June 2004 Archives

Steve, you had me at 10.4.

[UPDATE: There are going to be a lot of widget makers throwing hissy fits today.]

[UPDATE 2: Core Image looks awesome. It figures that the iBook G4's video card isn't supported. That's me, always one step behind on the cutting edge.]

[UPDATE 3: Ooo, I also heart the snarkiness.]

[UPDATE 4: Oh, and lost in the shuffle is 10.4 Server. Includes mobile home directories, iChat server, and weblog server. Umm, details on that last one, please?]

[UPDATE 5: Someone over at Slashdot pointed out that the Dashboard stock quote widget has every company up except Microsoft. Apple's legendary attention to detail even applies to sniping competitors.]

[UPDATE 6 (7/4/04): Great googly moogly!]

I don't normally surf through the tons of iMixes, just like I don't look through Amazon Lists. There's just not enough time in my life. Tonight, however, I found an iMix list that caught my eye and practically forced me to listen to a whole bunch of previews: the WORST Music on iTunes.

It's not kidding either. There's Arnold Schwarzenegger covering "It's Raining Men." The Brady Bunch singing "American Pie", the inevitable William Hung, and so much more dreck.

The previews are plenty, to be perfectly honest.

Want to know your PageRank, the vital ingredient of your site's Google search ranking? Of course you do, why wouldn't you?

Here's the steps:

1. Get your site's checksum (don't worry what that is, it's what the Google Toolbar computes)
2. Paste that checksum and your domain in the following text: http://www.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=checksum&features=Rank&q=info:domain
3. The last number seems to be your PageRank

Seem like a bit of a hassle to you? Wait a week or two and this'll all be automated. I'll post an update if I find it first. {via}

[UPDATE (7/10/04): PageRank extension for Mozilla FireFox. {via again}]

So today was my first Father's Day and it was a blast. Unfortunately, Kimberly woke me up at 5 a.m. and so it started a bit earlier than I would have liked. The family bought me The Simpsons Season 4 DVD and I watched four or five episodes immediately. It's a great season: it features "Marge vs. the Monorail—one of the best episodes ever, "A Streetcar Named Marge"—which had the Ayn Rand School for Tots in it, "Whacking Day" (favorite line: "I've got a hankering for some spankering."), and "Mr. Plow".

We spent the rest of the day in our traditional holiday fashion of shuttling between my family and Sandi's family. That meant we left the house at about 10:30 a.m. and returned by 6:20 p.m. That disrupted The Girls' schedule, to put it mildly.

Not too eventful, but spending it with the people who mean the most to you makes it memorable.

Loyal readers, I have five Gmail invitations available looking for a good home. First five get 'em.

[UPDATE: Still four left. I thought these things were hot tickets.]

[UPDATE 2: Two left. If no one uses them, I'll start sending out Gmail invite spam. Heheh.]

I apologize for the state of this site's feeds. I hadn't looked at them in Shrook lately and so I didn't see that they were being presented in escaped XML with excerpts only. Bleh. So I put in the HTML and made them full entries again. I also noticed that a lot of people never switched away from the old index_rss.xml feeds from my Blogger Pro days, so I replaced the "Moved" feed with a live RSS one since a lot of people were obviously not switching.

Also, I recommend ditching my Atom feed if you're subscribed. I can't get it to display anything but an excerpt of the entry and I can't get it to unescape the XML or show any HTML, despite reviewing the specification. It seems like it should work, but the aggregator keeps saying that it's bad XML. I'll delete the feed entirely in a few days, after everyone's had an opportunity to switch.

I just bought the Canon CanoScan LiDE 80—is there a better example of a braindead product name than that?—from Amazon for $124.39, which is a smoking hot deal considering the free shipping and all. I decided that I also needed to upgrade the scanning software included (ScanSoft's OmniPage SE) from the lite version to something more sophisticated.

Upon further investigation, I came to the conclusion that OmniPage Pro for X wasn't for me. I want software that is very much ready for OS X and sports a genuine OS X look and feel. From what I can tell, OmniPage had neither quallity. Luckily, I stumbled onto ReadIRIS Pro 9, which has gotten some rave reviews.

OCR software is very expensive: the OmniPage upgrade alone was $99. ReadIRIS—what is it with these stupid names—retails for $129 but Amazon is selling it for $99 and they're offering a $75 mail-in rebate! Let me tell you, folks, it doesn't get any better (or cheaper) than that!

I'll devote a future entry to reviewing these two products. I want to scan in reams of historical documents for a major project I'm undertaking but I also need to scan in pictures of my two little angels from time to time. This combination seems like a perfect fit, but I'll let you know.

Funny headlines from this week's The Onion:

• Heinz Factory Explosion Looks Worse Than It Is
• Michael Moore Kicking Self For Not Filming Last 600 Trips To McDonald's

I wish I could write titles/headlines for this blog like that.

We recently rented the movie Uptown Girls starring Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning. I'll admit that I wasn't the one who chose this title since, from the previews, I expected it to be a Maid to Order refresh with new actors.

The premise is both simple and timeless: a spoiled rich girl (Murphy) loses her means of support and is faced with obtaining actual employment. The twist is that the job she gets is being the nanny to another spoiled rich girl (Fanning), which unleashes a torrent of self-discovery. Murphy plays the daughter of a dead rock star who lives off the royalties of his songs—until her accountant embezzles her savings as well as future advances against those royalties. She bounces around from friend to friend, annoying each in turn with her whining and general uselessness. She tries unsuccessfully to get a job befitting her needs, but is finally forced to accept a nanny position with a girl that drove her nuts on their first meeting back when she was still wealthy.

