Moving server
I just got word from my friendly webhosting mistress that they will be moving their webserver to a new location. Tomorrow. Hopefully the changes to the DNS will keep up, but this site might disappear briefly from the tcp/ip aether. Fingers crossed.
Jun 1, 2003 @ 23:24 » no comments » Sitestuff
Questions
These are the questions CNET and other news organizations -- and you -- should be asking.
Jun 3, 2003 @ 10:10 » no comments » Webdesign
How personal
How personal is too personal? I guess most webloggers ask that question sooner or later, maybe not all webloggers actually blog the question though. When the question pops up though, it always makes me wonder what's on the blogger's heart that they're not sure about whether they can/should blog it or not.
Dooce is one example of a weblog causing its author quite a few headaches. Read the about page.
Jun 4, 2003 @ 09:02 » no comments » Blogosphere
Moving delayed
It turns out that the moving of the webserver has been delayed, probably for a few days. Not knowing when the server will go down, even though it's just for a couple of hours, makes me twitchy and I don't dare to log on to MT too much, scared that something might break when they pull the plug when I'm logged in. I have everything backed up locally. Now I'm waiting. Limbo.
Jun 4, 2003 @ 09:07 » no comments » Sitestuff
Bill
Getting a webhosting bill from my webhoster is almost an enjoyable event, because at the bottom you find a (randomly generated?) fortune-cookie-like insight. This time mine was:
We see things not as they are, but as we are.
Jun 6, 2003 @ 10:36 » no comments » General
Tsssssh!
It's been just too hot to do anything today. It's oh-forty-five am and it's only barely getting a bit cooler now. I sat in the window today, the fan doing its best, but not helping much. I had a Corona with a slice of lime stuffed down its neck and lots of ice tea. I watched some tv, surfed the net for a bit, and now I blog about it, because it's still too hot to go to bed. At least the neighbors turned down the noise twenty minutes ago. I guess it had to happen sometime: a post about pretty much nothing. Blame it on the heat...
Jun 8, 2003 @ 01:01 » no comments » General
Voyage of Bougainville
A while ago I mentioned an article titled Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville by Denis Diderot. It's available in full online.
Jun 8, 2003 @ 14:00 » no comments » Research
Updating past posts
I just posted some additional information about a subject I touched upon before in my weblog (Diderot's Voyage of Bougainville). Ideally this additional information would somehow be available from/through all posts related to the subject, so that someone entering the site through the first post sees that there are more posts on that subject. Of course I could create another category called "Diderot," but I doubt I'm going to post a whole lot more on this guy. So the category would have 2 posts in it and unnecessarily bloat the number of categories of this weblog.
Guess I'm going to have to use the RelatedEntriesByKeyword or the RelatedEntries plugins then. I'm also thinking about using the SimpleComments plugin to clean up the individual entries layout. It's going to mean that I'll also have to rethink the sidebar on the individual entries pages.
[Update: The problem is a bit stickier than I thought. Of course you can use a plugin like RelatedEntries, but unless you rebuild all of the individual archives every time you save a new post, that new post will not be automatically added to the RelatedEntries list of the old post. I'm trying to think of a good way to pull the information into the entries using a PHP include, but that's getting tricky because I'd like to be able to use multiple keywords, and if you use multiple keywords, it becomes difficult to generate the appropriate files automatically... Maybe I should start to learn some serious SQL-foo.]
Jun 8, 2003 @ 14:07 » no comments » Sitestuff
AutoTrackBack is evil
I agree with Phil that the autodiscovery function of TrackBack is evil. It is not always topical to ping every TrackBack enabled URL that your post links to. You should only ping other posts if you feel that your own post contributes something to the original post.
The autodiscovery function itself is actually pretty useful, because it helps you find the TrackBack URLs, so you won't have to go copy and paste between a number of sites. The problem however is that MT automatically pings these sites and you don't have any control over the pinging process.
What MT actually should do, is find the TrackBack URLs for you, and then, before pinging them, present the user with a list of these URLs and offer the user the choice of unticking the URLs that don't make any sense to ping.
