Chris.Weekly.org - A Web Space

Those of us who have been playing w/ the web since the early days have a special relationship with the HTML <blink> tag, having suffered through its noxious heyday. Today, thankfully, few sites I care about still employ it. However there is a chess openings web application which I use pretty frequently, which uses <blink> on every page, right next to the practice board. Since chess requires concentration, and the blink tag is explicitly designed to attract your attention, it’s one of the worst UI design decisions I’ve come across. Since there’s little chance of convincing the site’s web developers to change their code, I decided to take matters into my own hands and write a Greasemonkey script to strip the annoyance out myself. For those new to Greasemonkey, it is a browser plugin that lets you alter the markup in any given page or pages to modify its styling or behavior. Of course it only modifies it for *me*, but that’s all I selfishly care about. So, in case anyone else out there hates <blink> the way I do and wants to make use of this simple script, here it is. You’ll want to change the UserScript section to suit your specific needs of course.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           blink tag removal
// @namespace      eudesign.com
// @include        http://www.eudesign.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

var allBlinkTags, thisBlinkTag, spanTag;
allBlinkTags = document.getElementsByTagName('blink');
for (var i=0; i<allBlinkTags.length; i++){
 thisBlinkTag = allBlinkTags[i];
 spanTag = document.createElement('span');
 spanTag.innerHTML = thisBlinkTag.innerHTML;
 thisBlinkTag.parentNode.replaceChild(spanTag, thisBlinkTag);
}

Things went smoothly last night updating from a very old Wordpress version to 2.5.1, so when I realized today that WordPress had just released 2.6 (ahead of schedule) I went ahead and upgraded again. Piece of cake! Subversion sure makes things like this easy. 2.6 looks like a good product so far.

Hi

Later tonight I’m going to finish updating wordpress (the blogging software I use for this site). If it goes awry, the site might get hosed for a bit. Wish me luck…

UPDATE: After about an hour it’s basically done. Most of it was painless, and I’m glad to have hooked up w/ the Subversion repo to make keeping the core software up to date (and thus more secure). Just two issues:

(1) Extreme slowness of admin pgs. Wordpress forum suggests RSS support in 2.5.1 is the cause, so I’ve turned it off for now.

(2) The only other glitch was with the “wpg2″ plugin I’d customized for image management… but I was pretty unhappy w/ it anyway so I’ll probably use this as an excuse to figure out something better. But not tonight.

Well it took over 5 hours (during which time my phone was completely unusable), but v2.0 is finally on my iphone. The “Remote” app alone makes it worth the wait. With airtunes nodes in a couple different rooms, I can now access all my music and control where it plays in the house, from my phone. Sweet! Looking fwd to exploring more features this weekend…

To my friends with iPhones: WAIT TO INSTALL 2.0!

Apple is doing a remarkably bad job with rolling out version 2.0 of the iPhone software. I made the mistake of “upgrading” this morning, and my phone is now bricked. It looks like the cause is server load issues at the itunes store; apparently connecting to the store at the end of the download/install/verify process is required, and since the connection times out the phone remains unusable. This is being widely reported so I know it’s not just me. Come on, Apple, get it together!

Anyone trying to call me today, please use my home phone.

An automated script managed to inject code into my blog’s template. Fortunately it did nothing more malicious than to insert link spam (visually hidden links to various dubious sites, to boost search engine rankings for those sites), but it was pretty disconcerting. I’ve removed all traces of the attack, changed my password and am upgrading the wordpress software behind this site. I’d appreciate the help, if anyone reading my blog ever sees anything questionable here (links to questionable sites or anything that looks wrong) please let me know. I don’t do advertising here and I want you friends and family to be safe from harm and annoyance when visiting. Thanks and here’s hoping it doesn’t happen to any of your sites.

From Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs:

Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that “computer science” is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology — the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of “what is.” Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of “how to.”

http://code.google.com/p/doctype/

is a brand-new, comprehensive resource for web developers, collecting the webdev community’s tips, tricks, best practices, browser compatibility charts, etc.  Looks to be very, very useful. Enjoy!

I’m trying to get in the habit of posting here instead of emailing people when I find something interesting or useful. Here are some links that qualify:

http://www.belarc.com
A free tool for comprehensive analysis of your Windows system, very useful.

http://www.pivotalblabs.com/articles/2007/05/24/rest-theory-to-practice
Very helpful article about applying REST principles in a Rails application.

http://www.jedit.org
Text editor / simple IDE for programmers, a big upgrade over EditPlus2 which I used for years. I’ve been using it recently for Ruby development, but it’s suitable for use with any language.