I find it extremely amusing that all the fast food joints copy each other to try and gain a 1% market share advantage over the other guy. Why not do something different? I'm referring of course to the breakfast menu.

You can buy a cup of coffee at 7 in the evening. You can buy a double cheeseburger at 5AM. You can buy  a milk shake in Fargo in the dead of winter.

Why then can't you buy a sandwich with egg on it at 10:31?

Enron founder Kenneth Lay was found guilty on six counts of conspiracy and fraud and former CEO Jeff Skilling was found guilty on 19 counts by a Houston jury in the biggest of the corporate fraud cases.

We're finally reaching closure. This is the trial everybody was waiting for, so we can now put to rest the wave of corruption which brought down Enron, MCI, AOL and other corporate houses of cards.

To quote Roger Daltry - 'Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.'  

Don't you get tired of all those little 'valid' buttons claiming that the website you're visiting passes validation for protocol x,y, or z? Why should you care? It should be QA's responsibility to worry about whether or not the software validates to the applicable specifications, not yours. Unless of course it is the website owner's way of telling you that it's up to you to verify their code because they can't be bothered with it. Or perhaps for bragging rights. Either way I think it's a bit arrogant. "Hey, our pages aren't broken....". Who cares anyway? If they're broken, you won't be able to read 'em to find out that they aren't supposed to be broken.  So it kind of defeats the purpose. 

In fact, as I've found on this site, just because you're compliant on one day, you might not be tomorrow. I find it a little irresponsible that web specs are allowed to change without notice. That certainly wasn't the case when I was trying to write standards compliant software.

If, like me, you mostly find this amusing, I've got some buttons for you. Put 'em on your website.

Now you too can be compliant with all the latest acronyms. And you can ask your local admin - 'Are you GQX2.3 compliant? What about NORK2?' Huh? You will no doubt cause them a huge amount of emotional distress as they search the web to find out what is required to be GQX2.3 compliant. The nice thing is that your website is in fact compliant, so you can wear these badges with honor.

Give me a day or two and I might be able to come up with a NORK2 validator if you really want to mess with their heads. It will validate any page which has a nork valid image link on it and will fail with unspecified errors any page which doesn't. 

Syntax error on line 1. Illegal command 'DOCTYPE'.
Syntax error on line 2. Invalid or obsolete tag 'html'.  
Script type 'javascript' is not legal in NORK2. Please use 'carrotscript'
 or a transcendant document format instead.
'<title>' is deprecated in NORK2 without 'region=' specifier.
Action cancelled. Too many errors. 

...Isn't that wicked?

PS> In researching this article, I discovered what your local admin is going to discover, that even if they aren't NORK2 compliant, you can date a NORK girl; and they aren't anywhere near as ugly as Stalingrad babes.  They're also mostly Catholic, so you don't have to struggle with those pesky condoms. Isn't that the cat's meow? Details Here.

Found this on the 925 weblog. Thought you might enjoy it...

Just a little humor to help ease the pain of your next trip to the pump…

Compared with Gasoline Think a gallon of gas is expensive? This makes one think, and also puts things in perspective.

Diet Snapple 16 oz $1.29 …….. $10.32 per gallon
Lipton Ice Tea 16 oz $1.19 ………..$9.52 per gallon
Gatorade 20 oz $1.59 …… $10.17 per gallon
Ocean Spray 16 oz $1.25 . $10.00 per gallon
Brake Fluid 12 oz $3.15 . $33.60 per gallon
Vick’s Nyquil 6 oz $8.35 …. $178.13 per gallon
Pepto Bismol 4 oz $3.85 ….. $123.20 per gallon
Whiteout 7 oz $1.39 ……… .. $25.42 per gallon
Scope 1.5 oz $0.99 ……$84.48 per gallon

And this is the REAL KICKER… Evian water 9 oz $1.49……….$21.19 per gallon?! $21.19 for WATER - and the buyers don’t even know the source. (Evian spelled backwards is Naive.) So, the next time you’re at the pump, be glad your car doesn’t run on water, Scope, or Whiteout, or God forbid Pepto Bismal or Nyquil.

