May Contain Nuts

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in :P.

So, I’ve been fiddling around with IE8 Beta 1 today, and have a short list of notes thus far.  I haven’t put it through any serious paces, so this list will probably grow over time, but for now, here’s the shake-down…

Nice:

• “Super-standards” mode on all non-quirks pages out of the box.  “Nice” is an understatement.
• Passes Acid2 (as long as it’s on the webstandards.org site; acid2.acidtests.org fails, apparently due to a cross-domain request issue that’s being worked on, so it’s a conditional passage, but still way better than the grenade-victim look of the smiley face in IE7).
• Wide buttons successfully render their corners in Windows XP.  Previously, if a button became too wide, the edges of the button would become super-pixelated.  Looks like someone back-ported a fix to IE7/Vista for this release.  Thank god.
• An “Emulate IE7″ button is included to force the browser back to IE7’s rendering mode and user-agent.
• Based on the demo at MIX this morning, there’s a sweet set of developer tools, including in-engine JS debugging.  This trumps even the Web Developer toolkit for Firefox, which is sort of a gold standard for dev tools (Safari’s ain’t bad either though).

Not so nice:

• Buttons still scale horizontally out or proportion with the contents of the button itself.  It’s like every character you pile on adds some number of pixels to the left and right padding for reasons that completely escape me.
• IE8 scores a 17 on the Acid3 test.  While it’s better than the score of 13(?) that IE7 gets, it’s still woefully far behind Opera 9.26 (46/100), Firefox 2 (51/100), Firefox 3 Beta 3 (59/100), and Safari 3 Build 31A15 (76/100).  While I won’t be placing bets on who passes Acid3 first, I’d be willing to put money on who passes it last…
• The “Emulate IE7″ button requires a complete restart of IE before it will take effect.  I also somehow doubt that this feature will last into the final release (especially if it remains this mean to the user), which is sad, because it’s obvious enough what it does that it could help alleviate some of the headaches that will inevitably arise from MS “breaking the web” again (and hopefully for the final time, though I wouldn’t count on that given the Acid3 compliance).
• The developer tools are apparently really, really buggy.  I thought this was a developer release… whoops?
• The UI is still crap, but that’s aesthetics, not web standards, so whatever.

Otherwise intriguing:

• Activities looks like an expanded take on Microformats, which I actually wouldn’t mind seeing other companies like Google, Mozilla, and Apple jumping on the bandwagon for.  Apple’s already got the whole data detector thing going on in OS X, with hooks for it in more than just Mail by the looks of a few tips on macosxhints.com, so this seems like a decent enough initiative to adopt as well.  It’s even being released under a Creative Commons license, so hooray for non-proprietary-ness…
• WebSlices look like Microsoft’s version of WebClips, only built into the bookmark bar instead of the Dashboard (or Sidebar… guess they couldn’t do the Sidebar integration if it’s supposed to be an XP feature too…)  Practically speaking, I think I prefer the WebClips approach, which lets you capture any portion of any webpage, rather than just those sections that the web developers of certain sites have deigned it appropriate to let you save.  The bookmark bar integration is admittedly more accessible than the Dashboard though, in most instances, though, so that’s nice.
• Domain name highlighting looks like Yet Another Useless Feature to try and keep people from doing retarded things online.  If red (well, pink) address bars, huge certificate failure notifications, and phishing alert notifications in the browser aren’t enough to get someone to realize they’re about to get themselves scammed, making the domain name stand out from the rest of the URL sure as hell ain’t gonna do anything to help.  I’m betting on it being more confusing than anything else, honestly…

I will be following IE8’s beta cycle with supreme interest, if only because I want to see just how much more work Microsoft is going to make me do to get my sites to render properly in IE8, but so far all of my work-related stuff seems to be doing well, which is hardly surprising given that it renders will in other standards-compliant browsers…

Internet Explorer 8 will now run in IE8-standards mode by default.
No wonder it’s been so cold here the past couple of days…

Kudos to the IE team for turning the browser around after the firestorm of disagreement from the web development community, and further kudos to whoever decided that IE8 needed to fall in line with MS’s new interoperability principles.

Now, if only people would adopt IE8 as quickly as Firefox users adopt new versions (and if only IE8 were available on more platforms than just XP and Vista), web development would become much less of a headache.

Who wants to take bets on IE being the last browser to pass Acid 3, too?

