January 24, 2002
My thanks to everyone who wrote me today with Apple Airport advice. To follow up: when I returned home, the base station was still blinking in reset mode, as suspected. I pulled the plug and restarted it, only to find that nothing had changed; the thing was still inaccessible. I was finally able to access the station by switch the iBook over to Ethernet and running a crossover cable directly into the station. From there I was able to delete whatever it was I used to lock myself out earlier. As a bonus, I finally stumbled upon the correct config to get my desktop on the network as well. For some people, this is no big deal. For a hardware Luddite like me, it's a major coup.
I still think Apple should write better docs, though. 11:04 PM Link
The problem with Apple stuff is that it usually works wonderfully right out of the box, but you're in trouble if you ever have to touch it.
Case in point: the Apple Airport wireless base station I'm test driving requires the Airport 2.0 software to be installed. Nowhere is this listed in the manual, or on the box. You know how most hardware has at least a sticker that reads "Includes:" or "In this box:" or something like that? No. The accompanying CD is labeled "Airport Software." Well, hell, I already have that on the iBook, right? Of course I totally miss the oh-so-stylish tiny type on the CD that reads "Version 2.0," and not that I was looking for it, either, because I didn't know I had to upgrade to 2.0 in the first place.
Okay, so now I've figured out that even though I can't find out how to find the version number of the software I already have installed, I need to upgrade and the stuff I need must be on this disc. I plop the disc into the iBook and open up the readme file. Under "Configuring Your Base Station" one of the steps is "Upgrade to Airport 2.0." Gee, thanks. The installer icon is labeled "Airport." No version number. Huh? Is this the one? Do I just click it? I've never upgraded software on a Mac before; are there more steps? The iBook's help files say nothing, except a mention of an automatic upgrade via the Web. Forget that.
I click the icon and pray it All Just Works Out. The software installs. Is that it? I open the Airport panel and now I can see the base station. Yes! Good thing, because there's no more info beyond "restart your computer."
I happily surf the Web wirelessly for about five minutes before deciding to throw a password on the network. At some point, I make a mistake configuring the base station. Now the wireless card can't find it at all. I can't connect to the station to undo my mistake. I decide to reset the station with the "reset button," which translates to "stick a bent paper clip into this hole." The light blinks, indicating a reset. After five minutes it's ready to go. Hmm, still no connection, still can't log in. I reset again. No. Again. Nope.
I have to discombobulate the base station so's I can get to the Apple site. Ahhh. Buried on the Apple site in the tiniest font possible is a link to how to do a "hard reset." Apparently I was doing a "soft reset" which apparently does nothing so useful as reset the station. Nowhere is this helpful information mentioned in the hardware docs, of course. A hard reset is done the same as a soft one, except you unplug the power and plug it back in while holding the reset bu...er, paper clip in the hole at the same time.
The light starts blinking. That was nearly an hour ago. It's still blinking. Of course, I am terrified to pull the plug, because golly, it's supposed to be resetting. Blink. Blink. Blink. So. Tired. Blink. Something. Blink. Blink. Has. Gone. Blink. Horribly. Blink. Blink. Wrong.
So now I am going to work. I'm leaving the base station plugged in in hopes that when I return ten hours later it will have stopped blinking, indicating that everything Just Worked Out. Somehow I don't think it will. And if that is the case, I will stuff it back into its unlabeled box along with the accompanying CD with the inscrutable type and the wonderful "user manual" and return it post haste. 09:30 AM Link
January 21, 2002
The W3C recently released new working drafts of the DOM Level 3 specification. Significant changes are still being clarified, but the exciting part is the work being done on the load and save specifications, which enable the browser to load XML documents into DOM objects and saving DOM objects as XML documents. If you want an overview of where DOM is heading, check out the WC3 DOM Activity Statement, which summarizes the plan. 11:19 AM Link
January 17, 2002
At Webreference, XML Parsing and Loading from JavaScript, part of an ongoing series on web services and browser issues. Webreference, has a lot of good stuff, but recently a lot of the scripting columns tend to be rather IE-centric. For info on loading and parsing XML with JavaScript cross-browser style, check out Peter-Paul Koch's excellent article.