Jun 8, 2003 @ 15:26 » no comments » MovableType
High and low photography
Interesting analysis of the Fotolog site/community over at Wired. They take a high/low perspective, contrasting "kids with webcams" with more "serious photographers." Also of note, the fact that Brazilians are the largest "geographic group" on the site.
Jun 10, 2003 @ 09:47 » no comments » Blogosphere
Edge's numbers
I've checked out a whole lot of games and gaming magazines, but Edge is the only one I've found that discusses games and gaming in an intelligent and mature way. They, for example, made the issue that featured the review of DOA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball the "girl" issue, discussing the position of girl gamers vis-a-vis the games industry in several multi-page editorials. Xbox Nation needs an honorable mention here, because it's a pretty cool magazine that targets slightly older gamers and doesn't just dribble testosteron for teenage fanboys.
Edge is an English publication and it may be hard to find, but if you can, grab a copy of the last issue. You can't really miss it: it's a silvery grey with bright orange lettering and the Half-Life 2 lambda is pretty obvious. In this issue Edge tackles the thorny issue of how games are rated, numerically, in gaming publications. In two nicely complementary editorials Edge discusses the workings of public relations in the gaming industry and the process of reviewing and rating games. In this second editorial six reviews of the same game, by six reviewers, are presented side by side. The score runs from 4 to 7 out of 10. A significant variation that can have serious impact on games. The editorial then discusses how there is no such thing as a definitive review, an unbiased review, or a 'correct' score. Reviews, according to Edge, in the end depend in large part on the reviewer's critical opinion of the game and the magazine's readership, whose collective likes and dislikes are partly embodied and partly shaped by the reviewers. To make its point, Edge has moved the scores for all the games to a separate section, leaving a question mark under each review, where you'd normally find the game's rating.
At first I thought this was a great idea, something that might be worth continuing -- you too can play the guess-the-score game! After reading through the reviews though, I'm not so sure anymore. Even though I can look up the actual score for the game on another page, I find the reviews somehow lacking. Maybe I'm not the average reader, but I tend to read every word of a review. After reading I have a fairly decent feel for what the reviewers likes and dislikes about the game and what I myself might like and dislike about the game -- which might be different from what the reviewer is saying. So, then I actually want to know how the reviewer rates the "good things" about the game. I think scores are not so much made up by subtracting the bad from the good, but by evaluating how much you like the good and how much the bad hampers you from enjoying the good. At least, that's how I tend to grade student papers. So if there is no final score for the game, I feel I can't really judge how much the reviewer's liked the things s/he liked about the game. S/he might have liked them enough to give an 8 out of 10, or maybe just enough for a 5 out of 10, and I'd like to know.
Or maybe that's just the way of reading that I've grown accustomed to. The more I re-read the concluding paragraphs, the more I'm starting to think words might be enough to tell me what I need to know about the game, including whether I would want to buy it or not. I think I can read differently, but gathering enough information from the short, half-page, reviews is difficult and I think that if you really want to leave the scores out altogether, those will need to be longer.
So even though I had some initial problems of getting to grips with the slightly unusual controls, the included manual more than makes up for it, and this issue of Edge is a great read (again) and a thoughtprovoking experiment. Rating: 9 out of 10.
Jun 10, 2003 @ 16:35 » no comments » Games
Not even half
I'm reading some articles for a guest lecture this afternoon and I suddenly realize that I haven't even done half of what I could achieve with the material from my previous research. Previous research, yeah, because I've been in the middle of my present research since a year or two now. Is it already too late to go back, rework and re-analyse the material, and use it in my present research?
Meanwhile, Jill's post prodded a project that's been on the backburner for a long time back into my field of attention. Expect Notes later.
Jun 11, 2003 @ 10:55 » no comments » Research
Semi-random links
Some semi-random links are all I have time for today:
• The Raptor Mark III, found at the bottom of another fascinating post by Gibson.
