Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

Sometimes the media draws an inference from a rumor and the story gains a life of its own, regardless of how based in truth it is. I may be as wrong as can be on this one, but there's no way I can see Mac OS is going to Intel any time soon.

Here's the latest rendition of this rumor, as told by the Macworld Weekly newsletter:
... Bear Sterns analyst Andrew Neff released "PC Manifesto," a report on the state of the personal computing industry that predicted, among other things, that Apple would likely make a switch of its own from chip suppliers IBM and Motorola to their rival Intel. The reason? Intel can provide more than twice current processor speed, and that will likely win new customers. A second analyst-heavy feature from the NewsFactor Network posits that a Microsoft/Apple showdown for dominance of the desktop is coming.

Why do people think this? Here's a quote from a ZDNet article entitled Intel inside a Mac? Just wait.
Since Mac OS X is built atop a version of Unix, porting it over to Intel processors is fairly straightforward.

There's a huge problem here. The part of Mac OS X that's UNIX is most certainly easy to port. Try "done". You can get it here today if you wanted to. The problem is all you'd get is a command line. That's right -- a terminal. Like a DOS window. Woohoo. Not a single OS X configuration GUI, not the widgets that the GUIs would be made from, not the libraries every good Cocoa programmer uses, nothing. Just neat, "headless" UNIX apps like Apache, vi, and grep.

At the same time, most of Apple's serious software, and even much of its iApp apps, like iDVD and iMovie, are optimized heavily for the Altivec instruction set. I'm no assembly/computer language wiz, but here's what I do know [if I believe all I'm told]. There are certain instructions that can be called inside of the G4 processor that help with digital video processing. These instructions are not in the x86 platform (Intel and AMD, and Transmeta, to a certain degree, for all that matters). Rewriting these apps would mean losing the hardware advantage, that is, the advantages from these special instructions, Macintosh has had with apps like Photoshop. Unless the G4 really is quite a bit slower than a comparable Intel or AMD model, these niche-specific speed gains will go out of the window and "normal" apps, Microsoft Office, etc, would tank if Apple changed platforms.

So here's the bottom line. For Apple to use Intel processors, not only would they have to start thinking of ways to port over the "Apple-specific" parts of OS X (I'm guessing that's non-trivial), they'd also have to figure out a way to combat the Macintosh operating system's possible speed losses to Windows in not only everyday apps but the applications where Apple used to shine.

Add to this that IBM has a new PowerPC chip where it'd be easy to migrate existing Mac OS apps, and I think you have a pretty good case against expecting a move by Apple to x86.

That said, if Apple was going to move, now's the time. I've never tried Darwin on x86 hardware, but if they've bothered to keep it robust "cross-harware", there has to be a reason (though most likely just because it's smart and relatively easy to do with the pretty plain jane OS). More importantly, if Cocoa really builds off of Darwin directly and can be compiled against it (created without anything new added), this port might really be incredibly easy. And there's nothing Apple would rather have than people having to chunk OS 9 and have to buy new software for OS X. More software buyers mean more money in the Mac market means more software developers see the Mac as viable. That means more hardware sales for Apple.

But, again, I can't and don't see it. It'd take too much time for the rewrite and too much niche-specific speed would be lost. If this was Apple's plan, they would have done this while rewriting OS X, and we would have heard more about this possible switch than one comment from Steve Jobs flung into the ether. Unless I'm wrong and Cocoa works atop x86 Darwin just as easily as PowerPC, and possibly even then, I just don't see a switch happening.

Ye ole Glish has a pretty good article introducing CSS layout over on developer.apple.com, no less. Though I haven't seen anyone on the net work CSS better than this guy, I think he's barking up the wrong tree on one of his points in the above article.

Here's the quote:
But it is wrong to think that the markup is what specified the style; in fact, the browser decides how to display a section header according to internal logic given to it by its programmers. Had they wanted, they might have specified that section headers be displayed italicized, or with an underline. And that is where CSS comes in to the picture. CSS allows you to override the browser's plans for displaying any particular page element or group of elements.

