Where I’m @

20021127

Latest stable Mozilla version (get via HTTP or FTP) came out yesterday. It’s version 1.2, and we’ll try to point you to some detailed reviews of it, for we haven’t the time to do one ourselves.

20021126

Night of the Black Rider

We did something very unusual for us last night, and went to a rock show. Headlining the show was Frank Black, known to many as Black Francis, frontman for the Pixies back when. If you didn’t know, he’s had a variably successful solo career since then. He’s bounced around from label to label (the first two albums came out on 4AD, the third on SpinArt Records, the next on WhatAreRecords?, and then the most recent two on SpinArt again), but he always has kept on.

So anyway, the show was at Warsaw, the name used by the Polish National Home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, when it has rock shows. The first band, which played to about 50 to 75 people, was The Bennies, who rocked. Mix together some Blue Cheer, some Fugs, some MC5, some Hüsker Dü, some Dumptruck, and some others who we didn’t quite catch, and you might have The Bennies. It really was a bit of a shame that they were first, because they deserve a wider audience.

Especially since they were better than the losers of the second opening band, the Reid Paley Trio. We at Bleahh respect Frank Black and believe him when he says that Reid Paley is a great guy. And he may be a great performer, but if so he sent his understudy last night, who is not a great performer. His understudy is a guy who doesn’t know when to shut up between songs, who’s been on the road too long acting the Brooklyn Guy and forgets when he plays Brooklyn that people don’t necessarily dig the caricature. Raising a small glass of what was supposed to be a clear liquor to the audience between nearly every song was a poor touch also. Just look at his website fercryinoutloud!

Frank, of course, rocked the house. Started with Pixies, did stuff from his solo stuff and from his work with a steady backup band, The Catholics, three or four other Pixies tunes in the middle (including “Monkey Gone to Heaven” with nothing but two pedal steel guitars and an acoustic guitar), and three encore songs that included some of his best solo stuff. We’re paying for it today, naturally, but not as much as our SO’s co-teacher’s fiancé, who is a line cook at a fancy New York restaurant and had to be at work by 7 a.m.

20021125

We had an introduction to this post, but on rereading it and finding that it was windy and began with “Roland Barthes wrote . . .”, we have decided to cut to the chase.

We found a recent post by Mark Pilgrim about a post by Dave Winer on the differences between SOAP and REST to be quite nice, but not because we care about the difference between those two items or about. Rather, it was another example of Pilgrim’s clear, sharp use of logic to dismantle an argument. Dave Winer’s rebuttal notwithstanding, we appreciate it when bias posing as thoughtful argument is exposed as such. (For the record, we don’t have anything against Dave Winer; we try to be agnostic about who gets skewered by his/her own logical problems.)

20021119

James Coburn, dead at 74
While Mr. Coburn was not exactly the Olivier of the American screen world, we always kinda liked him. For some reason, he and Lee Marvin occasionally blend together in our mind, but not when it comes to roles like the owner of the El Sleezo joint in The Muppet Movie or Britt in The Magnificent Seven. Coburn was also remarkable as Nick Nolte’s character’s father in Affliction, redefining the art of being an angry, ornery old man whose death would be welcomed by most of those around him.

As Harrumph reminds us, December 1 is just under two weeks away, and December 1 is World AIDS Day. Amid all the stress of living in New York, in America these days, being told every two weeks or so that we’re in imminent danger of “spectacular” terrorist acts in our midst, it can be easy to ignore global problems like AIDS. To think that they are of less consequence. Unfortunately, they are not.

As last year, we invite you to participate in Link and Think, an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing world. The idea is for you to write about how any encounters with AIDS you might have had and/or to give some screen time to links to AIDS- and HIV-related sites. Last year I wrote about one of my favorite college professors, a brilliant man who died not many years after I first met him.

20021113

Green Party = Terrorists?

Our friend and sole tenant, Ishbadiddle, has a newsworthy post on the government harassment of a Green Party worker. This is the kind of thing that will only change if people know about it and act accordingly. Though our senators Schumer and Clinton are fundamentally on the good foot, we’ll be checking in with them on this one.

New Browser Version

These days, it’s all web, all the time at Bleahh. For some reason, we’ve been focussed on that part of the world. Surely, it’s just a phase we’re going through. However, it is a phase that left room to be excited about and test the new Opera 7 Beta1 (get it via FTP or HTTP)! Wonderful UI (excepting that ad in the upper-right, but we understand that Opera’s trying a different business model from the other major browser makers), much better support for CSS2, still a zippy-fast download and install. In short, the kind of browser we could grow to love, were it not for the fact that we’re going steady with Mozilla. (Yes, we know that Mozilla gets around, but we’re hoping to change that.)