• A funny Simple Guide to A-List Bloggers, thoughtfully linked by Ben.
• News in Dutch: Roosvicee MultiVit "extra-vitamin" fruit juice is NOT suitable for vegetarians, because it contains "fish extracts." Why would fruit juice makers put fish in their fruit juice? Apparently the "fish extracts" are used to "encapsulate" the added vitamins. The use of animal ingredients in this product is NOT mentioned on the packaging. Makes you wonder, ey? Milov linked there.
Jun 12, 2003 @ 10:04 » no comments » General
Triple threat
A particularly entertaining typo can be found in this article at GameSpy. The article discusses the confusion that ensued when a MS spokesperson was (mis)quoted as saying that Half-Life 2 wouldn't come to the Xbox. Apparently it will. The final question and response of the interview are below, the emphasis is mine.
GameSpy: Why is Half-Life 2 such a big deal to Xbox gamers?
Hufford: A lot of people left their jaws in Los Angeles [at the E3 2003, ed.] after seeing the Half-Life 2 demo. Obviously having it on Xbox is a major win. And with Half-Life 2, Halo 2, and Doom 3 on Xbox we've got an unmatched triple threat among the game consoles.
If anyone's looking for me, I'm hiding under my desk... waiting for this to blow over... btw, I'm selling an Xbox ;-)
Indeed, I figured they meant to say a "triple treat" for the gamers, but as Alex points out in the comments below, a "triple threat," according to Merriam Webster, is:
1: a football player adept at running, kicking, and passing; 2: a person adept in three different fields of activity
Another fine day as I learned another expression :-)
Jun 13, 2003 @ 11:38 » 2 comments » Games
Keep it liquid
There are two types of websites. Those which have a fixed width layout and those which adjust the layout automatically to the width of the browser window. Liquid design, particularly when implemented through CSS, allows for your website to show up looking its best in different sized browser windows, on different platforms, including handheld devices. Even older systems are catered for, because the design will degrade gracefully, allowing unfettered access to the website's content.
If you think that taking this approach is too much work or that users are not interested, think again. Ars Technica's latest poll shows that a whopping 78% (June 14, 2003) would rather have a liquid design than a fixed one for the site.
Jun 14, 2003 @ 14:57 » no comments » Webdesign
Whoosh
I just downloaded the latest OpenOffice beta. It's 60.2 MB in size and I got it to my harddisk in 33 seconds. That makes an average download speed of 1869 kilobytes per second. Those university-to-university networks are pretty fast. W00t!
Jun 16, 2003 @ 10:31 » no comments » General
Test screen
For future reference: MonitorsDirect Toolkit for testing CRT and LCD screens. Handy for picking out screens with dead (sub)pixels while still in the store.
Jun 16, 2003 @ 14:31 » no comments » Tech
Firebird is leaking
I've been using Mozilla Firebird as my primary browser for a while now and I think it's a pretty darn good browser already. My only complaint is that I think it's got a memory leak. I have Firebird installed with only one plugin, the Tabbrowser Extensions, but after a morning of fairly intensive use, it was eating up more than 90MB of memory. This seriously hampers performance of my work pc with only 128MB of ram. Closing down Firebird and starting it up again with the same set of open windows showed memory use of around 20MB. Quite a difference.
Update: Hmm... took me less than an hour to have Firebird suck up over 150MB of memory, so much actually, that Windows complained that it was running out of memory. Closing individual tabs doesn't free up any extra memory, only closing Firebird completely frees up the memory. I'm running Firebird on Win2k.
Jun 17, 2003 @ 14:35 » 6 comments » Software
Links, miscellaneous
After I inquired about how he did it, Martin put together a fine tutorial how to display entries from two (or more) different MT weblogs in a chronologically interleaved way. Probably most interesting to powerusers, but with the provided code most people should be able to get it running. Requires that you run MovableType with a SQL database. Thanks Martin :-)
It was a pleasure meeting Heidi Figueroa Sarriera at the Critical Cyberculture Studies conference in May. I knew her name already from the Cyborg Handbook she co-edited and I had bumped into her Teknokultura website/journal before and she reminded me how important language is on the web. Teknokultura is primarily in Spanish and apart from its content, I think it's a wonderful initiative to provide such a platform not in English, but in one's mother tongue.
