Enter the Matrix gameplay footage
Cool! Infogrames posted five movies on the upcoming Enter the Matrix videogame. The first movie is actual gameplay footage and the other four movies are interviews with some of the characters. I'm downloading them now, but they've capped each download to 20 kbps, so it's going to be another hour or so...
Mar 2, 2003 @ 17:33 » no comments » Games
Where Sendmail lives...
Yes, so really I should have been doing something more productive, but I tried getting FormMail to work on another site I'm working on. FormMail is a little Perl script that will mail a webform to you by making use of the Sendmail program that also lives on your webserver. I thought I had everything set up as it should, but I would just not receive the messages I entered into the form. Still, every time I hit the "send" button, FormMail happily said that I'd send out the mail. Needless to say that I spend entirely too much time figuring out that Sendmail on my server does not live in the standard !# usr/lib/sendmail but in !# usr/sbin/sendmail. Duh.
Mar 4, 2003 @ 11:45 » no comments » Sitestuff
Caught cheating
My dad, who teaches in highschool, just caught some cheaters. The students had a two hour exam where they had to write an essay. The times being what they are, the students weren't busy scribbling on paper, but they each had their non-wired computer on which to type the essay. Finished essays were saved on a fresh floppy and handed in. Back at his desk with a stack of floppies, my dad noticed that a couple of the supposedly freshly created documents contained metadata from other computers. Among other things, the cheaters' documents showed that they had been created by author 'Johnson Family'. When looking at the Word file with Notepad, a whole history of previous autorecovery saves was visible. So, somehow the cheaters had managed to bring an already finished version of their essays into the classroom and handed them in as if they were freshly written.
Lucky for my dad that Microsoft has a habit of storing way too much, way too personal information in their files. Just right-click a Word document and select "properties" or select "properties" from the File menu in Word itself to see the basic metadata that's in the document. You can always check other people's documents if they use Versioning, which allows you to see previous versions of the document that are being saved with the last version. Or maybe they were using Track Changes, which also allows you to skip through the changes made to the document. Then, if you still want to see more, just open de Word document in a plain text editor, like Notepad. You'll see a lot of unreadable symbols and mumbojumbo, but there are patches of plain, readable text in there, which show a history of autorecovery saves and more interesting details.
Spooked already, about what you yourself may be sending out when you send someone a Word document? Microsoft itself offers an overview of how to Protect Personal Data in Your Microsoft Word Documents. One of the things they mention, that I would have never thought about myself, is that if you use macros, the macro-author's name will remain attached to that macro forever. Ugh. But really, even if you follow all the steps mentioned in the overview, I'd say nothing beats saving your document as plain, standard, ascii text.
Mar 5, 2003 @ 09:38 » no comments » General
New layout
Welcome to the new layout: Vee-4-ooh.
This layout should work in all version 5 and higher browsers, but I'd be surprised if there were no issues whatsoever. If you find something weird or if something simply looks odd, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know. Use the comments on this post or e-mail me (e-mail address at the bottom of the sidebar). Yes, I know that Opera 6 has a slight rendering issue with the top navigation... if you have a solution, I'd love to hear, but otherwise I will assume that Opera users are generally a bit more tech-savvy and willing to upgrade to Opera 7 when it becomes available on their platform.
The whole weblog section of the site has been converted to the new design, but there are two parts of the site still in their old clothes: the Cyberculture Resources and the page about my book. Work on a slightly more styled version of the site for Netscape 4 and even more support for text-only and/or text-to-speech browsers is under way.
I've paid extra attention to the scalability of the design. As far as I've been able to determine, it scales well from 640x480 to 1600x1200 resolutions. Text is also resizable. You probably don't want to set the text-size to anything smaller, but on a 1024x768 resolution you can enlarge to 200% and on a 1280x1024 resolution you can even enlarge safely to 300%.
