I can print again!

Joy! This is so coool: Print via InfoWave PowerPrint USB-Parallel adapters. I've been installing lots of software on my TiBook in both the OS 9 and OS X versions, simply because my on-the-road printer (a Citizen PN50) only worked via InfoWave PowerPrint, and that only works under Classic, not OS X. The page above shows how to make printers like mine work under OS X. Yay! And goodbye, Office 2001.

Holidays are here, by golly

It's Secret Santa time again! Yes, I've had a number of bad experiences with these kind of things, including everything from company gift exchanges where my gift never showed up, to last summer's CD swap where 2 of the 5 people didn't bother to send me anything. But last year's Secret Santa project from these folks turned out great (I got a gift, and one I even wanted!) so I've signed up again. You should too.

Brrr!

The Boston 10-day weather report. I leave for there early tomorrow morning, and it looks like it's going to be COLD. I have no idea yet what I'm going to wear; I wish I had the time to go shopping.

Bin Laden's back? As if Bush cares.

From Salon (the Premium portion, unfortunately), Joe Conason , in He's ba-a-ck! makes some great points:

Why does the White House spokesman's response to the reappearance of Osama bin Laden sound so flaccid? When did the world's most wanted terrorist become "any one man"? Whatever happened to "dead or alive"?

Imagine how the punditry would have treated Bill Clinton if he had failed to take down bin Laden by this point. That "dead or alive" clip would be playing every night on cable, with appropriate commentary.

Sorry, but Osama bin Laden is not merely "any one man." He is the self-proclaimed mass murderer of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, at large, presumably armed, and extremely dangerous. To pretend that Saddam Hussein poses the greater threat—when he has been contained for a decade—is to foster a truly monumental delusion.

Readers write

I got this from a friend this morning:

i've got a favor to ask, because you get serious traffic at your blog, and ebay's empty at the moment. a friend of mine is looking for a malcolm x doll (a promotional tie-in from the spike lee movie). her father has cancer of the everything, and this will surely be his last xmas, and she's desperate to get this thing for him.

could you ask your readers, as a humanitarian gesture, for pointers?

If you can track one down, please put a note about it in the comments, and thanks!

BBEdit and Standards

I've gotten a little pushback about my BBEdit opinions, and was asked to document the following. So, here y'all go:

Web page	BBEdit 6.5.3	W3C Validator
BackupBrain.com	Invalid, with three errors	Valid
Pixel.mu	25 warnings, no errors	1 warning, no errors (note that none of the warnings reported by BBEdit was the one warning reported by the W3C)

So, my conclusion stands: if I can't use BBEdit to check HTML standards compliancy (because it gives erroneous results) and I can't use it to check CSS standards compliancy (because it doesn't support this), then, it's not a useful tool for standards validation. And that is something that I do a lot of.

The above was done using BBEdit 6.53—can someone check if BBEdit 7.0 produces different results?

Me? Bitchy?

I'm told that Bare Bones Software has shipped BBEdit 7.0, but I can't get to BB's site to check it out.

Unlike everyone else who read the press release or has looked at the product (I haven't, so I can't tell if the article writers have), what I read from the pieces online doesn't sound good. Here's an example: how many Web developers do you know who write ASP on a Mac? How many who write VBScript on a Mac? How many who write CSS on a Mac?

If your experience is anything like mine, the answers were zero, zero, and lots. So, where did BB put their programming effort? You guessed it. When I asked Rich Siegal of BB why BBEdit didn't support CSS syntax checking, he told me that no one had ever asked for it. I told him that he wasn't hanging out with enough Web developers.

And that was a serious comment, not just a flippant remark. I always see Rich at Mac conferences (most recently, O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference and Geek Cruises MacMania), but never at Web Design World or Web Builder. My understanding, though, is that this is the market where BB makes the bulk of their sales, so (imo) that's where they should be doing some heavy listening.

All it takes is a little bit of using HomeSite (and no, you don't need a Wintel box to use HomeSite; it's baked into Dreamweaver MX) to see how good BBEdit could have been if they were listening to their Web designer and Web developer customers. Whenever I'm using one, I miss the other, and vice versa.

I bitch because I care.

But use IE

But when you vote for Toby (see the previous post) make sure that you use IE, as it wouldn't let me vote using Mozilla. Heh.

Six Degrees of Sorkin

I mentioned here a few days ago that we're looking forward to Joshua Malina joining the cast of The West Wing. Today, Glenn Fleishman wrote about Toby Malina and the contest she's a semi-finalist in.

So, what do these two things have in common? Josh and Toby Malina are brother and sister. And I'm sure it's entirely (not) coincidental that two of the lead characters on TWW are Josh and Toby.

So, go vote for Toby in the Ms. Moxie competition.

Upcoming me

If you're local, consider coming and seeing me tomorrow night (Tuesday) at the Sonoma County Web Developer's SIG meeting where I'll be talking about "User Interface Design with JavaScript."

If you're not local, come see me at Web Design World Boston next week, where I'll be talking about "Cool DHTML Interface Hacks" and "Standards and Today's Tools: A Report Card."

If you make it to either one, come and say hi!

Star Wars Redux

Yep, I sure feel more secure, knowing that the GOP can be trusted more than the Dems with national security. The Big Media told me so. Of course, the Republicans do tend to literally give the Pentagon a blank check and not require any accountability, wasting billions of dollars in the process and not actually making our country any more safe. Think I'm exaggerating? Check out Star Wars Spending Spree - Billions for Missile Defense, peanuts for anti-terrorism.

Contribute VQS

Now it can be revealed: I'm currently writing Macromedia Contribute Visual QuickStart Guide, for Peachpit Press/Macromedia Press. The program was announced today, and it's really quite cool. The book covers shown below are just placeholders, of course; in order to be listed with an ISBN, books have to have titles, and the title and the cover of this book couldn't be disclosed until today's announcement. That will change, I trust. Now, I'm back to work on the book!

Breast cancer epidemic

Salon reports on High cancer rates in wealthy California county. The rate of breast cancer in Marin County (just south of us) is 45% higher than the national average. Why? That's what they're trying to find out.

Mozilla uber IE

Not entirely valid for the Mac version of Mozilla, but Neal Deakin's list of 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot does a decent job of explaining why I've mostly switched over to using Mozilla. Tabbed browsing is awesome, and popup ad blocking is now essential. When Chimera (the real Aquafied version of Mozilla) is a bit farther along, I suspect that I'll be using that instead.

Politics: What works

As you might guess, I've been pretty disappointed in the results of the midterm election. Sure, it's quite possible that the GOP will overreach and annoy enough voters so that they lose the House or Senate next time, but it looks like we're in for a fairly bleak two years. So I was happy to read Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Ground-level Politics, a practical guide to making things right. She effectively explains why antiwar rallies and other street theater are no longer effective; why if you want to make things change, you have to vote as if it matters (guess what? "strategic voting" for the Greens is bunk); and why power trumps purity. If you were dismayed by the election results, read this piece.