To further elaborate on exactly why I think Microsoft’s new default rendering method is a Bad Idea (since GermanShepherd has taken me to task for being anti-Microsoft at the expense of the good of the Web), I think it’s important to first explain why I don’t think its a bad idea. I am not opposing this plan because I automatically think that anything coming out of Redmond is evil by default (in fact I applauded the IE team’s efforts on version 7, despite feeling that they didn’t go far enough in implementing long-standing standards at that time; something that appears to be biting them in the ass now). I’m opposed to the idea of version targeting because it is antithetical to the very concept of the standards that Microsoft is claiming they support, and as a developer who is increasingly working to fully support existing open standards (HTML 4 Strict, XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1, CSS1, CSS2, CSS2.1, Javascript), this concept will make things harder for me, not easier.

I will readily acknowledge that MS is in something of a pickle of their own making here, because for over 5 years, IE6 was pretty much the only browser on the market, and as far as rendering pages built to standards goes, well, saying it sucked is putting it pretty mildly. Now they’re in a situation where their past shoddy support for standards in IE’s standards-compliant mode is making it hard to obey those standards and the commonly-accepted method for opting into them (namely, the doctype switch) without causing large portions of the corporate intranet to come crashing down because their standards-compliance is only as good as what IE6 and now IE7 require. (I think that the effect of IE7 was much greater on internal sites than it was on the Internet as a whole, but I’m just working from personal experience here. I have no way to verify or dispute Chris Wilson’s claim that IE7 broke half of the top 200 websites, so I’m just going to have to take his word for that.) So, rather than do the difficult thing and make it obvious to these people that their sites were built using antiquated, buggy, and often broken code for a product (IE6) which is nearing (if not already at) the end of its support cycle (something they seem to have no problem doing for Windows), they’re taking an easy way out and dumping the responsibility for keeping IE up to snuff with the other modern web browsers onto the developers who have so tirelessly demanded Microsoft’s compliance.

And really, that is the biggest problem I have with this meta tag business: it punishes developers who have already done the most work to build sites that are well-rendered by every major browser and which support the forward compatibility that these standards are supposed to ensure. Developers who are either too lazy, inexperienced, or entrenched in Microsoft’s broken method of rendering the web get a free pass for remaining 7 years behind the times. This is quite possibly one of the only computer-related fields where this would even begin to be an acceptable situation, and that simply boggles my mind. We cannot continue to support sites designed and built during the Dark Ages of the Web; it hinders progress and innovation, and puts us into situations like the one we have now. Websites are just like other pieces of software: they become antiquated, broken, and need to be replaced. Unfortunately, the “operating system” for these pieces of software is a browser so deeply tied into the desktop OS that it cannot support anything but the latest and greatest version of itself.

This brings me to my second point: I seriously question the sustainability of this meta tag version-targeting system. The way that this has been proposed, it isn’t a temporary solution to the problem of maintaining backwards compatibility in IE; it’s a new “standard” way for developers to target their pages for specific browsers and versions (in fact, it’s the exact opposite of a temporary fix; you don’t temporarily opt into the future, you temporarily opt out of it, and Microsoft is hoping that other browser vendors will implement this meta tag as well [interestingly, for some reason, devs from WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera have all rejected and disowned this proposal... I wonder why?]). Again, this sounds like an absolutely fantastic idea in theory, but in practice, it will turn any browser that supports it into bloatware, because antiquated, buggy rendering methods can now no longer be dropped from a browser after being fixed, they need to be retained for the sake of remaining compatible with all those pages out there that bought into the broken way of doing things (and I might note that despite Firefox, Safari, and even Opera going through numerous revisions in far less time than it took IE to go from 6 to 7, there has never been an outcry from developers for these browsers to support backwards compatibility with earlier versions of their rendering engine). What happens two or three versions of IE down the road? If developers build in a meta tag explicitly indicating that IE use the IE8 rendering engine, what does IE9 or IE10 do about that? What about IE11? IE12? How many versions of the Trident engine can Microsoft conceivably cram into this product before it simply collapses under its own weight? How much more difficult does this make fixing bugs in the program? How does this increase the number of potential vulnerabilities in the browser? What happens if IE9 introduces more than just bug fixes, but performance increases in areas like Javascript handling and page rendering? Will sites locked into IE7’s or IE8’s engines benefit from these improvements? If not, why even bother making these improvements in the first place? When everything still renders “just fine” in the default IE7-compliant mode, and standards are optional, what motivation does Microsoft have to continue to innovate and improve its browser?