One other minor problem is that we can’t use Blogger with it. Curious. There is already a big discrepancy between the IE and Mozilla/Netscape TEXTAREA used for entering a post, and Moz/NS gets a strange setup whereby in certain circumstances*, the POST and POST & PUBLISH buttons get lost under the top toolbar, but Opera 7 gets a frothing mass of bupkes for a TEXTAREA.

* When the browser is at about 800x600 or smaller, the TEXTAREA in which to type posts bleeds below the bottom frame. If the post exceeds the height of the frame containing the TEXTAREA, the frame rolls its eyes back into its head and the the POST and POST & PUBLISH buttons get lost under the top toolbar.

20021112

Further Adventures in Bad Markup

It was in the news yesterday that AltaVista (remember them?) was redesigning their home page in an effort to be more in tune with the new sparer look of the web’s more prominent and successful search engines such as Google and AllTheWeb. So far so good. Better usability, targetted focus, give the user what she wants, not a bunch of nonsense. But when we went to look at it today, we found that they did not take the additional step of some of the more prominent sites today of writing valid markup.

In the tradition, therefore, of such notable page rewrites such as Eric Meyer’s fixing of KPMG’s main page and Dylan Foley’s standards-compliant version of MSN, we’ve taken 20 minutes of our time and made a valid version of the AltaVista home page. Don’t go looking for beautiful markup just yet, sister. We only made it valid. Which is the point, to some extent: You want to have fugly, hard-to-read markup, that’s your biz, but fercryinoutloud, take the minimal time to see that it validates, huh?

20021108

Darn, That’s Bad Practice

The following is the code of the Washington Mutual page that greets you when entering their logical URI (http://www.washingtonmutual.com):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">"
<html>
<head>
<title>Washington Mutual</title>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0; url=/servlet/wamu/index.html">
</head>
<body background="#ffffff" link="#ffffff" vlink="#ffffff" alink="#ffffff" text="#ffffff">
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
Washington Mutual Bank - Online Banking Return To Home Page Redirect
</body>
</html>

Makes you wonder how many customers they lose that way.

20021104

Triptronix.net is going to be moving servers some time this week, probably sooner than later. If you experience any turbulence, please use the air sickness bag from the seat pocket in front of you. Thank you for flying, and have a pleasant day.

Update
The switchover has begun, and is supposed to take 24–48 hours to kick in. If you start seeing dead pages in the next day, please email your faithful servant.

Update — 11.07.2002
Everything seems to be working all right; carry on.

20021103

New styles for fall on the style menu (though it has been autumn for some time now, yes). If you're happy with your current color and font setup, it’ll last for 120 days after you first had it set. But sooner or later you’ve got to get with the squashes. Then again, in 120 days, it’s possible there will be another set of stylesheets available.

20021101

Out of the Mouths of Babes . . .

Let us start by saying that A List Apart (ALA) is one of the sites we look forward to reading weekly (or a rough approximation thereof). We wouldn’t be the mediocre web flunkie we are today without it, and we certainly wouldn’t be informed about practical ways to make our site better. (Better than what, you decide.)

But it’s getting quite frustrating the way that they have articles written by high-school kids. Let us emphasize that the frustration is with the way they do it, not that they do it. Consistently, the articles that have good points but bad writing are by high-schoolers. This week’s is no exception; while the concept presented is eye-opening, the writing is fairly immature and the article neglects to include a finished example of the concept presented*.

More and more, We believe, children are growing up around computers, and more people are learning the dirty little secret of markup, which is that it’s not that hard. Put that together with the fact that there are plenty of high school students smarter and more focussed than most soi-disant adults, and there’s no reason why your site can’t be built by the homecoming queen. But the fact remains that even within the elite group of particularly smart high-schoolers, there’s a lack of experience that, we believe, makes for weak writing when compared to adequate adult-world efforts**. If ALA is going to take on the challenge of accepting articles with good points but sub-par execution, it has to concurrently put in the time doing the heavy editing that such articles require.

* Note 1: Nor, since the concept is fairly advanced, did they explain why the finished concept could not be presented. Nor did they give an image (or workaround-markup-ed) to show what it could look like.

** Note 2: Spare us the complaint that most adult-world writing sucks. It does. We are tired of stumbling through New York Times articles seeing atrociously obvious typos and words like “doesn’t” hyphenated.