Author: shun

Short Life Spans of the Information Age

Brian and I are supposed to start a project on a site that would help consumers make more informed decisions on products they consume on daily basis. It’s going to be a site where anyone with Internet (or heck, an Internet phone like the iPhone) would be able to find out immediately all they’d need to know about a certain product they are buying: materials used to manufacture them, labor conditions, political influences of the manufacturer, environmental impacts/footprints….etc.

So I was doing some reading and research on the underlying software and how I’d build or modify it to work the way Brian had envisioned. I went back to some bookmarks I saved for this project from a couple of months ago and was surprised that some of them had already gone offline! And then I dug deeper and did more reading and realized that a lot of useful info on how I’d approach the project had all but disappeared!

We have all been relying on the availability (or the perception of) and immediacy of the Internet too much nowadays. We expect everything at our finger tips through the power of Google. But most of the time we fail to retain the information the good old fashion way — make a copy of it… This is frustrating… So I guess from now I will just use OSX’s “Print to PDF” feature more liberally when I see a keeper on the web….

Can’t Get Enough of Firefox 3

Fine. I am a technology whore.

Once I had a taste of Firefox 3 Beta 3, using Firefox 2 just wasn’t the same anymore — the speed, sleek look & feel… But there had to be a way around the random and frequent crashes!

So I surfed over to Firefox Mac Community Builds site and tried my luck there with one of the daily builds optimized for Mac OSX. And BINGO! Now I have a running Firefox 3 Beta 3-ish version that runs rock solid with none of the other issues I experienced with the official generic build from Mozilla. The stablized memory is also a welcomed change.

New problems though: There’s no cursor blink in text areas when typing in web based forms; some plugins still don’t work… etc. But I can live with these drawbacks given the advantages I gain in return.

So now I am a happy surfer again!

Firefox 3 Beta 3 Crashes — A LOT!

I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta 2 for almost two weeks now. Other than a few minor glitches, it’s been a pretty stable release. I was generally pretty happy especially with its fixes on memory leaks, not to mention its sheer speed.

So when Firefox 3 Beta 3 came out today, I rushed to download the latest living-on-the-edge version. What a mistake that was… Beta 3 chokes and crashes on the tiniest things; page render screws up quite a bit; the bookmark menu is huge and un-resizable… I could go on.

On the other hand, the new UI is REALLY gorgeous and is very Leopard-ish. And again, the speed is amazing as does its memory management. I guess that means they’ll need a couple of more beta versions before 3.0 goes gold…. 🙁

So now I am back with 2.0.x… 🙁

Gone without A Trace

One day my phone was there, and the next day it was gone. Gone without a trace.

But who could’ve done it? Who could’ve done such a senseless act? WHO?!

“I could’ve called my cell and easily found it,” you say?

Oh, no…. If only life was always so simple and straight forward. No way. You see, I had the silent mode on so that I could be in peace and quiet when the least I needed was a ring to break my coding/writing streak. In the age of information and communication overload, being away from it all from time to time can be healthy…

To make a long story short, luckily I had the vibrate mode on. And the phone model is old enough to “vibrate” quite loudly… After a few landline calls to it, I finally pinpointed its proximity in the house — in a far corner of the living room where DVDs were kept. And it’s not just hidden randomly in the orderly pile either — it was carefully tucked away behind the DVD stacks where it was buried under the cover of another DVD. OH~~ Whoever did this was good; whoever planned this thought it through; whoever did this never intended for me to find it… It was a masterfully orchestrated theft…

The first suspect was, of course, Bryan (What! Like Grace was going to hide my phone for fun!?). I offered some candies in exchange for the location of the phone. But no~~, he was no fool and didn’t budge.
.
.
.

Who was behind all this? Bryan — now known as the Master of Treasure Burier, or I might as well call him the Asian toddler version of Arsène Lupin from now on.