Two beefs. First, to think that html markup doesn't and shouldn't specify style is to think the NBA's style of basketball is still non-contact (or even High School ball for all that matters) or should be. It does and it is. That's what html has been designed to do/evolved into in reality, regardless of its "original mission".

Hey, standards are great. Carefully constructed DIV tags in xhtml 1.0 are great. But when even Glish has to admit that, "... roughly 25% of your site visitors will not be able to see your layout", well, we've got problems.

He also admits in the article that, "... the table layout page will look nearly identical in all browsers dating back to Netscape 1.1..." Well, isn't that the point? If you're not trying to provide uplevel functionality (dynamic sites, like this mapping site (click Query Storms)) that requires you use fancy styles and, more to the point, the object model these styles provide you, so that you can dynamically change the pages' content, you should be shooting to hit the most users possible.

I know there's some talk about using standards to make pages more accessible to people with screenreaders and the like (visually impaired), but I've watched some in action and good html 3.2 works just fine.

If you're just spitting out text & images, use tables. Glish's rewrite of the ADC site using CSS layout is pretty neat technically speaking, and his example of what the ADC site would look like with table borders is pretty heinous indeed, but the CSS layout is a pretty esoteric solution to undo some poor html layout by the Apple folk. The rewrite of the crazily tabled page reminds me a little of bloodletting. The problem might go away three-fourths of the time, but the lone man out in the quartet's really going to be hurting. And it's because you weren't really treating the right problem from the start.

Secondly (and then I'm done), there's the quote, "CSS allows you to override the browser's plans for displaying any particular page element or group of elements." If you wanted to stay true to what browsers were trying to do back in the day, you wouldn't include style at all.

You shouldn't be trying to force one type of display into someone's browser. If I wanted h1 tags tiny and green, Mosaic let me do it. With CSS layout, using mad class names that will differ from one html developer to another, I can't set a "universal stylesheet" in my browser's preferences and expect my headers to be tiny and green. I won't know to look out for <div class="yourSpecialClassThatMeansHeader1">. Or, in this specific case, <div id="top_nav">.

There's a reason why html went the direction it did, away from pure markup and towards style in the tags. Html is a hybrid of sorts, and what you use should be decided on your audience, not on the hope that, one day, you'll realize "... a vision for the future of the internet where the millions and millions and documents available on the web are well-structured documents with markup that accurately describes their contents." Make your pages readable by everyone today. Use Google if you want to experience the "More exciting possibilities [that] include programmable bots which could scour the reaches of the web for the best price on buffalo milk mozzarella or for the latest interview with Britney Spears." Sheesh. :^)

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!! Back-up your data and, when you bike, always wear white. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links in green.
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Saturday, August 31, 2002
I can't imagine how much this dude makes a year. Talk about knowing your VB inside and out. Heck, I'm just trying to get the file name in a CommonDialog to match when the user changes the extension in the select below (file type). I'm having the dangest time figuring out which variables to send to the SetWindowText API to get it all to happen. Got an answer that didn't work from Desaware, so at least it's not a blatantly obvious answer staring me in the face. But that guy linked to above, I bet it takes 10 minutes, tops. Sheesh. posted by ruffin at 8/31/2002 12:26:00 PM

Friday, August 30, 2002
iSQL is a pretty good JDBC frontend, even if it did steal its name from the a similar app for Microsoft SQL Server. Once I add FreeTDS (for MS-SQL 2k, you don't even need TDS; Microsoft supplies a JDBC driver), I'm getting really close to being able to do the whole SQL Server/ASP thing on any platform I choose. posted by ruffin at 8/30/2002 04:51:00 PM

This Rent-a-Coder site seems to be a really good way to do 80 hours of work and get paid less than $100 for your time. :^) posted by ruffin at 8/30/2002 12:40:00 PM

