Ahh, nostalgia. I’ve abandoned Mozilla’s modern skin (at least temporarily),for the tender embrace of Gold, a skin inspired by Netscape Navigator 3 Gold. Remember that? Before Netscape started sucking ass.
After working on twiddly pixel pushing, design twiddling, and display code, it’s actually relaxing to unwind and do some actual coding. I wrote a recursive function for the id3 tag viewer, based on the getID3() library (it’s reading a Prodigy song I threw up on the server to test with in debug mode). I’m putting together a ripping machine from one of my spare systems. I fully intend to rip my whole collection over the next few months. I figure if I can be bothered to do one or two in the morning before I go to work, and a few each night, I should be able to have all the CDs I own in a few months. From there on out, I’ll just rip as I acquire.
In other MP3 related news, a new version of MP3ext is out! I don’t think I’ve really found a better id3v2 tagger than this. (I really liked Helium and even paid up front for a beta version, but the writers abandoned that without releasing a finished upgrade and then started charging money for Helium2, which left me pretty soured me on that so they don’t count.) Came across a few interesting projects: the cool MP3 database of the future (not sure I like some of the stuff like the file tracking via id3v1 comments), and Netjuke, a streaming server that is a lot more like what I’m envisioning than most of the other ‘jukebox’ software out there.
Always a good idea to call before going to a show. Looks like Cursive has cancelled for tonight at the Troubadour due to medical problems. Well, there’s still the Sugarcult show next week. Although I really was looking forward to seeing Cursive.
My ER-6s came in from HeadRoom, so that’s keeping me amused.
Speaking of amused, I spent most of the day working on specifying CSS to make a header template as self-contained as possible so it won’t get destroyed by local CSS. Here’s a test page with examples of default borders for form text inputs. This is the first time I’ve had to use the CSS2 system colors (although part of me agrees that it’s icky and pollutes CSS, the pragmatist in me is appreciative and wishes there was more UI access, like being able to get font properties). Mozilla’s DOM Inspector came in handy for hunting down some font/color issues. It’s nice being able to seeing the computed values and styles rules and source they’re being applied from. If only all the other browsers had something like that, life would certainly be a bit easier.
Further Reading:
- Accessing the User-Defined System Colors – While it says it’s for IE4, CSS2 pretty much adopts the exact same properties. This is the most comprehensive description of each property that I could find.
I’ve been spending the past few days fixing a lot of code that was delivered that have these sort of arbitrary page construction choices seems fine, but make creating templates from them a royal pain in the ass.
Anyway, proof that time flies even when you’re not having fun.
Was doing some searching for something completely different and stumbled on an announcement posted this morning about PostgreSQL being ported NetWare. Interesting.
UMass researcher finds most people lie in everyday conversation – The study, published in the journal’s June issue, found that 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation and told an average of two to three lies… “When they were watching themselves on videotape, people found themselves lying much more than they thought they had,” Feldman said.
Been listening to some ‘old sad bastard music’ courtesy of AudioGalaxy. Yeah, Belle and Sebastian is one of the bands, as well as Now It’s Overhead, Elf Power, Tindersticks, Bright Eyes, and Big Star. Actually, over the weekend, I’ve been sampling quite a few bands. I even found a few that I really like: Death Cab for Cutie, Sparklehorse, Lilys, and Yellowcard among them. I ended up ordering a few more CDs than I probably should have over the weekend, which is one of the reasons that I originally stopped downloading music in the first place, it got too expensive when I found bands that I liked. One of the nice things about electronic music, since I never got into vinyl, it was just about mixes and shows. Umm, yeah, I’m not sure if I actually had a point with this point, I’m sure it would have gotten around to a rehash of the rants I’ve had made against the RIAA and how stupid the music industry or something like that.
Oh, one really nice thing about AG, I found this band called Letter to Juliet. They don’t have an album out yet, and their songs are currently only out on AudioGalaxy. Anyway, just thought that was pretty neat.
Oh hey, I’m in the post that the SMH article quotes from ernie‘s site.
This Neil Gaiman Interview by Dan Epstein is great stuff. A lot of upcoming stuff, comics and moviewise gets mentioned, sounds really cool.
This morning I was doing some browsing in IE with my proxy accidentally off, no sooner than 5 clicks in, I had a gaggle of pop-ups, pop-unders, and pop-oncloses jumping up and about. I’d been browsing with Mozilla so long that I’d forgotten how it’d gotten out there. I can’t really imagine how all these people can stand browsing the web nowadays. I guess most of them don’t know better. Remember when there was a time before popups? (Am I dating myself here?)