We asked if he’d known where my phone was. He protested innocence and even offered to help (and did but only at places that I’ve already looked at right behind me and to no avail). And after I found the phone, he even became “genuinely” puzzled and queried how and why the phone got there (with a tiny sign of smirk in one corner of his mouth).

If even candies can’t buy him off now, I am worried if I’d ever be able to find anything in a couple of year’s time when there’s nothing that can make him talk…

Conditional Commenting Using Multiple IE on VMWare

As most web developers know, testing for Internet Explorer is a necessary evil that comes with the job. Fortunately a few tools has made the process easy:

1. VMWare to run Windows XP with (and Vista if necessary; but yuck!);
2. Multiple IE app;
3. Conditional commenting using alternate stylesheets if push comes to shove (coding to standards is easy for all other browsers but IE; this is when you don’t want to alter your “standardized” stylesheet just for IE fixes; kudos to Microsoft for making this possible);

But #3 failed me today, and I had to find out why the hard way — Internet Explorers installed via Multiple IE will always default to the latest version of the IE installed (credit). Meaning, if you have IE6 and IE7 installed, even IE6 will always declare itself as IE7 when it comes to conditional comments (but not in browser agent, thankfully). After applying the simple registry hack (oh, the good old Windows registry, you…) and a quick reboot, everything worked as expected.

Here’s the hack (in case the link provided above disappears for some reason):

… by removing the “IE” key in the registry subkey

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[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector]

, Internet Explore defaulted to respecting conditional comments based on the version number prebuilt in the program.

My Turn

You know that feeling when you’d like to get your hands on something for yourself, but it seems like everything else is just in the way?

That has been the case for the past 3 months with my little photography site. I mean, the site is setup and almost ready to go, but I have yet to go back to Aperture/Lightroom to locate and publish all the images that I’d like to show in the gallery section. And then I will also need to print some promote cards from Moo Cards to distribute and litter the city with. I am all nervous and jumpy about this.

So today I finally finished the last of all those programming gigs I’ve been buried with (they help pay the rent though; so I am not complaining). When I wake up, it’d be a brand new day, and I shall complete my site this week! Yoohoo!

One of my longest running clients just emailed me about another set of feature extensions they’d like to do for their site. So I better finish the photography site before they slap me again with another contract gig!

Intelligently Designed Mess

I’ve heard some “interesting debates” (to say the least) about the idea of Intelligent Design that somehow all people were “intelligently designed” by this supreme being living up in the heavens. And this supreme being is almighty and can do no wrong.

My answer to that is: that being could take some industrial design lessons down here on my humble Earth. And while he’s here, I’d like to ask him a few questions as to why he designed things the way they were if they were supposedly so intelligently designed (NOT!).

Anyone who’s tried to pick his/her own child’s ear can attest that the way ear wax are formed inside a child’s ear canals proves that the ears aren’t so intelligently designed. Some wax hug to the wall of the ear and seem to have root grown inside them. Sure, there are remedies to use and techniques to try, but my point is, if the ears were so intelligently designed, the damn wax would always fall out of the ear “by design”!

Evolution is dirty and messy, and that’s the way things work. Anyone who tells me there’s a God up there who so intelligently designed everything so perfectly can try to dip his head in the water for 10 minutes and tell me if the fact that we can’t breath under water was so intelligently designed by this God of his. When everywhere else in the world is in a hurry to fund math and [real] science, it’s hard to comprehend that here, in the United States, arguably the most advanced nation in the world, even has a movement that’s seemingly winning the “Intelligent Design” war in education. Are they really serious? Or is this just a big hoax by the Religious nuts?

Religion belongs to the heart and private homes; it has no place in education, politics or government.