Thursday, August 29, 2002
I'm seeing more and more comments like this one over at Slashdot that are finally calling out people who have "Slashdot Syndrome". Hopefully the following quote from that comment will help explain what that means: I'm surprised, but then, not too surprised, at the number of posts here that castigate Apple as "evil" for doing this. They are in keeping with the widespread notion that "belief" in open souce/free software gives you a right to steal with impunity. I doubt that's what Stallman had in mind. People who write comments at Slashdot really do seem to be irrationally anti-capitalist at times. They seem to think that the U.S. Constitution is some strange trump card that can beat any bad contracts someone's willingly signed. "Oh, sure, he signed a contract that said he wouldn't steal industry secrets and deliver them to competitors, but don't forget Freedom of Speech!!!" Come on guys, you don't have a right to access content that's released on each DVD free of charge -- the DVDs' creators have a right to offer that content in some restricted way that best suits them. Nor can you do anything you danged well please at work -- you're there by choice, not by right. Stop harping about right to privacy with regards to web surfing habits. It's all a little reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. You don't get to ride everyone's gains and progress as some sort of entitlement. Cracking isn't innovation, and looting innovation is as despicable as any other sort of [nonviolent] robbery. This is not to say that every capitalist behaves rationally either. Why would a [fictional] company that only produces DVDs shut down an attempt to create, say, a [fictional] free (or even "Free as in GPL") DVD player on Linux if there wasn't a commercial player available? Now that is silly, at least in principle. One must simply remember that it is a free country here in the U.S. and it's everyone's right to behave as inanely as they wish, within certain regulations. You may be given certain rights, but you're also free for the most part to sign them away in a legal contract. And you're also free to ask that people willingly sign a contract you wrote up, no matter how irrational. Watch Judge Judy, guys. No, really. It's that simple. posted by ruffin at 8/29/2002 02:49:00 PM

Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Some people like to refactor. posted by ruffin at 8/27/2002 01:14:00 PM

Friday, August 23, 2002
YEEEEE-HA!!!!!!! From the "aspcommunity digest, August 22,2002"... Two DropDownLists in DataGrid!!!! That's 20¢... This really is silly, both the number of piddly articles and my posting them. I'm sorry to be wasting your bandwidth on a pet peeve. posted by ruffin at 8/23/2002 12:31:00 PM

Thursday, August 22, 2002
Adding a Totals Field in a DataGrid By Doug Seven 8/19/2002 WHEN WILL IT END?!!!! If I had a dime for every DataGrid article I've seen... Why do I want to get Microsoft to create my data-driven html tables? It's NOT THAT DIFFICULT. Learn some introductory html and do it your own danged self. Ooops. I need to write part II of that. slinks away posted by ruffin at 8/22/2002 11:43:00 AM

Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Admittedly I'm enamoured by the idea of a GPL C# IDE written in C#, but here's another project that works with Eclipse as a plugin. It's written in Java, which is an interesting mix (Java for C# dev), but Eclipse is a fairly responsive IDE for Java that I used on my last Java project that didn't require a GUI. Most of my day job uses a set of COM-based apps, so for the most part I don't get to do any C# jive unless I force a reason, but this "esharp" plugin strikes me as a little out in left field. I wrote the author on the off chance he hadn't heard of #develop. His reply amounted to this esharp plugin for Eclipse allows people to develop on Linux for C# via the Mono project's C# compilers. Last I'd looked at Mono, it was only good for a few simple console apps, and had just gotten to be self-hosting on Linux. Not exactly a pressing need. And once Mono is mature, it should run #develop right out of the box! Head to the Mono project website now and you'll see a different picture. Windows.Forms is starting to develop. The project is looking for someone to hack up "an ASP.NET application to maintain our class library documentation". They're even branching out to get VB.NET to compile and work with Mono in the future, though I didn't think VB.NET was in the standards proposal Microsoft submitted when it submitted C#. Neat stuff. And since #develop still doesn't have a good Windows.Form RAD, the esharp plugin might have a good niche for building console and ASP.NET apps until Mono finishes Windows.Form. posted by ruffin at 8/21/2002 02:39:00 PM

Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Looks like freakinname is finally in Google fairly well. Got a pretty good laugh today seeing what pages Google thinks are related to this blog. Some are pretty boring "finds", like the three or four that just point to links I have on the front page. Interesting hits include a review of XML Spy (which I might link to in some blog, but I'm hoping it's because the acronyms are similar) and someone else's blog. Some awfully similar stuff in there, like Mac links, REALbasic rants (though I've cooled off that jive and have gone back to Java on Mac), bike riding, and even things I haven't mentioned like not caring to fly and havin' pet cats. Not exactly Crossing Over brand sheenanagins (not using OmniWeb, obviously), but close. posted by ruffin at 8/20/2002 06:20:00 PM

Monday, August 19, 2002
#develop (SharpDevelop) is an interesting project I've mentioned here a number of times. It's a "free-as-in-puppies" IDE for C# written in C#. For a while it was barely more than a syntax highlighter that tied your F5 key to a very specific shell command (that would compile and run your code in the .NET runtime), but it's a decent IDE now with code-completion which comes with a reasonable price. That said, if you need to create a GUI, you're still better off plunking down a C note for the C# portion of Visual Studio.NET. But #develop is GPL and getting better all the time... Maybe once Mono's more mature more people will have time to contribute to the #develop project. Anyhow, I just downloaded #develop version 0.89 and had two comments. The first one's quite quick: I notice that #develop is using OpenOffice file formats for its documentation. I've been using OO a little recently, and it does a fairly good job translating Word docs and a better job of being a word processor. Powerpoint presentations [sic!] and Excel files are opened and edited fairly easily as well, as long as the files don't use many non-standard bells and whistles. I especially like its autocomplete function, where OO tries to guess what word you're typiing based on the words already in your doc. You hit return to accept the word, or just keep typing. Not nearly as clumsy as it sounds. OO is bound to be available for one of your OS's of choice, so have a look. Comment two comes from a new document on the #develop Tech Notes pages. There's an article entitled "The fine Art of Commenting [pdf]". I'm a pretty big believer in commenting, which for years I didn't realize was a controversial stance. My comment actually goes along with one of the references at the bottom of the page, namely "Ottinger's Rules for Variable and Class Naming". One rule, "Avoid Encodings", is downright wrong. Here's the quote. Avoid Encodings Encoded names require deciphering. This is true for Hungarian and other `type-encoded' or otherwise encoded variable names. To allow any encoded prefixes or suffixes in code is suspect, but to require it seems irresponsible inasmuch as it requires each new employee to learn an encoding "language" in addition to learning the (usually considerable) body of code that they'll be working in. As breifly as I can put it, encodings work across projects, and quickly become the most useful in-code documentation any code can have. It might take quite a while to learn each body of code you maintain, but you'll learn each much much more quickly if you spend a little up-front time learning a company-wide encoding standard and stick by it. Delayed gratification, that's what commenting's about. Just as examples, can we know that a variable called "browserWindow" is a JWindow in Java? Perhaps it's now a JPanel that's simply a child in a JWindow of a browser. Is "customerCounter" going to fail once we get to 32,768 in VB? We'd know immediately, no matter where we started reading the code, if the names were "pnlBrowser" or "dblCustomerCounter". Without hard and fast and easy to learn self-commenting encodings in code, you'll keep turning out code that's hard for members not on the original team to learn. Ottinger misses the boat on this one. I'm betting the rule came from people who learn a giant system and stick with it for the next 10 years -- if you were never going to learn or program something new, system-wide advances do lose their advantage [for those people who will never see another system]. posted by ruffin at 8/19/2002 12:42:00 PM

Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Honeywell's Career site is optimized for Internet Explorer version 5.01 SP1 or higher (except 6) and Netscape version 4.73 or higher (except 6). AOL browsers are not currently supported! Boy, those are some rockin' web programmers Honeywell's got there, eh? Makes me want to work there, certainly. posted by ruffin at 8/14/2002 06:55:00 AM

Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Sometimes the media draws an inference from a rumor and the story gains a life of its own, regardless of how based in truth it is. I may be as wrong as can be on this one, but there's no way I can see Mac OS is going to Intel any time soon. Here's the latest rendition of this rumor, as told by the Macworld Weekly newsletter: ... Bear Sterns analyst Andrew Neff released "PC Manifesto," a report on the state of the personal computing industry that predicted, among other things, that Apple would likely make a switch of its own from chip suppliers IBM and Motorola to their rival Intel. The reason? Intel can provide more than twice current processor speed, and that will likely win new customers. A second analyst-heavy feature from the NewsFactor Network posits that a Microsoft/Apple showdown for dominance of the desktop is coming. Why do people think this? Here's a quote from a ZDNet article entitled Intel inside a Mac? Just wait. Since Mac OS X is built atop a version of Unix, porting it over to Intel processors is fairly straightforward. There's a huge problem here. The part of Mac OS X that's UNIX is most certainly easy to port. Try "done". You can get it here today if you wanted to. The problem is all you'd get is a command line. That's right -- a terminal. Like a DOS window. Woohoo. Not a single OS X configuration GUI, not the widgets that the GUIs would be made from, not the libraries every good Cocoa programmer uses, nothing. Just neat, "headless" UNIX apps like Apache, vi, and grep. At the same time, most of Apple's serious software, and even much of its iApp apps, like iDVD and iMovie, are optimized heavily for the Altivec instruction set. I'm no assembly/computer language wiz, but here's what I do know [if I believe all I'm told]. There are certain instructions that can be called inside of the G4 processor that help with digital video processing. These instructions are not in the x86 platform (Intel and AMD, and Transmeta, to a certain degree, for all that matters). Rewriting these apps would mean losing the hardware advantage, that is, the advantages from these special instructions, Macintosh has had with apps like Photoshop. Unless the G4 really is quite a bit slower than a comparable Intel or AMD model, these niche-specific speed gains will go out of the window and "normal" apps, Microsoft Office, etc, would tank if Apple changed platforms. So here's the bottom line. For Apple to use Intel processors, not only would they have to start thinking of ways to port over the "Apple-specific" parts of OS X (I'm guessing that's non-trivial), they'd also have to figure out a way to combat the Macintosh operating system's possible speed losses to Windows in not only everyday apps but the applications where Apple used to shine. Add to this that IBM has a new PowerPC chip where it'd be easy to migrate existing Mac OS apps, and I think you have a pretty good case against expecting a move by Apple to x86. That said, if Apple was going to move, now's the time. I've never tried Darwin on x86 hardware, but if they've bothered to keep it robust "cross-harware", there has to be a reason (though most likely just because it's smart and relatively easy to do with the pretty plain jane OS). More importantly, if Cocoa really builds off of Darwin directly and can be compiled against it (created without anything new added), this port might really be incredibly easy. And there's nothing Apple would rather have than people having to chunk OS 9 and have to buy new software for OS X. More software buyers mean more money in the Mac market means more software developers see the Mac as viable. That means more hardware sales for Apple. But, again, I can't and don't see it. It'd take too much time for the rewrite and too much niche-specific speed would be lost. If this was Apple's plan, they would have done this while rewriting OS X, and we would have heard more about this possible switch than one comment from Steve Jobs flung into the ether. Unless I'm wrong and Cocoa works atop x86 Darwin just as easily as PowerPC, and possibly even then, I just don't see a switch happening. posted by ruffin at 8/13/2002 12:29:00 PM

