I’m a-lovin’ Marijn Haverbeke’s Eloquent Javascript, an interactive javascript tutorial. It’s clear, nicely written, nice looking, handy (what with its embedded console for trying scripts out), free, and Creative Commons licensed. It’s easily downloadable so you can run/read it even when you don’t have any of that newfangled “broadband” the kids are so excited about.

Thank you, Marijn. [Tags: javascript javascript_tutorial marijn_haverbeke ]

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LATER THAT DAY: I took Wray Cummings’ advice in the comments below, which worked. So, now all the examples of uncentered HR statements in this post are in fact examples of centered HR statements, which makes the post rather mysterious. Imagine, if you will, then, that all of the little horizontal rules are left-justified. And, thanks, Wray!

I know I’m going to be embarrassed about this, but for months, if not for years, I’ve been unable to bend the simple <hr> element to my will. I can adjust its length, but I can’t get the little !@#$% to center itself.

I’ve tried everything I can think of to make it work:

<hr width=’100pt’ >:

<hr width=’100pt’ align=center />:

<hr width=’100pt’ align=’center’ />:

<hr width=’100pt’ style=’text-align:center’ />:

None of these work in Firefox or Safari. I have not intentionally redefined hr in any of my many CSS style sheets, but wouldn’t the local, inline setting take precedence anyway?

What incredibly obvious, embarrassing thing am I missing? Go ahead, make me look bad. And I’ll thank you for it. [Tags: html hr ]

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Yikes. I finally got my Yamaha keyboard (PSR-270) attached to my MacBook so I can play and have Finale transcribe notes. I felt like I was back in WindowsLand.

First, you obviously need the cables. You can get some pretty cheap that go from the back of your keyboard to a USB input on your computer.

But, it turns out you also need a Yamaha driver. Yes, even for a Mac. You can get one here. To install it, just double click on the installation package.

Then you have to run Audio Midi Setup, a file you’ll find in your Utilities folder inside of Applications. (Or just use Quicksilver. Don’t tell me you’re not using Quicksilver! :) Even though it’s got big, attractive icons, it’s a pile of gobbledygook. You should see your keyboard in iconic form and should be able to drag the out arrow to the in arrow of the appropriate awaiting icon, drawing a visible line between the two, but, frankly, I don’t understand the whole thing.

I just know that it eventually worked. [Tags: midi tech_help yamaha ]

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Oh, I am so about to make a fool of myself in public…

I now have a D-Link DNS-323 plugged into my home network. It’s a network storage device that I want to use as a centralized backup for my family’s various computers because some of us don’t always plug our Macs into our USB external hard drive to let the Mac Time Machine work its backup magic. Unfortunately, the hack I found on the Net to get Time Machine to recognize the DNS-323 doesn’t work for me: Time Machine lets me say I want the backup to be housed on the DNS-323, but the software craps out when it actually tries to back up to it. If there’s an easy way around that, I’d love to hear about it.

In the interim, I’ve been playing with rsync, a command-line utility included in Leopard that does backups. I’ve had no luck with rsyncX, which is a Mac specific version, but rsync is working. It took some doing to get it running on the DNS-323, including installing fun plug (the DNS-323 is a linux box) and writing a config file that specifies which machines rsync recognizes. My Linux hacker nephew Greg did that part of it for me. (Thanks, Greg.)

There’s a script that enables rsync to mimic Time Machine. It’s been working pretty well — my hourly backups go far slower than they should, so I’m undoubtedly doing something wrong — but I had a heck of a time telling it which directories I want it to back up. You gain control over the backup set by specifying a file of inclusions and exclusions. You do this in the rsync command line by saying “–exclude-from=filename” where you replace “filename” with the name of the file that has the list.