Segue now to point #3: This idea will stifle innovation in the IE Team and on the Web in general. Certainly, the standards-compliant developers are welcome to “force” IE8 (and presumably IE9 and up) to behave like a modern browser, but if this defaulting to IE7 is being done to help unprepared developers, lazy developers, and corporations without the time, resources, or perhaps most commonly, the desire to update their sites stave off an impending armageddon, what motivation do they now have to do anything at all? If IE8, IE9, IE10, etc. all default to rendering content just like IE7 would have (and again, I question the sustainability of this approach), what motivation do these people now have to do anything at all? What motivation do novice developers have to learn about standards and advanced content creation methods when IE7 works just fine? Sure, the standardistas and the less fanatical but still standards-friendly developers are welcome to use this meta tag to target more advanced versions of the IE engine, but this practice of making standards opt-in rather than opt-out forces people to have to expend more time and effort to learn standards-based practices than they would need to spend just making it look right in IE7. It marginalizes the importance and impact of standards on the most commonly-used browser on the planet. This is bad for standards, not good for them, and standards are good for the Web, even at the expense of older sites ceasing to function. Some may find (and have found) it odd to advocate Microsoft enforcing something like this, since usually Microsoft forcing people to do something is anti-competitive and harmful to the computer industry, but this is not an advocation of more proprietary lock-in garbage from Redmond. This is advocating that Microsoft conform to open standards in the interest of fair competition. If they lose market and mind share because of past attempts to unfairly dominate the Web through proprietary technologies and poor support for even the most basic of standards from HTML to CSS, then they have nobody to blame but themselves for this calamity that they now face, and the longer they put it off, the worse it’s going to be for them when they finally do decide to make modern standards the default. Microsoft is not a charity, and we as an industry should not be expected to coddle them for having screwed up in the past. Nor should we allow Microsoft to continue to hold open standards hostage because it would temporarily damage some portions of the web and the corporate intranet (and I do wish to stress temporarily… sites can be updated, and will only be updated if there is a motivation to do so). If Microsoft would get off its ass and just freaking announce and end-of-life date for IE6 and that incompatible sites would no longer render or possibly even function correctly in newer versions of IE, that alone would be enough incentive to get corporations off of their own duffs and invest in modernizing their internal infrastructure and external Web presence.

To take a brief tangent into the hazy realm of economics, imagine if you would the number of jobs and the amount of economically stimulating cash would be generated by at least encouraging, if not outright forcing major companies to upgrade their websites and corporate intranets. It could – admittedly without the benefit of insightful education into the workings of economic factors – be argued that Microsoft making IE8 act like IE8 by default would be a good thing for the economy in this down-turning market, as it would drive the creation of tech industry jobs in the form of new contracts to freelance web developers and development firms. These are quite typically rather lucrative contracts which would drive considerable money into the hands of a segment of the market most likely to further re-invest it into the economy (in the form of purchases, likely from the very companies shelling out cash to upgrade their web-based infrastructure), doing far more benefit than free hand-outs from an already cash-strapped federal government.

But back to the real world, there are other ways that this sort of preservation of the ancient corporate American intranet could have been handled without a) blaming developers for making badly-designed sites so that they’d work in IE6/7 and b) further placing an additional onus of responsibility on standards-compliant developers to make their standards-compliant sites render correctly in IE8’s non-default super-duper standards-compliant mode. Unfortunately, all of these alternative methods would rely on some combination of user education, developer training, and the “breaking” of the Web which Microsoft is so terrified of doing (despite the fact that the vast majority of the web is either built to standards, or to such ancient implementations of HTML that it immediately falls under the purview of Quirks Mode). The sites most likely to “break” (by which I believe the IE Team means “render incorrectly” more than “ceases to function entirely”) are those written by tech-savvy developers trying to cleverly circumvent the bugs and limitations of IE’s Trident engine.

