But I’m going, baby!

The T-shirt should be a highlight.

Well, you can see what they’re going for.

I’m not actually looking for a job, by the way. But sometimes it all gets to me and I get fired up and visit Trademe or Seek or whatever. After reading a few of the job descriptions I tend to realise that I am one of those arseholes who doesn’t appreciate what they’ve got.

For all the promise of the Free Market, it’s a little unfortunate that incompetence and poor customer service seem to be the rule more often than they are the exception. Where’s the market forces? I guess it’s hard to vote with your feet when hot coals constitute every single option.

Web hosting is an interesting one, because of course it is so new that there are no large, established names that can rely solely on their brand. On the other hand, demand has absolutely exploded so new customers are everywhere. It’s also a pretty unhindered market – location doesn’t matter, there’s not really any lock-in (just re-point your domain), and as said above, no companies are large enough to mess things up. Frankly, I’m pretty happy with what I get – a domain for $US10 per year and pretty good hosting for $US44 per year is a drop in the bucket compared to all the hours I spend on it. I would like to know why going with a New Zealand host costs so much more – surely our costs aren’t higher than those in the US? Surely there’s enough New Zealanders to get some economies of scale? And how come .nz domains cost so much more?

For the most part, when I see people talk about their hosting companies on their blogs, it’s overwhelmingly positive. (Compare this to comments on, say, cellphone carriers, or broadband.) But you also get the other side. Recently Dreamhost had some rather significant downtime – not unusual for them, I hear. In what seems like misguided PR at its finest, their apology was “ha ha, did you see that, LOL!”

I am with Total Choice Hosting. This is because they hosted our previous site, nocents.org (RIP), since the first bunch wiped out our forums without warning or backup due to some obscure T&Cs violation. Frankly, TCH are pretty damn good – it’s a cheap service and you get good performance, good uptime, and great service – people actually reply (!) to your support requests. There was one incident recently that soured our relationship – our site went down, I combed their site, forums, status pages and found nothing about it so filed a support request. Oh yes, they said, there was a hardware failure and we are restoring from the backup now! Check the forums for updates! Well, that’s cool I guess, but I don’t think I see anything in your forums. I checked back later, and again, couldn’t find anything anywhere referring to it. So, had we not noticed, we might never have known it was down. Which is unfortunate, because their backup was a day old and my most recent blog post had disappeared. (Yes, even at my posting rate. How unlikely was that?) Fortunately, I still had a copy of it in my text editor. This was purely by chance, and if I hadn’t, it would have just been outright lost. Not so cool, but… all in all, considering what we pay, this isn’t too unreasonable. My only real issue was with their poor communication. Where I mean, poor from my point of view, but also dumb from their point of view – it is much cheaper to post in your forum than answer lots of individual support requests. This is the incompetence bit, where everyone loses, as opposed to being screwed over, where only the consumer loses. Not sure which one is worse, but at least if someone screws you over and is up-front about it, you can respect that. It’s hard to respect stupidity.

Here’s what sucks, though. PHP5 came out in 2004. It’s now 2007, and PHP5 is fast becoming the standard. I have been quite patient about this. But, you know, there’s patience and there’s eternity. Apparently TCH have opted for the latter:

With PHP 5 having been out for so long now, and many of todays applications beginning to require it, I am surprised that TCH has no plan to migrate. How about making some new servers available with PHP5 so that new or existing customers can choose or migrate to them? [etc]

[Jan 14 2007] Currently there are no plans to migrate to PHP5.

I mean, it’s bad enough that they haven’t done it yet. But they don’t even have plans to do it? I really like being a customer of TCH. I just don’t understand. Why would you force your customers to leave?

Internet Explorer 7 was released on October 18. How the last five years have flown by. So, let’s begin with the good news:

• Numerous rendering bugfixes/improvements. Yay!
• Improved security. (Probably most notably, ActiveX will no longer install stuff from websites without asking. Because I bet we were all surprised at how badly that turned out.)
• New UI.
• Pushed out by automatic update, so we should see a rapid decline in IE6 usage.

