So smart, in fact, it makes sense

Posted November 21, 2006 at 05:42 PM

When I check my American Express account, it remembers who I am and auto-populates my username field. At first I thought something had screwed up because it would type the first two characters followed by asterisks. I'd always clear it out and type it verbatim.

However, I just figured out what was going on. The AMEX site has an internal mechanism of remembering prior visitors. The visible characters are for your reminder, while the asterisks are there to hide your username from anyone else who uses the computer. If you leave it as-is, entering your password logs you in, which is at least as insecure as having the username visible and auto-populated, but useless if you move to a different computer.

Brilliant!

Jumping Jack

Posted November 16, 2006 at 12:38 PM

I've been teaching myself Flash lately. More specifically, ActionScript 2.0. I'm a seasoned veteran of Javascript, so the transition hasn't been too difficult. Comments:

• Tweening
  WTF is up with the name Tween? and Easing? In my day, we called it a transition with an interpolation curve. Once I made that connection, it all made sense.
• JSON
  I was very comforted in finding out I could carry over much of my JSON techniques, however property names cannot be enclosed within a string. Such a convention seems to defy the standard documentation, which irks me because I've come to rely on it.
• The Flash GUI
  I'm learning so much more (and at a greater rate) by ignoring the Flash IDE and going straight to F9 and working everything out in code. Any time I try to create or manipulate anything "On the stage", I tend to fuck things up.

Iconoclash

Posted November 16, 2006 at 04:54 AM

There's been a lot of chatter over vector (as opposed to bitmap) icons on Daring Fireball lately. I have a somewhat unique perspective on the matter. One of the factors that drove me away from Windows was the easily-cluttered icon-happy desktop.

At any given moment, if you were to glance over my shoulder and see my desktop, you'd likely not find any icons. As a matter of practice the only icons that appear on my desktop are currently mounted volumes (disk images, CD-ROM, etc...) and files I'm currently working with. Files on the desktop either get filed to their appropriate location or deleted at the end of the day (or sooner) and volumes no longer in use get promptly unmounted. You might also notice that the few icons that do remain are as big as the OS will allow (in the case of OS X: 128x128) for reasons that should (hopefully) be obvious.

The result? I never have to stop and think about where on the desktop anything is, if it's there, I'll see it. If it's not on the desktop, I can start with the thought: "It's probably where you'd expect it" and usually find it without looking too hard. Also, the icons that remain are usually pleasant to the eye. Adopting this methodology was one of the first steps I took in simplifying things and bringing the operation of computers to a level that is manageable, and it's working quite well.

As for vector vs bitmap? I'd say as long as it looks good in large format without draining resources, I don't think it matters.

One More Reason to Use XSL

Posted November 10, 2006 at 03:32 PM

This site has been one big experiment in learning XSL/XSLT. I have extensive knowledge and experience with PHP and Smarty, which has its benefits: fast, easy-to-use, extensible with PHP, etc...

One problem I've experienced with Smarty is that template creation goes hand-in-hand with template assignment, and that the template designer requires knowledge of the script that is ultimately displaying it (to know what is available to the template). This isn't an altogether bad thing, but can be with poor planning and documentation.

XML, on the other hand, is easily documented, and it's very easy to build an XSL template around a single XML tree. On the PHP side, it's a matter of building objects which export themselves to XML, which produces a single document to use as a model for the template to translate it into HTML. The page your seeing is handled by a template which produces HTML. With the flip of a switch, I can take that same content, use a different template and reformat it into something else, for example RSS.

Most recently, I added a template for Google Sitemaps. So, for every HTML page you see, Googlebot has some additional information that lets me prioritize how it gets indexed in the Google main search engine!

Finally some consistency

Posted November 9, 2006 at 03:03 PM

I seem to have figured it out. Everything is consistent between IE and The Rest of the World. SMTAM is now IE-friendly.

Still Totally Borked

Posted November 7, 2006 at 12:27 AM

...But it's getting closer to being presentable.

Totally Borked in IE

Posted November 6, 2006 at 07:04 PM

I switched up the templates to see if making everything pure-ish XHTML would fix some of the layout issues in IE and it's totally fubar. Seriously, Windows/IE6 users, all you'll see is a grey background with the pipes on the left, not that you'll actually be able to read this. So, I have some work to do, but not before I get back into town, and not before I go to the Texas Ren Fest, and not before I sit down at a windows machine. So, it might be awhile.

[UPDATE] It's fixed, for now.

On Being Lucky

Posted November 3, 2006 at 07:26 AM

It's 11:23 AM, McCarran Airport, Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm set for standby on a 12:40AM-over-booked-by-five flight. I had some good sushi at the Little Buddha at the Palms, and a fortunate encounter with an ozzie in town for SEMA from Ford at the prickly pear restaurant and bar. I wish I were at home now. Internet is free, though.

CSS Refresh

Posted November 1, 2006 at 11:49 PM

Inspired by the internets being a series of tubes, and by our visit at The Kennedy School, I've switched up the CSS for the site. I haven't seen it in windows yet, if there are problems I can just switch back the CSS to what it was originally.