Making IE7-compliant mode opt-in, through either the inclusion of the meta tag or the use of the also-proposed X-UA-Compatible HTTP header, would allow these tech-savvy developers to “fix” their sites temporarily while still placing an onus upon them – and not the standards-based development community which has been doing the legwork to get Microsoft to pay attention to this issue in the first place – to update their sites before this temporary stop-gap measure ceases to be supported in the future. For those sites that don’t have active support teams or who for whatever reason were tech-savvy enough to know how to work around IE’s shortcomings but not up-to-date enough to know about this temporary solution, a button and/or contextual menu item (I’m thinking both) can be added to the browser that would toggle IE7-compliant rendering for a given domain. Make it look like a band-aid, and trumpet the feature as the best of both worlds: forward-looking standards compliance and the ability to continue to view “legacy” sites in a non-destructive manner. You’re already giving the browser the ability to switch renderers, just put that ability into the hands of the users. With proper education of users on the use of this feature, and proper education of developers through notifications from Microsoft on any and all tech-related blogs and news sites to ensure that this “band-aid” feature would be required only in the most dire of circumstances, Microsoft could continue their pledge to not “break the Web” while still properly implementing modern Web standards. And if you don’t like the band-aid button, here’s another one for you: make IE8 a stand-alone product, separate from the built-in, deeply-Windows-integrated IE5/5.5/6/7 releases. Since I’m pretty sure that by this point, most of the “Web breakage” has already happened in the nearly-mandatory move to IE7 (which inexplicably hasn’t impacted IE6’s browser share all that much), most of what’s left is corporate intranets still stuck in the mid-to-late 90’s. Let people run the antiquated IE5/5.5/6/7 engine for those sites that need it, run IE8 for the actual Intarwebz, and make the new IE8 release available for all versions of Windows from Win98 through Vista (seriously, it can’t be any more work than making sure IE10 still has IE7, 8, and 9’s rendering engines in it…) to ensure maximum adoption so that devs can more quickly move to end-of-line the old versions of the browser.

As a final salient point, making yet another opt-in to replace the opt-in of the doctype switch because so many people (and WYSIWYG editors) completely loused that idea up simply begs for this opt-in to be similarly abused in the future. There’s even a setting in the meta tag for “edge”, which will force the page to target the latest version of a browser’s rendering engine regardless of how far in the future the page is being accessed. Knowing that most devs aren’t going to want to be locked into a specific release of a browser (as they’ll want a well-formed site to be able to take advantage of improvements to performance and capabilities over time), and knowing that WYSIWYG editors are going to make “edge” the default for inexperienced devs simply because it looks bad to target an older browser release as a default, the proliferation of “edge”-defined sites – despite strong advisement from Microsoft not to do this – is going to ruin this as a way to guard against future incompatibilities in rendering the same way the doctype switch has failed to do so for the exact same reasons. Opt-ins don’t work, because everybody wants to opt-in to the future, even if they don’t understand what that means. The only way to preserve standards and their forward-compatibility is by opting out of them as needed until the people responsible for maintaining and creating content on the Web get their heads in the game. If they choose not to, there are plenty of forward-looking developers out there who will gladly take their business once they explain to their clients why their sites don’t have as much portability, functionality, speed, or simplicity. Standards as defaults drive innovation; standards as options do not.

Now for my paragraph of anti-Microsoft paranoia, which will likely serve to undermine all of the hopefully well-reasoned arguments I’ve just made (oh well). I can easily see this move by Microsoft as a way to ensure that IE7 becomes the “gold standard” for the internet yet again. It may not be the intent if the IE Team right now, but faced with sharply declining browser share and a potential way to make up for it through this new non-standards-compliant IE7 default rendering method, I have no doubt that someone at Microsoft will turn this into another crusade against open innovation. By effectively paying lip service to standards by including them as a non-standard feature, Microsoft is once again already marginalizing the open standards community in favor of maintaining its own proprietary, or at the very least, “broken” standards, which serve to keep people locked into their products, lest those customers find that they are no longer able to use their corporate intranet site after moving to another browser vendor. It’s a small – and predictable, based on past performances – step from this marginalization to another take-over effort built on the back of IE7 and 8, rather than IE4, 5, and 6. It’s easy to understand why this would work, too… even after the rise of Firefox as a viable alternative and the steady increase in Safari market share, IE still commands anywhere from 60% to 95% of the traffic going to most popular websites. This is arguably the most commonly-used (if not popular, since that sort of implies that it’s something people want to use, rather than people simply not knowing they can use anything else) browser on the market, and leveraging the power of stupid people in large numbers is something that Microsoft is very, very good at. But that’s just my bit of anti-Microsoft paranoia to cancel out the well-reasoned arguments. Feel free to just pay attention to this paragraph and ignore the other 9 when making your counter-arguments.

… again.

(My apologies for the language.)

