Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

New Earth Time

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Via Mike Whybark: New Earth Time.

Their site goes into more detail, but in brief, timezones are a pain in the butt. As the ‘net connects more and more of us in real-time, perceived distances become smaller and smaller (my Flickr contacts page, for instance, has a few people scattered across the US and others in Luxembourg, Singapore, Johannesburg, Brisbane, and Tunis). Rather than having to deal with local time zones and the bother of constantly converting back and forth, NET is an attempt to standardize one global time system.

This isn’t the first time something like this has been put forward, of course. Mike referenced WRLD.time, which I’d not heard of before, and I remember Swatch Internet Time. These projects always interest me, though, and I’d be thrilled if this actually caught on.

Okay, well maybe “thrilled” is a bit much, but it’d at least fall into the “really nifty” category.

The NET site provides a couple different javascript clocks, and pointers to both Windows and Mac clock applications. The Mac software they link to is an old System 9 menu bar extention, so it’s not terribly useful under OS X — but as the JavaScript clocks look fairly simple, it strikes me that it shouldn’t be terribly hard to slap together a Tiger Dashboard widget (and, should such a thing be put together, it seems to be that it would be useful to include a converter, too…). Not that I know the first thing about doing that, aside from the very theoritical basics, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be very difficult.

Then, as long as I’m daydreaming, I wonder how hard it would be to hack around and automatically compute the NET time from the post time of each entry to include that in the dateline of each post on my site…

DVD-R? DVD+R? Argh!

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In theory, according to Apple’s promotional literature, iPhoto is supposed to be able to handle up to 25,000 photographs in its library without a hiccup. I’d love to know what kind of hardware they were testing that on, because I’ve got around 7,000 photographs in my iPhoto library and it quite frequently brings my 2.0Ghz G5 to a standstill, if iPhoto doesn’t crash out entirely.

Annoying.

So, part of last weekend’s running around was picking up a small spindle of recordable DVDs so that I could back up the older photos and pull them out of my iPhoto library. Prairie and I hit Best Buy and found a spindle of fifteen recordable DVDs for about ten dollars.

Yesterday, I grabbed all my photos up through 2003 (only about 2.5Gb out of the 4.7Gb available) and told iPhoto to burn the DVD. It asked for a blank disc, I put one in…and it popped it right back out and asked again for a blank disc. “That’s odd,” I thought, and put the disc back in. This time iPhoto went ahead and started chugging away, and I didn’t think more of it.

Until iPhoto finished burning, and the disc never mounted on the desktop. I started trying to figure out what was going wrong, and then some small part of my brain kicked in. “Wait a second…aren’t there a couple different DVD formats?” Sure enough, I’d picked up a spindle of DVD+R discs, and the Superdrive in my G5 uses DVD-R discs. Crud.

I’m just glad the discs weren’t terribly expensive, and I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience. Thanks to an Office Depot just a few blocks away from my apartment, I now have a spindle of 25 DVD-R discs (for only \$9.99, too — the sale goes through Jan. 8th, and that’s a pretty good deal, as their spindles of 50 DVD-Rs are priced at \$40), all my photos up through 2003 are successfully burned onto one disc, and most of 2004 (Jan-Nov is all that would fit on one DVD) is merrily burning away in the background as I type this.

Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible formats, though, especially so similarly named (one is “DVD ‘plus’ R(ecordable)”, and one is “DVD ‘dash’ R(ecordable)”, I guess, though it could just as easily be read as “DVD ‘minus’ R(ecordable)”, which is even more confusing). If I hadn’t had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I’d probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary.

iTunes “I Sit on Acid ’96” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1996, 4:31).

My Netflix

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I’ve just added a new page to the site (and linked it in the header navigation of every page): my Netflix queues.

Thanks to the plugin goodness of the Netflix Suite, it lists the movies I currently have checked out, the last 90 days (?) of movies I’ve watched and returned along with what I’ve rated them, and my entire Netflix queue (sitting pretty at 441 as of this moment).

