jtnt://life/unedited

Is it just me, or does the silhouetted man in the new Dave Matthews video for Gravedigger bear some resemblance to the recently departed Man in Black, Johnny Cash? I know the video was probably conceived and produced long before Cash’s death, but it is a bit eerie nonetheless.

Lest ye forget, it’s Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrr!

I am currently on a BitTorrent swarm that has 182 complete seeds going and 33 other active downloads. My speeds should be blazing, right? Not exactly. They’re hovering in the 3k/sec range. BitTrickle, indeed.

Are all those “experimental” clients that allow people to set their upload speed to minimal amounts (without really affecting download speed much, I’ve tested it out) to blame? I hope not.

Update: I’m now hovering at around 12-20k/sec. A marked improvement. But certainly lower than what I would expect for such a popular swarm.

* No relation to Dick.

Oh my. OH my! OH MY!! My beloved Canon has done it this time. They’ve announced the first digital single lens reflex camera that to retail for under a grand.

At $900 USD, the EOS 300D doesn’t offer the metal body of the EOS 10D, and it offers much few image control settings, but it does save you 600 smackeroos.

I love my tiny Powershot S230 too much to part with it, but I might just have to sell one of my old EOS film cameras to help finance this little guy. It’s almost too hard to resist! We’ll see what the Erickson Barnett Santa puts in my stocking this holiday season. I’ll just have to drool until then.

Marty has picked up the ball on the Launch.not browser-detection ugliness and confirmed that the Launch.not video does indeed play on IE 6 on Windows. Shocker.

Following up on this test and doing my own due diligence, I present the following.

IE 5.2

Camino 0.7.0

Omniweb 4.5

Opera 6.02

Success? No. the video never showed. Moreover, when I refreshed the page, I was greeted with the ever-popular:

In the interest of completeness, I decided to run a BrowserCam job to see what the Windows and Linux browsers were up to. Not much, it seems.

I ran and re-run the job a few times and got the same result each time. I have to assume that the video would have played on those displaying “Load a plug-in you don’t have” dialog boxes.

I have to hand it to Yahoo, the parent of Launch. Their Launch.com System Requirements page tells the truth on what to expect from Macintosh browsers.

Still, it seems that the core application that runs the video is Windows Media Player. This is all one should really need, if only one was given the opportunity to download a streaming file with an external app — like everybody else does it! If they don’t, they should.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Surfing around while trying to find something else to look at besides hurricane Isabel coverage, I came upon a link to view a new Dave Matthews video on Launch.com. I click said link, get get this:

Now, there are all kinds of things that are striking about this “ERROR!” message. As you can see from my browser interface, I am using Safari, not any flavor of Netscape. But let’s excuse this, since Safari does identify itself with as a Gecko browser.

The beauty is that I get this error even when I set Safari to report that I am using MSIE version 6. Now, I can’t test this right now, but I am certain that if I was using the most popular (by default) browser in the world, this video would launch properly. There’s no way Launch.com could survive if IE 6 users couldn’t see their stuff.

I have no real conclusion here. This is just another fine example of bad web development or design or whatever bucket you want to put this into. It’s just bad, ok? It’s a simple example of yet another awful browser-detection script gone awry.

Why do I need Launch.com to protect me from myself. Can’t I at least try to get it to work? At the very least, a link to continue regardless of the error should have been included.

Silly Launch.com, browser detection tricks are for kids.

Update: The reason switching the User Agent Safari reports doesn’t work is because the link pops up a new window, which defaults to reporting itself as Safari again.

This doesn’t excuse the behavior of this site. Just offers a bit more explanation.

What’s with all the pirate-related blather going on around the blog world? Honestly, I just posted that Talk Like a Pirate Day link, because I randomly found it somewhere one day. I had no pre-existing obsession, or even thoughts in the slightest, on pirates.

I saw Tony’s mention of pirates awhile ago, but now Webcrumbs points me to yet another blog on pirate-speak. I really can’t comprehend how this is happening.

I’m glad this third site is not local to the DC Metro area. I’d think it was something in the air, and I would truly be frightened.

I just have one thing to say about all of this: Yes, that is a hornpipe in my pocket and I am happy to see you.

I would be remiss if I didn’t make mention of the site of one my co-workers, Marty, who’s definitely fighting the good fight on the CSS “DHTML” dropdown menu battlefield.

The bitch (see, these things make me curse. They’re surely evil!) of it all is that he has worked tirelessly for the better part of a week trying, laboring even, to get these damn (There I go again.) leeches on the peckers (oh my!) of all web developers to work consistently (as much is possible) across all major browsers and platforms. Macintosh users have at least nine browsers to choose from. Granted, we don’t test in all of them, but it gives you an idea of the magnitude of the task.

And to say that Mr. Marty has spent a lot of time wrestling with these pocks on the faces of all web sites is not to diminish the man’s talent. He’s not just a smart guy; he’s pure heart. Without that, these zits on the noses of all web users would have beat him down long ago.

So, props to you, Marty. Death to you, dropdown menus. (I can’t come up with another silly metaphor. Sorry.)

I added a big, fatty, 120Gb Seagate Barracuda drive to my machine, Walfredo, today. And when I bought my G4 a couple years ago, I thought the 60Gb drive it came with was big. I’m freaking swimming in hard drive space now.

My only complaint is that it didn’t come with mounting screws. On the up side, I now know about 6-32 UNC mounting screws. Joy is mine.

Hurricane Isabel is currently on track to rape my beloved Outer Banks (although, a few of those monster houses that, as my brother-in-law says, “use every window in the Andersen catalog” could stand to go). Its inland track puts it right over Richmond, then DC/Maryland a short time later. For those that don’t know, your’s truly is based in Arlington, VA, just outside of DC.

I procrastinated this week-end and didn’t go out and get one of those big, flourescent tube, stand-up type flashlights. I finally got around to it today, and this was way too late. The only flashlight of any size I found was a Monsters, Inc. jobby at Home Depot (after visiting Target, CVS, and a local hardware store). While it would be a funny item to have around in general, I felt that a flashlight with Mike from Monsters, Inc. head over the light wasn’t the most practical thing to use to find my way around my dank basement should it be flooded and the electricity is out. It would surely keep my spirits up, though.

Myself and the other two developers where I work are hot on the issue of ridding all future sites that we develop of those dropdown menus used to “enhance” a website’s navigation which seem to be de rigeur since about a year or so ago. Even when they are done with nice and purty pure CSS, they are still the clunky, startling things they always have been.

The HierMenu sample page linked to above shows one of our (and others’) gripes with dropdown menus. Looking at the two menus demoed, one has no idea what the menu is going to do. Even I moused over the top example and thought it was broken until I thought to click on it. And I physically recoiled when the menu popped down.

Here are some links to resources that back up our claims that dropdowns are the devil:

IBM DeveloperWorks: “…menus that pop up automatically when the user positions the cursor over a particular item onscreen. Whatever you call them, these things can be so difficult to use that they border on evil.”

User Interface Engineering: “Users Decide First; Move Second”

Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir speak out. “In fact, many users are startled when they hover over an area of the screen and a new element pops up unexpectedly.”

Shorewalker.com: “Once you realise the dangers of flying menus, you have to confront the truly difficult issue of Web site navigation.”

Cascading vs Indexed Menu Design: “…Participants selected the Index as their first preference…”