Blogging sporadically since February 2001.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2007.
Stupid Code Tricks:
Ruby http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs
foo, bar = [1, 2]
PHP http://www.php.net/manual/en
list($foo, $bar) = array(1, 2);
JavaScript http://developer.mozilla.org
[foo, bar] = [1, 2]; // I believe this is only valid in the latest versions of Firefox.
Tags: web-programming
Not too long ago I asked on h about commuting strategies from Simi Valley to Brentwood. It’s been a few weeks, and here are the results:
What I’ve tried in these past several weeks:
1. 118->405->Wilshire
2. 23->101->Kanan Road->PCH->Wilshire
3. 23->101->Topanga->PCH->Wilshire
4. 118->Sepulveda->Wilshire
5. 23->101->Las Virgines->Malibu Canyon->PCH->Wilshire
6. public transport
The results:
1. feels fast generally while on the 118, but the 405 just feels no fun, so I avoid it. It feels slower that the other options. and i feel trapped. if i want to get gas or whatever
2. is fun, but I think it wastes a lot of time on Kanan.
3. too curvy – i don’t get motion sickness, but this route makes me think of that
4. kind of nice, but too many other people are taking this road and it ends up being a bit nerve-racking
5. my favorite route, it’s not really much faster than the other options, but it feels faster, and i get a nice amount of having the ocean off to my right. there’s something to be said for looking at the ocean for mental health.
6. unexplored completely. very sad, since i love the train and don’t mind the bus.
audio books and podcasts have been wonderful for this trip. a stanford class on the historical jesus, and a bunch of future of warfare talks from johns hopkins, plus lots of coverville and misc IT conversations podcasts have been great. it makes me think about working in santa monica, frankly. i always swore that i’d never have a commute, but this one has worked out well.
Hey kids, I’ve made artlung.com no longer be a homepage. If I do something like that again it’ll be over on the one-page joecrawford.com. At this point I have a great deal of faith in WordPress and I’ll be migrating all I can from the old pages into it. It’s been quite a few years, and it feels like the right thing. You can see old pages and designs over in the archive area.
As usual, lots happening. We’re on the verge of many things – taxes, new cars, and much more. It’s an exciting time, it’s a difficult time. Rock.
And now, there’s other stuff to do today. Rawk awn!
Here’s the first post—rather short.
Since that time I’ve built other blogs, sold other blogs, been divorced, fallen in and out of love, lived with some different people, remarried, been interviewed on the radio, worked at a few different placed, gained weight, lost weight, travelled, regained faith, been cranky, been happy, had long hair, cut it short. Hopefully I’ve learned something along the way—it feels like I have, I know that I know more than I once did. It’s hard to ask for more than that.
I think it’s an accomplishment to have been blogging for six years. I have seen many many blogs start and stop. It’s been a good tool for my own mental health, to connect with people, to make my complaints, to announce my projects, to make my greetings. I’ve been doing it since before blogging was a word that appeared in the news or on tv commercials. I’ve been blogging since before it was making presidential news. I joined the blogging “craze” at an interesting part of the adoption curve—2001—before it was ever a “craze.” Ever self-critical, I consider myself late to the party—I was late to identify the importance of the technologies we now call blogging. I had been knocking about mailing lists—discussion lists where people discuss everything from web development, to the music of talking heads, to politics, and everything else. Here’s some evolt.org postings from 1999 for example. It’s pretty cool that it was Matt Haughey who encouraged me, by email, that what I had to say would make a good blog. Considering how large he looms in the world of blogging now, it’s quite a compliment. I think of it as though one of the Wright brothers had encouraged me to get into aviation. Eventually I listened. But I resisted it for a long time. I had many questions: what’s wrong with usenet? What’s wrong with individual web pages? What’s wrong with mailing lists? I relented because the ease of publishing via blog was too tempting. Today, to post to my website—to start writing this post—the one you’re reading right now—I don’t have to start a new html file , write it up, and upload it by FTP. All I have to do is click my browser’s “blog this” bookmarklet, start writing, and click “publish.” That ease of use was critical. It was a huge step towards what we now call the “Read/Write Web”—which is closer to Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception of browsers – that they would be a mechanism not just to read the web, but also to write to the web.
Privacy and anonymity were concerns for me, then, as now. When I started blogging, I was also acutely aware that I wanted to write as myself. I might have been “ArtLung”—but I’m also “Joe Crawford.” No anonymity meant that this was writing that would eventually be read by friends, family, enemies, government, employers past and present. I made myself ready for that. The blog was not discovered by those folks for several years—and still has not been paid much attention by any of employers. Buy my operating philosophy was to think of it as public. It was a diary, but a diary that I would write and then walk down and post to the laundromat bulletin board. It was not necessarily a safe and quiet space. I had strong, strong opinions about blogging. For example, I knew that I in no way wanted comments. And it stayed like that for several years, while the site was run through blogger.com. The idea I had about comments was that I didn’t want it to be a venue for anyone else. And I didn’t necessarily want to know what people had to say about the stuff I had to say. This was my own space, and not anyone else’s. If people want to write on the web, they should get their own site.
Now, I welcome comments. Yes, I have deleted a few over the years, for various reasons; but in the main I am more open to other points of view than I once was. I’m more apt to give your crazy idea a listen. I’ve found it’s been a great help to me to get those other perspectives. By ceding to the point that “other people might know something” I’ve learned so much more.
In 2007 the most popular site on the web, at least for the time being, is MySpace. It allows people to do exactly what I was doing in 2001 – share myself with the web. And it makes it as easy as possible. It’s no surprise to me, though I still wish the tools worked better than they do. This future, where it’s as easy as pie for people to publish to the web, is a pretty good one. It could be better, but that’s a normal kind of aspiration. Onward to the future y’all. Have a great day and I’ll see you soon, right here. Onward.
Everything needs to be remade. Things will look wonky until I get the thing looking right. It may be a while. Comments and suggestions are welcome in the interim.
“It is a story of a small town girl, single mother, model, party animal and how she changed a little part of the world and touched so many people. “
read more | digg story
It’s been a sore spot for me that Leah’s excellent blog has not really, uh, worked, for a long time. In MSIE 5 to 7, the thing basically went all wonky with the sidebars and ads and content. The thing was consistently off, and occasionally very broken. There’s an aphorism that “the cobbler’s children have no shoes;” to which a corollary might be—“the web designer’s wife has no working blog theme.” The look was based on an older version of the sandiegoblog.com theme, which was in turn based on Kubrick, a classic (read: OLD) WordPress theme.
Tonight I finally did something about it and voila! It looks like it even works. It’s a relatively generic three-column theme. Not really “new”—the thing that’s new is that it’s not broken. The code is pretty and it works and it is consistent. Besides one non-semanticly correct html table, the rest of it is pretty darn clean. The xhtml even validates!
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