It's been a few years since Yahoo! redesigned their front page - it was looking pretty cluttered and pretty tired. So they cleaned it up again. Doesn't look too bad considering all of the information they're trying to cram into one screen of pixels. It's still a bit dis-organized though. This is the direct result of being a large company that can no longer turn on a dime. Different pieces of the page have slightly different looks than other pieces. Ah yes, I remember well the process of trying to get development teams scattered across the globe to provide a common look and feel when all their pieces came together on a single page.  

But I would like to draw your attention to the little menu bar on the right, with mail and chat and traffic reports, etc. For those to whom it isn't intuitively obvious, it's a little AJAX app.

Nice touch. 

The new Apple PowerBook operating manuals are warning folks not to put these laptops on your lap - you could get burned from the generated heat. It is recommended that you place them on a desk or other non-flammable surface.

An early laptop computer (you wouldn't put this on your lap either).

When I was young (sometime toward the end of the last ice age) braces were the kiss of death. The only thing worse than wearing them to school would've been to have your grandmother give you a big slobbery kiss in front of all your friends. Amazing what a few years of creative marketing can accomplish. My daughter begged to wear braces. She shrieked with delight when told she would be getting them. She was up at 7 this morning (unheard of on a school day) and picked out her colors (blue with red in front) before we even stepped into the orthodontist's office. When we got home, she couldn't wait to show and tell all of her friends. 

Endlessly circling the flaming gas ball. Each time you complete a cycle you get another notch on your tally sheet. I've now got 50 of them suckers.

What does it all mean?

It doesn't matter. You just keep spinning around the flaming gas ball and counting. That's what it's all about. Does the number fifty have any significance? Why of course it does. You see, humans have ten things hanging from our arms (five on each side). Four fingers and a thumb to be exact. On each side. But the only significant thing is the total, which is ten. If we didn't have thumbs, we'd be counting in octal. But we have thumbs so the issue is moot. Now ten times ten is 100. This is significant because it uses three symbols to represent in our written language, while the number immediately preceding it (99) only takes two. And half of that is fifty. So if you split it (this weird three symbol multiple) into two equal parts, you'd have equal numbers in each pile. Are you following?

So I'd like to raise a toast to travelling through space. A number of revolutions around a gas blob equal to splitting a multiple of the count of human appendages which takes up one more byte of storage into two piles.

I'm fifty years old today.

Some would claim this is significant.

Why?  

[I should probably note that this journey has so far covered a distance of 2.9216 billion miles  or 93 million miles from the earth to the sun times two (radius to diameter) times pi (to circumference), times 50 revolutions. This fails to account for the motion of the sun through the local galaxy in particular and the space/time continuum in general, which also incurs some significant distance. I will leave it to the reader to ponder the significance of that number. But if you ever feel really really bored, consider that every day of your existance your space travel covers over 1.6 million miles.] 

Family and friends are advised that I've now migrated all my existing photo albums from the old website. You will need an account here to access the photos. (Contact me after you've got the account so I can add you to the access list). The old password won't work anymore - and the old website is going away. 

I've also finally implemented Atom feeds. I know it's been an RFC for several months, but I already had one feed format so it wasn't a priority while I built the rest of the community site software.

But my RSS feeds won't validate if any articles have more than one attachment. There was a huge debate about this a couple of years ago. Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead seem to hold the view that the RSS 2.0 spec clearly states that an item can have at most one enclosure.

I've read the spec over and over - in fact every version of the spec. Nowhere is this spelled out. I can't even find the passages they claim 'imply' this limit. But face it, it's a very poorly written spec which Dave Winer grabbed from Netscape and made his own. He changes it whenever it suits him, and interprets it any way which suits his personal ambitions. Along the way teaming up with Adam Curry and 'inventing podcasting' (which also led to the protocol abortion we call iTunes). Dave also get very wealthy off of RSS during the dot-com crash, probably the only person besides the Google founders to get wealthy off the Internet during this period.

