It never fails... I sent out a few hundred resumes this week. There's a very prominent link to check out my recent community project (on one of the websites where this message is coming from).

And of course Murphy strikes. The site was down for a couple of days last week and it's currently running slow as molasses. Seems like everything breaks whenever one of my employment contacts is looking at it. I no longer have this running on my own server, so most of these things are out of my control. I'm sharing resources with maybe a hundred other folks. All of the optimizations I performed to make the data fly onto the page don't matter if my shared database is choked or one of the ISP's DNS servers takes a dive. 

Sigh...     

More Microsoft madness... 

So I downloaded the 'Release Candidate' of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7 (that's what 'RC' stands for in the software world) to see if they fixed any of the long standing CSS quirks and anomolies.

The first thing to report is that the installation failed the first time and left my machine in an unworkable state. I had to re-install a couple of times to make things work somewhat normally again. This isn't a pleasant user experience, but of course I'm used to such things.

Second thing to report is that even though this isn't production code yet (meaning it hasn't officially been released), the installation offered no choices for continuing to run IE6 as an alternative. The existing browser was over-written. This is a bit of a problem for web developers who need to check their code on multiple browsers. In order to be able to check both IE6 and IE7 I would need to use two machines.

Now for the good news (and bad news). It seems that they have indeed fixed a lot of CSS quirks (and presumably Javascript/ECMA quirks and DOM quirks and ...). You'd think this was good, no?

No. Because until IE7 is widely deployed, the developer trying to write cross-browser apps needs to add yet another 'if' statement into every section of their code where cross-browser issues creep in. It is no longer enough to detect 'Gecko' or 'MSIE' and providing behaviour based on these possibilities (this is making a lot of simplifying assumptions about Opera, and IE/Mac, and the real old browsers). Now you've got to add yet another behaviour for the differences between MSIE7 and any other versions of MSIE which you've already got hacks for. 

You're thinking that this shouldn't be much of a change, and you're probably right - at least for one particular page. But consider that there are millions, if not hundreds of millions of pages out there written with browser specific hacks in place. Somebody spent a lot of time to make sure that they looked the same on IE and Firefox (and Opera and Lynx and Netscape, etc.), and now they're going to have to spend a lot of time fixing them all once again because they will all be broken.

The good news is that once IE7 does get widely deployed, you might eventually be able to write a web page that looks the same on Firefox and IE without a lot of special case code. The bad news is that it may take several years for IE7 to get widely deployed.   

I'm seeing an ominous trend in big-box retailing. They are victims of their own success. Let's take Costco for instance... I was there this morning. Saturday morning. You can't get a parking space. The lot is full. A hundred cars ahead of you dashing into every space which becomes available.

It is probably unneccessary. The reason you can't get a parking spot is because all the people who are parked there are stuck inside the store, jam-packed like sardines. No room to move. The root of all these problems is the supersized grocery carts. (Which I've ranted about before.) If I were on the Costco board of directors, I would be fighting to buy some reasonably sized carts, and quickly. The aisles are choked with carts and people getting very hostile because they can't move their own cart to where they want to go. Gridlock. This results in choked checkout lines. It results in choked aisles. It results in a choked parking lot. The keyword here is choked. There is no room for single-store sales to grow. I saw dozens of people abondon their carts in the middle of the store and walk away in frustration. This further escalates the problem, because now the aisles are getting choked with empty carts which have nobody moving them. Everybody is frustrated. Millions of frustrated customers is not a good thing for a business. And all because of these supersized carts.

Hey Costco, if you're listening, you better do something about it. Or your business model is in jeapordy. Sure, you can continue packing 'em in, but there's no room left to grow. Opening more new stores is the current business model for growth, but opening new stores is expensive - a lot more expensive than buying smaller shopping carts. 

Huh?  

So after an arrest last week in the JonBenet Ramsey murder, I was compelled to do a web search to see if there was any news on the investigation of the murder of a friend of mine in Boulder back in the early 1980's.

Lo and behold, I found buried in a 2002 annual report from the Boulder PD that detectives had re-examined some DNA evidence, matched it to a suspect, and obtained a conviction. It took twenty years, but they solved it. Oh, and it wasn't who I thought it was - a gal who left her purse in the apartment that night and acted suspiciously for the next several days. (It's still entirely possible she was there at the time, but I'll leave it at that.) The conviction was for a male who's name doesn't ring any bells with me; and based on DNA from a hair found in/on Gary's hand. 

It was probably the result of extraordinary public pressure over the handling of the JonBenet investigation which resulted in this turn of events. Regardless, closure is closure. It's also interesting that the Boulder PD sent me a letter back in 2001, stating their commitment to solving this case. Wish they would've followed up when they actually did.

My daughter starts fourth grade next week. Back from our family re-union which came on the heels of a beach trip which was scheduled (i.e. the spot reserved) in better times. Now perhaps I can get back to the important task of finding employment.

I'll probably give Norm a hand next week with band instrument rentals. He'll need the help - and perhaps give me a chance to say hi to some of my Sonica friends.

