Oops and ai
Spectacular console gaming failures (via Slashdot).
AI storytelling technology (via Slashdot).
Feb 1, 2003 @ 18:43 » no comments » Games
Outside my window
Feb 2, 2003 @ 14:47 » no comments » Photo
Bug report
I just filed a bug report with Opera. The Low weblog consistently crashes my Opera 7 (on Win2k/SP3) on loading the page. Does your O7 crash on that page as well?
Incidentally... I'll probably be singing that New Order song all day now...
Feb 3, 2003 @ 07:56 » 3 comments » General
Town hall
Feb 3, 2003 @ 14:10 » no comments » Photo
Space elevator
Wasn't it Carl Sagan who first came up with the idea of the space elevator (or at least brought it into popular imagination)? I can still see the cover image of that book very vividly before my mind's eye. The space elevator is the idea that you'd stretch an incredibly strong wire from somewhere along the equator 62.000 miles up into space and that you could have elevator carts riding up and down that wire. Wired has an article how carbon nanotube technology could make this possible. There's an article about it over at NASA as well. Pretty cool idea, right? Just makes me wonder how you make sure no planes fly into it.
Feb 4, 2003 @ 13:03 » 4 comments » General
Backups
Hmm... I really should start backing up my data again. I stopped doing that regularly when I reinstalled my computer a while ago. I had backed up everything I could possibly ever need before re-installing and that left a false sense of security. In the meanwhile a lot of stuff has been added or changed. So...
a) find suitable freeware backup utility (recommendations, anyone?)
b) figure out a sensible way to weekly export MT data from server
c) move unrestored data back to primary harddisk
then
d) run daily backup from primary to secondary harddisk
e) run weekly backup from webserver to secondary harddisk
f) run monthly backup from secondary harddisk to cd-rom
g) repeat steps d, e and f ad infinitum
Feb 4, 2003 @ 13:57 » no comments » General
On the subway 2
Feb 4, 2003 @ 18:59 » no comments » Photo
On the subway 1
Feb 4, 2003 @ 19:00 » no comments » Photo
Saved the day
How did we ever live without Sane CSS Sizes?
Feb 4, 2003 @ 23:19 » no comments » Webdesign
Money and the imagined nation state
In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson discusses the different processes and factors that contributed to the rise of the nation state. He argues that shared conceptions of time, the printing press, 'official' languages and the school system made it possible for the individual to imagine and thus to understand an unknowable amount of people on a largely untraveled territory as a community, as a nation. One of the arguments he make is about the rather arbitrary nature in which these signifiers are made (and understood) to stand for particular conceptions of the state.
The national currency as materialized in banknotes and coins, I suppose, is also one of those signifiers that both expresses and constitutes the nation state as a nation state. There's American money, English money, Chinese money... and until not too long ago there was a whole bunch of different European countries' currencies. A lot of the Dutch loved their colorful and daringly designed banknotes, and hated to see it go in favor of the bland and drab Euro-money.
Still, it doesn't seem that the understanding of The Netherlands as a nation has been significantly dimished by the disappearance of its national currency -- well, in the short run, anyway. Wouldn't it be a great study to research if and how the disappearance of the national currency has impacted the imagination and understanding of the nation state among the European citizens who've lost their national currencies? Are there ways in which the loss is compensated? Is the nation state reimagined because of the loss? Intriguing questions... somebody, somewhere is probably already hard at work trying to answer them.
Feb 5, 2003 @ 13:43 » no comments » Research
Breadcrumbs
On a site I'm designing I've just implemented a breadcrumb navigational tool. (Breadcrumbs I hear you ask... Just like in leaving a breadcrumb trail to find your way back, like so: Home > Category > Subcategory > Page) This exploratory study on usage and usability of breadcrumb navigation seems to say that breadcrumbs aren't necessarily a big help in navigating a site, even though they are used by the participants. Personally I like them though, since they allow me to better visualize where I am in the site, which in turn means that I'm better able to see where I'm going and how I'm going to get there.
Feb 6, 2003 @ 10:25 » 1 comment » Webdesign
Boxmodel
If Tantek's boxmodel hack made you believe that IE6's boxmodel was somehow better than IE5's then you're wrong. The IE6 boxmodel is broken so damn badly that it can't deal with percentages AT ALL!
Mozilla and Opera work just fine with percentages, although Mozilla 1.2.1 cannot render the following: border-right: 5% solid #AAA; just as IE6 cannot. Opera 6 and 7 can.
Feb 6, 2003 @ 16:08 » no comments » Webdesign
Pixels
Was it Zeldman who at some point decried that the only way to get something working across browsers is to use pixels? I'm starting to think it's true.
Feb 7, 2003 @ 09:42 » no comments » Webdesign
Two interviews
Ah, two great game masters interviewed by GameSpy: Richard Gariott (Lord British) and Warren Spector (via Slashdot).
Feb 12, 2003 @ 09:19 » no comments » Games
Hover
I've become so used to links changing their appearance when hovering over them that it has become sort of disconcerting when they don't. Is it really a link I'm hovering my mousepointer over? The pointer does change into a little hand, so it must be... oh, right, click it!
Disconcerting also that a couple of years ago links almost by definition were blue, underlined and didn't change their appearance when you hovered over them (unless they were clickable images... or worse, a big image map with different clickable regions), and that was normal and what I was used to.