After a bunch of Internet research and way too much trial and error, I now have a list that does what I want, although I’m sure it’s laughably kludgy, and possibly fatally wrong. Nevertheless, here’s how I think it works…

The file can list both includes and excludes. You indicate which is which by prefacing each item with a + or a -. The list assumes that the root directory is whichever one you specified in the rsync command line. So, if your command line said that you want to back up “/Users/me/”, then you would tell it to exclude “/Users/me/junk” by putting the following line in your exclude-from file:

- junk/

Likewise, to include /Users/me/importantstuff/ you’d put in the line:

+ importantstuff/

But, at least in my experiments, that line will not include any subdirectories of importantstuff. After failing to understand the instructions I found on the Net, and after a lot of trial and error, I’ve found that it works if I also include the line:

+ importantstuff/**

The double stars tell it to backup all the subdirectories and all their subdirectories, ad infinitum. I’ve found I have to put in both the line without the stars and then the line with the stars. You’d think the line with the stars would be enough, but in my tries and my errors, it wasn’t.

The list of inclusions and exclusions is sensitive to the order of the list. If you have particular subdirectories you want to exclude (e.g., importantstuff/junk/), put them first:

- importantstuff/junk/**

If you want rsync to backup only designated directories, list your excludes first, then your includes, and end with

- *

which tells it to exclude anything you didn’t already tell it to include. I have the feeling that that may be an ugly hack with unintended consequences. Remember, I don’t know what I’m doing.

So, my exclude-from file looks roughly like this:

- *Azureus*/
- *Azureus*/**
- Documents/TiVo*
- Documents/Aptana*
+ Sites/
+ Sites/**
+ Pictures/
+ Pictures/**
+ Music/
+ Music/**
+ Documents
+ Documents/**
- *

Two important notes: 1. The -n parameter on the command line will run rsync in “what if” mode, showing you what it would do without actually doing it. 2. As I’ve likely made some embarrassing and awful mistakes, please read the comments in hopes that some knowledgeable and kind soul will correct me. [Tags: rsync exclude-from dangerously_wrong ]

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The latest version of Keynote exports files in Powerpoint format that the latest version of Popwerpoint can’t read. Charming.

A discussion board pointed out, however, that if you strip out all the presenter notes from your Keynote file, the exported Keynote file will indeed open in Powerpoint. I tried it on one small file, and it worked.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to strip out all those notes. And I haven’t seen anything from Keynote about an update.

[Tags: keynote powerpoint ]

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My new new Mac (a white one) is well, except Finder doesn’t see my family network. To be more exact, there’s no “Network” icon listed in the sidebar of Finder. If I go to Finder’s prefs and toggle “connected servers” or “bonjour computers” on and off, there’s no change. But, if I go to Connect to Server and tell it to connect to smb://192.168.0.134, which happens to be the static IP of a network storage device, it finds it fine, and shows it to me in the Finder. It likewise finds smb://honkervista, which is my big, Vista-crippled machine.

I’ve tried making random alterations in the system config network panel, since that traditionally has forced empty network panes to fill up properly. Not in this case.

Should I really have to be mounting these machines by hand?? TIA…

[Tags: mac os_x network_configuration ]

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Steve Pepper has started a blog, and one of his first posts explains — from his insider’s vantage point — how Standard Norway managed to approve OOXML as an ISO standard despite the overwhelming disapproval expressed by the committee members. It is not a pretty story.

The following post on Steve’s blog is about prostitution in Norway, starting with a conversation he had with a woman called Jenny. So, Steve’s blog is off to an appropriately eclectic start! [Tags: steve_pepper iso ooxml standards norway ]

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YaCy is a peer-to-peer, open source Web search engine. You can use it to create a search portal, but the officially Very Cool thing about it is that you can peer it up with other Yacy installations, creating a distributed, p2p search engine.

[Tags: search p2p open_source everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Here are photos of an actual IT protest demonstration in Norway. How often do you see that? (Answer: This is the second IT protest demonstration in Norway’s history.)

Steve Pepper, Chairman of the Norwegian ISO committee since 1995, gave a speech that explains why standard document formats are important and why the adoption of Microsoft’s specification — OOXML — as an ISO standard was a bad mistake. There’s also bloggage here, which links to a podcast I have not yet listened to.

Steve has stepped down as chair of the Standard Norway committee in protest of the overall committee’s process. Steve told me about what happened when we had dinner in Oslo last week. It sounds pretty gruesome.