I've done some interesting stuff recently with the website software. A lot of consolidation of things which are similiar. These leads to better code, since similiar things aren't duplicated. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to help get anybody to take notice of what either the software or myself are capable of doing. Sounds like I need a concerted marketing campaign...

But let's take an example. Categories. Forums. Subscriptions, photo albums. These are all very different - n'est ce pas? Categories are collections of articles with the same tags. Forums are collections of articles. Subscriptions are collections of forums. Photo albums are collections of photos.

Whoa, hang on. They're all collections.

So I created a software class called 'containers' with an associated 'contents'. Contents are the things which go in containers. Together they create a collection. Of anything. I no longer have different database tables for all these different collections of things. I just have a bunch of containers that contain things.

Remember not too long ago when I mentioned that forums and weblogs and newsfeeds were all just collections of 'articles'?

Similiarly, a while back I created permission lists. Which are - containers. But I digress. Permission lists can be associated with anything. Photos, weblogs, forums, whatever. Until last week I just had access permissions. But what about write or post permission? It's the same thing. Just a list of permissions. 

So now you can not only create a private forum, you can also specify who can post to it. You can create a soapbox that only you can write to and everybody can read. But wait a minute... That's what a weblog is. So I've just created a new way to create weblogs - as forums. So why would anybody need a separate thing called a weblog? A: They don't. So eventually I will get rid of them as well. No I don't mean that I'll remove weblogs from the software. I'll just remove the management of things called weblogs from the software. It isn't needed.

Where is this all going? There's a lot of unneccessary code. At some point there will be another re-write. When that happens, a lot of the extra crap will be tossed into the bit bucket. What will be left? Containers. Things that go in containers. And perhaps 'people'. That's all. And it will still do everything the software does now. It will do everything you could ever imagine doing with a content management system. Want buddylists? Want MP3 collections? Private groups? Public groups? Taxonomies? Events? In every other content management system, these are all new database tables, new software classes. More code and data to manage in some unique way. But it doesn't have to be that way.

They're just boxes of stuff.   

British Petroleum (BP) has apparently figured out the not-so-secret way to make lots of money.  (They also insist that there's no substance to the charges currently under investigation of manipulating propane prices. But I digress...)

Hmmm. How could you drive the price of oil right through the roof? Wait. I'm thinking... Oh, here's a way! What if you could shut down the entire Alaska pipeline for a few months? You'd be swimming in money. And so it happens. They found a couple of rust spots on an oil pipe. So they're shutting down Prudhoe Bay. Completely.  Right. Normally you would do something like this in stages - fix one section while routing through another. After all, there's more than one pipe at Prudhoe. That's how you would keep the supply chain working under adverse conditions if that was what you wanted to do. But that's not how you make lots of money. No, to do that, you have to shut off Alaskan oil completely, indefinitely, with no advance warning.

So that's what they're doing.  

I never wrote the story about my DSL saga back in 2001 because frankly it would've taken a book to describe the whole story. It took a court order to get my twisted pair back from Earthlink after Flashcom went bankrupt and gave them my account. Even though I signed up with Earthlink even though I could not use their service but did so just so I could pay a $100 cancellation fee so they would disconnect my line and give it back. It was the only way to get my circuit disconnected. Even after all the gyrations, they never disconnected it and the circuit ended up in legal limbo and couldn't be used by anybody.

Fast forward to 2006. The latest chapter is no exception. Sometime last week my DSL line went down. The connection just vanished. I've spent a week and numerous service calls to get it back. But I don't have it back. I only have something that works for now. I don't believe I can ever get my service back again the way it was. 

In the meantime, I've broken into my DSL modem, and changed just about every setting on it (hundreds) in a few thousand different combinations.  I've got a new DSL modem. This is the fourth modem I've been through this week. I've got a new DSL circuit from AT&T.

What don't I have? One stinkin' static IP. You'd think this would be easy, but in 2006, static IP's are a thing of the past. The AT&T call center in India can't give me one. Even though I pay about $50 a month extra above the base DSL rate so I can get five of them. They wouldn't give me just one. But that was Pacific Bell. Now it's AT&T. AT&T doesn't like giving out static IP's for any amount of money. The local installer can't get one for me. Neither can his service office and neither can his boss. All they can get me is another dynamic IP, which I can't use (but I'll use right now - it beats no IP at all). And they're still charging me $50 extra each month for the five static IP's which they refuse to sell  me.

The worst part of it is that they are telling me that I've got a static IP. I don't, and I've wasted a lot of time trying to prove it to them - but there's nobody to listen; and the two or three people left in the company who even know what a static IP is can't get past internal politics to make it right for me and give me what I paid for. Nobody cares.

Welcome to the new AT&T. Same as the old AT&T. But be warned - if you're an AT&T residential customer with static IP's, you're gonna' lose 'em. It is no longer a supported configuration. They will turn them off whenever they feel like it, and you'll never get 'em back, and there's jack you can do about it.