Speaking of web services, I've been looking for a bona-fide web service that validates HTML and CSS. I'm not talking about the W3 Validator, but something like it that accepts and sends back SOAP or XML-RPC messages, so that a web application like Moveable Type can send blog posts to the service for validation and get back an XML response, with errors indicated. I've searched XMethods, xmlrpc.com and done a fairly extensive search on Google, with no luck. Does such a beast exist? 03:00 PM Link
January 15, 2002
Billy Bragg fan fiction. No kidding. 08:01 AM Link
January 14, 2002
Ooh ooh! Paul Sowden has a new weblog. Check out his various DOM experiments (see also his archived ones). Paul is a standards samurai; keep an eye on this one. 12:06 PM Link
Youngpup AKA Aaron has a few thoughts about rollerblading and the future of DHTML (scroll down to the January 8th entries):
We're leaving the stage of ballsy "go huge" programming and starting to move into the technical era. It's no longer considered cool to contort Navigator 4 into creating entire windowed GUI environments. It's been done, we've seen it, and we want to move on...it won't be long now before it's considered cool to create complex, standards-compliant, and structurally accurate DHTML. Similar to complex techinal skating, this style of authoring will not mean much to the casual observer, but will advance our "sport" far beyond what we can even dream possible today.
I think this is an important point. There's a tendency to associate "cool DHTML" with "fancy dropdown menus that whiz across the page and break in NS4." But it doesn't have to be that way, especially if we had a set of common tools to work with. Oh wait, we already have those. 12:04 PM Link
Fun DHTML stuff from bodytag.org AKA Glen Murphy. 11:56 AM Link
There's a mini-interview (henceforth to be termed "minterview") with yours truly in the inaugural issue of 13th Parallel, a joint venture of Dan Pupius and Michael van Ouwerkerk. 11:54 AM Link
January 9, 2002
The W3C has released a second public draft of the SVG 1.1 spec. Check out the changelist for details on how it differs from the 1.0 spec. I really wish I had more time to mess around with SVG. 03:10 PM Link
January 2, 2002
Boy oh boy, do I have a lot of links for you. So much for vacation.
A few weeks back I mentioned SVG and how useful it will be to front-end Web developers once it's natively supported in all the major browsers in use today (without a plug-in, that is). Kevin Lindsey has been playing with SVG since at least July 2000, and he's got a fantastic collection of examples and tutorials that use JavaScript and the DOM interface to manipulate SVG documents. I particularly like the diagonal slider bar widgets, something that at this point cannot be done with DHTML.
It's my opinion that this kind of GUI stuff won't take off until we can do away with the plug-in. If that ever happens, the days of using DHTML for widgets may be over. And that's not a bad thing; since the underlying code is all DOM, any DHTML guru could easily make the switch to SVG. In return, you get a richer, more flexible palette of visual elements to work with: true vector graphics, rather than trying to bend a DIV to your will. 05:42 PM Link
Last April I first mentioned the TIBET IDE, which takes JavaScript and builds a Smalltalk-like environment on top of it. The beta version is finally out. Check out the FAQ and the programmer's guide for the full scoop. 05:40 PM Link
Rich Doughty has created a DOM Level 2 Reference sidebar for Mozilla. Click the link to add it to your collection. Includes handy links to almost all aspects of DOM Level 2, including Styles, Views, and HTML. 05:35 PM Link
Fabian Guisset provides us with a Mozilla DOM Status Update, an overview of Mozilla's DOM support, with notes on bugs, priorities and future directions. Fabian plans to do these updates several times a year, so if you have a keen interest in the DOM side of things, tune into this. 05:12 PM Link
December 31, 2001
So, Happy New Year, to one and all. Me, I've thrown away all my ridiculous and unattainable New Year's resolutions and replaced them with one simpler one: this coming year, I resolve to try and do a little better at everything. There.
Okay, back to the vacation thing. 02:59 PM Link