Archive for the 'Geekology' Category

As soon as Sarah gets off her currently ongoing phone call, I’m going to call AT&T and see if I can get DSL service here. Their web site tells me that I can’t, but I have neighbors that have it, so I’m hoping that it’s just a glitch in their system.

Charter has gone offline four times in the past week, for as long as 15 hours. I’m fed up with it.

I sure hope AT&T can hook us up. I’m getting tired of having to deal with outages when I’m trying to get work done.

My cable modem service failed last night around midnight and is still not back up. Frustrating, to say the least. Right now I’m trying to work at my mother-in-law’s house, where there’s Internet access that works.

I’m starting to wonder if the fact that I keep having trouble with Charter is because searching Google for “hate Charter” finds this blog as the top hit…

In more directly Mozilla related news, I hope to have the new MDC stuff into version control so that localizers can work on the skin. I have detailed instructions for how to go about doing it, which I’ll post prominently once the SVN access is ready.

Woot!

July 11th. I have to wait until July 11th to get my new iPhone. Oh, the humanity!

I want one.

I’m nigh-on giddy with anticipation at the impending WWDC keynote. Less than 12 hours to go now. I expect this is a sure sign of my immense nerdiness, but I don’t care.

I sure hope the rumor that it will be available later this week is true. I’m all set to go!

Today Google launched Google doctype, their new open reference for the web.  I’m just starting to look it over, and while I’ll reserve my final judgement until I have the opportunity to spend more time poking at it, I thought I’d share my initial thoughts.

Google is right that there needs to be a solid, reliable, and complete reference to the web.  The Mozilla Developer Center is being built as a complete reference to the open web.  Notice the difference there.  It appears that Google’s aim is to build a complete reference to all web browsers, even the ones that diverge from open standards.

That’s a critical difference.  Mozilla aims to improve the web by encouraging the use of genuine open standards.  The more compatible browsers are with a universal standard, the better the web experience becomes for all users, regardless of which browser they choose.  Our goal isn’t to get everyone to use Firefox — it’s to get everyone using the web to the utmost of its potential.

John Resig has a great analysis of how the tests were done to determine browser compatibility, so I won’t go there.

Reading through the documentation, such as it is at this point, is an interesting experience.  It’s clear that this initial release is something of a rush job, with automatically exported material posted and hoping that people will come along and tweak it up.  For example, take a look at the documentation of the document.getElementsByClassName method in the DOM.  It’s pretty much a stub right now.  The most interesting part there is the test they did to see which browsers offer the method (not to mention the links to John Resig’s blog posts on the subject).

Contrast this to MDC’s documentation for the same property, which includes a description of what the method does, what its result means, as well as a number of examples and a link to the WHATWG specification.

This is a pretty typical example.

Google doctype is an interesting experiment, and I’ll be curious to see what happens with it, despite my confusion over its purpose.

I’m a long-time GoLive user; I started using it back when it was still GoLive CyberStudio, and before Adobe started gradually screwing it up over the years.

Now that GoLive has been discontinued, I need to decide whether or not to take advantage of the $199 crossgrade to DreamWeaver that Adobe is offering.  Anyone have thoughts on whether or not I should do that?  I’ve never been a big DreamWeaver fan, but admittedly that’s because I didn’t feel like learning a new product when GoLive more or less did what I needed.

Everyone seems to be sharing, so let’s see what a technical writer’s shell history looks like:
MacXTreme:mozilla sheppy$ uname -a
Darwin MacXTreme.local 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar  4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386


MacXTreme:mozilla sheppy$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
106 ls
102 cd
51 bbedit
48 xulrunner
21 ps
16 proj
15 kill
10 man
10 locate
9 ssh

I’m starting to get antsy for an iPhone, but need to wait for it to be 3G.  It’s kind of weird.  I get cranky when I’m out someplace with my iPod touch and don’t have access to a WiFi connection for Internet access.

I find it quite enjoyable to do mail and the web on it — except for the limitations on when and where I can use it.  I’m pretty confident now that I’ll be one of the losers waiting in line early before the release in order to be among the first to get one.  I’m awfully eager to get one.

It’s gotten to the point where I wholly resent my Treo for being large, cumbersome, and unpleasant to use by comparison.  This is a sad state of affairs given that only a year and a half ago, I called it the coolest gadget I’d ever seen.