I also got an e-mail from someone I didn't know: Kenji Siratori. He took the trouble of finding my e-mail address on this site and sending me an e-mail about his recently published book: Blood Electric. As far as I can see, it's being published both on and offline. I read through most of the first chapter, but the cut-up and fragmented prose is a bit too dense for me. You may like it though, it's got a certain flow to it. Alan Sondheim reviewed it and liked it, so if you know Alan's work, you'll have an idea what you're in for.
Jun 18, 2003 @ 09:59 » no comments » General
Online gaming documentaries
Last week I discovered that there are a couple of independent projects trying to capture online gaming in documentary style. The projects I found mainly seem to focus on the role-playing variety of online gaming, such as Everquest. Still it's really good to see this kind of attention for games and gaming.
A short, but well-linked article at the BBC site provides some background information for a documentary that was recently released online: Modern Day Gamer by Simon Bysshe.
Another online available documentary is the (untitled?) EverQuest Players LFG film by Nathan Bramble. It's available as a Real stream, but as I detailed before, you can capture those if you want to keep the film around as reference material.
Then there is the Avatars Offline documentary by Daniel Liatowitsch, which you can order for $25. Unfortunately the order form is not secure, so I haven't made up my mind whether I want to take that risk.
Last is the still running MMORPG Documentary Film Project, produced and directed by Tracy Spaight. This looks like an interesting project and they have people like Julian Dibbell and Sherry Turkle on the advisory board.
Jun 18, 2003 @ 10:51 » no comments » Games
The world as a blog
The world as a blog is really quite an amazing application. This shockwave file keeps an eye on weblogs.com, crossreferences with GeoURL and then displays an excerpt of each weblog entry that is posted in almost real-time on a map of the world. You gotta see it to believe it :-)
Okay, posting this message now and waiting if it shows up on the map...
Update: Ooh! I showed up on the world map. Only thing that seems to have gone wrong is that it couldn't read my RSS 1.0 feed. Maybe I should add a RSS 2.0 excerpt-only feed.
Jun 18, 2003 @ 16:04 » no comments » Blogosphere
Male chromosome seriously weird
Wired is running a seriously weird story. The entire text of the story reads like this:
The Y chromosome is probably the weirdest chromosome in the human genome. Scientists already knew that it determines the male sex, but other than that it was considered a genetic junkyard. It contains very few actual genes -- the rest is repetitious, random DNA.
The screenshot is proof... but probably it's just a mistake, where they forgot to paste in the body of the article, leaving just the title and intro to be published.
Jun 19, 2003 @ 11:01 » no comments » General
Quiet
It's quiet. The tv is off, the windows open to a warm summer night. The cats are sleeping on the couch. Paula's reading the new Harry Potter book. "Tomorrow you're gonna have to drive," she said, "because I'll still be reading." It's 766 pages after all. Guess I'll be driving back as well.
Jun 21, 2003 @ 21:52 » 3 comments » General
Search fixed
The search function was broken, but is fixed again.
I added a blog, but didn't exclude it from being searched. The new blog doesn't have category archiving and the sidebar that gets MTIncluded in the search_template does make use of the MTCategoryLink tag. This broke the search template. Bah.
Anyway, just a good reminder that I should make the different elements of the sidebar into different modules, as I had decided to do some time ago. Including only the modules that make sense on a page, cuts the amount of unnecessary stuff on pages, which is always a good thing.
Jun 23, 2003 @ 15:44 » no comments » Sitestuff
What a pain
Sometimes it's the simplest things that will drive you crazy. You won't hear me say that archiving websites is a simple matter, but this is one stupid problem.
