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August 2009

Monthly Archive
31 Aug 2009

Yaaay, pumpkin!

Today is the 5-year anniversary of the day I started blogging. Woo!

I thought about doing a retrospective, or linking to interesting posts, but I’m too lazy. I figure you can navigate around just fine all by yourself, so have at it if you so desire.

In other news, here are some cool things I saw recently:

  • Typedia is a new site like Wikipedia, for type. To get started, check out this article (with pictures!) about the anatomy of a typeface. Now you, too, will be able to tell a finial from a terminal, or a bowl from a counter.
  • Type Daily is an aggregator of type-related content from across the web, brought to us by iLT. Super terrific!
22 Aug 2009

Keeping the beaches shipwreck-free

So I just got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I thought, as I often do, that I need to do something about this. See, I have a routine when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night:

I’ll shuffle over to my bathroom, which coming from my bedroom is just before the corner I round to get into the kitchen. Then what I’ll do is, standing just outside the bathroom, I’ll lean forward, turn my head away, squinch my eyes shut, then grope for the kitchen light switch to turn it on. Then, still looking away, I’ll back up quickly and go into the bathroom, using the light shrapnel from the kitchen to see by so that I don’t fall into the bathtub and crack my head open, because my bathroom is pitch black.

After I’m done, I do the whole squinch-eyed groping-for-the-light-switch routine in reverse, and all because I don’t want to blind myself. Clearly, I am in need of a night light. Equally clearly, it has to be a blue canary night light. Lite.

But tragically, there is no such thing. And I can’t understand why. Google searches for “blue canary night light,” “blue canary nite lite,” and “blue canary night lite” all turn up song lyrics and forum posts from frustrated souls like me bemoaning the lack of a purchasable blue canary night lite. I mean, wtf? If I can get a leg lamp, why can’t I get a blue canary night lite? God.

Entertainingly, however, every one of the sponsored links on a search for “blue canary” is night-light-related. But this situation still sucks. :(

21 Aug 2009

Strange but true

So I came across (and reported) a rather strange bug in Safari 4 for Windows today. If you’ve styled a select box with a border color, and your windows’ and buttons’ appearance are set to Windows Classic style in Windows XP, the down arrow on the select box disappears. No lie. Try it yourself:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xml:lang="en"
      lang="en">
<head>
  <!-- meta tags -->
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>

  <style type="text/css">
    select.with-border
    {
      border-color: black;
    }
  </style>

  <!-- external javascript links -->
  <!-- libraries -->
  <script type="text/javascript"
          src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js">
  </script>

  <script type="text/javascript">
    (function($) {
      $(document).ready(function() {
        $(".user-agent").text(navigator.userAgent);
      });
    })(jQuery);
  </script>

  <title>Home</title>
</head>
<body>

  <p><strong>User agent string:</strong> <span class="user-agent">blah</span></p>

  <p>
    <select>
      <option>One</option>
      <option>Two</option>
      <option>Three</option>
    </select>
  </p>

  <p>
    <select class="with-border">
      <option>One</option>
      <option>Two</option>
      <option>Three</option>
    </select>
  </p>

</body>
</html>

In Windows XP appearance mode, you’ll see:

windows_xp_mode.png

And in Windows Classic appearance mode, you’ll see:

windows_classic_mode.png

Very, very strange. Apple must be drawing the form inputs pixel by pixel or something.

10 Aug 2009

Appallingly Bad Software: episode 1

I do not own a Kindle. I do not plan to own one in the near future. The reasons for which are manifold, among them the hefty price tag. What’s the deal-breaker for me, though, is the lack of a companion desktop app. I’m at one of my computers pretty much constantly, so having a desktop solution with which to read ebooks is pretty important to me. Sadly, there’s no such thing in the Kindle ecosystem.