Says Steve, 80% of the committee was apparently against changing Norway’s vote from No to Yes, but that wasn’t close enough to consensus, so everyone had to leave the room except for three administrators and four technical experts, the latter conveniently chosen to get the balance down to 50-50. When there still wasn’t consensus (surprise, surprise), the experts were dismissed and the Vice President of Standard Norway just decided the way he wanted.

Steve believes the 8,000 page spec (!) should not have been “fast-tracked,” and that ISO voted in favor of the Microsoft spec in part because it didn’t want to leave it in the hands of Ecma (a semi-competing standards body). Yet, OOXML is pretty much nothing but Word’s document model with a whole bunch of angle brackets added…overly complex and too tied to Word’s peculiar capabilities. Meanwhile, we have a truly open and well-worked out document standard in ODF. (Get yer copy of Open Office here — it’s free and it works real good.)

This matters a lot, for two basic reasons. First, the world runs on documents so we want to be able to interchange them without even having to think about which application made them. Having two standards vitiates much of the point of having a standard. Second, OOXML is so tied to Word that having it be an official ISO standard gives one vendor (guess which) a market advantage that truly open standards should take away: You should be able to pick the word processor you want based on its features and feel, without having to worry if using it will lock your documents out of the worldwide market of ideas and information.

Steve tells me that the battle to reverse the Norwegian decision is continuing, and he urges that irregularities in other countries be similarly investigated. [Tags: ooxml steve_pepper norway iso ecma microsoft standards]

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The Media Re:Public group at Berkmanhas announced a breakthrough technology that promises to take the “conference” out of “un-conference.”

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For those who are keeping track (= me), the new new motherboard on my MacBook has not prevented the same old problems from recurring. I still am getting random app crashes, most well-behaved by an occasional crash to blue. (Actually, only Keynote crashes to blue.)

I’m feeling pretty certain that we’ve eliminated the mobo as the source of the problem. Since these same problems have occurred in two separate operating systems, including through a clean install of the second one, I don’t think it’s an OS thing. Since they’ve persisted through the creation of a clean user account, I don’t think it’s a software thing. Because the RAM has passed repeated testing by me and by the service professionals, I don’t think it’s a RAM problem.

I am therefore taking it personally.

[Tags: macbook apple ]

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My MacBook continues to crash, even after the complete reinstall and upgrade to Leopard and even after a local geek shop put in a new motherboard. I’ve been collecting some of the crash reports the Mac generates and would like to crowd-source them to see if anyone can figure what the @!#$%! is wrong. Would I be violating my own privacy by doing so?

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Brian Kelly worries that the W3C is making itself obsolete, and writes well of the perpetual (?) battle between perfect standards focused on close-bracketed compliance and sloppy practices focused on getting things done. (This is related to the article in my newsletter about HTML5.)

Along the way he cites Molly Holzschlag, who writes: “It’s not the specs that define Web Standards. We are talking about best practices.”

The contention between standards and best practices so far has been quite fruitful. Fortunately, it’s unlikely to end any time soon. [Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.] [Tags: html5 brian_kelly molly_holtzschlag ]

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David Pogue points to a TechBlog post that explains why we keep seeing “Free Public Wifi” listed on available wifi networks. No, it’s not a fraud. No, it’s not a hoax. Yes, it is maybe the stupidest Windows thing ever. As TechBlog says, it’s viral without being a virus. Or, maybe it’s a virus that is all symptom.

In any case, I’m glad to have this clarified at last.

[Tags: wifi free_public_wifi ]

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Vista has an integrated Web server, but it’s off by default. If you want to use your machine as a Web server (I do because I use some javascripts that write to my hard drive and thus need to believe that my hard drive is the Web server they’re running on, and if this is stupid or incredibly insecure please don’t tell me because I think I’ll cry), you have to jump through some hoops.

Unfortunately, they’re invisible hoops. Fortunately, over a year ago, Blondr, in his very first post, explained how to do it, with words and screen captures. Incredibly helpful. And along the way, he even explains how to find the !@#$%-ing Web server control panel: Go to Run and type “InetMgr.exe.”

