbang a constant sound in our neighborhood, I bragged to Yayoi about how spectacular the fireworks were in our own neighborhood. boom boom bang bang boom boom kids setting stuff off in the streets, and prettier stuff going off overhead. The best stuff was behind Wells High School, where they were shooting off very pretty lights into the sky, that were accompanied by very loud explosions – M80 at least. Walking down my own street at one point I had to turn back and run away from a roman candle that had fallen over and was shotting sparks toward me.

“I hope that Baghdad is quieter than Chicago tonight.”

Yayoi agreed to that.

I look forward to when those 130,000 soldiers can peel off their sweaty body armor and enjoy July 4th at home. Back home, we know how to party. It was all I could do to drag myself from slumber this morning to stumble in to work, where I’m spending the day on my own projects, while answering what ought to be highly infrequent calls from customers requesting server reboots, which I relay to the Datacenter Technician.

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Well, the family just left, and Yayoi is down at Navy Pier with Brian and his sisters to watch the fireworks. So, I have the place to myself. Time to check out this new software.

Yesterday I had to Google for “how to tie a tie” and I found that the third hit returned was the best one. So, I mention it here in the hope that this page will get a better placement. We went off to Li Chun’s wedding, in Chinatown. It was a spectacular affair. About 80% of the thing was in Cantonese, with some translation into English. The wedding banquet was a twelve course meal, give or take, of top-notch Chinese food. If you want to hear see what a Chinese wedding banquet is like then you need to procure yourself a copy of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” which would give you a fair idea of what ours was like. It is a culture that knows how to have fun. The groom speaks Mandarin and the bride’s family speaks Cantonese. (These are two dialects of “Chinese” which has a common written language, but sounds completely different in different parts of the country. You can’t understand folk from Naw’lins or Scotland? Same thing, but with an extra few millenia of history …) So, as part of the amusement had at the expense of the wedded couple, the groom had to recite wedding vows in Cantonese. I know that this was a very funny ordeal, because I was laughing. And I wasn’t laughing because I understood what he was saying, but because everyone else was laughing, and whether we all spoke the same language or not, we all understood that the guy was happy to have everyone laughing at his expense because at the end of the night, he got to go off with the bride.

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We got ourselves a new piece of software. This WordPress stuff seems pretty darned not-broken, which is good. But after a long nite of playing with HTML and tweaking parsers to generate meta-data appropriately, it is time to get some sleep. Got a wedding to attend tomorrow …

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An anecdote from http://wordsmith.org/words/anacreontic.html:

The US national anthem ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is set to the tune of the English song ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’ which was the ‘constitutional song’ of the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s music club in London.

It is worth subscribing to A.Word.A.Day to expand your mind with stuff like this.

/danny

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This is the most fascinating map I’ve seen in a very long time:

Thanks for the tip, Declan!

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Friday we visited Mom, who was layed off recently. She’s doing very well with the whole thing, but she was having home networking issues. After a lot of poking around we went off to dinner together to a Persian restaurant that Yayoi found in the Japanese guidebook her mom sent her. We ate a great deal and came home stuffed, after picking up a replacement router, because I had diagnosed Mom’s Linksys as bad. I showed her how to set it up and turn off the wireless part, making her network more secure.

Saturday we drove to Michigan for Ravee’s picnic. The weather was fantastic and the drive was so pleasant. The picnic was alright – I got to see Yvonne, an old highschool friend, and one of the few I’ve stayed in touch with, and she and Yayoi talked at great length. I mostly just used the time to relax. At the end of the picnic I ran up and tossed mine, Yayoi’s, and Ravee’s name in the hat for the giveaway. Yayoi won a portable CD player, which she gave to Yvonne, because we have one and Yvonne does not. Then Ravee won a slimline DVD player, and gave it to us, because he already has a DVD player and we would like to have one. Ravee pointed out that I had put his name in the hat anyway, and I remarked that it was all good karma.

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I noticed that e-mails from the Kerry campaign are consistently quarantined to my Spam folder. So I forwarded them a sample and gave them some suggestions for being less spammy. They responded promptly:

Dear Friend,

Thank you for attempting to send a message to the John Kerry Campaign. To better handle and manage our email volume, everyone must now use the new web form reached by clicking the link below: http://www.johnkerry.com/contact/contact.php

This does not inspire confidence …

… but I’m already in for $100, so I went to the web site and suggested they spend some of it on better IT.

Hrmmm, no auto-response from BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com. I’ll let ya know if I get anything back from the pachyderms.

And, I’m sorry to report, that Ralph Nader’s website has only a form, and no e-mail link that I can find. You’d think a populist …

/danny

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What has been going on lately, we all like to know?

Well, let us step back a few years. When I was a kid, I spent most of my time in institutions. There was pre-school, public school, after school, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, soccer … heck, when I graduated High School it only made sense to enlist in the Army. I was pretty good at institutions — no great responsibilities, and a clever guy like myself could figure out the game and mostly do what he pleased.

And so this led the way through college and in to work. I was accustomed to having bosses. I had more respect for the private sector than for education – a TA grad student was giving me instructions as part of a course that was ostensibly for my benefit. A boss or a manager was paying me money to affect certain outcomes. It was an exchange. For the bosses I would bust my butt, and get money. For the teacher … not so much. After all, I was there for my own education, right?

My biggest crisis in the past few years came from unemployment. I’ve been so accustomed to having other people telling me what to do, whether I was ignoring them, fighting them, or cheerfully serving them, that I was at a complete loss for what to do when nobody was demanding anything of me. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone to boss me around. For someone who had lived his life being bossed around up until that point … well, like I said, it was a crisis.

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