There's more to say about the redesign, like the restructuring of the archive, but it's late now and I need some sleep. Let me know if you like it :-)
Mar 9, 2003 @ 01:15 » 4 comments » Sitestuff
Quiet evenings in the blogosphere
Not that it ever really is all that quiet, but the past two weeks or so, I've noticed a, ehm... certain stillness. Calm before the storm? You decide:
March 4, Phil Ringnalda feels a bit out of touch because so many people write so many interesting things and really, he wants us all to "slow down a bit, can't you?"
March 7, Martin Sutherland discovers life without a RSS aggregator spitting 50 feeds onto his desktop, each taking a 2 minute bite out of his day. Acknowledging the kind of compulsiveness that lies in keeping up, keeping in the loop, he writes: "I uninstalled it, and I felt free."
Meanwhile, Mark Pilgrim has been keeping uncharacteristically quiet since February 27.
Haven't heard from Brad Choate since February 24.
Six Log isn't all that hyperactive, but the last post is from March 1.
Even Zeldman's been keeping quiet for the past five days.
Mar 10, 2003 @ 17:56 » no comments » Blogosphere
Catching up
Got some catching up to do after finishing and tweaking the new layout. Game news first:
The bad news of the week of course is that Bungie announced that Halo 2 isn't going to be released in 2003. I've clocked Halo on the Easy level and am about 70% through the game on the Normal level. Do they really want me to play the game on Legendary... in my sleep! before they release the follow up? Sigh...
Well, Freelancer was released. If you have fond memories of 8-bit era game Elite, like I do, you might want to have a peek, as Freelancer seems to resonate strongly with the open-ended, choose your own career space faring Elite. Nice graphics and online multi-player options too. Tomshardware.com has a review.
Ludology.org got a makeover and finally lost that impossible to read small print in the sidebars, yeay!
A while ago the Xbox Linux Project sent a letter to Microsoft, asking for their digital signature, so that their Linux distribution would be able to run on the Xbox without having to modify the hardware. The Register explains that this is unlikely to happen, mainly because Microsoft is selling the consoles at a loss and is planning to eventually recuperate their losses through software and service sales. They're probably not really interested in subsidizing hardware for people to run free software on which they wouldn't make a penny on the Xbox. I kind of agree, but from a PR/geek credibility point of view it would be a great move. Sony has the Playstation-Linux project and with Xbox being a distant second to the Playstation in the console market, Microsoft just might need all the help they can get. Yes, there will be people who are going to run the Xbox as a cheap Linux firewall/webserver, but on the other hand, if you really have premium software titles (more Halo quality games... hint!), are all those people really just going to let that box sit in a corner without trying out the best (or bundled) games?
Assorted GameSpy articles, there's a whole bunch worth reading:
Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Run a Massively Multiplayer Online Game
64-Bit PC Gaming is Coming. Will it Change the Way You Game?
Interview/discussion with Shigeru Miyamoto and Yu Suzuki
More talking with Miyamoto, this time with Eiji Aonuma
Seamus Blackley on the state of the games industry
Why is Korea the King of Multiplayer Gaming?
And in this article a fairly staggering number of 800.000 EverQuest subscribers is mentioned.
Mar 11, 2003 @ 08:49 » no comments » Games
Apropos Xbox: Live
March 14 is the launch date of the Xbox Live service in the Netherlands. I would be really excited about that, if it were not for the games the service launches with. I really don't like sports games (because I'm really not into sports), so that rules out NFL Fever 2003, NBA 2K3, NFL 2K3, NHL 2K3. Besides... are that many Europeans interested in basketball, American football and ice hockey? Those strike me as particularly American sports... only missing baseball here, really.
Edge says Moto GP is really good, it's packed with the online starter pack, so we'll see. I know I'm probably starting to sound a bit picky, and I do like a bit of racing around every once in a while, but I'm not so big on it. Whacked and Capcom vs. SNK 2 are beat em ups, which can be fun, but Edge thought very poorly of Whacked and at the prices these games are going, I'm really thinking twice about buying them or not.