Once you have it running, pages are served up by default from C:\inetpub\wwwroot. I think. It looks like once you’re in the Web server manager (the IIS Manager), the left-hand panel lets you add sites and specify where those sites live on your hard drive, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Anyway, thanks Blondr! [Tags: tech vista web_server blondr]

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The SpeedDial add-on for Firefox brings the useful Opera thingy to FF. Its a page of thumbnails of pages you want to get to quickly. Ah, add-ons What cant they do? Thanks to Ev for the tweet.

Tags: addons firefox opera speeddial

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When I first heard that Apple had introduced a 3-lbs Mac, technolust heated my blood. But from my very first poking-arounds about it, my tremors of desire have quieted.

On the basis of preliminary reports, it sounds like Apple threw everything overboard in order to achieve a single design ukase: Thou shalt be the thinnest! No CD/DVD player, yet another freakish video out, no ethernet port, a battery that requires a trip to the factory to be replaced (and given that my MacBook battery is failing rapidly after 8 months…), a single USB port, no firewire port, no good way to plug in an external drive (assuming you have a mouse plugged into your USB port), no mic input, yet another unique power supply. Dongle city! And the Mac Air ain’t cheap.

Thinness is an aesthetic criterion, not a utilitarian one. Art triumphs over usefulness yet again, driven by Steve “One Button” Jobs.

Good. I can enjoy my MacBook unruffled by envy. Well, at least not much envy.

[Tags: apple mac macintosh_air mac_air macbook technolust ]

17 Comments »

You want to see some nice tech writing? James Pelow at PHPmac explains how to enable the Leopard apache server to use php. It’s written so clearly, even I could follow the instructions! (Because he wrote this in 2005, you’ll want to change the references to php4 to php5.)

[Tags: php leopard os_x tech_help good_writing ]

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Cyberduck works well for most of my FTP’ing needs. But sometimes I want to be able to automate an upload or a download without having to go through a graphical user interface. The Mac comes with a handy tool called curl. Unfortunately, I’ve had trouble finding instructions comprehensible to one such as I. (Here’s man page for curl. Of course, you can also see the man page by typing man curl into a terminal window. As usual, the man page is efficient to the point of being terrifying.) So, here’s a beginner-to-beginner guide. As always, use this carefully because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

To begin, open up a terminal window. Type curl -V into it and hit return just to make sure that curl is there. If it is, it should tell you what version of curl you’re running.

Excellent!

If you want to upload a file called test.txt to the mydir directory on your myserver server, and if your username is uname and your password is pwd, then you’d type the following into your terminal:

curl -v -T test.txt ftp://uname:pwd@myserver/mydir/

The -v turns on verbose mode so you can see all the errors I’ve made in these instructions. Once it works, you can replace the -v with -s to silence the messages.

If you want to download a file, use -O instead of -T.

If you want to do this by double clicking on a file in the Finder, you have to go through a few more steps.

First, type into a text editor the same line that you were typing into the terminal, except make sure that you give the full pathname of the file you want to upload. Save the file with .command as the extension (e.g., autoftp.command). In the terminal go the directory where you’ve saved the file and type chmod a+x autoftp.command. This makes the file executable (runnable). Now double clicking it in the Finder should run it.

There’s lots more you can do with curl. If you figure out how to do it let me know. And, of course, I’ll happily correct this post with the corrections you point out in the comments… [Tags: curl mac]

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Jeez my MacBook is hinky. Basically, nothing works reliably on it. I thought Leopard would fix the problems, and it has brought a little more stablility, but I can’t count on using any app without it vanishing in a puff of kernel errors. My RAM tests ok, the CPU temperature is reasonable, my permissions are good, and I’m working out of a new, clean user account. Even so, I can no longer get advanced apps like Parallels or VMWare to work, and even good ol’ Quicksilver (oh, how I love it) seems to be cross-linked with other apps, sometimes popping up when I open them. The problems do not seem to be app-specific, since even little programs will end randomly. Usually, it’s just an annoyance, but since products like Keynote are too proud to do autosaves every few minutes (on Windows, I have Powerpoint set to autosave every 4 mins), the random puff of disappearance has at times cost me work. Not to mention that in the upgrade to Leopard, GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto and iTheRest have vanished off my hard drive. Yokes.

