Chasing My Own Tale
When the search phrase “i’ve been contemplating suicide but it really doesn’t suit my style so i think i’ll just act bored instead” places your site at number 3 on the Google results, you really need to re-examine your online activities.
While everyone else is getting ready for SXSW, the WebVisions board has been busy getting this year’s edition ready to go. I’m really excited that Jeffery Veen is back. His presentation (5 or so years ago) was one of the best ever and even though we usually don’t have return speakers, Veen is one of the few that I’m truly glad to hear again.
WebVisions: May 22 - 23, 2008 - Portland, Oregon
Media, technology and consumer trends visionary Lynne Johnson will join WebVisions to deliver the Thursday keynote address. Lynne is the Senior Editor and Community Director for FastCompany.com, a leading website and community for people passionate about business ideas that also offers the complete content of Fast Company magazine. She also writes a technology blog following web, media, and consumer trends for FastCompany.com, and guest blogs for techPresident and Black Web 2.0.
An internationally sought-after sage, author, and user experience consultant, Jeffrey Veen will return to WebVisions to deliver one of the event’s keynote addresses. Currently a Design Manager and project lead for Google’s Measure Map project, Jeffrey is returning to WebVisions to share his vision for the future of the Web.
At this point, WebVisions as an event runs really smoothly. We get a good set of volunteers returning each year, and my Tech Crews are always on top of things. I’m the stage manager and try to make sure that each speaker is prepared and comfortable, the audience is undistracted, and the volunteers understand that the audience members are expecting to have a great experience and we want to give them an outstanding experience.
WebVisions is incredibly cheap and for the quality of the speakers and the location, it cannot be beat. I hope you’re coming!
I love the idea that the death of HD-DVD means that BluRay gets to be the one killed by downloads. It’s really time that we gave up this whole spinning platter thing and just went solid-state for anything that needs to be stored ‘off-line’ or transfered across non-networked machines.
Here at Casa Del Futbol, we’re gearing up for the Timbers 2008 season which will open April 17. As part of the lead up to the season, a few articles that recently came out worth mentioning for their timbery content:
Q: What did the Dalek dermatologist say to it’s patient?
A: “Exfoliate!”
(I’m truly sorry… I thought that up this morning. I realize that there are only a small sliver in the venn diagram subset between the circle of “UK SciFi TV enthusiasts” and those “familiar with skin care techniques.”)
Would someone please let Smash Lab’s voice-over guy know that the Richter Scale does not ‘top out’ at 10, that it’s an open-ended scale? Thanks!
I’ve got a couple of short podcasts that I’m subscribed to that are daily. Merriam Webster’s Word of the Day and Scientific American’s 60 Second Science are short little podcasts that are an interesting way to start my daily commute.
However, it’s bugged me that when I drop my iPhone into it’s cradle at night when I get home, it syncs up the podcasts at that time. This is anywhere from 6 to 11pm. However, the next day’s podcasts are not available until after midnight. In order to get the Word of the Day on the Day of the Word, I’ve been resorting to picking up my iPhone out of the cradle each morning as I’m rushing out the door and dropping it back in and then waiting for it to sync. Sometimes this is just a few seconds, but if one of my other longer podcasts subscriptions had an overnight update, it can take a few minutes.
It’s a small matter for modern living, but I figured there ought to be a better way. iTunes doesn’t have a native way of telling an iPod or iPhone to refresh at a certain time. There’s two times when the sync will start: If you hit the Sync button in iTunes and when iTunes first connects with the iPhone.
The sync button method is a no-go for me, because it A) requires me to do something and B) in order to do it, I need to have the screen turned on and the mouse ready to click.
But when I say “when iTunes first connects with the iPhone”, there are a multitude of ways that this could happen. It could be the time when I plug the iPhone in while iTunes is running. It could be when I restart the Mac and iTunes automatically launches and finds the iPhone connected. Or it could be whenever iTunes gets launched. All that needs to happen is for iTunes and iPhone to become disconnected and reconnected.
So what are my options? I could have the Mac on an outlet with a timer on it and force the Mac to power down and then start it back up again. I could set the Energy Saver preference pane to schedule a shutdown and startup of the Mac. I could build a contraption out of Legos that would lift the iPhone out of it’s cradle and then slam it back down again. I could have a similar contraption that pulls the USB cable out of the Mac and plugs it back in. I could put the USB hub on a timer at its power connection.
But far more simply, I could use AppleScript to tell iTunes to quit and then tell iTunes to run. The key is getting the said script to run at the appropriate time. The easiest way of doing that is to schedule an event in iCal and using the alarm function to trigger the script. So here we go…
1) In your Applications folder look for the AppleScript folder and then open the Script Editor.