Book of Blogs II

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Earlier this month, I linked to a project by Tvindy to collect and anthologize some of the better weblog posts by a number of contributing authors. I really liked the idea, and nominated a few entries for potential inclusion.

Tvindy’s hoping for a little more assistance in culling worthwhile posts, preferably posts chosen by regular readers of the participating weblogs, rather than solely author-nominated work.

As readers, are there any posts that stand out in your mind as particularly noteworthy, for whatever reason? They don’t have to be long, or serious, or anything in particular aside from standing out in one way or another. If so, toss ’em in the comments here — if you don’t want to dig through the archives yourself, just throw up whatever details you can remember, and I’ll track it down.

Not only will this help the project, but I’d be interested to see what — if anything — comes out of this.

iTunes “Conga Fury” by Juno Reactor from the album Bible of Dreams (1997, 8:06).

NNW missing images

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NNW Image Bug

This is odd — sometime over the past day or so, NetNewsWire has suddenly stopped displaying images. Images on pages show up fine in Safari, but never load in NNW.

I’ve checked all the preferences I can find in NNW, and can’t come up with anything that might be doing this.

Has anyone else ever seen this, or have any idea how I can troubleshoot this further and figure out what’s going on? I’m stumped at the moment.

iTunes “King Crack” by Dax, Danielle from the album Blast the Human Flower (1990, 2:10).

New Styles

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I’ve done very little posting or reading over the weekend, and I’m up way too late tonight (tomorrow morning is really going to suck), but it’s all for a good cause — well, okay, depending on how you define that — as there are now two new stylesheets available in the switcher over to the right.

Simple Green style screenshot

The first is “Simple Green”. There’s really not a whole lot to look at, as I was mainly using it to play with a couple ideas that I had but wasn’t sure if I could quite get them to work correctly or not. Green monotype text on a black background, very little styling aside from that. In all honesty, while it’s kind of fun for a few moments, I wouldn’t want to read my site this way on a regular basis. Who knows, though, maybe someone will decide that it makes me look more ‘l33t’ and Matrix-y.

Blue Distressed style screenshot

The second is “Blue Distressed” and is the reason I’m up so late. I’m really, really happy with the way this one turned out. Cool blues and greys, distressed edges, and a lot more visually interesting than any design that I’ve come up with so far. Many thanks must go out to Keith Bowman, whose Photoshop brushes and color palletes made this design possible.

Now, neither of these stylesheets have been tested in anything other than Safari yet, so they may very well look like ass in other browsers (especially IE, and even more so with Blue Distressed, as it uses transparent .png images that I don’t believe are supported with IE). Caveat emptor and all that jazz.

For me, though, Blue Distressed is the way I’m viewing my site from now on.

And now — bedtime. I’m so going to hate my alarm in the morning.

Update: After a little tweaking, I’ve deemed the appearance under IE 5 “good enough” to make Blue Distressed the default stylesheet for the site. If you haven’t already used the stylesheet switcher to pick a style or if you’re a brand-new visitor, you should be getting the fancy-shmancy new design now.

I still don’t know how this looks under IE6, though. That’ll have to wait until I actually bother to turn on the PC in my apartment, something that tends to happen about as often as America elects a Democrat to the White House.

Or so.

It’s close.

iTunes “God is a DJ (Edit)” by Faithless from the album Sunday 8 PM (1999, 3:32).

A Book of Blogs

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Thanks to Alicia, I just found out about this project of Tvindy’s:

With all the phenomenal writing that has appeared on our various blogs over the past several months, wouldn’t it be cool for us to get together and publish a physical anthology of our greatest posts?

The way I envision it is that several of us agree to participate and have a couple of their entries published in the anthology. Since most people (myself included) find it hard to evaluate their own work, we can make suggestions as to what the best entries of our fellow bloggers are and urge them to choose those. That should make for some interesting debates.