Then you have MechAssault and Unreal Championship, which didn't rate above average for Edge. They might be good fun for when you just want to run around and shoot some, but I prefer a bit more depth to my games. Ghost Recon would appear to provide that depth and at the moment appeals most to me, and as a bonus Edge thinks it's worth its salt. Then there is Star Wars: The Clone Wars... haven't heard much about that game and with the Star Wars games reputation, this could either be a decent game or a total disaster, so I'd better check it out first.
Maybe the Live package appeals to some people, but at the moment I think I'm going to hold out for more interesting games to come out for it, because with only one game really appealing to me, it seems a bit of gamble to put quite a bit of money down for. (Not just for the starter kit... I'm going to have to do some serious rewiring of the local network here: change from coax to utp cabling, get a router for the ADSL modem in the living room, a switch for in another room, etc...)
Mar 11, 2003 @ 09:27 » no comments » Games
Quoting The Sisters
Last night I saw the second episode of a new tv series, John Doe. It's set in Seattle (which is nice, because I'm going there for a conference in May) and it's about a guy who's lost his memory, but happens to have a huge amount of information stored in his head (like the complete White Pages, exhaustive knowledge of chemistry and chemical compounds, expertise on quantum mechanics, and more) and he's sort of helping a police detective to solve crime mysteries. So far so good.
In this episode however, there's a typically rebellious teenage girl, who doesn't really look gothic, but somehow the script writers make a point of calling this troubled girl a goth. Near the end of the episode, when the crime is pretty much solved, John and the 'goth' girl sit on a bench and she sighs, "Won't somebody help me chase these shadows away?" John replies, "Take me through the darkness to the break of the day. Sisters of Mercy, Man After Midnight."
Heh... so now tv series try to build some cred by quoting The Sisters? And are they really quoting them? These lines come from the song Gimme, Gimme, Gimme by ABBA. The Sisters have indeed covered this song during live concerts, but as far as I know, it has never been officially released by them.
As for John Doe... either he doesn't quite know everything as he claims he does, or the script writers didn't think quoting ABBA was a very gothic thing to do for a not very gothic looking goth girl. Hmpf!
Well, let's see if The Sisters are going to play Gimme, Gimme, Gimme on their March 30 concert in Amsterdam. Yes! I'm going to their concert. I think it's the first time in a decade they play in the Netherlands, or at least in Amsterdam and I'm very excited about seeing them play live again.
Mar 12, 2003 @ 10:20 » 1 comment » General
RSS feed
Someone surely will be happy with the RSS1.0 feed now available for this site. I followed Ben Hammersley's instructions and the feed gives you access to the last 15 posts of the Fragments weblog. Enjoy.
Mar 12, 2003 @ 14:23 » no comments » Sitestuff
Mediated personae
William Gibson posts some thoughts to his blog, about the scope of being able to create a mediated persona. Even in the type-and-run medium of the blog, he has a way with words. So, to keep this on file, here's the quote:
While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me, anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to fora) represents the democratization of the mediated persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several. I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and this website is maintained by a publishing company that belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case. Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.
In another post Gibson says that he hasn't reread any of his novels in full since they were published, so I wonder what he would make of this (expanded) footnote I have in my book about Gibson's coining of the term cyberspace.
