onfocus

Good use of Flash by the Associated Press: Red Planet Rising.

I'm a big fan of bagels for breakfast. Toasted, with cream cheese. A month or so ago we stayed with some friends in Sebastopol, and they were making bagels for breakfast. Toasting. Great. Cream cheese. Great. But they were also slicing tomatoes. Wha? Tomatoes? On a bagel? For breakfast? It seemed like insanity. Then I tried it. Since that day, I've added tomato slices whenever I have a bagel for breakfast. I call them Sebastopol Bagels.

Secure blogging via email. [via Ben Hammersley] This is great, and this same technique could be applied to any anonymous discussion spaces. (I've implemented PGP-signing for my comments system.) It's heartening to see any work being done to bring digital signatures to blogland.

I did an interview with Matthew Rothenberg a few months ago. He was doing his thesis on the semantic web at New York University and wanted to ask some questions about the Weblog Bookwatch. He just posted the interview on his weblog. He was studying in the departoment of Media Ecology—which sounds fascinating.

I just want to say, right on! The referer field is being abused by just about every RSS aggregator. Instead of Referer, they should be using the User-Agent request-header field to identify themselves. My guess is that they also want to show up in referrer logs for marketing reasons...because they're more likely to be read by site authors. I block them specifically from my referrer reports because they're meaningless. (Has anyone compiled a comprehensive list?) But I shouldn't have to.

Brian wrote in with an analysis of my CSS problem. Apparently IE5 and Safari on Mac ignore a "top:50%" setting in the div that aligns things vertically and horizontally. He reports that Chimera works fine, but I'd like to find a way to make it work across all browsers. I might have to play around with some JavaScript navigator.userAgent selective writing. But I wouldn't be surprised if that opens a whole new can of cross-browser headaches. I think my best course is to go back to using tables for layout.

Someone just sent a screenshot of the gallery below on a Mac (thanks Dave!), and it wasn't displaying properly. The latest version of snapGallery has an all-CSS layout, and it appears there's some problems with the technique I'm using to center everything on the page. Do any CSS experts out there know a cross-platform way to center information on a page both horizontally and vertically using only CSS? (no tables.)

This last weekend skp and I made another trip to the Oregon coast. On the way home we stopped by the home of Tillamook Cheese and I snapped a few photos. If you live on the West Coast you've probably seen Tillamook in the grocery store. It's good stuff, but it's sort of like sausage...you don't necessarily want to know how it's made. The light in the factory made everything orange.


more >>

Remember accounting scandals? They're still happening. The SEC is going to sue KPMG for fraud in their audit of Xerox. (This is only the 2nd time the SEC has ever sued a major accounting firm. It's big news, and under-reported.) Our financial system is still a mess.

Situationism for Dummies.

(and The Situationist International Text Library.)

Did you buy a CD, cassette, or vinyl record between 1995 and 2000? If so, the music industry ripped you off. And though you were probably ripped off more than $5-$20 thanks to illegal price fixing, at least you can get $5-$20 back. It's a class-action lawsuit. Everyone vs. The Music Industry. Sign up now.

This latest Internet-wide DOS attack was harsh (BBC article). Jason wrote about his experience with the MeFi server which explains just how malicious this thing is. I noticed a problem with my server last night around 10 PST, and haven't been able to reach it until 30 minutes ago. I've installed the hotfix, and that seemed to stop SQL Server from eating up CPU cycles. If you run a server with SQL Server installed, be sure to patch it up. Of course the best way to be secure is not to run a server at all. Or if you do, keep it locked in your closet and don't connect it to anything.

Like a lot of people, I rely on the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer to keep me up to date with fixes. I guess I need to add a few more checks into my routine.