So, I think I’m going to back everything up yet again - I am a man of many backups, although none seem to work when I need them - and take it back down to the bare metal: reformat, reinstall, re-hope.

Even so, and I want to be clear about this, I love my MacBook with an ardor that none of the many Windows machines I’ve had has ever inspired, including the big, honking box on which I am now running Vista. Vista is crashing left and right on me in ways that a new operating system with very few programs installed (and most of them Microsoft programs at that) ought not. Plus, everything about Vista requires thought. After all these years, I’m pretty good at Windows, but I don’t want to have to think about it any more. And if I were new to computers, I think I’d find Vista incomprehensible. It’s become Unix-like, which is ironic given that Ubuntu is making Unix/Linux easier every day.

So, I think I’m going to rebuild my Mac from the ground up. Consider it an act of love. [Tags: mac vista ]

5 Comments »

I’ve been having trouble getting Nvu — an open source HTML editor — working for the second user on my Mac (Leopard). It works fine for user #1, but for user #2, it refuses to launch unless I become root in the terminal and launch it from there. After a lot of messing around with permissions and multiple re-installs, I found that while there is no Nvu folder in “/Users/user2/Library/Application Support,” there is in “/Users/user1/Library/Application Support.” Renaming that folder didn’t have any effect. So, finally I copied the Nvu file from “/Users/user1/Library/Application Support” to “/Users/user2/Library/Application Support”. Now when launched from within user2’s desktop, Nvu asks if you want to create a new profile. I said yes and it seems to work.

And here’s an important note: I don’t know what I’m doing. This “tip” may prove fatal. I am especially puzzled by the fact that changing the name of the Nvu folder for user1 didn’t seem to make a difference. I also don’t know why when user2 launched Nvu, it was checking user1’s environment. In short: I’m flying blind here, and my tip” may be the tip of a sharp stick with which you poke yourself in the eye. [Tags: nvu os_x ]

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Farhad Manjoo at Salon offers a measured take on the iPhone, while still declaring it the Technology of the Year. He says it

marks a new way of living. For some people constant access to the Internet is a pleasant dream, while for others it’s a dreaded nightmare. This year, for all of us, it became a reality, the unavoidable future.

I’m waiting for the gPhone because of its commitment to openness, and also, because, um, I still have time on my indentured servitude to AT&T Cingular AT&T. [Tags: iphone farhad_manjoo gphone tech ]

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My One Laptop Per Child computer arrived overnight, as if delivered by elves. As Drew Barrymore would say, “Magical!”

Other than saying that it’s the cutest thing since otters began holding hands, I feel incompetent to review it. I’ve only used it for a couple of hours, and it’s very different from the usual computers. I can say that it does some things incredibly easily, like take photos. On the other hand, I’m lacking the mental model for doing some more complex things, like downloading an ebook from the Web and reading it offline on the laptop.

But this was not a computer designed for me, so I’m going to give it time to shape my expectations. So far, though, it’s just so cute and cuddly that I want to feed it kibble and take it out for a walk four times a day.

[Anthropological note: The OLPC laptop serves the social function as puppies: When strangers see you with one, they just have to stop you, stroke it, and say "Awwww."]

[Tags: olpc xo laptops linux ]

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Preston Gralla at Computerworld lists 15 Firefox hacks. Some are pretty geeky, but others are simply must-knows. [Tags: firefox preston_gralla ]

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Check out the hilarious photo of a 5mb hard drive as of 1956, at Snopes….