Alas, the bad news:

• The rendering improvements were only tweaks, as opposed to the Trident rendering engine being booted out the door, kicked in the guts a few times, then having petrol poured all over it and being set on fire as web developers had hoped.
• They closed some of the worst security holes, but fundamentally it’s still the same IE. And fundamentally it is still the same Microsoft, with a security track record that is, shall we say, unparalleled.
• New UI. Now, okay, this is a subjective thing, so don’t just take my word for it. No menu bar, though? Refresh button hidden inside the Go button? And best of all, it’s not customisable! So you’re stuck with their bizarre design decisions.
• Oh yeah, doesn’t work on Win 2K. Which kindof a lot of people use, so IE6 is going to hang around for ages. Dammit.

Here’s an Internet Explorer 7 Review by CNET. While it’s generally positive, basically every paragraph ends with ” … but Firefox does it better.” Is there any reason to use IE7 apart from ignorance? Well… the toolbars are very shiny.

I feel very sorry for the IE team really. They were on a hiding to nothing. There wasn’t the time to really fix it, so they were tasked with taking what is quite possibly the most widely despised piece of software ever built and somehow patching it up to be as good as browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari, all of which are rocketing along the cutting edge at the moment. It was an impossible task, and they were going to be abused just for trying. You only need to read the comment thread on any of the IEBlog postings to get an idea of it – sometimes dozens, often hundreds of comments, the majority just outright dissing them, their product or Microsoft. It’s not cool.

Mind you, you get that when you peddle the corporate line on your blog. For example, we constantly asked for a way to run IE6 and 7 side-by-side on our PC – you know, so we could support their browser – and constantly got told to either buy another computer or get Virtual PC. Now, again, this was all they could do, so I’m not holding it against them. But what they consistently failed to do was finish it with ” … yes, this is shit, it’s the best we can do right now, we’ll try to do better in the future.” If they had just said that, people wouldn’t need to keep screaming at them about it all the time. The internet is full of angry, nasty people, but you know, if you don’t treat us like shit, we can actually be pretty cool once you get to know us. (By the way, you can get unofficial standalone IE builds.) So it was pleasing to see this, finally, in the latest chat transcript:

Q: Any word on supporting developers who need to run IE6 and 7 concurrently? I’m currently running the IE7 RC1 standalone hack.
Tony Chor [MS]: As we’ve mentioned before, we suggest users who need to run multiple versions of IE use virtualization technology like Microsoft Virtual PC (available for free download now!) or multiple machines. We know this is a pain point for everyone (including us!) and will focus on providing a good solution in a future versions.

From the same chat, this was my favourite bit. Sometimes, you only need one word:

Q: Will IE7 work with Windows 98?
Tony Chor [MS]: Sorry.

So yeah, if you want to get IE7, I guess you can download it from here or something.

Good design is not fragile. You can change your screen resolution without it falling apart. You can even view it in a completely different way and good design will still be beautiful. Some genius has come up with a test for this: Websites as Graphs. Be sure to check out the screenshots – especially Boingboing, Apple and Google.

I’ve done a few of my own. See if you can guess which site they are before reading the caption. (Note: this is more of an exercise in psychology than HTML. For example, the first site I did had to be…)

…the incomparable db.rambleschmack.net. (The front page – basically a few lists of links.)

The spartan code underlying rambleschmack.net.

My associate at The Eschaton.

Flashback: it’s table city at the Nocents.org blog. All those tables to create our cutting-edge post borders seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ok, kids: make your own!

