Getting Cheap with Apple

I installed iTunes this morning… again. I installed it when it first came out and thought, "This stinks." It’s somewhat better now, but man, it sure is slow. However, I installed it for one reason: Villa-Lobos. That’s the name of a composer that I heard on the radio in Texas that caused me to stop cleaning the apartment and just sit and listen. Of course, as Jessica will tell you, it takes very little to get me to stop working. However, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5: Aria (Cantilena), is really beautiful and the warm deep cello mixed with the flowing vocal melody is enchanting.

I got cheap with Apple because the song is just over seven minutes long. That’s right, for 99¢ I bought what is three punk songs, two pop songs from the radio or part Pink Floyd’s The Wall 🙂 I had been looking for that song for some time and actually own a recording of Villa-Lobos conducting an orchestra in 1935 but the fidelity is low and so I keep looking for better versions. This version is good and I recommend it. However, after sampling the sample file on Amazon, you will not the price of the CD and choose iTunes, too..

Standards Savings, My Take

Eric Meyer reviews an article about saving money using standards based design Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Standards Savings. One thing that he notes is that end users often see faster pages but smaller companies don’t see a savings in bandwidth (due to flat bandwidth rates). However, I propose another form of savings. Harddrive savings. This site is on a plan that costs me USD $10.00 a month, if I go over my three gigabytes of traffic I pay more. If I go above the thirty megabytes of storage space I have to either pay a fee or upgrade my plan to include more storage. Here’s the thing, if you use a static website with semantic markup you’ll probably have room on a server for a lot more products, press releases and pictures due to ‘skinny’ markup.

Another point to make in this discussion is that you can write semantically marked up pages that are as ‘fat’ as old-style pages. Granted you have to try, but if on a forms page you use the myriad of tags available to you you could find yourself with a heavy page. That said, it is most likely much more accessible. Being accessible, more usable and ready for most user scenarios outweighs any loss in download speed. However, it does bring to mind the need to be careful how you markup your page. It may lead you to choose a select form element rather than radio form elements when the options get long. If you use a label for each radio button you’ll most likely get some pretty bloated code. fieldset, legend and label are all useful for making nice, semantic forms, but they can bloat your page. accesskeys as accessibility helpers (ignoring discussions about what keys should or should not be used) add bytes to pages as well so keep your accesskeys under control.

In summary, you’ll see lots of discussion on both sides (pro or anti-semantic markup camps) about how the side has seen pages that do or do not achieve the claims of the other camp. The practitioner of the art is what makes the art stand out, however, the form of art does not cease to be good if one practitioner fails to execute well.

First Time Bungee Jumping

The first thing you should know about Bungee jumping is that your first time should be from lower heights to get you aclimated to the free fall. Fortunately for me I tried bungee jumping from a mere five feet. You see at five years old I was playing it safe because I couldn’t climb any of the taller trees and I wasn’t sure how to make things go. In fact I wasn’t trying to bungee jump at all, I was trying to parachute. I had taken a plastic bag from the grocery store and placed my arms through the handle holes and then wrapped a small bungee chord around the branch of the tree and then affixed the other end to my belt buckle loop.

I braced myself for the wonderful feeling of being suspended in the air (due to the ‘parachute’) and then lept out into the wide open space below me (wide open was a relative term because I had about a one square foot area upon which I could land without destroying some of my grandmother’s garden). To my surprise the grocery bag did not open up in a wide parachute but instead, blocked by my body the opening of the bag did nothing, much like the Vice President of the United States. Fortunately I had a backup plan, the bungee chord. This chord, measuring approximately 18 inches in length had lost at least eight or nine inches to the branch and so the 10 inches of elastic bands stretched to their limit quickly and I found my male parts severely restricted as my pants strained at the belt loop to be free.

I quickly bounced up. OK, not really, instead I hung their by my belt loop in pain until the sheer weight of my five year old body pulled the belt loop off of my pants and I fell well beyond the one foot area. Of course I was going to have to explain to my mother why my pants were missing a loop but what delight and joy I experienced once the blood flowed into my legs… I had invented a new sport.

Four Years

Today, though it marks a terrible anniversary, also marks a lighter and more positive anniversary for me. I have been involved with Alt-N professionally for four years. I have been blessed to work with the people there and the sales company that they work with, GIS2. Here’s to four more years!

On Playing the Internet Explorer Game

Jeff Croft writes about John Carroll’s article on using Internet Explorer as ‘the standard’ for web browsers. A brief summary of John’s article is that if Mozilla, Opera and Apple want a larger share of the market they will need to copy Internet Explorer’s functionality. One issue that I’ve seen brought up several times is that Microsoft pays dues, sends representatives to the W3C and yet they still don’t adhere to the standards they help create. So if standards don’t mean a lot to Microsoft, why should we let them set the standard for browsers?

Some of the things that Microsoft has created are good innovations (the creation of the innerHTML property in JavaScript changed my DHTML world), but I don’t see them as critical for the development of the web. I’m wondering which ‘whiz-bang’ features of IE John is referring to. I’ve written some pretty nasty Internet Explorer only code in my time. I have a client that said, "Other browsers be d*mn*d, I want this to do X,Y, and Z and IE can do it."[0] I’m now in the process of converting all of that work over to work in Mozilla and Opera because customers are starting to demand support for these legitimage browsers (use of the term alternative makes me ill, a browser should be just that, no matter who makes it).

What does this conversion mean? It means that I get to innovate with solutions that are friendly to all of the browsers and are standards compliant. Instead of IE’s popup object (or the Mozilla XUL equivelent) I have created all of the content in an iframe and floated the popup div out with JavaScript whenever the right click is captured. This means that I get the right functionality with all three browsers. Another issue is that Internet Explorer’s popup object added some complication with the new Windows XP Service Pack 2. Microsoft made developing for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer hard. My new solution should avoid those problems all together since a new window is not created in IE‘s mind.