footnote begins >
Gibson hit a nerve in the mediated, possibly already postmodern world, when he described "cyberspace" as a "consensual hallucination". The first time the word surfaces in his text, is in this sentence:
He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. (Gibson 1984: 4)
Later in the novel, he returns to this idea and elaborates on it, letting a voice-over in a childrens' program explain:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by millions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... (ibid.: 51)
For Gibson the concept of "cyberspace" overlaps with the "matrix". The matrix however, is more like a visualization of the more abstract concept of cyberspace: a digital landscape consisting of a luminescent grid on a black slate, out of which geometric datashapes rise like buildings. This space is navigated by jacking into your cyberdeck and steering the icon that represents you around. In a short contribution to one of the first and most influential scientific works on cyberspace (Benedikt (1991) Cyberspace: First Steps) Gibson reflects on how the word "cyberspace" came to be:
Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceded any concept whatever. Slick and hollow -- awaiting received meaning. All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices. [...] I work the angle of transit. Vectors of neon plaza, licensed consumers, acts primal and undreamed of.... The architecture of virtual reality imagined as an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, shooting galleries, pinball arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with damp-stained years of men's magazines, chili joints, premises of unlicensed denturists, of fireworks and cut bait... These are dreams of commerce. Above them rise intricate barrios, zones of more private fantasy. (1991: 27-28)
There's a sense of wonder, I taste in his words, about the effects that his descriptions of cyberspace have had. Something that Gibson probably never foresaw when he first described the matrix in a dreamy glimpse, almost hidden in a dependent clause, when "[s]till he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void...." (1984: 3-4).
Benedikt, Michael (ed.) (1991) Cyberspace. First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Gibson, William (1984) Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.
Gibson, William (1991) "Academy Leader." In: Benedikt, Michael (ed.) (1991) Cyberspace. First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Mar 13, 2003 @ 13:00 » no comments » Research
Nickname
This is too cute not to mention:
My Hobbit name would have been: Fastolph Grubb, but had I been an Elf, I'd go by the name of: Lólindir Anwarünya.
Mar 13, 2003 @ 15:43 » no comments » General
Researching weblogs
Today I stumbled across two studies on weblogs and weblogging. With weblogging growing more and more visible, it was bound to get some academic treatment. There's a survey with so little information about the actual research that I haven't bothered to fill it out. Then there is the rudimentary WhyBlog.org website. There's more background to this project on the researcher's thesisblog and his regular blog. Looks interesting enough to keep an eye on.
Mar 13, 2003 @ 17:55 » no comments » Blogosphere
Styling the HR tag revisited
I wrote about styling the HR tag before, but there's more to it than I knew then. Marek Prokop has the most elaborate tutorial, but there is some more information over at Saila.com, huberdoc.at, and over at BradChoate.com. Paradoxically, the most stable and usable way to use HR's in CSS styled documents is to hide them completely and style the surrounding div... makes you wonder sometimes.
Mar 13, 2003 @ 18:23 » no comments » Webdesign
Moz1.3
Mozilla 1.3, just released! Release notes here.
Okay... here's a wish: Moz1.3 now supports rich text editing in a document... I want it in my MovableType text entry boxes! Shouldn't be too hard.
Mar 13, 2003 @ 23:21 » 2 comments » Software
My first ever PHP code
Hah! Took me about 20 minutes to dig through the documentation at PHP.net and write my first ever snippet of PHP code. To get exactly what I wanted, I needed to tweak it a little, but basically, it worked the very first time I ran it. Whee! And this is it (with some extra dashes in it so it all shows up here and doesn't get eaten either by the server or your browser):
$pieces = explode(" ", "<-$-MTEntryCategory-$->");
$number = count($pieces);
$lower = strtolower($pieces[0]);
print("<-a-href=\"/$lower/\">$pieces[0]<-/-a>");
if ($number > 1) {
print(' » ');
for($i = 1; $i < $number; $i++) {
print("$pieces[$i] ");
}
}
print('<-/-p>');
It may not be the most elegant or intricate thing ever written in PHP, but I'm still quite happy with it.
Mar 16, 2003 @ 17:16 » no comments » General
Who let the aliens out?
This website is the number five hit when you search Google for "shapeshifting reptiles". Heh... Don't blame me, I only quoted William Gibson.
Mar 17, 2003 @ 07:43 » no comments » General
Moz1.3 observations
I've been using Mozilla 1.3 for a couple of days now and while it's got its good sides, it's not picture perfect. I'm not using Mozilla for anything else but browsing, so I'm only talking about the browser here.