But RSS has run its course. It is now time to rid the Internet of everything associated with Dave Winer. He is a disgrace. RSS is a disgrace.  Upgrade all your feeds to Atom. It's a much better syndication format, clearly thought out - well defined and specified.

Just do it.

The Bush is defending some of the new NSA wiretap programs, stating that this isn't about monitoring what you or I are doing. But in fact, that's what is happening. Everything which goes through the telecommunications structure is being intercepted and filtered. Email, web traffic, phone calls. There are back doors and monitors in every conceivable place.

It is particularly telling in that the Justice Department is not able to review the program. The Justice Department! Seems nobody there has an adequate security clearance. Don't you find that a bit alarming?

It's only a matter of time. The remote control channel changer on your TV already has a little window with an IR detector on it. You would never know if the TV manufacturers replaced this with a CCD through a government mandated covert program. Since it also covers the IR spectrum, it would work just like a channel changer. Just like you expect it to work. Except it's also a webcam, feeding what's happening in your living room back to a monitoring post through your cable system (which coincidentally is also a high-speed internet line these days). The technology to do all of this exists today. All the microchips required to make this a reality are available off the shelf. The monitoring posts are already in place.  

And you would never know...

Standing at the crossroads. The website software has evolved a bit more. Photo albums are necessary so that I can pull in what remains of macgirvin.com - which does little more these days than house my photo collection and collect my email archives.

Soon I'll be shutting down the aging Linux box in my garage and moving everything that's left onto hosted websites such as the one you are getting this post from.  

The photo archives use group permissions. This way if a new family member of friend registers I only have to add them to one list to let them see the entire private photo collection. It is also a departure from the simple permissions I originally baked into the site - registered or not, admin or not.

It provides full control of who can access what. The basic permissions structure was fine for getting something working quickly. Now it's time to move on. You want something only accessible to family? To males over 35 that are into scuba diving? You need a little better permission control. 

This in turn opens the possibility of group permissions for forums, weblogs, or just about anything else. That's what I mean about standing at the crossroads.

This is where everything changes.   

Happy Cinco De Mayo - where we honor the Mexican army for repelling an invasion by the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862.

...Just a few years after they failed to repel an invasion by the United States. 

The celebration was short lived. A year later, the French regrouped and took over Mexico anyway.

I've been asked why I do this. Why do I spend so much time on my computer? What do you have to show for it? What purpose does it serve? If you aren't making money, why are you doing it?

I suppose to a casual observer it looks as though my efforts have been about as productive as if I spent my days playing Duke Nukum or hack all day. Why bother, indeed? What have I done?

I built a community web portal. If you think it's so easy, try it yourself. There are a lot of smart people on this planet, and a lot of community web portals - and most of them are free. So what is it that drives me? First of all, I don't know of anybody that has tried to single-handedly write a community portal from scratch. This is almost always done by organizations (both formal and informal). It is a huge undertaking full of thousands of challenges. I'm not a worker bee solving one little piece of the puzzle. Instead it encompasses a much bigger picture. 

That's why. 

This is my education. You can't buy this education. You can only live it. Why would somebody choose mysqli over the mysql interface? Why not use HTTP auth for a website? Isn't it easier? Can you make drop shadow images in a cross-platform manner? How about if you change the page layout? How do you upload entire directories to a photo album? Is it even possible? How do you make clean URLs? Plugins? Virtual hosts? Themes and avatar pages? How about ajax chat? How hard is it really? What else is AJAX useful for? Should you use a procedural or object oriented approach for a large website project? Why? How do you manage sessions? What problems are you likely to have if you build a PHP5 application and try and run it on PHP4? Why on earth would somebody use PHP if Ruby is so much faster to develop? Why on earth would somebody use PHP when the execution time of 'C' and 'C++' are so much faster? Which costs more to maintain, MVC programming or mixed-script? Should forums be flat or threaded? Why? What is the most efficient schema in all of these cases? Do you use existing code or write it yourself? Which is really the quickest to market? 

Anybody can download a web portal and create a website. I can answer all of these questions and hundreds more from first hand experience. I've done it. I know why. 

And that's why...