Adam's Blog

I've heard a bunch of people already whining about Internet Explorer 7 and how much it sucks and how it's too little too late. I feel confident doing this in one fell swoop: these people are idealistic, out-of-touch, and at their very core, naive. IE7 is a major plus for anyone who understands the internet and networks, and especially for those who do web development. Read on for a lengthy review.

Entertainment Weekly: Do you ever worry that there can only be so much happiness in the universe, and that every time you smile, a unicorn gets punched in the face? Rachel Ray: I would smile all day along, every day, if it guaranteed a unicorn getting punched in the face. I find them really annoying.

I have frozen the code and made my first updates to Small Axe in a very long time. In fact, calling what's currently available for download in the -devel build 0.4 is not even really accurate. This build has all the features planned for the 0.7-0.8 timeframe. But alas, it's "0.4 alpha 1" for now. It doesn't work. Above all things, it doesn't work right now. The build system is now set to rebuild the demo site every 30 minutes, and the code is changing very quickly, but there are still major problems. All in all, I think I should have it available within the next month or so. All I'm trying to do is fix the features that already work here on sethadam1.com. However, they must all be made completely portable, which is a challenge. Anyway, it's exciting, because I've been working on a lot of stuff I hope to release by year's end. It's good to be coding again. Feels good. God, I'm a nerd.

So last night I rebuilt smallaxesolutions.com using iWeb. It took a lot longer than expected because I did so much customization, and let me say: iWeb has a LOT of limitations. Simple, basic stuff like changing link colors and styling the navigation bar are simply omitted. iWeb, in some respects, is as dumb as Front Page. That said, it's also MUCH MUCH better than many of these programs, because it generates such clean HTML. It's so clean that I simply used the fantastic mac freeware MassReplaceIt to build a few queries to immediately clean up the output. I was able to integrate some PHP into it, and I think we'll see it expand quite a bit over the next few weeks or months. I'm pretty pleased with the design, thus far, particularly the angled images, which is really nice looking. The only problem I see is that the pages are VERY image heavy, and will be murder over dial up. Even on our T1 they still take a second to load. I'm happy with the site, and I'm looking forward to iWeb 2.0, where Apple hopefully introduces some much needed features.

So, seeing as Mozilla released what they expect to be their final release candidate, I went ahead and upgraded my work PC to FF2. It's time - most of my critical extensions have been updated and so far, so good. It handles all pages beautifully, as expected, and most of the settings no longer feel like they are a mess. Mozilla did a nice job of bringing together what looked silly even a few weeks ago. Now, I'm still a bit ticked about RSS. For some reason, the Firefox devs feel as though RSS is meant to be handled by a reader, so they have Firefox COMPLETELY IGNORE the <?xml stylesheet?> declaration. I filed a bug report, and it was promptly closed with WONTFIX, although they suggest it might make for interesting discussion - I'm still pissed about it. Why do they get to completely ignore a standard? Microsoft would be GRILLED if they treated users this way (and they do - IE7 also ignores xml stylesheets.) Anyway, I'll end up using FF2 probably, but at home I blew off Firefox for Camino, and I'm seriously thinking about moving to Opera at work. In the meantime, my user agent: Mozilla/5.0...

This week, Jenn and I went to an Alice in Chains concert. AIC was one of my favorite bands back in the early 90's - I thought the SAP EP was one of the best and most unique Seattle records recorded. They have replaced Layne Staley with a guy who sounds a LOT like him. I was skeptical, but I had heard good things. Let me tell you - they were AWESOME. They put on a really great show. First off, the new lead singer can play guitar - and well - and he really had a great style of his own. He did Layne proud without looking or sounding like a rip off. The setlist was incredible, the only thing I could've asked for was "I Stay Away," which was semi-curiously omitted. All my favorites where there though: Got Me Wrong, Nutshell, Down in a Hole, Bleed the Freak, Junkhead, Would?, Brother, Angry Chair, even Whale & Wasp, for crying out loud. The middle section was a small acoustic set with a carpet and lamps, all set up while they played a short Layne Staley movie tribute. The most incredible thing was that even though the concert crowd was...

I searched with my good eye and turned to the side, "This train isn't leaving - your grandmother lied." It's pure like an iceburg (but just half as wide) and cutting the onions Penelope cried. You drank from the carton and toed through the tide, reclining the seat back, enjoying the ride. A pinball was jagged, or so Milly spied, and sandpaper napkins were what Jeffrey tried. And ever so slightly, as Sandy Jo pried, the turnip was rolling and catching a stride. Deb's always the bridesmaid and never the bride So there she lays pond'ring her own suicide. Her passion, she's finding, she now can confide, is bathing in vats of cool formaldahyde. It's not so much flying as much as a glide - All these green tomatoes are half-baked, not fried. Yet there, in a zip top, the leaves had been dried and friends of the party were stuck on the slide Seems Katie, not Booker, will serve as the guide, since sweet cousin Lizzy has never applied. The rules penned by Justin were meant to abide the by-laws by Preston and, yet, were denied. He said "Glass champagne flutes were not made to hide!" Yet, beneath crates...

Well, something I've LONG considered implementing is an API for my website. Yes, there's VERY little to ever use an API for me, however, it's always been one of those "out there" challenges. It's always been breaking new ground to parse an XML request and return XML to it. I've tried probably 10 times before, and each time I've given up. This time, I had to figure it out. So I slammed the pedal to the metal and did it. I now have a working API. It currently supports only 1 method reliably - blogger2.newPost() - however, I have tested blogger.getRecentPosts and both corresponding methods under the metaWeblog API. That said, I will probably hack something up that explains how to add an API to your homegrown PHP weblog. There are functions out there that do the hardwork, and there are functions I've written that do the rest of the work, so you just need to write the correct queries for your database. Anyway, I can now post from digg.com, which is cool. Ultimately, if we ever support user blogs on OSNews, we'll roll out an API so people can comment on OSNews and Digg stories via the API. Could...

So, I have been very very slack in keeping the open source version of my blogging application up-to-date. In fact, I'm so outdated that almost all of the best features aren't in the current downloadable codebase. I considered just saying "f it" and not maintaining a public version, and I've come to terms with the fact that it's just a hobby, I've never pushed it like my previous apps. However, I think what I'll do is wait until I finish the latest round of features and then perhaps scrub it and release it. So, what I've begun doing is perousing some of the popular blogging apps out there for some ideas. The first feature I'm rolling out today is "slugs." I've been thinking about this for some time now. I was trying to create pretty URLs without using mod_rewrite or anything that would bind the app to Apache. My old approach was really cool, it was completely dynamic. For instance, if a post had an id of 1111111111, it would come up like this: https://adamscheinberg.com/blog/read.php/1111111111/[link].html The [link] in this case was the title of the post manipulated via a PHP function to be URL friendly with an arbitrary extension of...

Is this a common color palette? Am I the only one who thinks this is a wee bit suspicious? These logos look a LOT alike to me.