Javascript is an interesting little language. In terms of people who have used it at least once, it is probably amongst the world’s most popular languages. And yet very few people have anything more than a bare minimum understanding of it. Generally you get pretty good at HTML, CSS and maybe PHP etc, but Javascript tends to only come up when the client says something awesome like “I want it to pop up in a little window!” or “dropdown menus would really make my site better!”. In fact before the proliferation of CSS it seemed that Javascript was a language that existed purely for the purpose of constructing image rollovers. Because you could never raise a million dollars in venture capital without image rollovers on your site. You can’t sell usability.

In fact a lot of people don’t even realise that Javascript is not Java. Simple mistake, but a pretty big one. Java is the one that occasionally throws errors and will take down your entire browser, and possibly your operating system, with it. Javascript, on the other hand, throws errors constantly and you wouldn’t even know. Seriously, have a look in the Javascript console now and chances are better than 50/50 that at least one of the pages you have visited will have thrown a JS error. That’s how critical Javascript is to your browsing experience. I generally use it about 5 lines at a time for clever little usability improvements. I pity those poor bastards who have to develop entire applications in it.

The other thing about Javascript is that even people who use it know almost nothing about how to. Sometimes I have to do a separate Google search for every line I create. And always I thought, is there, like, an API? A hitchhiker’s guide? Anything?

Not as far as I know. But here, have a look at Javascript in Ten Minutes. It is a great little primer on the basics. The first half is anyway. The second half, I got a bit lost, but once again I pitied the poor bastards who develop entire applications in it. All the complexity of OO, with all the ugly of procedural! I love you PHP.

No offense to Perl. This was the only PHP image I had.

This is Microsoft’s way of saying, “you’re fucked, buddy.” A quick Google revealed that the problems could be anything from misconfigured software to incorrectly connected cables to faulty memory or power supplies. It was indeed a chilling read, like I was browsing the menu at the Inquisition buffet.

If you have arrived here via Google suffering the same dilemma, here’s what fixed it for me: uninstall BootSkin. Here’s what most definitely didn’t fix it for me: turn off caching and shadowing in the BIOS. If I knew anything about hardware (and I have a C- to suggest that I don’t) I could tell you why that mattered. However, all I can tell you is that with those turned off, your computer will slow down by a factor of 100. This can seriously disguise the fact that you have fixed the actual problem. Thanks, Microsoft!

During the period that I thought I faced a hardware problem, I mused over whether I wanted to go through dealing with that crap. I’m really not into hardware. And I mean, I could get a whole new computer for less than $1000. At one point I turned to my torturer and said, “how about I throw you in the fucking bin? How would you like that?”

There are many lessons to learn. First of all, don’t be emotionally decisive. I suspected from very early on that BootSkin was at fault, but didn’t uninstall it straight away because I really, really like BootSkin. (Well, not so much now.) In fact it is only the fresh feelings of trauma that stop me immediately reinstalling it. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to hold out. (Oh, I shame me.)

Anyway, guess what the first thing I did afterwards was? A full backup. It goes without saying that this would have been only the second best time to do so, had this been a hard drive failure.

On a related (if you happen to be in the know) note, are you aware that there are easter eggs in the home of Bartleby? For example, the Windows XP Silver theme has been available as an alternate stylesheet since earlier this year. That was, of course, hardly user-friendly, so with a little inspiration (from none other than Mr GrayModern) I whipped up a stylesheet switcher. You can access it in the (and here’s where it gets confusing) View menu. No, not that View menu. Well, actually it is still there, but now it is in the other one as well. And it is better there. In fact, it uses Javascript to do the switch and set a cookie, and PHP to read it back and set the sheet for subsequent page loads. If I may say, I feel that NotePress is pretty much my coolest project ever. Thank you, Bartleby.

I started my DVD collection today (assuming you don’t count those bonus discs that come with CDs), and already it has swelled to three titles:

• Point Break
• Lost in Translation
• Cowboy Bebop

Oh and Filthy’s back, if you didn’t notice. He’s got right back into his work, giving one finger to Aeon Flux. Good man.