What I’ve been using up till now is Adobe Reader, followed by Adobe Digital Editions, both of which are some of the sorriest excuses for software I’ve ever had to use. Aside from the whole activations clusterfuck—and believe me, there’s really no other word for it—and the indifferent-at-best customer support, ADE has two “features” that move this, ah, software from terrible to appalling:

  • ADE crashes after startup. Every time. I have to restart it after the first crash. Every time. Though it’s worse when you have a book open rather than the library list view.
  • Turning a page takes 5 seconds. Seriously. And this is on non-reflowable books. How much processing can turning the page possibly take?

Put that all together and what do you have? A recipe for disaster, and the reason I will never buy an Adobe-format ebook ever again.

So what are my alternatives? Palm Desktop reader? No, I don’t have a Palm OS device, and my experience with Palm software in the past has not been positive. MobiPocket? Double no. What the hell is a mobipocket anyway? Microsoft Reader? N—well, hold on there. Microsoft Reader actually has one of the most usable and thoughtful designs for an ebook reader I’ve ever used. All MS reader format ebooks are reflowable, and you can set the font size and text clarity, which makes for a solid, comfortable reading experience.. Pretty much all I need, except, oh yeah, I need to start up my Windows VM to run it. So, no.

What’s left? Enter the Barnes & Noble eReader, which as far as readers go is the best one I’ve ever seen—turns out it’s actually just Palm reader rebranded. Not that it doesn’t have its flaws, mind you—for one thing, the settings are split up into two sections, accessed from two different menus, using non-intuitive keyboard shortcuts—Cmd-S for view settings? Really? Have they never used Mac software before?—it’s not Mac-like at all. That said, you can change line spacing, page background (though I don’t know why you’d want to use anything but plain white), font face, size, color, and even highlight color pretty much arbitrarily, plus add bookmarks and annotations. Where it counts, this little app works like a charm. It loads fast, pages fast, and remembers where you were on quit. Pretty much everything you could ask for, though I’d like a bit finer-grained control on the line-spacing. While it definitely has some kinks, the software nails what’s important. Add into the mix a selection to rival the Kindle’s, and you’ve got a formidable competitor.

So, long story short, I’ve switched over to the B&N reader, but—you knew this was coming, didn’t you?—my story is not without its adventures:

I hadn’t logged on to the B&N website in ages, so I didn’t remember my password, nor was it anywhere in my keychain. So I went to reset it. Now, I use Keychain Access to randomly generate all my passwords, and these days I’m using 15-character ones except where expressly forbidden. So without much reading of instructions (I’ve reset my password on a website a time or three), I put in my shiny new randomly-generated 15-character password, and it went through without a hitch. The website said my password had been changed, and then asked me to log in with the new one…pretty much SOP, right? Of course, this is where things started going south. I put in my new password, and the site came back with an error that there was no record of that username/password combination in their records. I was like, WTF? I just changed my password.

Okay, I thought. Maybe it just hasn’t propagated through the system yet, or something. I’ll just wait a few minutes. I waited for about 15, for good measure, then tried again. No dice. So I kept trying again and again, until I finally got a “your account has been locked due to too many failed login attempts” error, suggesting that I either call B&N customer support or reset my password again. So I did the latter, and I got the same problem. I reset the password once again, before I finally read the fine print and realized that the password had to be 6-12 characters long (And why the arbitrary limit? This should not be an issue on modern websites.) at most.

So I reset my password yet again, this time taking care to use a password no longer than 12 characters. This time when I tried to log in, it worked.

…So, wait, let me get this straight: first, there is a ludicrous arbitrary limit on the password size. Annoying, but not outrageous. No, what is outrageous, what is simply crazy-making, is the fact that the B&N site does not appear to validate the password length. It saves an invalid password with no indication of a problem whatsoever, and then fails login with a non-descriptive error message. What, is this such a new thing that no website has ever done it before? Oh my god, changing a password online! How high tech! No one’s ever done that before. Right?!

Are you fucking kidding me? How could you not validate your password field? What is this, amateur hour? Jesus H.