I use GNU Wget to archive personal home pages that I've identified as interesting for my research. Apart from Wget's inability to archive pages linked through Flash or Java(script) applets (without recompiling the code yourself), it generally works okay. Wget, however, is a bit too smart for its own good, but you can't really fault it, because it's really Microsoft who's in the wrong here. Let me explain...
I'm trying to archive a website that contains a number of pages without an extension. Normally a webpage has the extension .html, .htm, .php, or some such, but these pages have no extension at all. Instead of "page.html" they're simply called "page". The webserver serving these pages is Apache and if the stuff it serves does not have a recognized extension or content type, then Apache serves these pages as "text/plain," rather than "text/html."
Opera and IE are not picky about the content type that these pages are served with. Even though the webserver says to them, "Hey, the next page is a plain text document," they still render this page as HTML. Mozilla based browsers, however, obey all protocols and when a webserver sends out a page it proclaims to be plain text, then it is rendered as plain text. That means that Mozilla actually shows all the HTML code on screen.
Wget, being another fine open-source software project just like Mozilla, also sticks to the specifications and refuses to parse files served as "text/plain." It's simple to see why this is important. If you have a plain text file on your server, you want it to show up as a plain text file in the browser. Who knows what will go wrong if browsers just decide by themselves to start interpreting everything that a webserver sends out as HTML, instead of following the content type specified by the webserver.
So now I'm stuck with a website with 50 or so pages that I cannot automatically archive, because Microsoft (and Opera) decided that they don't have to play by the rules. If IE hadn't been able to display this pages as HTML, then the author would have corrected his mistake a long time ago, when he'd noticed that his webpages weren't showing up as he intended them. Unless I find a way to get Wget to parse text/plain files, I'm stuck with visiting each file with IE and saving them all by hand, one by one. Sigh.
Jun 24, 2003 @ 15:43 » no comments » Research
Drifter
Wonderful: drifter.tv. Especially check out 'channel' 37, "lonely-cam" (via D2D).
Jun 25, 2003 @ 12:27 » no comments » General
Schlijper
Check out professional photographer Thomas Schlijper's photolog. There are some wonderful collections in the archive.
Jun 25, 2003 @ 17:18 » no comments » General
FTPEdit and tweaks
How did I ever get anything done on this site without FTPEdit? This freeware text-editor with customizable syntax highlighting doubles as a FTP client, transparently getting and saving files from and to your webserver. And as a bonus FTPEdit works with "Projects," allowing you to easily manage bunches of files that belong together. Very highly recommended for anyone who hand codes their HTML or PHP files!
For the first time in a long while I found some time to work on the site and I've been tweaking some elements of the site. I've started modularizing the sidebar, as I mentioned before. The different needs for navigation on different types of pages can now easily be integrated in the sidebar. It's not been implemented throughout, but on the Archive Index page, for example, you can see that the sidebar only contains elements relevant to that page. Also, the individual entry archives, such as for example this very page, now show the Chronological and Categorical entry-to-entry navigation in the sidebar. And again, elements not essential to the page are easily left out. More changes will follow as I start combing through the templates.
Jun 26, 2003 @ 00:09 » no comments » Sitestuff
Floats
Martin has been redesigning (I like it, much more readable, although for my taste the dates are a bit too big and blocky right now) and writes:
As soon as you throw CSS positioning with floated elements into the mix, you can just forget everything they teach you in web school. I may well abandon it at some point in the (near) future.
Oh, how do I agree! He mentions a whole bunch of very worthwhile sites, but especially with regard to floats and browser differences (i.e. bugs), I miss two important resources.
First, css-discuss, a very high quality mailing list that helped me understand CSS better than any tutorial. Although css beginners can enter the fray without being afraid of getting ridiculed, it does help to have some basic knowledge, because it speeds up your conversation with the other participants.
Second, Big John's Position Is Everything website. What John does is really quite revolutionary. He doesn't tell you how it oughta be done, but he tells you why browsers don't do what you expect them to do when you write some textbook CSS code. He also provides detailed information about how to work around the bugs, such as for instance in the Float Model.