Firefox 1.1 was originally scheduled for release in March. In fact, they barely made November. That just sounds bad though, so in a cunning move it was renamed Firefox 1.5. That’s clever. This post? This is post 2.0. That’s why it’s a week late.

Seriously though, stuff got done in the last year. Highlights include inbuilt tab drag-and-drop (which comes as a great blessing, as MiniT was the Grim Reaper in my experience), incremental updates (so you no longer have to uninstall, download, and reinstall the whole program for every security patch) and bug-free XUL error pages (instead of those abominable dialogs). There’s plenty of other stuff, such as SVG support. One of my personal favourites is that on tabs with an image (instead of a webpage) the tab icon will be a tiny thumbnail of that image. How funky is that?

But that’s not all! Mozilla.org is dead (sort of), long live Mozilla.com! Oh yeah, and of course a new release of Gecko means cool new things for web developers to play with. How about some CSS column action?

So what I’m saying is, download now. And then hook yourself the fuck up with some Best Firefox Extensions. I’m hoping that link will bump up its PageRank because it is currently number 11 in Google: high enough to have required lots of work and months of waiting, low enough to never get any click-throughs. Let me know if any of the extensions/links are outdated. Or perhaps you know of exciting new ones to add. I’m all ears. Here’s a couple to get you started.

As you may or may not know, I’ve been particularly busy this year due in great part to my final year project. It hasn’t been an especially large amount of work – to be honest, I’m sure other groups have done much more – but it hangs constantly over one like an insatiable spectre. Should you try to relax at any time, guilt casually drops by and enquires about your weekly progress. Holidays instead become opportunities to do more work.

Well, fuck that. In two weeks time, it will all be done and good riddance. A topic that I was originally enthusiastic about – web design and usability – turned into an epic slog from about week two. I hope this is not what having a job is going to be like. I might have to join Lo4d3d Lawnmowers Inc.

Because I am a reasonable man, I should Say Nice Things too. And indeed, I have learnt a lot. At times it has been enjoyable. And Hell, it has been good experience. So you know, perhaps it was worth it after all.

We’re giving a 30 minute seminar on Thursday at 5pm in 3.403, and next Friday there is the exhibition, where we stand next to a poster (and possibly computer) answering the same questions dozens of times. I think it will be relatively interesting (if you’ve ever been to a Software Engineering lecture, you will understand what I mean by that) but I wouldn’t recommend cancelling your reservations for Herbie: Fully Loaded just to see it. Actually, I would. Shame on you.

By default, WordPress doesn’t seem to have an archives page. It just stacks up all your months of writing in the sidebar. This strikes me as an inelegant solution (interface clutter, anyone?) It also strikes me as a solution that does not scale well. I haven’t yet come across a WP site that’s been going for, say, five years (in fact I don’t think its been around anywhere near that long), but just imagine.

It’s actually remarkably easy to make your own archives page with the power of WordPress templates (AKA themes.) Being a little familiar with these helps, but is not necessary knowledge. You’ll also need to grab the Clean Archives plugin.

Begin by making the template for your archives page. Create a file named (say) archives.php in /wp-content/themes/currentThemeName/.

<?php
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
/*
Template Name: Archives Template
Description: A template for archives pages.

Note: requires Clean Archives plug-in
http://www.sporadicnonsense.com/2005/04/28/clean-archives-plug-in/
*/
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<h1>Archives</h1>

<!-- You may wish to add a search box here -->

<?php echo srg_clean_archives(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

The second and final step is to create the “page” in WordPress. Go into your WP admin area then Write > Write Page. Give it a title (eg. Archives.) Down in Page Options you will see Page Template. Select Archives Template, and click Create New Page.

Important! If you are using permalinks, make sure your .htaccess file is writable (eg. chmod 777 it) before doing the above step!

And that’s it. You should have a nice page like so. Remember to make sure it’s valid XHTML.

Acknowledgments: this post drew heavily on Secrets of WP Theming Part 1.