Saturday, August 10, 2002
Wow, a rare weekend blog! Was out biking today, thinking about Hotmail. Don't get upset, it didn't take long. I was just wondering why Microsoft doesn't do more to make Hotmail in Internet Explorer more like Outlook Express. If you've used Hotmail, which to its credit hasn't pulled a .Mac on us yet, you might have noticed you can compose html mail with a sort of "RichTextBox", but only in IE on Windows, I believe. By using some fancy smancy dhtml, the Hotmail coders have made a pretty fancy smancy text entry control. Not that you couldn't make this for Mozilla/Netscape 6, but they didn't. Hey, that's okay, it's Microsoft that's footing the bill for Hotmail. I'm not upset yet. In fact I wonder why they don't do more! I'd like to be able to, for instance, drag messages from one folder to another. How hard can it be to do that? Not hard at all if we're limiting ourselves to the very specific platform of IE 6+ on Windows. By this time, and after hitting a few potholes of sorts jarring my neck and blaming Gates for each one, I remembered MSN Explorer. I've never used it, but it sounds neat. From the site, this "wonderful" program is described as: MSN Explorer is Microsoft's all-in-one software that delivers everything you need to feel at home on the Web. E-mail, instant messaging, Web browsing, and more are integrated in a friendly program... Well heck, here's an application that handles everything from Hotmail to instant messaging to goodness knows what! A little scary, but Outlook Express for Macintosh OS 9 integrates with Hotmail and it's a pretty neat feature. Perhaps this MSN Explorer is IE 6 on steroids, and seemlessly does all that iApp stuff people do on the Net every day. Then it struck me. Waaaait a minute. Seems like there was another application suite that checked email, let you browse, and instant message all in one package. Hrm, anybody remember Netscape 4.x Communicator? How about Mozilla today (though I still haven't learned how to use IRC)? Both are suites that do the exact same thing, but without the Hotmail extensions (although some people are working on that, too). Remember when I say, "same thing", I haven't yet used MSN Explorer (but will try it if I can get the idea that it's got to have spyware in it out of my head). Can it really be that Microsoft is 4-5 years behind the curve on offering this sort of application? I think they are. What's more, I know they've stuck a link to this app in the Start menu of Windows XP (though I haven't messed with XP any more than to make sure my latest VB app works there). Fair playing field? Not exactly. Like all other MSapps, they might start off inferior, but eventually they become decent peers and that icon on the desktop or in the start menu becomes a big problem for the new guys on the block. Luckily it doesn't bother me so much from a practical standpoint. If these jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none apps keep popping up and increase in popularity, specialist apps that do one bit and do it well will continue to thrive. And I'm more interested in hacking one of those than making the next Mozilla/MSN Explorer. And I'm oh-so-savvy enough (;^D) not to stop because an icon on my desktop opened an app that seemed "good enough". One more note: A friend was reading web logs from his web log (logs from a blog?), and came across Crazy Browser. Turns out this actually looks neat. Crazy Browser shamelessly steals ideas away from other browsers like Mozilla and then slaps those ideas around the Microsoft Internet Control, aka the IE engine. If there's one thing that drives me crazy, it's that Microsoft says they can't take the icon of IE off the desktop. They most certainly can, and if there wasn't an "IE" by default, we'd have tons of Crazy Browsers out there duking it out. That the IE engine is in the OS isn't a problem at all. That an icon to IE itself, with all the trimmings, is something of a problem, I think. Phew, long enough ramble for a weekend. posted by ruffin at 8/10/2002 03:47:00 PM

Friday, August 09, 2002
Now here's a situation I don't enjoy. 1.) Software company marketing schmoe promises end users "increased functionality and interoperability" in "the next version" of their software, and gives the impression that people will save hours web-enabling content created by the company's desktop software. 2.) "The next version" rolls around, and "increased functionality and interoperability" means, "if you buy our new extension, you'll save 30 minutes by creating proprietary files from our product in place of the XML files you were creating in an extra step before". 3.) Expectant user community asks web developer to get excited about and show them all those hours they're going to save. The story usually ends with the developer either giving them a white lie and saying, "There is no increased interoperability" or with the developer taking several opportunities over the next month to meet with each user of the desktop software and explain over and over that their dreams have been dashed on the rocks and that they (and by "they" we don't mean the royal they) will lose the ability to customize their web content like they did before. And they'll've paid extra for it. Reminds me a little too much of a Visual Basic wizard. It'll do 70% of what you'd want a good app to do in an afternoon, but the last 30% will take longer to develop using the wizard than it would have to have done it all from scratch to begin with by a factor of about four. Did I make that too esoteric and situation specific? More succinctly... 1.) Third-party marketer promises end users the world. 2.) Third-party software has a hard time delivering The Bowery. 3.) Developer whose job is the customize third-party software has many angry end users on his hands because his (or her) skillz apparently ain't up to the marketer's promises. Any way you look at it, it means extra work for your friendly neighborhood developer. posted by ruffin at 8/09/2002 04:11:00 PM

Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Where's the blog been? Well, I've been busy so the blog's not. But I thought I'd share the kind of thing I'm having to deal with in my busy days. I'm copying files from one place to another in VB 6, where that other place is determined by the user. Simple enough, and here's the code to take the original file (and there are many so I'm doing this as generic as possible. I'm cycling through the files collection with the FileSystemObject and recursively calling the sub when I hit a folder) and get the new file position: strNewFile = Replace(fileItem.Path, strOldPath, strNewPath) Here's the glitch. On Windows NT, 2k, and XP, we're happy as pigs in mud. On Windows 98, we end up blasting the original file. Quick, first person to get the answer gets a quarter! That's right, I'm pulling the path from an actual File object, and in Windows 98 a file's path, due to some DOS interaction, I imagine, has capital letters all over. When I try to replace, I'm doing a binary replace by default, and that makes "a" (97 decimal) and "A" (65 decimal) very different. Here's some evidence from the Immediate Window in VB 6: ? Replace("first", "FIR", "tree") first ? Replace("first", "FIR", "tree", , , vbTextCompare) treest For heaven's sake. Note that I'm not upset with the Replace function -- it does great. But I am a little put off by Windows 98's integration with its file system. The user interface and the plumbing underneath just don't do well together. Note that, since I didn't make myself clear above, that the Windows UI (eg, the File Explorer) displays these file names with lowercase letters. So a file like, "C:\camelNotation\anotherCamel\fileName.txt" comes up as "C:\CAMELNOTATION\ANOTHERCAMEL\fileName.txt" with the File object for some reason that must be related to MS's plan to lay Win32 over legacy DOS code. Put that together with the fact that I just "won" a laptop at eBay that will have a hard time running anything other than Windows 95 (thought it'd be a fun VB test box)... but that's another blog. "The myth of the $100 laptop." I think you can see where I'm headed. :^) posted by ruffin at 8/07/2002 05:39:00 PM

Friday, August 02, 2002
Had a one hour meeting with the boss and another "senior" programmer (our company's not really old enough to call anyone senior) about using Linux and an application called pen for load balancing. The quick summary is, "We'd rather spend an extra two grand per server in the farm to purchase Windows software that does the same thing. (I realize NLB does quite a bit more than pen, but not in our use. We need to preserve state, and will need "single affinity", which, long story short, makes true load balancing like you'd want at, say, a site like Amazon.com pretty difficult.) Linux sometimes doesn't go over well in a system where not to spend is to lose funding the following year (depending on how cash-strapped your agency is), so I particularly enjoyed some of the comments from Slashdot's "Open Source In Government" thread. My favorite quote is probably this one: Who's going to bribe politicans to get the government to use [open source software, eg Linux]? The tone of these articles suggest that the government would use it because it is better. Perhaps the author is trying to be funny. Much as I hate to say it, that's often how it feels around here. The strange part is that I know we're not consciously choosing Microsoft because MS has "courted" us or given us a good marketing pitch. Makes me wonder how much of our decisions are based on the biases of the individuals that work here (which would be fine; we're all biased), or if there's a real "trickle-down" culture that prefers the beast. posted by ruffin at 8/02/2002 04:11:00 PM