Much to my surprise and amazement, I’ve leapt onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon with considerable zeal this week. I updated my LinkedIn profile for the first time in probably a year or so, I joined Facebook (because the alternative seemed to be MySpace, which I refuse to be a part of in any way, shape, or form on matter of artistic principle :P), I signed up for the private beta of Mixx (aka “digg but with different letters and colors… and fewer assholes”) as a way to keep tabs on the world without having to resort to the far more inane CNN news feeds I was using before, and I bit the bullet and spent a fair amount of time organizing my bookmarks on del.icio.us (no link because none of my bookmarks are presently shared, so what’s the point?).

We’ll see how long this lasts… I’ve already had my Facebook profile for a week and have yet to add a picture of myself to it, and I just got into the Mixx beta today, so the novelty may soon wear off again, and I’ll be back to my old ways.

To go off on a ranty tangent, the only service I’ve started using that I think may end up annoying the crap out of me is del.icio.us (in part because I think the URL is ob.noxio.us [pity that URL is already taken by someone :P). The reason for this being that I am apparently one of the few people who actually likes using Safari on the Mac, and there is next to no delicious (I give up on the periods) integration for Safari, because there’s no really viable plugin architecture for the browser (InputManagers aside, which may be of limited longevity anyway). I’m someone who likes having their bookmarks stored in Safari, and I like the .Mac sync service enough to make use of it for the purpose of having access to my stuff at work and being able to save things for later review at home.

Now, ideally, I would like to be able to tag stuff in my Safari bookmarks the way I would tag things in delicious. Seeing as Safari’s bookmarks are nothing but a .plist file in ~/Library/Safari, one would think there exists somewhere on this series of tubes an application that is able to load this plist and generate a collection of data that tack onto each entry in a separate “database” maintained by the application, thus: Safari-integrated tags. However, such an app seems to be completely beyond the realm of possibility, instead making way for apps like delicious2safari and Socialist, which basically either maintain their own collection of bookmarks based on what you’ve added to delicious (Socialist), or simply append your delicious bookmarks to Safari’s .plist (and in its current state, delicious2safari doesn’t even maintain an active collection autonomously, you have to manually re-sync it every time you want your Safari .plist updated).

Obviously, the “simple” solution would be to just ditch Safari as my browser and use Firefox with the new (and very nice; I’m using it on Firefox at work) delicious add-on, but frankly, I hate Firefox in OS X. It’s bulky, it takes too long to launch, and it totally fails at managing to look like an OS X application. I could of course get all the benefits of the Gecko browser with none of the fat ugly UI elements by using Camino, but then I lose the add-ons, so what’s the benefit of using Camino over Safari then?

If anybody (chucker?) knows of a decent way to integrate Safari’s bookmarks with delicious (or hell, even just a way to tag Safari’s bookmarks, so I don’t have to use delicious), I’m definitely all ears.

As a number of you may know, DPWR is (still) undergoing a long-overdue and much-talked-about-by-me upgrade to the latest version of Invision Power Board and its ancillary components. Among the things being done is a complete overhaul of the Archive and a major upgrade to the Gallery. I’m hoping to automate the Golden KI and make it easier and less tedious to manage and participate. The Library may also see some extra love, but it depends on the time I have after upgrading the Archive – much as I’d love to see the Library flourish, the Archive is what most of the people on the site are there to see.

As you may also know, DPWR integrates the entire site into Invision Power Board’s member database and session tracking classes. I’ve maintained this level of integration between the forum and the site for several years now because I believe it is the best way to provide a consistent experience for the visitor and allows me to create a single site powered by a single database without having to re-invent the wheel too much. Unfortunately, this integration also comes at the price of not just being able to toss up the latest version of the forum whenever a release comes out. The upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1 would have completely destroyed the site integration bridge I had built (okay, “cobbled together” is perhaps a better term), and the delays in completing the new skin as well as the site integration back-end caused 2.1 to become 2.2, and I had to start over again. Finally, I managed to catch up with the release of 2.3, and DPWR is well on its way to being upgraded, hopefully by the end of the month. If not, then by mid-August at the latest. The new Archive component will likely be finished within a week or two, and IP.Gallery is moving toward Release Candidate by the end of this week, and those are the only remaining third-party updates I need to get. Everything else is up to me.

On that note, I decided to undertake the site integration bridge tonight while I waited for final releases of the other components. It’s still something of a hack – essentially I’m copying the forum’s index.php file and removing the parts I don’t need to create a site init file – but I’m being smarter about how I implement it this time. For 2.0, I very crudely hacked on the init file and started throwing code willy-nilly in a fashion that only vaguely resembled OOP standards. This time, I’m being clever about it.

