...more recent posts
I usually don't link to java applets, but this one's pretty cool: visual thesaurus. Pretty slow on my machine, but Mac java support is poor, so you may have better results.
Datasynapse just got $15 million in new financing. Nice going guys.
photo series of the basement office construction.
Photos are back.
Wow. This seems reasonable given the current economic situation, but I hadn't seen it in writing (although this is just a note, not an official message.) Anyway, looks like Userland isn't going to be offering free Manilla sites forever. Apparently they've alread turned off the ability to create any new free sites.
I've been trying to think of a way to organize photos on the site. This started in an effort to support Alex's work, but as always I want to generalize anything I build so that it will work for a variety of people in a variety of situations. This is efficient, in one way, but also difficult. As the scope of a tool increases, it's utility often decreases. Anyway, I had been trying to think this problem out (walking the line between a general enough solution so I can reuse it, and a specific, and simple, enough one so that it is really useful) and hadn't been having much luck. Then the other day I started putting up some photos, and as usual, once I started to get some real experience with the problem (instead of just thinking about it) the answer was clear immediately. What I want is a way to make closely linked series of pictures. Something like a slide show, where each frame is a new page. Traditionally the pages would have forward and back buttons to either advance or retreat through the series. (This is what Alex does a lot for the picture pages accompanying Arboretum.) I was going to build a whole new system to deal with this, but of course now I see that the archive system for these pages is exactly what I want. If the window for display on the page is set to 1 post (instead of several,) and the '...more recent posts' and 'older posts...' links have their wording changed (to '...previous' and 'next...', say) then that is exactly what I want. To make a slide show like series, just post all the pictures to one page, and then crank the window down to 1. Easy. I'll get this finished up right away.
Anyway, I'm mentioning this mostly to help me remember the lesson. I try to do this anyway, but often I forget. You can't just think about a problem. You have to really get involved with it. And luckily this is often easier than just trying to think about it. Jump in and swim around - even if you don't know how to swim - and the answers will come fast.
So I'm taking down the awkwardly architected photo pages here, and they'll reappear in the new style soon. I think this will be a good solution.
Friends of Jezebel's Mirror has been much imporved on the server side and relaunched as the mirror project. Very nice. If I were smarter I'd try to say something about why this is so cool. Just hit random for a while and you'll see.
Started to add some of my links. Now that I'm often working on different machines I need to have these on line.
This whole microsoft smart tags thing is a little overblown. It might be another reason not to use Internet Explorer (not that you have much option at this point) but it's clearly within Microsoft's rights to do this. Once you put something on the web you aren't really in control of it any more. Anybody should be free to write any sort of software to "browse" web pages in any manner the software author sees fit. This would include adding, subtracting, or just plain rearranging content. If you're against smart tags are you also against something like netomat (or junkbuster for that matter?) I don't see how to support one without supporting the other.
[Just to be clear: I think this is an incredibly stupid, almost offensive feature, and I would never use it. Plus I'll encourage others - probably through a childish sort of mocking - not to use Microsofts products as well. Still, they should be able to do it if they want.]
Looks like automatic media is gone due to "an inability to secure additional financing." Rest in peace: plastic, suck, feed (and salon?) Too bad. I'll miss them. But I'm not really surprised.