Ye ole Glish has a pretty good article introducing CSS layout over on developer.apple.com, no less. Though I haven't seen anyone on the net work CSS better than this guy, I think he's barking up the wrong tree on one of his points in the above article. Here's the quote: But it is wrong to think that the markup is what specified the style; in fact, the browser decides how to display a section header according to internal logic given to it by its programmers. Had they wanted, they might have specified that section headers be displayed italicized, or with an underline. And that is where CSS comes in to the picture. CSS allows you to override the browser's plans for displaying any particular page element or group of elements. Two beefs. First, to think that html markup doesn't and shouldn't specify style is to think the NBA's style of basketball is still non-contact (or even High School ball for all that matters) or should be. It does and it is. That's what html has been designed to do/evolved into in reality, regardless of its "original mission". Hey, standards are great. Carefully constructed DIV tags in xhtml 1.0 are great. But when even Glish has to admit that, "... roughly 25% of your site visitors will not be able to see your layout", well, we've got problems. He also admits in the article that, "... the table layout page will look nearly identical in all browsers dating back to Netscape 1.1..." Well, isn't that the point? If you're not trying to provide uplevel functionality (dynamic sites, like this mapping site (click Query Storms)) that requires you use fancy styles and, more to the point, the object model these styles provide you, so that you can dynamically change the pages' content, you should be shooting to hit the most users possible. I know there's some talk about using standards to make pages more accessible to people with screenreaders and the like (visually impaired), but I've watched some in action and good html 3.2 works just fine. If you're just spitting out text & images, use tables. Glish's rewrite of the ADC site using CSS layout is pretty neat technically speaking, and his example of what the ADC site would look like with table borders is pretty heinous indeed, but the CSS layout is a pretty esoteric solution to undo some poor html layout by the Apple folk. The rewrite of the crazily tabled page reminds me a little of bloodletting. The problem might go away three-fourths of the time, but the lone man out in the quartet's really going to be hurting. And it's because you weren't really treating the right problem from the start. Secondly (and then I'm done), there's the quote, "CSS allows you to override the browser's plans for displaying any particular page element or group of elements." If you wanted to stay true to what browsers were trying to do back in the day, you wouldn't include style at all. You shouldn't be trying to force one type of display into someone's browser. If I wanted h1 tags tiny and green, Mosaic let me do it. With CSS layout, using mad class names that will differ from one html developer to another, I can't set a "universal stylesheet" in my browser's preferences and expect my headers to be tiny and green. I won't know to look out for <div class="yourSpecialClassThatMeansHeader1">. Or, in this specific case, <div id="top_nav">. There's a reason why html went the direction it did, away from pure markup and towards style in the tags. Html is a hybrid of sorts, and what you use should be decided on your audience, not on the hope that, one day, you'll realize "... a vision for the future of the internet where the millions and millions and documents available on the web are well-structured documents with markup that accurately describes their contents." Make your pages readable by everyone today. Use Google if you want to experience the "More exciting possibilities [that] include programmable bots which could scour the reaches of the web for the best price on buffalo milk mozzarella or for the latest interview with Britney Spears." Sheesh. :^) posted by ruffin at 8/02/2002 01:26:00 PM

Three lessons for people who code browsers. 1.) Right-clicking quickly on a link should open the contents of the link behind the window you're working on (or right-click and "open new window" from context menu). If I'm opening a new window, it's usually because I'm midway through an html page and want to come back when I'm done with the content of the current page. OmniWeb gets this right. 2.) Spell check (I'm not asking for grammar checks, mind you) what I write into textareas. Again, OmniWeb gets this right, but it doesn't work with Blogger's interface (what I'm using to enter this) so it's less helpful than it could be (or at least that's why I still can't spell here). 3.) You should not have to navigate through tiered context menus to see the source in a frame. Mozilla had it right right up to the 1.1a release, iirc, and then botched it (now it's only easy to view the source to the frameset). If you're a web designer, you know what I mean. IE gets this right-er, though you can't see the frameset source with the mouse easily. Mozilla 0.9.9+ had this spot on. I don't have 1.0 nearby, so I'm not sure which side of the fence it landed on. posted by ruffin at 8/02/2002 01:13:00 PM

Thursday, August 01, 2002
Note to self (from this morning's email readin'): Java look and feel Graphics Repository (toolbar etc. icons for Java apps that match the "Java L&F" (Metal). posted by ruffin at 8/01/2002 10:55:00 AM

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