First, it's fast. Moz1.3 is really fast, maybe not quite as fast as Opera 7, but getting close. In general Opera 7 feels a bit more responsive, but that might also be because it starts rendering the page sooner than Mozilla, which waits for a bit more data before it starts showing the web page.
Second, Mozilla's download indicator seems a bit broken. I hardly ever see it in the status bar, where it should tell me how much of the page it has downloaded. This function is implemented really well in Opera.
Third, the message "Transferring data from www.domain.com" in the statusbar doesn't always disappear, even if the browser is obviously done with loading the page. This can be a bit confusing.
Fourth, Moz1.3 has a bit of trouble selecting text in the address bar. Double and triple clicking don't always work reliably.
Fifth, for the life of me, I can't get Composite installed. (Composite promises WYSIWYG editing of content in HTML textareas.) The Composite website is a bit of a mess: it only provides a download of version 0.0.5, which it says is broken, but the recommended version 0.0.4 isn't available either (I had to get that through Google). Besides, how the heck do I install .xpi files? I always thought that simply opening them should do the trick, but apparently not.
Sixth, a couple of times now the address bar of Moz1.3 locked up. Everything was still working, including new tabs and launching websites through bookmarks, but I couldn't type anything new into the address bar. Closing and opening Mozilla again solves the problem.
I think that for my Mozilla browsing needs I'm going to switch back to Moz1.2.1 and check back on 1.3 after the next point release or maybe when Composite or another textarea editor becomes available for it. Too bad...
Mar 17, 2003 @ 23:13 » 2 comments » Software
RIP espresso machine
This is a veritable disaster. Our espresso machine just kicked the bucket.* The steamy-pipey-thingy simply broke off when I was cleaning it. No more cappucino, no more latte... With desperation slowly gripping my heart, I'm drinking the very last cappucino I just made myself and I savour every sip. How cruel a world that would take my caffeine away!
* "to kick the bucket" in Dutch is: het hoekie omgaan, het loodje leggen, kassie wijlen, de pijp uitgaan... hebben we nog meer mooie uitdrukkingen voor doodgaan? Zet ze maar in een reactie op dit berichtje :-)
Mar 18, 2003 @ 15:24 » no comments » General
Danny reviews
I remember I was quite impressed by the constant stream of reviews Danny Yee put out when I was on the Anthro-L mailinglist, long long time ago (1997?). Today I bumped into his website after a Google search and he now has more than 600 reviews to his name. I'm impressed again. Don't forget to look at FAQ and the infrequently asked questions while you're there.
Mar 18, 2003 @ 21:09 » no comments » Reading
There goes the neighborhood
I've resisted for a long time, but starting with this post, I'm pinging weblogs.com and blo.gs. MT makes it simple and unlike a while ago, when it pinged every time you saved a post, it now only pings once per post.
Somewhat related, Blogdex's been around for a while, Popdex and Daypop too, and I only recently found Technorati.com. Anything else in the neighborhood I should ping, link, or know about?
Mar 19, 2003 @ 16:56 » 2 comments » Blogosphere
Good evening
Fed the cats, so it's off for dinner and a Madrugada concert at Paradiso. Yay!
Mar 19, 2003 @ 17:22 » no comments » General
Do not eat this fruit
In 1772 Diderot wrote a piece called "Supplement to the voyage of Bougainville, or dialogue between A and B on the inappropriateness of attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions that do not accord with them." This richly layered text takes off on the account of Bougainville, commander of a French maritime expedition, who published an account of his voyage around the world in 1771. In Diderot's text, the visit of the expedition to Tahiti plays a central role and offers him a setting for exploring ideas of different but not necessarily worse cultures, and ideas of what laws govern mankind.
