June 28, 2001
There are secrets all around us, mysteries both wondrous and profound, hidden from view. It's up to you, dear reader, to discover the source. 1:33 PM
In her blog, Shannon talks about running into Canadian folkie James Keelaghan on a bus in Calgary. What's amusing is she mentions it casually, as if to say, ain't no thing, we run into stars all the time up here. A few weeks ago she sent me a disc with some Keelaghan and a whole bunch of other good stuff on it (sorry Shannon, I didn't tell you it arrived safely this time!).
So, underneath all the Microsoft hoo-ha from yesterday, the brand spankin'-new company I work for quietly had its official launch. KnowNow does real-time, two-way event stuff on the web. It's messaging. It's event notification. It's what both push and pull were supposed to be. It's damn fun to play with. Skip the marketing stuff and watch this Flash movie for an overview of what KN's stuff does. The more adventurous among you can download a demo router to play with from the developer site.
In a strange twist, the company I used to work for just months ago, 2Bridge, has apparently laid off the majority of its staff, the latest victim of investor wariness. I initally left 2Bridge to work on the DHTML Bible book and get my head together, dissatisfied with the direction my professional life was going at the time. Not much time had passed before Bryan, then a KnowNow worker bee, contacted me about this new company some guys named Rohit and Adam had just started. I took one look at an early demo and I was totally, completely hooked. I can't help but think that sometimes the reason my muse is silent so often is because she is busy shoving me out of the way of oncoming trains.
And now that I've said all that, I'll probably get smooshed by a falling satellite. 12:34 PM
Speaking of the book, I've decided against doing a separate book blog. It's a lot of work and I'm already busy with writing sample code and chapters (chapter summaries kill me -- how many different ways can I say the same thing a hundred times?), and I'm just not up to it.
Next chapter: draggable layers! Joy! 3:41 PM
June 22, 2001
Apparently, the key to choosing your pirate name is to choose it quickly, before someone chooses it for you. I hesitated, and thus my pirate name is Captain Scurvy Claw, which I'm pretty sure isn't even a real name. I had originally picked "Baitfish," from a story I read long ago about a boy who's haunted by the ghosts of pirates and who force him to find their long-forgotten treasure. But nooooo, that wasn't good enough. 12:33 PM
June 20, 2001
I'm
very much enjoying the new Tool
album, Lateralus. Tool makes me think of an ancient steel
machine that sits, covered with cobwebs, in a remote corner of an
insane inventor's attic. It sits silently for centuries, never
rusting. Until one day you get too close, and it suddenly grinds to
life, unwinding like a coil, with mechanical precision and a
terrifying purposefulness, bites the head off your teddy bear, and
then proceeds to carry out its primary directive of destroying the
world. And it's all your fault.
Hey, all you closet Queensryche and Fate's Warning fans! It's cool to like progressive metal again. 1:57 PM
Project Big Book rolls on. Chapter currently under construction: "Keystroke Events: Good For You, Good For America." 11:59 AM
For a cool and useful DHTML example, take an IE5- or NS6-only gander at the latest essay at Disenchanted (skip actually reading the tired treatise about whether or not weblogs are revolutionary or not) and click on the "Reader Responses" links buried in the article. Clicking reveals a pop-up layer that contains a list of pointers to other sites that have referring links to the article. Cool. I think I might do something like this for user comments on this site, allowing you to leave a ThirdVoice-style sticky note.
BTW, the difference between this and MS Smart Tags is that I control the look, feel, content and placement. So blah. 12:07 PM
June 15, 2001
How to be a Great and Prolific Author:
Okay, it's time to write. Wait, gotta check my email. Hm,
here's someone with a NS6 problem, I can solve that. Whao, look
how many threads are on this list! [an hour passes]...okay, NOW
it's time to write. Oh, wait, Letterman's on. I'll just
watch the monologue...[another hour passes]...this sucks, hey, Dune is on SciFi! Naw, I'll
just tape it [3 hours pass]...damn, I shoulda taped that, the dialogue
sucked anyway. Okay. Now. Time to write. Really. I mean it now.
Crap, it's 2 a.m.! 4:11 AM
Hey, does anyone out there know of a site or web app that uses the DX0 PHP/DHTML library? The project moved to SourceForge but the new homepage hasn't been tended to recently. I'm specifically looking for sites that use DX0. Know something? 10:32 AM
Wondering how to change the look of the mouse pointer in Mozilla/Netscape 6? Have a gander at the W3C specs for the cursor style property (Props to Dylan). 11:34 AM
June 14, 2001
Zeldman says a mouthful about Nestcape 6, Opera 5 and the state of browsers in general. 12:56 PM
I'd also like to point out that it has been over a year since Megan has had to drive a car. 1:00 PM
June 12, 2001
With any luck, my insidious plan to make the Alex Kottke Band's
website the most visited site in all of Germany today will be a
success. Moohoohoohahah...
