Category: Tech

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NASA Returns to Flight as Discovery Reaches Orbit.

Rather than getting my hopes up, I’ve been taking an “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach to this. And now, we’re finally back in space!

Here’s hoping the shuttle will be able to tide us over until the next-generation ship is ready. IMO we should have had another type of launch vehicle five years ago at the latest. That way Columbia never would have gone up, or if it had, we could have kept the newer fleet flying and just grounded the shuttles.

On a more personal note, I’m reminded of the time I went to see a shuttle landing. My mom took me and my brother out of school for a day, and we drove up with a family friend to Edwards Air Force Base where we set up camp with a zillion other people on the dry lake bed. We slept in the car, and the next morning everyone tried to get as close as possible to the chain link fence that marked the edge of the public viewing area.

Somewhere in a closet, I’ve still got a roll of slides from that landing. Of course, they had us so far away from the runway that I could barely catch the shuttle with a telephoto lens. I made an 8×10 print of the best slide in my grandfather’s home photo lab, and the shuttle was barely 1½ inches. [Update: I finally scanned the photos.]

And the shuttle that I watched land? It was Discovery, and it was the first flight since the Challenger disaster.

Now if someone can just convince NASA to give Hubble its 120-zillion mile checkup instead of just throwing it away…

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If you have a website, you’ve probably seen link swap spam. People running link farms search for a keyword or phrase, then fire off a zillion emails to the contact addresses about how they’ve looked at the site, their site is clearly relevant to yours, they’ve already linked to you and they want you to link back to their site.

All this without bothering to actually look at the sites in the search results.

For example: last Saturday I posted picture of the marquee in front of San Diego’s Ghirardelli Chocolate shop. By Monday someone had asked me to link to their website about chocolate, because our sites were clearly related.

Today I got one that trips the irony-meter. I’ve made four posts over the past year about targeted—or mistargeted—advertising. Just four. This morning I received three copies (one to my webmaster address and one to each DNS contact) of this message:

Hello,
I have found your website hyperborea.org by searching Google for “targeted advertising”. I think our websites has a similar theme, so I have already added your link to my website.

Continue reading →

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Just a day after Firefox decided to jump from 1.1 to 1.5 (triggering far more discussion than the numbering change really deserved), Microsoft has announced the official name for Longhorn: Windows Vista.

Okaaay. Yeah, I can see the connection: a vista is something you see through a window. But at that point, why not just go for broke and call it Ventanas or something?

Yeah, no one wants to use numbers anymore. It’s kind of like in the mid-1990s when it was taboo to tack a number onto the title of a movie sequel. As if having a 7 on Star Trek: Generations or a 4 on Alien: Resurrection would have scared off more viewers than the movies themselves.

Meanwhile, we’re left with yet another version name that does nothing to help you keep track of which version is newer. XP? 2003? Vista? MX? CS? Tiger, Leopard and Jaguar?

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Apple Matters has posted What OS X Could Learn From Windows, a short wish list of features that Windows already has. The first one is to move keys around so that Command on Macs and Control on PCs are in the same place. When I first read it, I thought “Yeah, that’s tripped me up a lot!” Then I thought about it, and realized that it only causes me problems when I’m using Unix apps on OS X, either directly or through a SSH connection, or on those rare occasions when I’ve booted the PowerBook into Linux. I can’t remember the last time I fumbled over this while using Mac software. It’s only when there’s a conceptual conflict—and then I really stumble!

Maybe it’s because laptop keyboards are already different from standard keyboards. Except for occasional browser testing and iTunes importing, I haven’t used a desktop Mac in years. Or maybe it’s harder for people switching the other direction.

Anyway, I would’ve just posted this in the comments over there, but they require you to register before you can comment. I consider that rude, and I usually refuse to register on a site just to be able to post one comment. If I’m going to come back as a regular reader, that’s one thing, but if not, it’s not worth setting up yet another account with yet another username/password/etc.

(via Slashdot)

Edit: And just to prove that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I just tried to close a tab in Opera using Alt+W instead of Ctrl+W. (Alt on a PC being where Command is on a Mac.) I guess all that writing about the Apple keyboard had me thinking differently.

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The Web Standards Project has announced a joint task force with Microsoft to promote web standards in products like Visual Studio and ASP.NET.

I imagine this was probably a factor in the decision to divest themselves of Browse Happy last month. Certainly this project is more in line with their core mission—promoting the use of standards on the web—and fits right in with the Dreamweaver Task Force they ran with Macromedia back in 2001.

(via WaSP Buzz)

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The ridiculous Firefox/Opera rivalry (it’s software, not religion) has given rise to one annoyingly persistent meme: the belief that tabs are just MDI (Multiple Document Interface).

They’re not.

MDI, as implemented in many Windows applications and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, involves having a mini-desktop inside your application, with its own windows that you can minimize, maximize, and rearrange. If you have a taskbar-like interface it can look a lot like tabs, and you can certainly use it the same way as tabs, but it’s a different UI paradigm.

A tabbed interface is very specific. You have only one view at a time in your application window, and you switch between them based on a row (or column) of tabs along the window’s edge. You can look at it as a proper subset of MDI, but it is not the same thing.

Additionally, classical MDI uses one master window for the application. All documents appear in that window. Tabbed interfaces often (though not always) allow you to have more than one window, each with its own set of tabs. This makes it possible to group documents, web pages, etc. by category in a way that you can’t with a single-document interface or classic MDI.

So when people claim Opera had tabs first, they’re thinking of MDI—which Opera did have before Mozilla did. Tabs were showing up in browsers like Netcaptor and Galeon, however, long before they showed up in the Mozilla suite—and long before Opera hid its MDI capabilities under a tab-like veneer.

(reposted from Spread Firefox in response to Asa Dotzler’s post on the history of tabbed browsing)

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