2) Type the following lines:
tell app "iTunes" to quit
delay 30
tell app "iTunes" to run
3) Click the Compile button and you’ll see the code get nice and formatted, color coded even.
4) If you want to test it, click the Run button. iTunes will quit if it’s already running and then 30 seconds later it will re-launch.
5) Save the script and call it something obvious like “iPhone Refresh”. I saved it to the Documents folder, but you can save it anywhere. You don’t need to set any other options in the Save dialog box. The defaults are fine.
6) Open up iCal and double click on the time of day when you’d like the script to run. I set it up to run at 6am.
7) Set script to repeat daily.
8) Set the alarm to “Run script”.
9) Below the Run Script setting click and select “Other…” and then find the script file you just saved.
10) Set the “Minutes before” to zero.
That’s it. I found lots of other ways to specifically choose the “Sync iPhone name” menu item, but they were 5 to 10 times the amount of code and with no further advantages. My method will refresh any and all iPhones or iPods connected to the machine, it will disconnect anyone that is ’sharing’ the iTunes library, and it will help stave off any memory leaks that iTunes might develop. These are unintended consequences, but in my situation, they’re all good ones.
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4″ />
Ah now there’s the rub. This whole thing with the X-UA-Compatible HTTP header has been basically portrayed as how the web creation community can bail Microsoft out of a tight corner that it got itself into. With both Zeldman and Meyer supporting this and many, many people railing against it, I’ve been trying to figure out where I stand in this. Here’s my gut reaction and how I got there.
1) This is the next version of DOCTYPE switching. No it is not. DOCTYPE switches were not simply a method to choose a rendering engine. Using the DOCTYPE to switch to ’standards’ mode worked well because using it made the pages markup more valid. It was a situation where the hand of standards was slipped into the glove of DOCTYPE. X-UA-Compatible does nothing of the sort. It simply adds more information to the header of a page. (Interestingly enough, this is exactly what HTML5 is shooting to reduce.)
2) “IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4″ Exactly who designated IE as an ‘official’ abbreviation for the browser from Microsoft? And who said that FF was adequate to represent all of the multitude of Gecko-based browsers out there? Talk about arbitrary. I would hope that Microsoft would put forth some sort of official registry for these “browser codes” like we have for MIME types and for Unix communication port numbers. At this point, this is going to be as helpful as User-Agent strings…
3) What IE=7 really means What Microsoft is stating with all of this is that they are happy to designate IE 7 as being their final answer, their best effort to present what I’ll call “IE7HTML”. Much like HTML 4.01 or XHTML, this is a specific flavor of HTML. Our friends in Redmond are also declaring IE7HTML as the final version of HTML. This stems from the idea that all pages that are not designated with IE=8 (or 9 or 10 or ‘edge’ or whatever) will default to IE 7’s rendering engine. So that’s it. HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01, XHTML can all be put out to pasture because IE7HTML will be the default way for MS’s browser to render the World Wide Web.
4) Smart for Microsoft This is incredibly intelligent for Microsoft. Here we have a great language (IE7HTML) that can be used to present Web Pages and is really good at Documents, and can be forced into use as Applications. The IE7HTML language works with all of that ‘interesting’ code those goofy guys working on Word used for their ‘Export to HTML’ function. What a bunch of comedians over there! Who can forget such funny tags as “<o:p>”?
But then, when IE7HTML becomes ‘old news’ or too limiting, where will we go next? HTML5? HTML6? No! We will need to abandon HTML entirely, because unless the web creators write code that specifically tells IE to use a later rendering engine, it will always default to IE7-style rendering, sending us right back into the arms of IE7HTML. In order to break out of it, we’ll need some new web technology that doesn’t use HTML at all… What about Flash? Oops! Flash requires the OBJECT or EMBED tags from HTML. I wonder if anyone has a technology that displays rich graphics and advanced (ie Desktop Application-style) interfaces. Well golly gee! Someone does! And it’s a good thing that it’s being fostered by a company with such a passion for open communication and shared standards.
Gosh isn’t it funny how selecting the default rendering engine to be the outdated version caused Microsoft’s last best chance of controlling the web to become a viable alternative?
5) Ignore it and it will go away. In this case, the old sarcastic admonition might be true. If no other browser respects this X-US-Compatible tag, and if only a small minority of web creators and Microsoft tools support this, the overwhelming majority of the web will continue to evolve and grow and adapt to new technologies. Looking 10 years down the road, the bulk of the web will use new technologies. The IE browser family and later generations, by defaulting to the IE7HTML rendering, will become increasingly outdated. It will certainly be able to read old and outdated web sites, but yet again Microsoft will have painted IE into a corner. They will then create a new browser (Windows-Yahoo-Live Explorer anyone?) that will skip forward to modern era web pages.
6) Is there any chance we could have a <sarcasm> tag added to HTML5? I’m actually serious about this.
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