Personally, I worked around various float problems in this design by putting regular non-floated divs inside floated divs. Putting content straight into a floated div almost always guarantees trouble. As for styling forms... ugh.
Jun 26, 2003 @ 09:40 » no comments » Webdesign
Sort order
One of the core definitions of a weblog is that entries are posted in reverse chronological order. However, when you have a monthly archive, doesn't it make sense to have the entries show up there in chronological order? For some reason lost in history, most everyone publishes their monthly archives in reverse chronological order. I've changed my monthly archives to show the posts in chronological order. The reason is that, if the reader wants to see a month's worth of posts, they're probably going to read or skim through them, and since some posts are follow-ups, it makes sense to preserve what little narrative or historical order there is.
In related Sitestuff news: because I have both individual and monthly archives, I've set the Robots meta tag so that search engines will not index the monthly archives, as per Virulent Memes' instructions. The monthly archives are there primarily for the reader's convenience and don't contain any extra information over and above the individual archives. And, as per Anders' instructions, I've set the Description meta tag of the individual archives to contain an excerpt of that post, hopefully making the life of search engine users easier.
Jun 26, 2003 @ 10:53 » no comments » Blogosphere
Woordlog
Woordlog, where they log only one word at the time. You get to comment on it though, using as many words as you want. In Dutch.
Jun 26, 2003 @ 11:49 » no comments » Blogosphere
Server moved
The webserver was finally moved today and this site was off the air for a while. It is now only reachable as "www.fragment.nl" and not yet as "fragment.nl". Hopefully that is corrected soon... and when it is, you should get to see the site again in all its CSS styled splendor :-) While I enjoyed the nice weather with some friends and some beer, everything was fixed and the site's back online.
Jun 27, 2003 @ 17:20 » no comments » Sitestuff
Blog census
Now this is just the kind of information I was looking for! Blogcensus.net is creating a current database of weblogs, as far as that is possible for such a dynamic medium as the web. They're sponsored by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education and the project has been up and running for close to two months now and has collected a database containing over half a million sites believed to be weblogs. That database is available for download for free, so you can run your own analyses against it... fabulous!
One very important breakdown they provide, is along the lines of language. Of the half-million-plus weblogs, about 50% appears to be in English, with Portuguese, Polish and Farsi in 2nd, 3rd and 4th place. Dutch weblogs take up a 10th place, with 2720 indexed sites. There's also a nice little breakdown according to the 'stand-alone' weblog tools being used, showing MovableType in the lead, while Blogspot takes the lead in 'hosted' weblogs.
Jun 30, 2003 @ 15:07 » no comments » Blogosphere
Down and out
So I read a great quote from Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which has been on my wishlist for quite a while, and I decide to get it. Being an online kind of person, I figure I scoot over to my favorite online bookshop, Proxis, but they're not carrying it. Bol.com is only carrying the hardcover at 24,99 euro, too expensive.
Amazon.com is charging a total of $9,98 for shipping, plus $10,36 for the book, making a total of $19,34, which is 17,07 euro at the moment. Cheap, but paying half the price just for shipping? That's silly. And, important information: the paperback has not yet been released. Amazon will gladly take your order though and ship it when it becomes available. Amazon.de charges 5,60 euro shipping in Europe, which together with 11,77 euro for the book makes a total of 17,37 euro. Not bad, but I'll have to be waiting for the paperback to be released. Amazon.co.uk only carries the hardback for (converted) 18,13 euro, plus 5,79 euro shipping, total of 23,92 euro. No mention of the paperback.
Round the corner, at the American Book Center, they have a list price of 19,55 euro for the paperback, but I can only come and get it when it's released.
Guess I could always download it and read it now... but I'd rather have it bound and printed by a professional, until I get my UniversalBook (TM), on which I can read all e-books with the same ease of use as print books offer. Right... this title goes back on my wishlist for a while.
Jun 30, 2003 @ 15:56 » 2 comments » Reading