In Diderot's rendering of Bougainville's account, when the ship arrives on Tahiti, the sailors are initially warmly welcomed and the Tahitians are portrayed as "noble savages". Especially noteworthy is their frankness about sexuality, their apparent lack of shame and their women's bare breasts. According to their tradition, the Tahitians even offer their visitors to sleep with their women and daughters. In Diderot's story, the ship's chaplain is welcomed in this way by one of the villagers, Orou, and of course finds himself in a rather difficult emotional and social situation, especially when he's told that he should not offend his hosts by refusing their hospitality. A long discussion ensues between Orou and the chaplain in which Orou's role mainly is to question the chaplain about his beliefs and the laws and mechanics of the chaplain's world. Somehow, many of the questions that this fictional two centuries old Tahitian poses to the equally old and fictional chaplain, seemed very pertinent to this particular moment in space and time as I read Diderot's story this morning. Below follows a quote from Orou that really caught my eye (about which I maybe should add that the chaplain previously explained to Orou that his "God" could be likened to a "great craftsman who made this world and everything in it"):
Yesterday at supper you talked to us about magistrates and priests. I don't know what you mean by 'magistrates' and 'priests', who have the authority to regulate your conduct, but tell me, are they masters of good and evil? Can they make what is just unjust, and transform what is unjust into what's just? Can they make harmful actions good, and innocent ones evil? One would hardly think so, since nothing could then be true or false, good or evil, beautiful or ugly, unless it pleased your great craftsman and his magistrates and priests to deem them so; in which case you'd be obliged, from one moment to another, to change your beliefs and conduct. One day, on behalf of one of your three masters you'd be told, 'Kill', and you'd then be obliged in conscience to kill; another day, 'Steal', and you'd then have to steal; or 'Do not eat this fruit', and you wouldn't dare eat it; 'I forbid you this plant or animal', and you'd refrain from touching them. There's nothing good that couldn't be forbidden, nothing evil that might not be required of you. And where would you be if your three masters, out of sorts with one another, took it upon themselves to permit you, command you, and forbid you the very same thing, as I suspect must happen often? Then, to please the priest, you'll be forced to displease the great craftsman; and to satisfy the great craftsman, you'll have to abandon Nature. And do you know what will happen then? You'll come to despise all three of them, and you'll be neither a man, nor a citizen, nor a true believer. You'll be nothing. You'll be out of favour with each form of authority, at odds with yourself, malicious, tormented by your heart, miserable and persecuted by your senseless masters, as I saw you yesterday when I offered my daughters and wife to you, and you cried out, 'But my religion; but my holy orders!'
(Thanks to Stijn who brough this piece to the attention of the PhD club)
Mar 20, 2003 @ 22:05 » no comments » General
Warren's weblog
Some of Warren's posts are quite brilliant in their contrasting imagery. Too bad he doesn't host all the images himself, because some of his posts break when the remote image is taken offline, but I guess, that's all part of the game of this quirky weblog.
Mar 21, 2003 @ 12:25 » no comments » Blogosphere
Uh...
www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com
No, really, it all happens on css-d.
Mar 21, 2003 @ 17:08 » no comments » General
Anonymous
Someone leaves a link to an anonymous blog with a twist on an old entry. This time it's not so much the author him/her/itself who remains anonymous, but the blog is open for anybody to post to anonymously. An interesting experiment, but I can't help wonder... we did already have Usenet, didn't we?
Anonymity all around though: an anonymous commenter, Nobody in particular, shows up at Anders' weblog. Anders however appears to have a fix on this commenter and replies with some thoughts about what it means to 'know' a blogger.
Then of course, we had the mystery of the Raging Platypus for the past week or so, and Mark Pilgrim now fesses up to be its creator, driving 10.000 visitors to the site with some help of a few high-powered blogging friends. Not bad for a bit of a silly site like the Platypus... it's not quite the Slashdot effect I guess, but I recon it must be quite visible in your server logs if your site starts making the rounds in the blogosphere.
