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May 2003 Archive
Monday, May 26, 2003
[Comments: 2] 3:43 AM - i-can't-stay-mad-at-you
I had vowed that I would never use MSN messenger again. There was really only one reason. I found that regardless of my privacy settings, a user could completely circumvent a block by being invited into a coversation by someone else that I know.
I figured that the easiest way to fix this problem was to simply stop using the service, but unfortunately for me, MSN is becoming more and more popular and I've felt pressured to start using it again. I now have my privacy settings such that only users on my list can contact me, however, again Microsoft leaves the same loophole. If even one person is on my list, they can invite anyone else in the world to chat with me.
However, I've decided that I can survive this minor inconvenience for now. Quite simply, users only get on my list if I think they deserve it. If they decide to help someone else exploit the loophole, they'll simply lose the privilege of being on my list. Best of all, this policy does prevent people with no friends from contacting me, because even with my MSN name, there's no way they could bother me without knowing someone on my list.
Microsoft, is it really so hard to fix your block system?
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
[Comments: 1] 10:26 PM - all-good-things
Tonight was the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was perhaps one of the most unlikely series for me to watch. I had the unfortunate chance to see the movie a while before the series started, and that certainly did not help matters. Even if I hadn't a name like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" certainly wouldn't spark much interest from me. However, the series turned out to be amazingly different, and I'm glad I started watching it from the beginning.
While the ending was sad, the writers injected the same wit that I've come to expect all along, and the finale, with the situation as bad as it was supposed to be, was still funny, and truly in the usual BtVS style.
While I will definitely miss watching the series every week, the open-ended closing (I realize that's sort of an oxymoron), in which only one major character died, leaves with it the feeling that things are not necessarily ever "over," and I can hope that perhaps the show will lead to something new in the future.
Perhaps the rumors of a spinoff are true, and something new will be coming. At least in the meantime, I can continue to watch Angel, because it will return to the WB next season. I don't know that I could accept the end of Angel, Buffy, and Firefly (all amazing Joss Whedon shows, two of which are now gone), all at once.
Sunday, May 18, 2003
[Comments: 1] 2:39 PM - in-honor-of-a-friend
In honor of Liam's Mayron.net, I've added another new theme to my site. It seems to work pretty well, though it's a little slow on account of loading extra images.
In Mozilla, the header and menu may disappear periodically upon loading pages while you are moving around the site. If this happens, reloading the page should correct the problem. I think this is a Mozilla renderer bug, so it isn't something I can fix myself without copious free time.
In Opera 7, when switching themes, the image size and logo may not be updated if you switch between the Mayron theme and something else. This can also be fixed by reloading the page.
Saturday, May 17, 2003
[Comments: 0] 8:29 PM - need-more-visitors-so-this-is-worth-the-effort
I have added themes to the site! Play around with the little listbox on the right-hand side. When you change the selector, it will set a cookie so that any pages you visit from then on will use the correct theme.
If the page is slow to load, the logo image may look odd for a second on load, or between changes. Please excuse this. :)
[Comments: 2] 4:57 PM - might-as-well
I decided to switch over the site to XHTML 1.0 Transitional instead of HTML 4.0 Transitional. While I was at it, I further abstracted the CSS from the HTML in the pages, which should allow for some new features soon.
[Comments: 0] 1:59 PM - long-overdue-but-no-less-welcome
Mozilla Firebird, formerly Phoenix, has finally hit the streets with version 0.6. I find it hard to believe that naming problems were the only thing that delayed it this long. Fortunately, the extra time between this and the previous release has allowed many new features, most of which were simply inherited from the Mozilla trunk, to creep into Firebird and to get pretty decently tested.
Firebird also has this new "Why Firebird" page up. It runs down the features in Firebird, most of which are the same as IE's existing features and therefore don't demonstrate a good reason for anyone to switch from IE. They also mutter a bit about minute percentages of extra browsing area within the window. This isn't worth much consideration either. Really, I say this browser's major selling point is this: It's a powerful, compact, cross-platform, very customizeable and reasonably fast browser. Plus it has built in popup ad blocking!
I do enjoy this part of the known issues list:
- Form auto-complete is
still an unstable feature and may lead to crashes.
- Disabling of form
auto-completion is not working.
So form auto-complete is buggy, but there's no way to turn it off. Wonderful! I can confirm I've had a little bit of instability here, but it's basically stable enough to use.
My personal opinion: Try it and see if you like it. If not, stick with IE. Otherwise you've got yourself a new friend. No, not like BonziBuddy who secretly reports back to his real friends about what you do... Firebird will respect your privacy and streamline your browsing experience!
Friday, May 16, 2003
[Comments: 3] 4:30 AM - i'm-going-to-sleep-now
I just spent a number of hours updating my projects page and fixing various errors that I found on the site. Take a look at keyMMapp (projects page) if you have a keyboard. More specifically, a Dell USB Keyboard with Multimedia keys running under Linux. (Maybe that's too specific for most people.) :)
Anyway, all this work has finally made me tired. Good night.
[Comments: 0] 1:27 AM - shamelessly-stolen-from-slashdot
My posts will feature a department. I did this simply because I like the idea, so I hope Slashdot doesn't have one of those crazy patents that are all the rage now, because I'm not paying royalties! It's sad enough that Amazon.com was able to patent the process of bying a product with a single mouse click, but they couldn't possibly stop there. They now hold firm a patent for search query autocompletion. Thankfully they haven't somehow patented online shopping as a whole.
So, I spent about 3 hours reading XHTML 1.1 specifications trying to figure the things out. XHTML by itself is kind of silly, because it's just there to start the move from HTML to fully customized XML Documents. XHTML 1.1 however is really quite interesting. In 1.1 everything is modularized, which means you can load only the DTD elements that are needed for your purposes. If you don't need legacy HTML, you don't have to use it. However, this is only really useful if you feel like learning how to make a Document Type Definition of your own, because the DTD available from the W3C is rather restrictive, and while I was able to enable the iframe module in my experiments, it seemed to be broken. You could say the DTD acknowledged iframe as a valid tag but didn't actually let you use it anywhere. Still, it's a great step towards moving the web to XML. However, most people have barely made it past HTML 3.2 final to HTML 4 and no one seems to be willing to give up designing with HTML. CSS is for designing. If I'm going anywhere in web development, I figure I might as well learn what's on the bleeding edge, so I'm trying, as per the W3C recommendations... but I'm not expecting these recommendations to get much actual use for a while yet.
I got around to finalizing my new SimPage.net design, which was the reason I was drowning in spec docs, and I went with XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I'll continue to read up on XHTML 1.1 and if I can figure out how to make that iframe module work correctly, I'll move on up.
On a side note, if you happen to be interested in my resume, it's now up to date, in MS Word, Text (for those who just can't seem to get X running... or get out of MS-DOS), and of course, HTML. No matter what I do, though, I never feel like my resume really outlines my abilities well enough. I guess I just can't fit what I know on a page of paper. :-)