The final product would be a paperback, containing hopefully as many as fifty entries in no particular order. Each entry would identify the name (or pseudonym) of the author and the URL of her/his blog. We’d make a nice cover using combined artwork from various blogs, and there would be an introduction at the beginning explaining what the book was.

He’s got more thoughts on how to approach the project in his next three posts (make that four).

I think this sounds really good, and would love to contribute, if anything I have is deemed worthy of inclusion.

Taking a quick look at my recent Four Years post where I pulled out a lot of highlights, I’m thinking that the following posts would be most likely to work well:

If anyone else has any other nominations, though, I’d be glad to see them. Your views on the “best” posts as readers might be quite different than mine as author.

ecto 2

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So ecto 2 is updated, and one of the nifty new features is Amazon integration. It’s pretty slick, with a handy little search window within ecto to find items, one-button posting once you’ve chosen what you want, and a few options for how you want the finished link to appear.

I do have one concern about the link format, though.

I’ve been very careful to make sure that all my Amazon URLs are formatted a specific way, after reading this from kottke early last year:

I’ve noticed lately that when I browse items at Amazon, the URLs now take one of two forms:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/ http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/

The former URL style has been around for some time, but the latter is relatively new. If you’re an Amazon Associate, the proper way of linking to an individual item (per their linking guide) is to append your Associate code (mine is “0sil8”) to the first URL style, like so:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/0sil8

But if you run across an item at Amazon with the second type of URL, this won’t work:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/0sil8

If you’ve linked to items using that style of URL (something I’ve seen on several sites), check your reports at Amazon…you’ll find that you’re not getting any Associates clickthroughs or credit for those purchases.

Obviously, since I would like to get credit for any clickthroughs I might receive (rare though they may be), I’ve been very careful to make sure to use the ‘ASIN’ format of link, and not the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format.

While experimenting with ecto’s new Amazon integration, I put together a quick link to Neal Stephenson’s ‘Quicksilver’, and checked the URL — and, unfortunately, it came up with the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format (though I’ve fixed it in that link). After poking around in ecto’s settings for the Amazon integration, it doesn’t appear that there is any end-user control over the links (that is, the URL format, not the format of the link itself) other than manually fixing them after they’re inserted. While this really isn’t a major dealbreaker — it’s essentially what I’ve been doing for a while anyway, and the ecto integration does make it much easier to find items — it does leave me with a few questions…

  1. Most importantly, does this still matter? Or does Amazon now give credit correctly for both styles of links? On the assumption that it does still matter…
  2. When constructing the link, does ecto receive the entire URL string from Amazon, or just the ASIN?
  3. If ecto only receives (or needs) the ASIN, can the URL string be changed to the ‘ASIN’ style of link in the next update to ecto?
  4. If ecto receives the entire string…
    1. …is the returned string always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, or does it switch between that and ‘ASIN’ format?
    2. If it’s always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, can that be automatically adjusted within ecto to ‘ASIN’ format?
    3. If it switches, can ecto watch for that string and adjust it when necessary?
  5. And lastly, according to the tail end of Jason’s post, adding ‘ref=nosim/’ before the Associate ID forces Amazon to skip the “You may also be interested in…” page and send you straight to the actual product page. Can an option be added to ecto to add the ‘ref=nosim/’ string in the right place for people who might worry/care about such a thing?

If not…well, I’ll live. I can hope, though! :)

iTunes “Leæther Strip Part II” by Leæther Strip from the album Penetrate the Satanic Citizen (1992, 6:00).

MSN Spaces reactions

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Robert Scoble is collecting reactions to MSN Spaces, including mine:

Michael Hanscom: “Power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.” (Scoble’s note to Michael: hey, did you see the Macintosh in the video?)

I actually haven’t taken the time yet to watch either of the two introductory videos that Scoble posted, so no, I hadn’t seen that yet. :) I’ll try to get a look at them later today, maybe this evening.

iTunes “Get to Know Ya” by Johnson, Jesse from the album Pretty In Pink (1986, 3:35).

