random($foo)

I’ve been coming down with a head cold over the past few days, but it looks like it’s finally overtaking me. I was going to finish writing up some stuff and put it online, but I’m just going to sleep instead. In the pipe: why Mozilla is the best browser available, essential windows productivity tools, contemporary web design thoughts, my review of NNG’s Sitemap study.

Oh, I was looking at JZ’s new <forward compatibility> page for his new book. The Mozilla/strict mode trick seems handy, although I’ve never had to use it. If you’re going to validate w/ HTML 4.x, why use tables? Actually, this would be less of a problem if there were different modes for Transitional and Strict rendering, but alas, that’s not how it works. I first saw David Baron’s site back in 1998 or so (more nostalgia). I remember being impressed by his CSS header.

For those interested in what Mozilla quirks mode actually does, DB has written docs for web developers on mozilla.org. BTW, the method I use for compatibility if I must use tables, is to trigger quirks mode by not using a system identifier, which seems like a much better solution if you’re going to be kludging your page with tables for layout anyway.

On this note (which took longer than I expected), I’m heading off to bed.

After a bit of searching, I finally found some resources for dealing with the NeXT carryover NetInfo DB. The MacAddict article Of NetInfo and /etc gives a good start on using nidump and niload. There a presentation slide that has a little info, as does a MacWEEK article on Darwin and using niutil:

[localhost]:~] root# niutil -create . /users/wanda

[localhost]:~] root# niutil -createprop . /users/wanda uid 1000

[localhost]:~] root# niutil -createprop . /users/wanda gid 0

[localhost]:~] root# niutil -createprop . /users/wanda shell /bin/tcsh

[localhost]:~] root# niutil -createprop . /users/wanda home /Users/wanda

[localhost]:~] root# niutil -createprop . /users/wanda realname "Wanda Tinasky" 

I’ll take useradd any day of the week.

When in doubt, take a look at install scripts. Once you find what you’re looking for, manfiles actually help.

I emailed this to a friend who was a former koop employee the other day, but forgot to post it up here. In lieu of real content:

We’ve already proved the existence of black holes (Score:4, Funny)

A famous former surgeon general discovered the first of these monsters a few years ago, and named it drkoop.com (the .com designation is often used to help identify black holes). Then there was altavista.com, webvan.com, and many others. The escape velocity exceeds the speed of VC money. Since nothing can go faster than VC money… Enron, by the way, is not a black hole. It’s a pulsar — a dead star that regularly flashes us with reminders that it’s dead (“Enron doesn’t have any money,” “Enron doesn’t have any money,” Enron doesn’t have any money,” etc.).

I smiled when I saw Paul’s new design because of the “the end” at the bottom of his page. I looked at the xhtml code and thought that he might indeed be using the content autogeneration with pseudoselectors on body, but then I popped up up the page in IE and it rendered; the footer is a background image attached to a div. I’ve started playing around with the autogeneration, pseudo-classes, and various esoteric CSS2 selectors and decided to use them on some wires that I’m doing for production. IE’s performance rendering those is predictably shitty, of course.

hoo ray, i now have my own personal web page!

Hmm… Offtopic=278, Total=646. Interesting (that’s right, the whole thread was bitchslapped). Here’s the user’s journal entry. Good stuff for those who are interested in online moderation systems and community dynamics, or browsing /.

Found the link on a jonkatz post about the Net and community issues. There is some spirited discussion on various online and offline community issues. Oh, and blogging gets mentioned.

Yesterday, I mentioned discovering a new Mozilla clicking mode that I never knew about. Today, I was playing around in IE5.13/OSX and found that if you Option-Click, you get a hand to move around on the page, albiet only while you hold down the mouse button. Funny, since I was just thinking about how hard it would be to write a hand effect, say in XUL or JS/DOM so that if you clicked ‘h’ while you focused on the body, you could move around (like in Photoshop).

I was doing some CSS layout (thank the lord for min and max-width) this morning, and was wondering, “why the hell am I still using workarounds for such simple thing as columns?” Oh, because Multi-column layout in CSS is still a dream (new draft last week). Until then, we’re stuck with using clever hacks [put up my three column variation – more elegant and useful than blue robot 3 col]. Why is this better than tables? (Yes I’ve read the discussion on this, it’s a rhetorical question).

At least one day, when css3-multicol is actually implemented, there’ll be at least one new feature.

Interesting, if you CTRL-left mouse click in Mozilla, it will select everything within a table cell. Who knew?

I was looking for Lance Arthur‘s Soulflare, and was disappointed to find that the domain had lapsed and last fall and is now instead selling porn.

More and more I’m starting to use the Way Back Machine like Google: for everything. Does that mean I’m growing crotchety and curmudgeonly, or that all the good stuff on the net is disappearing? [Actually, in all seriousness, I believe that time-based searches is the next frontier of knowledge management on the web.]