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nerkles November 4th, 2005

There has been a stream of old friends from college and elsewhere finding me and each other through this blog lately. I just want to say if there are more of you out there, please do say hello. It’s really wonderful and heart-warming hearing from you. Post a comment or email me: nerkles (@) gmail dot com.

Yes, even you.

• General
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nerkles September 15th, 2005

Regarding the clever trick for automating your emails that require follow-up.

Here’s what I did (I use Apple Mail on Tiger):

• Created a couple extra signatures, one with my usual sig, plus a tag like [*ABC.wf*] (where ABC is your initials or something unique) which I set to be white text and very tiny so it’s invisible to most people. I also made a sig called “inivisi-wf” with just the tag in white, for less formal emails.
• create a Rule like “message content” contains [*ABC.wf*] and have that route the message to your Waiting For… folder.
• BCC myself on WF emails.

This was much easier than setting up a whole other email address, and I don’t really care if someone with a non-HTML capable email client sees my little tag.

It has the added benefit that replies will also go to your ‘waiting for’ folder if the responder doesn’t strip your sig.

• General , Nerding
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nerkles August 30th, 2005

WARNING! Humans have been spotted wearing izod shirts with the collars flipped up and F’n docksiders! In NYC of all places!

People. This. Has. To. Stop.

The 80s are over for a good reason, and I’m not just talking about the passage of time here.

Here are a just a few reasons the 80′s need to stay over:

• Ronnie Ray-gun. ‘Nuff said.
• Most of the worst. music. ever. happened in the 80s, and almost none of the best music did.
• more vapid movies than ever
• worst. clothes. evar.
• worst. hair. evar.
• gummy bracelets

OK, I don’t have time right now to work on this list, but feel free to help complete it in the comments.

• Funny Bits , General , grumble
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nerkles August 5th, 2005

I’m still a bit new to Cocoa and Objective-C, but not to programming in general.

I’ve been grappling with a way to use all the goodness and time-savingness of Apple’s new Core Data such that multiple users can access the same data but not mess each other up. I have no idea if this would work. But I’ve done quite a lot of digging and the consensus seems to be that this is impossible, and it would be much easier to settle for FileMaker 7, or maybe Servoy or 4D.

From what I’ve read on various listservs and forums, it seems that it’s safe for multiple users to access the same Core Data document over AFP (assuming it’s stored in SQLite format), and it’s quite unlikely to get corrupted. The problem is that no notifications are sent, so if User A and User B are both editing the same Object, you could run into trouble: they can overwrite each others’ changes and that makes the data unreliable.

My crackpot idea for a potential way around this problem is that the Client app has to log in to a Coordinator server. Any time a user starts editing an object, the client sends a notification to the Coordinator, which quickly tells all the other Clients to lock their user from editing that particular object. When the edit (or creation of a new object) is complete, client tells Coordinator, which tells the other clients to refresh their copy of that object. This might require the use of an “Edit” button similar to how Apple’s Address Book works.

The client app has to be responsible for sending some kind of “hey, I’m editing this object” message to the Coordinator before letting the user finalize a change, and it has to quickly mark an entire object uneditable when it receives a notification from the Coordinator (which means each client is running a server thread to listen for these).

Here’s a rough diagram:

That’s the basic idea. So am I nuts? Is this just too impossibly complex, is it even possible, is there a better way?

I was also kicking around the possibility of the Client apps coordinating themselves, by way of Bonjour. But that means you couldn’t run this across the Internet, only on a LAN (which may be OK for most cases, and there is always VPN).

Anybody want to work together on an open source proof of concept?

• Code , General , Nerding
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nerkles July 31st, 2005

• Leg warmers always look stupid on everyone.
• If you own leg warmers and you are not a dancer, you must burn them immediately. You are advised to remove them from your legs first.
• Fellow humans should tolerate leg warmers for the well-being of dancers, while the dancers are working in a dance-related environment, but under no other circumstances.
• Non-dancers must wear pants or other suitable non-leg warmer garb to keep their legs warm.
• If you are not actually a dancer, you have no excuse, and by the way, you look like a total buffoon in those things.

Addendum

• The burning of leg warmers acquired for non-dance purposes is an essential step. If you give them away or donate them to a resale shop, they may fall into the hands of a non-dancer who is unaware of the few legitimate uses for leg warmers.

• Funny Bits , General , grumble
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nerkles July 17th, 2005

I figured out some unobtrusive javascript to do hanging punctuation… So keep an eye here for my write-up of how to do it, and free code.

• General , web stuff
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nerkles July 15th, 2005

Wow. I wish Kathy had written this years ago. I think I’d be much better off if I’d had this approach… although the only thing I really regret about college is the dreaded loans. It was a lot of fun, and I was passionate about learning everything I could about everything (still am), so it really was all fun until the bills came.

• bits , General
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nerkles June 30th, 2005

• You say to yourself, “it looks good in Internet Explorer on Windows, now my work is done.”
• You are unaware that certain color text on certain color backgrounds is literally unreadable to a noteworthy section of humanity.
• It never occurred to you to think about how your site is experienced by people with disabilities.
• You think closing an open tag is just too much darn hassle.
• You think the <blockquote> tag is for indenting stuff.
• You think that what comes out of Microsoft Word or Front Page actually counts as HTML.
• You’re waiting for a rainy day to learn CSS.
• You honestly believe that people who don’t already love you will stick around to read your content, no matter how wonderful or important it may actually be, even though your site is hideous.
• You are so enamored with Flash that you only learned enough HTML to slap your Flash content onto a page.
• You think <h1>, <h2>, etc. are for making text big & bold… or you think using the <font> tag to make stuff big and bold counts as a section heading.
• You don’t read A List Apart and the blogs and books of its contributors and other web smarty-pantses all the time, and joyously learn all you can from them.
• You expose your clients to more of the gory details of what you do than is necessary (unless they wanna know).
• You don’t “do nuance”—like learn the difference between <i> and <em>, and why it matters.
• You don’t update your methods when they are proven obsolete (or worse).
• You get all offended by lists that poke you in your shortcomings instead of seeing them as an opportunity to improve your work and learn something.

Feel free to contribute to this list, including links to where people can learn to do better.

I’m trying to give a friendly kick to the butt of complacency, not be a total jerkface. In keeping with that spirit, anything mean in the comments will be deleted.

• Funny Bits , General , grumble , web stuff
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nerkles March 15th, 2005

I spent my train ride home from work sketching this… I always come out with a tree when I doodle. Hmmm. I must like them or something.

• arts , General
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nerkles March 14th, 2005

Molly.com has an interesting post (and ensuing discussion) about “The Return of JavaScript”.

I posted this in the comments (so far it seems to still be in the moderation queue UPDATE: it’s posted now.):

It is “back,” but in a new way.

JS + DOM + CSS enables us to start with a basic, standards-compliant, accessible page first, and then add in some clever tricks and styling with JavaScript and the DOM later (after the page loads). It’s tricky (though a fun challenge) to do it in ways that don’t ruin the order in which a screen reader like JAWS will read the page. Using a post-page-load script to move elements around can help you determine how search engines and content indexing systems will read your pages, but you can still have the layout you want.

I recently wrestled that one down (I think!) in this method of adding a floated sidebar that text can wrap around while keeping it at the end of the source.

The DOM can become a good friend to standards-based design now that a majority of browsers support it well. And emerging things like Ajax can make very interesting use of the DOM too.

• Code , General , Nerding , web stuff
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