Invision Board, for those who don’t know, includes additional files into its execution through index.php based on the task it needs to perform. With IPB 2.1 and later, these files inherit a base class called ipsclass, which contains all of the skin, session, language, and common control functions to do away with the old method of using global variables. I’ve emulated this behavior by creating each PHP file with a class identical to the name of the file itself (i.e. “index” for index.php, “library” for library.php), including the site init file, and then instantiate that class by stripping the file name out of the PHP_SELF variable. From there I can then pass the ipsclass class into the site’s files without resorting to old-fashioned global variables and messy non-OOP practices.

It’s a fairly simple thing, but I’m rather proud of myself for figuring it out in about 30 minutes.

I would also like to note that I never thought I would see the day when a 23″ widescreen display wasn’t big enough for me, but I’m rapidly approaching that point with the number of text files and browser windows I’m juggling trying to pull this whole mess together.

Has been installed in our apartment in Spokane.

(for those out of the loop on this joke, Oscelot and I finally have an internet connection… and Comcast has foolishly provided us with a switch on the router to turn the internet on and off (seriously, that’s what the button says, “Internet On/Off”…).

I am so tired… I just spent the last 7+ hours working on getting caught up on everything I’ve missed in almost two months of Library-only internet access, which sucks for things like comic reading, arts-watching, podcast-listening, and Battlestar-watching (I get it from iTunes, and I have withdraw SO BAD it’s not even funny…). It barely functions for things like Archiver management and keeping tabs on forums.

So I have 5 episodes of Battlestar Galactica to watch, plus about 15 hours of podcasts to catch up on between Filmspotting and Mac OS Ken (which is a daily Apple news ‘cast, but I’ve been offline, and so have missed the fun non-iPhone tidbits… plus, Ken Ray is just a blast to listen to most days. Plus I have 3 TCT ‘casts to at least peruse, plus ShortWave updates, plus I haven’t even looked at the Uru Live forums since January… I already spent about 6 hours with Oscelot playing the 2 episodes of Sam & Max that came out while we were offline (hooray GameTap!), plus another 5 hours cleaning up my watchlists on various art-related sites (and that’s still not done). Plus I spent 2 hours watching the MacWorld keynote, because I enjoy these sorts of things.

But now, it’s almost time for Oscy’s alarm clock to go off, so I’m going to head off to bed. More posts tomorrow when I finally drag myself awake again. Specifically, I have something I think Chucker may well be interested in… if only so he can re-write it to be more awesome ;).

Those viewing this site directly, rather than reading my posts through MystBlogs, may notice that this place looks rather different. And the title of the blog has changed too.

Simply put, I was bored, and this place needed some love anyway… I don’t like using other people’s themes if I don’t need to, and I got tired of needing to. I also felt it was time for a name change… “May Contain Nuts” seems fairly appropriate, even if it is a somewhat overused joke (and often times more lewd than what I’m implying).

Those using IE6 may notice that the site is completely freaking FUBAR. Unfortunately, I really don’t much care at the moment, and I don’t have the time to fiddle with it right now, nor do I have IE6 on a machine to test with regularly. At least the 24-bit PNG script seems to be working. If you’re viewing this site with IE6, I would strongly advise upgrading to IE7, partly because it will (probably) make the site look better (again, IE7 is not on a machine I can immediately test with right now), and because it finally at least partly catches IE up to the modern browsers in terms of compliance, features, and security.

Really, though, I’d suggest using Firefox, Camino, Opera, or Safari, myself.

I’ll get around to trying to get this site compatible with IE6 at some point, just probably not anytime very soon.

I think that the comment posting problems have been fixed… I’ve gone back to captcha versus the “do you know math” plugin, because I was still getting spam comments from it and legitimate posters were having problems getting past it due to the bugs inherent in using the plugin on the old theme. Yes, it’s more ugly, and yes, it’s a pain in the ass, but I’d rather cause a minor inconvenience and keep my inbox clear while letting everyone post than open the floodgates or prevent some from posting because of the plugin.

So… does it say something about my skills as a web developer that it took me until last night to realize that floating a div to the right of another div only works the way you’d expect it to (i.e., the two divs end up on the same horizontal line) if you put the floating div before the div you’re floating around?

I have to admit, I feel kinda stupid now…