I'll grant that the plot could easily serve as the basis for a network sitcom, but the actors and the script's character development really save it from banality. I wasn't expecting much from Brittany Murphy after her disastrous role in Just Married with the actor-who-wasn't and Demi-Moore-plaything Ashton Kutcher. She delivered and did it in such a way that I found myself rooting for her character. Dakota Fanning stole every scene she was in and is easily this generation's Mara Wilson, speaking her lines in a serious, adult deadpan while looking as cute and adorable as a doll.

There's also some traditional subplots involving a love interest and a neglectful mother who comes to realize what she's missing. Overall, a good movie that is consistently funny, cute, and engaging. I could see myself purchasing it for repeated viewings.

I've been using the same basic template for a few years now and I'm thinking that I might want to freshen it up a bit since I'm now a MovableType guy. My wife suggested that I use entry titles, but I've never really liked the implementations I've seen. You may not know it, but I've been using titles for years—they're available in my syndication feeds.

So, in the comments, please leave your vote whether or not I should include titles and, optionally, suggestions for implementation or links to sites that don't have gaudy, obtrusive titles.

FireFox 0.9 is out now and it seems like a pretty solid release. Unfortunately, it disables all of your old extensions and makes you re-install them. That's normally a pain, but I see it as a chance to reevaluate some of the cruft and detritus that gets installed on a lark.

And that's a good thing because doing it led me to discover Chris Pederick's Web Developer extension. I couldn't possibly do it justice by explaining its features or pointing at specific screenshots. You need to go there and read through the site. Or, better still, install it into your FireFox.

Don't have FireFox? What are you, an Internet Explorer user? Ditch that virus-ridden, stagnant crap and get a real browser. Makes me wish that OmniWeb, my favorite browser, had gone with Gecko/Mozilla like it was originally planning. Oh well.

Two things: this has been making the rounds, but it didn't really fit the profile over at Found on the Web so I'll post it here.

I don't agree with the premise, but I do think that the exercise is useful at getting one to think in essentials. After all, can you think of any field in which there are only two things you really need to know and the rest are just details? If only knowledge were that simple.

I just realized that I had been developing too long when I closed out a sentence in email with a semicolon instead of a period and it took me a second to realize it didn't belong there. Soon after, I realized that it was 2:30; I was expecting it to be time for lunch (11 A.M.). That's flow, baby.

NOTE: for all you non-programmers out there, in C# (and many other languages), you end every program line with a semicolon.

For my future reference (perhaps more immediate than that implies), digital photography composition tips or "How to Take Better Pictures."

[UPDATE (6/24/04): More good references: Photography Composition Article Library, Photographing on Federal Lands, and The Photographer's Right (PDF {via}).]

[UPDATE (7/19/04): Here's a very promising blog that seeks to help digital photographers move past the automatic settings.]

For my future reference, here's a good resource on regular expressions and ASP.NET, including a useful library of prebuilts. {via}

[UPDATE (6/15/04): The Tao of Regular Expressions: another interesting resource.]

Seen at Alton Brown's Rants and Raves:

The fact that "Dr." Phil has the number 1 cookbook on Amazon.com makes me want to end it all.

[UPDATE: I suppose I should elaborate since someone I know liked Dr. Phil's Self Matters. I think he's a hack, the Dr. Laura of TV. He takes common sense advice and stuffs it into a gruff, stick-it-to-'em package that delights Joe and Jane Sixpack. Schadenfreude might be a German term, but there's a certain PWT mentality that embraces it. I guess my disdain stems from the general level of scorn I have for all popularizers of OPT.]

If you look closely, you'll see that today is a milestone in my life.

Sadly, former President Ronald Reagan died today at the age of 93. It's not at all surprising, given his long bout with Alzheimer's, but it's still a good time to reflect on the man, the myth, and his legacy.

Reagan, as a man, was versatile, energetic, and principled. I read his recently published book of letters and I was impressed at his frequency of correspondence and the level of erudition displayed.

Reagan, as a politician, was fiscally conservative (which is good), socially conservative (which is bad), and hawkish (which is generally good when your biggest foe is the Soviet Union). Unfortunately, he frequently tempered his fiscal conservatism with compromises to accomplish the other two goals. This led to massive, profligate spending on the military and Social Security. Typical politician stuff, but it detracts from his record.

Reagan's legacy is, unfortunately, our current president George W. Bush and the presidential runs of Steve Forbes. The former is a bastardization of everything Reagan stood for, a vacuous optimism with heightened religiosity. The latter is the true successor to President Reagan, but with his Goldwateresque views on several other fronts, he's practically unelectable and epitomizes the dark horse candidate.

In sum, Reagan was a good man, a mixed politician, and an inspiration for the Republican Party decades after his withdrawal from public life.

Two new commercials developments in technology and visual cognition debuted recently: Nokia's Wave Messaging {via} and subway ads in Japan {via}. Both rely on visual tricks to display information in unique ways. I particularly like the elegance and utility of the latter, since subway tunnels are underused and the ads rely solely on the subway's motion for the effect.