MSN Spaces launches

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Microsoft finally makes their long-rumored debut into the weblogging service arena with MSN Spaces. I got curious, and it’s free, so I went ahead and signed up for a Space of my own to try it out. I have no intentions of moving over…I just wanted to kick the tires a bit, so to speak.

My MSN Spaces site

Signup is pretty easy, as long as you have a MS Passport (I didn’t…but now I do). So far, it seems to be a fairly decent option for beginning bloggers — it’s free, there are a decent number of design templates (though there’s only so much customization you can do, much like the entry-level TypePad system), you can choose whether or not to syndicate your blog (with RSS 2.0 only), comments and Trackback are both supported (interestingly, Trackback has three options: disable, accept from everywhere, and accept only from other MSN Space weblogs, with the last option being the default [and I don’t seem to be able to switch it off of the default so that I can allow Trackback pings from everyone]), there are a few default categories and custom categories can be added…all the basics, and some frills.

MSN Spaces apparently ties in tightly with both MSN Messenger and MS Outlook (though I can’t play with that, being a Mac user), and as such, adds a special privacy option that can restrict visibility of your weblog to only people on your MSN Messenger Allow list, along with an option to only allow selected contacts in your MSN Address Book to see your blog.

secure.spaces.msn.com

There are settings for moblogging (blogging via cell phone) — amusingly, though, when I first clicked on the “Mobile” settings tab, I got an “unknown authority” error dialog. Not having a cell phone, there’s not much here I can play with.

You get 10 MB of storage, with no indication if there’s a way to increase this (or if there will be a way in the future). That should be fine for a good amount of text, but enough photos will eventually eat into that, so there’s a simple file manager to allow you to delete any photos you’ve uploaded.

Finally, there are some simple statistics available, showing total page views, views this week, today, and in the last hour, along with a referrer list (no idea how extensive the referrer list is, as I’ve got all of three hits so far while poking around with things).

So far, so good — it looks like a decent entry-level weblogging service.

One thing did catch my eye, though, and it could be a big one: apparently, posts have to be written with paragraph tags (\<p> and \</p>) or linebreak tags (\
), otherwise your text gets all smooshed together into a single paragraph. I was surprised enough that this would be the default behavior after I posted my first test post, but looking through the interface, I can’t see an option to turn on any sort of automatic linebreak conversion that would allow someone to type normally and actually get paragraphs. I can see this causing some serious headaches from HTML-ignorant newcomers who expect to see paragraphs and instead get huge blocks of unseparated text!

(Caveat: I am looking at this via Safari on my Mac, so it’s entirely possible that this actually works correctly with IE/Win — though if that’s the case, that’s another strike against the system, in my view.)

There is a note on the bottom of the posting screen that “Some HTML tags may be removed from your entry for security and formatting reasons” — unfortunately, they don’t list which tags may be removed. And what’s this “may” bit? Are they or aren’t they? Will the list of which tags get removed change from time to time, and if so, why? Odd.

Clicking the “Trackback” link takes you to the comment entry form, and I can’t find a Trackback link to send a ping to. I can’t find a Trackback address in the source code, either, and auto-discovery from the MT QuickPost interface isn’t coming up with anything either. Perhaps that’s due to not being able to set the global Trackback acceptance flag?

Permalinks are ugly — for instance, the permalink for my first test post is http://spaces.msn.com/members/michaelhanscom/Blog/cns!1plKnLKPq0gBtnAfWaupqTNA!106.entry. Ouch.

Source code is also ugly (though honestly, that’s exactly what I expected). Heavily table-based, lots of crud and cruft. Running it through the W3C validator returns 193 errors, and that’s after the validator displays a big warning that no Doctype was found so it’s guessing 4.01 Transitional.

End result: it’ll keep newbies and MS fans happy (assuming that that bit with requiring paragraph or linebreak tags is fixed), but power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.

(via Scoble)

iTunes “Making Plans for Nigel” by XTC from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1979, 4:10).