One simple rebuttal to John comes when he makes the statement that Standards Compliant sites render correctly in Internet Explorer. This is not the case by default. By using code that renders well in the latest releases of Opera or Mozilla I get funky side-effects or poor rendering with Internet Explorer because of its bugs in implementing CSS. However, folks like Tantek have worked out plenty of hacks that allow me to fool "Internet Explorer into emulating a browser."[1].

Finally, calling advocates for standards a religion is probably a dangerous thing because when you’re dealing with end users, the standards advocate is merely trying to let the end user choose which browser they want, no matter what browser it is, and view the content. This site delivers readable text for Lynx, and other sites are equally able to do the same. Internet Explorer 3.0 users can view this site’s content as well. I would love to have a discussion with John, and if he reads this, please consider emailing me to further explain yourself.

Via Dave Shea

Footnotes
[0] This was for a web based application and not for a standard website, usability is a critical issue that is addressed with another interface that doesn’t use DHTML.
[1] Dave O’Hara said this, but I can’t find the reference.

Abby’s Homework

Our friends the Kaes’ children, Kailey and Trystan are over doing homework while Krystal goes and works out with Jessica (my mom will come over and watch the kids shortly). Abby was going pee-pee in the potty and was so delighted when she was done that she exclaimed, "Kailey, I’m working on my vocabulary!" Yeah, she’s good.

Unblog

I wasn’t thinking yesterday that usually life is empty of things that keep us bored. We never lose ourselves in a passionate flare of laziness. So, with that out of mind I thought I should start keeping track of things I’m not doing. For example today I have not (so far)

  • Found weapons of Mass destruction [though my two year old is a ‘weapon’ of minor destruction]
  • Starved to death
  • Taken up smoking
  • Tried to quit smoking
  • Built a house
  • Climbed the light post outside of my apartment
  • Gotten pregnant
  • Chased my tail
  • Driven anywhere
  • Driven my wife crazy

Life is full of things we haven’t done. What haven’t you done today?

Camping Story

Well, a brief summary of the camping, but not so brief as last time.

Friday evening we left Denver late enough that we stopped to eat dinner at Chipotle. This was mistake number one. Don’t eat beans while sleeping in a tent with your wife. Don’t eat beans while sleeping in a camp ground where others might hear you reap the rewards of bean eating. Don’t put two bean eating tents together lest those tents produce a ‘call and response’ sort of passing wind festival of beans.

Mistake number two was that I left the air mattress at home because the car was full. I should have left home the three pounds of trailmix I bought. My back was incredibly sore that night. I was also incredibly not sleeping. Abby didn’t sleep well either, which means that Jessica and I didn’t sleep well on top of anything else that might have caused us to not sleep well [rocks].

Mistake number three was not bringing matches or a flashlight. Fortunately we had a small flashlight in the glove compartment of our car (we never have gloves in there!). That flashlight lasted all weekend long… which was amazing. The Kaes and the Doyle’s brought plenty of camping supplies that made up for our lack, but I still felt silly.

Note to self:
Make a checklist next time and don’t forget the hatchet.
Second note to self:
Buy a hatchet. You read the book in Jr. High, you know that with a hatchet you could rule the world.

We had a great time and on Saturday, since the Doyle’s had to leave the our family and the Kaes family went for a hike. What fun it was. Craig ripped down a tree with his bare hands (and a little help from me). Smokey the bear shortly thereafter hunted him down and ripped him down with his bear hands. OK, not really, but if you’re an environmentalist pretend you didn’t read that. OH, and seriously, the tree was already dead, Craig just uprooted it.

That night we ate a feast of various things the ladies had brought and also sang songs around the campfire (I wedged my guitar into the car, but not the air mattress). The Lord blessed us because we also got to sleep on an air mattress Saturday night since Mike Doyle left us his and promised to come up on Monday to help us pack up. Mike left us his sleeping bag liners as well, Donna left Jessica her water retardant coat.

If we hadn’t had the air mattress we’d have been uncomfortable. If we hadn’t had the sleeping bag liners we’d have been in worse shape than without the air mattress since the cold weather swept in and mad a mess of our camp with its windy cohort.

Sunday morning we woke up and I crawled out of the tent into snow blowing onto my jacket. Fortunately it didn’t accumulate much, but it was a surprise. I walked over to the Kaes’ tents and discovered that they too thought leaving for dryer, warmer and friendlier climates was a good idea. We packed up, came home and then basked in the sun all the way home. Serious. It was as if Denver was having summer break while just 50 miles away snow was having its way with the mountains and the people in the campsite near ours who drank way too much Coors (you can’t drink anything else in the Rocky mountains) the night before.

Oh, and there’s pictures of the good part of the trip.

White, Two Year Old ‘Jive’

Abby doesn’t really know jive, but I’m reminded of the elaborate handshakes and coded language of yester-year when we put her to bed or down for a nap. The sequence of events follows closely along this outline:

  1. Big Hug (makes you feel good)
  2. A Kiss (makes you feel ‘gooder’)
  3. Eskimo kisses (rub noses together, I’ve sometimes heard this referred to as ‘b*tt*rfly kisses,’ but ever since the Bob Carlisle song I’ve wanted to plug my ears and gouge out my eyes when I hear or see the term.)
  4. Bonk heads together(I have no idea where this came from)
  5. Push our ears together (came from me)
  6. Push our elbows together (me, again)

Abby insists that these things be done before she goes to bed, funny, but true.