An Experiment in Bloggery

Well, I recently acquired a Gmail account and last night I set up a mirror so all email to my email address (kevin at sb dot org) gets mirrored to my gmail address (kballard at gmail dot com). Today I started playing with Gmail. It’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, it also reliably crashes Safari. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself, assuming you have a Gmail account. Simply create a filter, fill out the information, and hit Create Filter. Safari crashes (don’t worry, the filter is also created). I also got it once hitting Edit Labels, but that wasn’t reproducible.

Jonas is giving away free Gmail accounts. The catch? You gotta do something good. Not for him, but for somebody. And you gotta tell him what it is. If he thinks it’s worthy, you get an account. What a great way to foster goodwill among others.

Codepoet, somebody who I thing is usually a good person to listen to, has posted a long blog entry about Joshua’s recent rant that’s completely mistaken.

Joshua’s complaint is that Erik Barzeski stole his CSS Tabs without attribution (even though it’s under a Creative Commons license). When contacted, Erik absolutely refused to attribute Joshua and claimed he wrote the tabs entirely himself (i.e. no claims that he got it from somewhere else). This was Joshua’s biggest complaint—not that Erik stole his CSS, but that Erik outright lied about it. It’s pretty clear that Erik did in fact steal the CSS Tabs - if you compare his CSS with Joshua’s CSS Tabs technique it’s almost identical, down to the ordering of the properties. How many ways are there to write CSS tabs? Not many. But how many ways are there to write CSS, given the numerous ways of writing properties and ordering and such? At least thousands.

Anyway, Codepoet completely ignored the real complaint and wrote that the only reason Joshua said Erik stole his CSS was because he used the same names for identifiers. In fact, Codepoet accused Joshua of fraud and claimed that the CSS Tabs technique originated with A List Apart. Codepoet: the license wasn’t on the CSS Tabs idea, which is indeed pretty common, it was on the specific CSS code. Joshua wrote the code and licensed it, and Erik stole it. Next time get your facts straight.

I was just given a link today to a blog post by somebody who had come up with a method of creating nice-looking tabs and copyrighted it under a Creative Commons license. Then Erik Barzeski blatantly stole it.

This is a very interesting read. It talks about the validity of CC copyrights on CSS code, identity theft (courtesy of the Zeldman mimic), and other such fun topics. Go read it now.

Yesterday I finally got modpython working with the help of the friendly folks on the modpython mailing list. And then I started fooling around with a script I’m calling index.py. Eventually I’ll turn this into a template system for my new website (once I finally get off my butt and design myself one). But for now, I was just playing around, learning how to do stuff with this. So, to learn, I made myself a routine that duplicates the built-in FancyIndexing feature (you know, where you type in a directory that doesn’t have an index file and it displays a list of all the files, with icons and information). It duplicates everything except the Description column and sortable headers. Other than that, it looks identical to the real thing, even down to the spacing of elements and the icons (hell, I went to the trouble of parsing the server config for the AddIcon and AddIconByType and DefaultIcon directives just to get the icons right!). Later I’ll add the Description column and, hopefully, sortable headers. Then it will look exactly the same. The only way to tell the difference will be to look at the source, where you’ll see a much nicer-looking source than the built-in indexing feature.

The other facet of my script is anything accessed from inside that directory is funnelled through the script, i.e. the script is given the filename and it opens it and gets the content-type and outputs the contents of the file. The point of this, of course, is for the templating system, but for now it’s just for fun.

If you want to try it, just go here.

I just ran across a good article on slashdot about why personal websites matter. It’s an interesting read, not too long, and makes a lot of sense. I hope I’ve been doing the right thing with my 2 websites (this and tildesoft). Now that I’m running a blog on this site, anybody who runs across it can see what I’m up to and follow my current work. And anybody that goes to Tildesoft can see what I’ve already released and download some useful tools.

Well, I’ve just reduced a surprising crashing bug in Safari. It turns out if you have an image that’s defined as display: block surrounded by a link (or probably any tag) that displays content with the :after selector (in my tests, I used an image) then Safari crashes if it doesn’t have the images already cached. This means refreshing the page or emptying the cache and going to the page again crashes.

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Looks like Safari now has support for the <marquee> tag. I just hope this doesn’t lead to <blink>.

A blog that I really enjoy reading is codepoetry.net. I ran across it in a hint on macosxhints.com. codepoetry.net is a very well-designed, standards-compliant blog using lots of CSS and XHTML. It also has some nifty effects, like text shadows for Safari. In fact, codepoetry.net is basically what spurred me to actually set up a blog, which I had been meaning to do for a while.

Go check it out! And while you’re at it, visit the codepoetry.net forums.