It is hard to believe that the day is finally here where we learn the true identity of Deep Throat, the mystery man that made Watergate what it is today. Russell is right, it isn’t everyday you wake up and history is being made. So now we know that Mark Felt is Deep Throat. The announcement came from a Vanity Fair article: I’m The Guy They Call Deep Throat.
After all these years the secret has finally been revealed.
Last week Russell brought up the idea of an RSS only blog. The general idea is to only provide content via a feed instead of the traditional web page method. I think this quickly became an interesting question that wasn’t going to develop in to something particularly useful. Producing something usable wasn’t as important the other ideas that this question spawned and the conversation surrounding it.
The next experiment with blogging and feeds that Russell is trying out is forms in feeds. He took the first logical step, adding a comment form as part of a blog entry in his feed. I tried it out in Bloglines and it seemed to work correctly. There are a few problems that I see with this though.
I think there is some potential here, although I think a variant of this idea will be more useful. I’d like to see a link that pops up a little comment window. It would work similar to the way the del.icio.us bookmarklet does, it would be able to remember your info, ask some additional info to avoid comment spam and should work in most cases because it simply another link. I should work up a WordPress plugin or something to try out this idea. In the mean time try out Russell’s comment form in his feed and see what you think.
There aren’t too many regular shows on TV that I’d call good. Not good in the sense of quality of television, but good in a moral sense, the idea that the actions and messages on the show are good. Tonight I watched Extreme Makeover Home Edition where the folks from the ABC show came in and built new house for a family who had lost their home in a fire and were living in a (very) large storage shed. They took down what was left of the burned out house and built a huge new home for the family. I’ve watched this show several times and this was one of the larger homes that I’ve seen them build.
I was talking with a few people about this show at work and we all pretty much agreed that it didn’t matter how many of the TV moments in the show was staged more for the camera that what was actually happening, this show seems to be doing a good thing. I don’t even care if it actually takes them a month instead of the seven days portrayed on the show, helping out people who are in such desperate need is nice to see. I suppose this show falls under the “Reality Television” push, but at least this one isn’t about who is sleeping with who or how deceitful everyone can be.
This show makes me feel good, and yes sometimes I get a little teary eyed, and there just aren’t enough shows on TV that can evoke that kind of response from me.
The DVD’s have started shipping for BBS (Bulletin Board System) The Documentary. I’ve read through some of the material on the site and watched the trailers for the DVD and had a flood of old memories return. I spent many (too many I’m sure) hours logged in to BBSs in the 80s and early 90s. Although I had accounts on several different systems (sometimes under the name Stilts) it was the WWIV systems that I was most fond of.
One of the great things about WWIV was getting the source code when you registered the software. This lead to an absolute flood of hacks, tweaks and mods to WWIV by other sysops of WWIV systems. WWIV mods was something of a cottage industry back then. I remember staying up late at night working on WWIV mods with friends and then releasing them out in to the wild. I remember seeing my first 14.4k modem and thinking that I’ll never be able to have at more than $500 each. Talk about a different time. (insert reminiscing sigh here)
I can still remember the thrill of discovering HS/Link (High Speed Link) and the ability to upload and download, AT THE SAME TIME! Sure, laugh, but at the time that was a big deal. On top of that HS/Link had another cool feature that let you chat while downloading, assuming the sysop was around at the time. Sure X, Y and Z modem (and Kermit) were all great, but HS/Link just fascinated me. Of course it probably helped that I’d found a flaw in it that allowed you to start a download only transfer and then start an upload that wasn’t probably controlled by the receiving BBS, so you could upload and even over write a file any where on the BBS systems hard drive. Many of these ran on MS-DOS so it would have been pretty easy to take over the system by uploading a hacked up command.com (or even a hacked up copy of 4DOS) to the BBS system. This flaw was fixed in later versions of HS/Link and even though I never used it to do any damage, the discovery process was thrilling.
Today we have massive multi-player games, back then they were simply doors on BBS systems, like Trade Wars.
Strange that I’m getting old enough (just turned 32 on the 21st of May) to long for the old days. Just not the systems we used in the old days, I don’t know if I could carry around that 12 pound 286 “notebook” that I had back then.
Oh, I forgot to mention that WWIV is still around and was released as open source in September 2004. It is even up as a Source Forge project. Some where along the way it went from C to C++. I never dealt with the Pascal version of WWIV, let alone when it was written in Basic.
