Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Designers take note: Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink. Computerworld:
In just one-twentieth of a second — less than half the time it takes to blink — people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.
Unfortunately, no tips there on how to make a positive first impression…
Had cause today to strain the heck out of vi — a client wanted some known chunk of a 1GB, 5-million-line log file integrated with another log. Took about two minutes to open the file, but once open, was surprised by how snappy it was. Found a buried string in about 15 seconds. Snagged from that point to the end of the file and wrote out to a temp file in about the same amount of time.
:3976053,$ w newlog_temp
Try that in Word.
vi: It’s not just for breakfast anymore!
Will it be possible to run Windows or Linux on Intel-based Macs? ZDNet has a FAQ summarizing a lot of the discussion out there on the topic. The problem primarily comes down the boot-loader. Current versions of Windows use good old BIOS, while Intel Macs boot from Extended Firmware Interface, or EFI. Until Windows can boot from EFI, it’s not going to be an easy feat. But Windows Vista will include support for EFI, and a version of Windows Media Center already does. And some Linux distributions use Elilo rather than LILO or GRUB, and Elilo already knows how to boot from EFI.
When a server at work that should have had gobs of free space suddenly claimed to be running on empty and we wanted more info than we could get from the find command, I discovered this little gem: Disk Inventory X, which quickly drew a map of files and folders on disk by type and space. Culprit turned out to be a 305 GB log file generated over the past few days by an out-of-control Samba process.
Pictured above is the main drive in my home Mac. Rectangles are files, and their containing rectangles are folders. Each color represents a different file type. Select a rectangle and it’s immediately selected in a corresponding file tree (not shown), and vice versa. The region selected in yellow represents my old unused OS 9 System folder. Trippy. And useful.
A Gedanken for you: How would the web be different today if no browser allowed users to view source?
Reader Kiernan recently contacted me about my old (and apparently much-linked-to) Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea document, saying:
I do not believe HTML email is going to disappear any time now. In fact, I expect we will see an increase in HTML email which suggests we need guidelines, not proscription. I think in the interests of furthering discussion on this subject, a poll would be useful.
Personally, I care a lot less about this subject than I used to. I’m still no fan of HTML email, but it doesn’t bug me the way it once did. Formatting in email can be useful and attractive. The security concerns it raises aren’t very relevant to me since I use a Mac (though I’m still concerned for all the Outlook users out there). Even command-line pine displays the plain-text alternate properly for most HTML emails these days.
At its best, HTML email highlights the strong points in a message. At its worst (for me), HTML email is a minor annoyance, sometimes resulting in tiny font displays — but nothing I can’t get around by punching Cmd-+ on the keyboard. There are a thousand things under heaven and earth more worthy of getting het up about. What about you? Have your feelings about HTML-formatted email changed over the years?
Apple kindly provides RSS feeds of “Top 10” and “Recently Added” items to the iTunes Music Store. The version linked above is for the general public. Partners/affiliates use a separate interface to generate RSS feeds with embedded affiliate IDs. Either way, the feeds they generate display by default as … wait for it … a series of HTML tables including all kinds of information you probably don’t want to display on your site — stuff like price, release date, and copyright holder all seem locked into the feed.
I’m using Magpie to display columns of genre-specific artist images on pages in The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. At first thought I’d have to scrape the feed to get just the data I wanted out of the tables, but then discovered that all of the data elements actually are atomic – they’re just stored in a subarray. Since this isn’t documented and Google turned up nothing useful, thought I’d share the code I came up with for the sake of future searchers.
Skipping commentary on today’s righteous MacWorld announcements, but this is probably drowning in the noise: Google Earth is finally available for the Mac. And they’ve done a killer job with it. For severely directionally challenged knuckleheads like me, it’s one of the best spatial visualization tools available.
Boot up iPod for first time in two weeks and the icon of a sad Mac stares me in the face, with (most excellent) Xs for eyes, its tongue lolling out. An ominous clicking sound emanates – telltale sound of a shot drive. Hmm… just enough time to race to the Apple store before work. Genius notices that I bought AppleCare for it, calls me “his hero” (yeah, right). Goes in the back, pulls a brand new replacement unit from brown cardboard, sends me on my way with a new unit 10 minutes later, no questions asked. The experience could not have rocked harder. Always buy AppleCare.
Interesting: Asked if I could cross-grade to a Nano, and he said no. What I didn’t know: All Apple hardware replacements are like-for-like. Even though my iPod model is no longer sold, they still manufacture them as replacements. Apparently, Apple keeps manufacturing every device they make for seven years after they stop selling them, for just this reason. Otherwise people would intentionally damage their Macs to score upgrades.
Started stepping through OnLAMP’s Ruby on Rails tutorial this evening. A lot of foreign concepts — brave new world compared to PHP development. Then, suddenly, on page 3, I added a field to my database and wham! — that field was added to all relevant pages of my application. A text entry field for the edit, create, and update pages, and an appropriate column on the display pages. Number of lines of code added to the application: Zero the Hero. Change that field’s position in the database table, and its placement throughout the application changes automatically. The application automagically models itself after the form of the database. The dataset is the model for the application.
Granted, we’re just talking about the scaffolding here, but when I stopped to think of the number of files I need to modify in a PHP application to get the same effect (and how many times I’ve needed to wheedle through exactly that kind of repetitive work), just had to roll my chair back from the desk and take a deep breath. This has some pretty stunning ramifications.
Also amazing how much mileage Rails gets out of simple naming conventions. Name a model class Recipe and it will automatically map to a corresponding database “recipes” (the pluralization translation happens automatically). Stick to the conventions, and the need to write database CRUD (create, read, update, delete) code goes away. And elegant URLs are totally automatic too.
Newbie steps, but all of a sudden I’m “getting” what all the fuss is about.