Mar 22, 2003 @ 01:18 » no comments » Blogosphere
Get in line will ya?
It's those small things that can really annoy me. When I want to log on to the university's Exchange server through webmail, I get an authentication dialog box that asks for my name, password and domain. However, when I want to log on through Outlook, I get almost the same dialog box, but this time the order of the elements is slightly different: first name, then domain and finally password. That means that I keep typing my password in the domain field and vice versa if I don't pay full attention. Sigh.
Mar 26, 2003 @ 16:04 » no comments » General
Some Composite hurdles
A while ago there was some talk on the MovableType forums about getting a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor working with MovableType. I guess I don't have to tell any blogger what kind of bliss a nice in-browser textarea editor would be, as opposed to typing into an always too small textbox, navigating around the inevitable HTML tags. The editor under discussion was htmlArea. I gave the program a try and it works, but as Richard notes as well, it leaves you stranded with some seriously non-standards compliant code. For further discussion of htmlArea see John's Jottings and there is an extensive list of "through-the-web" rich text editors here.
When Mozilla 1.3 was released, it promised new opportunities for rich text editing and Composite appears the most suitable candidate for taking advantage of the new Mozilla functionality. I couldn't get get it to work though, but there have been some developments.
First of all, the latest Composite (0.0.5) doesn't work with Mozilla 1.3 (oh irony), so I went and reinstalled Mozilla 1.2.1. Then, if you go to the Composite installation page, you will find that the download link points to the downloads.us-east2.mozdev.org server, but that's incorrect. The right address to get your Composite xpi is downloads.us-east3.mozdev.org/composite/. Next, if you want to install xpi files, you have to go into the Mozilla Preferences > Advanced > Software Installation and Enable Software Installation. If you were being paranoid about security, like me, and turned that off, you can try as you might, but Mozilla will keep completely schtumm, whatever you do with that xpi file.
So, finally I had Composite 0.0.5 installed on Mozilla 1.2.1 and it finally opened up the editing window when pressing ctrl+e in the textarea, but for the most part the program didn't work. Nothing happened when switching between the View and Source views, none of the menus or buttons seemed to work. After I'd almost given up, I spotted a link to a Composite version hacked to work with Mozilla 1.3. This hack works! Well, mostly. Don't use the ctrl+e shortcut to open the editor, because it will eat the first character in the textarea, but double click in the textarea to open the editor.
I played around with it for a while and here's a list of what I think it should do before I can really use it on an everyday basis (with MovableType):
• XHTML rather than HTML compliant tags out of the box
• it should respect CR/LF. Right now, even if I'm not using paragraph formatting, it still inserts BR tags when I hit the Enter key. It should only apply paragraph and break tags when I tell it to. I could of course set MovableType to not Convert Line Breaks, but Composite insists on inserting a BR tag as the very last thing of every paragraph even when using paragraph formatting, so that's out for the moment.
• user definable markup. I want to be able to define how Composite handles the tags it inserts, so I can control how for instance fonts and images are handled by adding relevant CSS, or basically include any markup (like MTTextile formatting if I'd wanted to) instead of (X)HTML.
• more control/keyboard shortcuts for character entities.
• last wish: user configurable toolbar :-)
Mar 26, 2003 @ 18:02 » no comments » Software
Got game?
Today we've been helping our friends fix up the apartment they recently bought. It's a pretty four room apartment with high ceilings and loads of "original details", so you understand that the place needs some *cough* work. Most of the day I've been sanding door- and windowframes. Oh joy. I'm still covered in a fine layer of dust, grit and muck.
Anyway, Got game? The future of play looks like an interesting new weblog.
Mar 29, 2003 @ 21:24 » no comments » Games
Oh yeah!
What can I say... it was a fantastic concert. And they were pretty darn serious about the smoke part of the tour name :-)
Mar 31, 2003 @ 19:08 » no comments » General
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