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David Pogue has posted five tips for Leopard users to entice you to buy his new Missing Manual for Leopard. One of the tips I’m finding especially useful. The search box you get when you click on Help in an application displays any menu items that match it by dropping down the menu itself and putting a big blue arrow next to the item. Yay. But that’s not the tip. Pogue points out that if you’re in Firefox or Safari, if you type in the title of a page on your Bookmarks or History menu, the blue arrow points you right at it. Cool

[Tags: os_x leopard tips david_pogue ]

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The switch from Movable Type to WordPress has gone pretty well, but some of you have pointed out a huge bug in my implementation. If you know CSS well, you’ll probably be able to spot it quickly. I don’t and I can’t. So, I’m asking for your help…

in IE 6, the page is loading some style other than the default, making the left column appear blank. If you click on a comments link, the text is centered, even if you click on the “default” style in the “Hard to Read?” list of links.

I don’t know why it’s not loading the default style in IE. I don’t know where it’s getting the center alignment. Do you?

Thanks!

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Amazon’s ebook, Kindle, looks great. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t browse. You can only receive the materials Amazon chooses to provide.

Too bad. I was about to buy one.

If I’m wrong, please let me know…

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This site is now officially under construction as I switch it from Movable Type to WordPress. So, pardon the glitches, and, no, I haven’t finished moving my blogroll over yet.

Why am I switching? It comes down to no good reason. I like MT as software and admire it as a company. But, I have it configured for maximum host churn. So, I could work on configuring it better or I could try something new. I’ve been using WP for my Everything Is Miscellaneous blog, and have been enjoying it. I’m also fairly comfortable with it now. So, I opted to try something new.

My only regret comes from mt sense of loyalty to MT. The company is a good contributor to the community and I recommend MT wholeheartedly. In fact, if bradsucks weren’t doing the WP install for me, I’d absolutely fail at it; WP is easy to get up in its default state, but much harder to configure and personalize than MT, at least in my experience.

So, now for the tweaks, the fixes, the general annoyance, and the post-installation regrets…

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Ok, so I forgot the password for a WordPress installation I was playing around with. That makes me an idiot, but just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill idiot. The built-in WP idiot-guard, which sends you a copy of your password, didn’t send me anything.

In googling around for a solution, I found lots of info about installing phpMyAdmin, a powerful tool for managing your SQL install. Except I don’t want a powerful tool. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to install it, and failed.

More googling, however, revealed an extremely simple php script at (appropriately) www.village-idiot.org. You install it into your WordPress directory, you visit it in your browser, you enter a password, and then you immediately delete the script. Couldn’t be simpler.

Thank you, Village-Idiot! [Tags: wordpress]

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My digital camera stopped being recognized by both my MacBook (with the latest version of OS X) and my Windows laptop. I tried lots of things, including many reboots and various photo import programs. I was on the verge of ordering a card reader when I tried a second USB cable, even though the first one worked without any problems when plugged into a mouse that uses a removable USB cable for its cord. With the new cable, the camera was recognized by both the Mac and Windows machines.

I may be missing the relevant factor here, but since the first cable continues to work fine with the mouse, all I can figure is that thickness matters. The first cable is one of those thread-like jobbies that come with a spring-loaded winder. The second cable was a normal USB cable.

Assuming that that’s the factor, does the skinny cable not let enough electrimification through? Oh, pity the poor humanities major! [Tags: tips mac windows cameras ]

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Suppose you want to positing the insertion point in a textarea on an HTML page using javascript. (If you don’t want to suppose that, then stop reading now.) This is basic stuff for real programmers, but it took me longer than it should to figure out exactly how to get this to work, so pardon my step by step instructions. I figure it might save some other clodhopping amateur like me the effort of figuring out what’s so obvious to real programmers that they don’t bother mentioning it.

So, let’s say your HTML page has a textarea element — you know, one of them type-in fields. In fact, let’s say the entire body of your page looks like this at the code level:

<textarea id=”ta”>01234567</textarea>
<input type=”button” value=”Move cursor to after first letter” onclick=”setsel()”>

That’ll make a page that looks like this:

01234567

(The button doesn’t work. It’s just for show. But see below.)

In case any of this is unclear, the first line creates a textarea with an identifer that I made up (”ta”), and containing “01234567″ as its initial text. The second line creates the button, gives it a label, and says that when a user clicks it, the function “setsel()” should be executed. But you already knew that.

Here’s the operative part of the function “setsel()”:

var t