Feb 12, 2003 @ 16:28 » no comments » Webdesign
Excuse me but...
It looks like you're suing Microsoft...
Feb 12, 2003 @ 21:24 » no comments » General
What a beautiful day
Boot computer, check e-mail, see message from MovableType Users mailinglist, read about release of Version 2.6, get all excited, read MovableType Pro announcement about slated summer release, get even more excited. Downloaded the upgrade, checked the changelog and checked out the new features in 2.6. Ooh... giddiness, especially when seeing how the new text-formatting options allow something like Brad Choate writing a text-formatting plugin based on Dean Allen's Textile formatting syntax. I can see many beautiful things coming from this.
So, before getting my fingers and head buried in upgrading and fiddling with all the new features, I'm going to be conscientious and finish the other work that needs to get done today. Nothing better than eager anticipation to get one working, right? And the sun's shining too on this cold winter's day. Whee!
Feb 14, 2003 @ 13:59 » no comments » MovableType
Bork!
From the Opera press release:
Two weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft's MSN portal targeted Opera users, by purposely provided them with a broken page. As a reply to MSN's treatment of its users, Opera Software today released a very special Bork edition of its Opera 7 for Windows browser. The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork!
(via Slashdot)
Feb 14, 2003 @ 15:56 » no comments » Webdesign
Frodo has failed
Feb 15, 2003 @ 00:35 » no comments » General
Uptime outage
Nothing terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but I returned home last night to find the alarm clock on my desk blinking its red 0:00 eyes at me. Power outage apparently while I was at work. The only thing, besides the fridge of course, that was hit by the outage was my FreeSCO router/firewall. It had a nice 63+ days of uptime since I last had to reboot it myself, so no uptime records there anytime soon. Nevertheless, when the power came on, the FreeSCO box had come back up again as well and everything was in working order... safe for the alarm clock that needed a little jog to remember what time it really was.
Feb 18, 2003 @ 10:58 » no comments » General
Online reputation management
Interesting read: Spinning The Web: The Realities of Online Reputation Management (via Slashdot).
Feb 18, 2003 @ 11:33 » no comments » General
Nerds
Paul Graham wrote an important article called Why Nerds are Unpopular. Even coming from a different (although Western industrialized) culture with, as I perceived it then, much less emphasis on popularity than in the American schoolsystem he describes, there is still so much in this article that I recognize from "basisschool" (ages 6-12) and "highschool" (ages 12-18). There are important lessons for both students and teachers in there.
Feb 19, 2003 @ 12:55 » no comments » General
Upgraded
Well, if this message gets posted and the weblog is rebuild correctly, then I've succesfully upgraded MovableType to version 2.62 and converted the database from Berkeley DB to MySQL. The only thing that appears to have broken is the search function. I'll fix that as I go along.
[update: yes, everything seems to have gone okay. Maybe it's just my imagination, but it would seem that the MT response times and rebuilds are a bit snappier too now.]
[update 2: good, fixed the search function. Since I was upgrading from version 2.21 I was still using Jay Allen's MovableType Search. This search engine was incorporated into MovableType in version 2.5, so I had not converted the config to point to the correct search templates.]
Feb 21, 2003 @ 16:21 » no comments » Sitestuff
The form of writing
For a while now I've felt like this blog doesn't offer me the right kind of space for writing the way I want to write. I've been mentioning a redesign off and on for the past few months. The two are probably connected. One of the things I try to keep in mind and pay attention to in my research is that form and content are very closely connected. Let's see if changing the form gives me more room for writing.
Seeing all those bloggers go through regular redesigns of their site, I can't help but wonder if they're creating new creative space in/on their blogs as well.
Feb 21, 2003 @ 21:51 » no comments » Sitestuff
Can't wait...
The new design is coming along nicely I think. I'm pretty much done with the tweaking, now I need to work on some more structural changes to the site. Work first now though: preparing for teaching class tomorrow, paper to edit and abstract to finish.
Feb 23, 2003 @ 17:18 » no comments » Sitestuff
Setting sun
Nothing like playing a Chemical Brothers cd very loudly on your walkman to wake up.
Feb 24, 2003 @ 09:38 » no comments » General
Entry metadata
I thought I was about done fiddling with the new design, but somehow I can't seem to find a really satisfying way of displaying the entries' post time, category and number of comments on the index page. In the current old design this info goes directly behind the title of the entry in the 'entry header'. The new design is more conventional and right now I have a nice, somewhat bigger title above the entry and the entry meta data aligned right at the bottom of the entry. But having it sit there... or rather, dangle there at the bottom somehow offends the very simple layout I'm using. The little right floated box in the Webstandards.org design is really nice, but somehow it doesn't fit with my current design... or does it? So what to do? Or rather, where to position?
Feb 25, 2003 @ 09:59 » no comments » Sitestuff
Clickety click
Now this worries me... One of my harddrives just went through a few minutes of intermittently making clicking sounds, repositioning its read/write heads while I wasn't doing anything in particular. Right now everything still works okay, but it's most probably a sign of disk trouble coming my way. Time to back up!
Feb 26, 2003 @ 11:18 » no comments » General
Backing up
I was looking for a good, comprehensive backup program to automate and schedule my backups and I found the freeware Backup4all. It's got everything you need to back up all your files to a nice big zip file that you can then burn to cd-rom. Recommended!
Feb 27, 2003 @ 12:40 » no comments » Software
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