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's probably for
the best. 3:57 PM
June 11, 2001
Fear not! With a single line of JavaScript you can disable smart tags
forever!
if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("MSIE") > -1)
{
location.replace("get_lost.html");
}
14:47 PM
June 9, 2001
Microsoft Office XP's new smart tags may not be maliciously editing your web page content per se, but it's pretty damn close. This person thinks so, as does this one and certainly this one.
I'm beginning to wonder if I care anymore.
Microsoft is doing what they set out to do in the first place: create a proprietary Internet. And so what? After all, that's what AOL has, and 29 million subscribers don't have a problem with that. Granted, AOL doesn't own your operating system, your browser, and the vast majority of your business software as Microsoft does, but still.
Megan said something interesting over breakfast this morning. She said that her high-school vision of a separate school for the jocks, prom queens and cheerleaders is becoming a reality on the Internet. Would it be so bad, she reasoned, if all the businesses and ecommerce sites that are ruining the Web with their pop-up ads, surfing-habit tracking software, "targeted email broadcasts*" and marketing bull, thus enslaved by their dependence on Windows products, be consigned to the Microsoft trailer park?
The more I thought about this, the more I liked it.
There'd be three Webs: the pristine-lawned, gated communities of MSN and AOL, and the funky, broken-concrete hipster neighborhood of the Rest Of The Web, where the freaks hang out.
This could work out great. Don't want smart tags popping up on your site? Simply redirect any Microsoft user agents to a page that equates to a "not in my backyard!" sign. And if MS decides that sites that aren't viewed in IE6 or not satisfactorily designed (I'm anticipating the ressurection of MSHTML any day now) aren't worth looking at, all the better. After all, you can always go shopping uptown, because unless you're using Linux, IE is installed on your system, somewhere.
This of course may raise the barrier of entry to the gilded kingdom. Need to take your business online? Need integration and support? Pay the admission fee. Or more likely, the subscription fee. But hey, do you want to be a Steve or a Stu?
Finally, the Web will truly reflect our society. 12:01 PM
June 7, 2001
I thought it might be interesting to point out that for the past week, the majority of hits to scottandrew.com have come from Sweden. In fact, the number of visits from .se (that's Sweden) domains currently outnumber those from .com domains. Huh. I guess this would be a good time to say something profound about reaching across international boundaries, the limitless social importance of the web, global citizenship, et cetera. Instead, I'll just say: 'ello Stockholm!
Of course, being the pathetic, consumer-culture driven, mass-media immersed ignorant-of-the-world American that I am, the first thing that came to mind was... 10:23 AM
June 6, 2001
The URL Everyone Is Pointing To: Netscape no longer a browser company. Not that they have been for years, anyway, but this is the official word. Netscape is being repositioned as an online media outlet for AOL/Time-Warner properties. Didn't they already try this with Pathfinder?
The question being batted about here is: will they continue to support the Netscape browser? Or will hundreds of enterprise companies be forced to migrate to IE when Microsoft rolls out some crazy new stuff? 11:47 AM
Is Passport/HailStorm/.NET/XP the ghost of Blackbird? Or is that too glaringly obvious?
And on that note, this 1996 Suck article is an entertaining read, as it predates the AOL-Netscape deal and savors the failure of Blackbird as a sign that Microsoft "may very well be the next Apple" when it comes to the web. Heh. 10:28 AM
June 4, 2001
In case I forget to mention it, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of our journey from Cleveland, Ohio to San Francisco, California. It's nice here. I think I'll stay a bit. 11:19 AM
And what better way to celebrate than with a shiny new
iBook, which came this morning. It comes with OS9 and OSX installed.
It has a CD-RW drive. And it's small -- I daresay,
insufferingly adorable. Now I can be just like that annoying kid on
the airplane in those latest Apple commercials. 11:29 AM
DynAPI rockstar Pascal talks about his new DHTML library called DOMLib in this interview at Webreference. 1:22 PM
Not over yet: AOL-Microsoft talks stalled. This should be interesting. Can AOL survive if its installer software isn't bundled with Windows?
Matt's site is back online! Today is like Christmas! 1:49 PM