Sorry. I was frustrated trying to pick some of the weirdest ear waxes in Bryan’s ears. And I thought this stupid Intelligent Design idea is just insane and poorly conceived…. hence the rant…

Apple Mail RSS Reader — For the Critical RSS Feeds I Can’t Afford to Miss

After the last mishap in missing the California editions of The Secret Workshop, I’ve decided to make use of Apple Mail’s built-in RSS reader for a change. See, I don’t really get the time to follow all the RSS feeds that I’d like to. So I keep on missing out on stuff. So now that It’s in my mail client, every time I check for emails I’d be able to get an update on the latest openings of The Secret Workshop…

The only caveat is, I go to bed at weird hours. And those workshops get filled up almost immediately within half of a day of a workshop location being announced. So unless I am diligent in checking my mailbox every 4 to 6 hours, I could still miss out on the next convenient location…. 🙁 This is when an iPhone would be a sweet device to have!

Pissed About My Own Forgetfulness

I’d been following the opening of The Secret Workshop in California so that I can attend one and learn more of what I can’t get from other professionals. I am not so worried about the technical stuff in Photoshop or lighting stuff — it’s the meat on how to get into the commercial and editorial industry that I am most interested in. Also the bits on how to photograph infants that will be a boost in the right direction.

But I’d been so busy with other stuff that I’d forgotten to follow up with the site and COMPLETELY missed out on the signups for San Francisco, San Diego, AND even Phenix, the next closest thing to anything California! I am so bummed! The only opening they have is in Michigan, but it’s going to be held within weeks after Grace giving birth, which means it’s probably not a good idea to leave home for four days…

Maybe I will bum around trying to get on a waiting list (if I am so lucky)…

ARGH!

Of American Politics and Possibilities

People who really know me (or are regulars of this blog) know that I often have gripes about America and its politics. For a while I didn’t understand why I’ve become so cynical of this country though I’ve spent over 14 years (!!) living here. All the hopes and aspirations I read about America just didn’t seem to exist anymore. And all I seemed to see were just the negatives and caveats of my life in America.

Then today I stumbled upon this interview of Prof. Harvey J. Kaye with Bill Moyers. The enthusiasm of Kaye on the subject of Thomas Paine is infectious and puts me in a happy place about those hopes and aspirations I had for being in America again*.

* Unfortunately, as Kaye stated in the interview, Paine’s ideas and words are now being quoted by the wrong people in the wrong contexts to do the dirty works of politicians. Or maybe I am just too naive.

Another Microsoft IE Rant

Ok, another pointless ugly rant on Microsoft IE.

Engineers who came up with the guidelines for Microsoft IE must have their heads filled with tofu… umm, wait, I like tofu. Their heads must be filled with turd. Simple standards are simply ignored or conveniently misinterpreted by the IE’s rendering engine. It makes debugging a living hell from the perspective of a web developer no matter how much time I’ve already spent doing this for a living.

And then today Microsoft went and made an offer to buy out Yahoo for a cool $44.6B? Give me a f*cking break. How about spending some of those billions on fixing the damn IE and ensure future developments of IE adhere to standards?

The World Wide Web would be a better place without Microsoft. But then again, without scums, how can we appreciate the beauty of all the other standards-adhering browsers? Nonetheless, if I ever meet the guy(s) who was in charge of defining the renderer guidelines, I might just kick him in the nuts. Idiot.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 Graphic

Just out of curiosity (and because I am a new-tech whore like that), I downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 2 to check it out. I was surprised to be greeted with its “welcome” page upon first launch. It’s got a nice retro illustration of a robot destroying some high rises.

firefox 3 Beta 2 grphics

Seems like going retro is hip again.

Some quick thoughts on Firefox 3 Beta 2 on my Mac:

1. Snappier performance;
2. Some nice visual effects (like the tabs sliding from side to side);
3. Crashes from time to time;
4. Bookmarks a little messed up; but I simply used the “manage bookmarks” feature and reverted back to a previous backup the Firefox had made when I installed the beta;
5. Many addons don’t work; I had to use

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about:config

to add a new

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Boolean

variable

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extensions.checkCompatibility

and gave it a value of

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<strong>false</strong>

so that Firefox won’t check for addon compatibilities and disable them. Some addons still won’t work, but most will likely work as advertised. Others already have un-advertised beta versions out for this beta release!

So far I like it enough to want to keep using it full time.