If you’ve ever been here before you’ll probably quickly realize that I’ve redesigned the site. I finally took some time over a few weeks to put together my own layout. I borrowed the feel of the layout from Russell Beattie. I’m not done yet, but it seems to be functional, so I figured it was better to get it up an live than to wait for it be complete/perfect.
I’m making more use of WordPress‘s page feature and several plugins to get the features that I wanted. Here’s a list of the plugins I’m using (so far):
In the short term I need to get some sort search functionality going again. Perhaps I’ll just stick with using Google for that. I’m hoping that tagging my posts will be more useful than using the categories support in WP.
I was working on some site design and needed to tweak it for IE (IE dev team, hello, is this thing on? Better CSS support please) in order to make look more along the lines of what I had intended (which is the way that FireFox and Safari display it). So off to Google I went hoping to find some way to easy include CSS only for IE browsers. Low and behold it is amazingly easy! I first came across this example which lead me to the conditional comments site. All I can say is, wow! It works, it’s simple, doesn’t feel like a complete crazy hack (although some might say the mere fact that this has to be done at all is a hack) and it only took me a minute or two to put it all together.
It is a shame that this has to be done, but at least there is an easy way to do it. Here’s an example of including CSS that will only be used by Internet Explorer (IE):
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
href="/ie-style.css" />
<![endif]-->
It seems that you could include any sort of HTML (or JavaScript?) between these conditional comments.
Yes, my wish has come true (at least in part). Someone has put together an AJAX spell checker for forms. There doesn’t seem to be a specific license included, but hopefully that will get worked out and projects will start making use of this. I’ve been spoiled by having the ability to spell check form fields in Mac OS X, having this feature on the website itself would make using Windows less painful.
Yes, I know, Gmail already does this, but I want to see it spread into other projects. Anything where you type significant amount of text should seriously be looking into this. Along with the ability (should be a requirement I think) to do comment previews in WordPress, spell checking the comments comes in as a close second on my wish list.
Marc complains about the branding confusion for feeds. When O’Reilly decided to only support ATOM feeds they kept getting requests for RSS feeds, not because people were so up in arms that O’Reilly wasn’t supporting their preferred format, but because they didn’t realize that the information they wanted was already available as a feed. I think Marc is right, ATOM suffers from an awareness problem. For better or for worse many people (especially the less technical) equate RSS with a feed and vis-versa. So for these folks, if you don’t have those three letters (RSS) on your feed then you don’t have a feed.
The solution that O’Reilly has decided to take for this awareness problem is to more or less revert back a few years and start plastering those ugly little RSS icons in place of the currently less ugly ATOM icons. They aren’t going to make it overly obvious what format the feed is in, this is a good idea. What I’d like to see if for the feed links to be a bit more descriptive, like “blog post feed” or “blog comment feed” or “comments on this post feed”. One of the things that has annoyed with how many sites describe feeds is that they don’t really describe they at all, instead relying on the format they use as their only meaningful description. There are so many different bits of information that are made available via feeds now it simply isn’t good enough to simply go hey, here’s my feed. Users need to know what data is included in the feed.
Personally I’d love to see this whole feed format terminology more or less go away. The bulk of the public doesn’t care if you are using HTML or XHTML for your website, or which version of each, they simply want to know where your website is at. So let’s get people asking where your feeds are like they ask for your email address (for which they also don’t care if you use MS Exchange, Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail or Exim) and your website.
If you haven’t come across the cheat sheets site for MySQL, PHP, mod_rewrite and CSS then go take a few minutes and check it out. Most of these are things that I usually only often enough that I remember where to look information but not the actual information itself, so these cheat sheets should come in handy. I recommend using the PDF versions for printing over the PNG versions, I was able to get much better print quality out of the PDFs.
I’d love to see a few more these for MS SQL server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and Vim.
Sarah and I watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on DVD the other day. The story was interesting enough to keep things going for most of the movie. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by this film, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. But the completely absurd absolutely over the top completely in your face so that you don’t ever forget it use of shadows was just way too much! After the first ten minutes I felt like getting am and explaining that I get it already, you are into shadows, now move on. Instead of being completely absurd with the shadows this file should have just been down in blank and white instead.
I’d rate this film as watch it, but take some Advil before you do to counteract the headache inducing use of shadows throughout the entire film.