Raible Designs

Googlism

What does Google think of you? It's pretty acurate on it's impression of me and my company.

Apple (finally) releases JDK 1.4.x

Allen Denison, Java Product Manager at Apple has just sent an email to their java-dev mailing list announcing the availability of a Java 1.4.1 Developer Preview. This preview is available to all ADC members and can be downloaded from the "Download Software" section of the ADC web site. [via MacSlash]

Happy Day! Downloading now...

Apple Switch Ad

You gotta check this out whether you're a Mac user or not, it's a good laugh. Found via Zeldman.

Unrelated to any of the above, an Apple “switch” flick that thinks different is now making the rounds. A second copy is available on another server. No doubt many copies are available on many servers, though perhaps not for long. Thanks: Dori Smith and Todd Fahrner.

Dreamweaver MX Certified

I passed a test today to become a Certified Dreamweaver MX Developer. I got an e-mail from Macromedia a few months ago, looked at the sample questions (PDF) and figured, what the heck. The sample questions looked so easy (basic HTML stuff) that I didn't even study. After the first 5 questions on the test, I was shittin' bricks since most questions where related to Dreamweaver and such things as the Asset Panel. I use Dreamweaver a fair amount, but only as an HTML editor, and I hardly ever use the advanced features. So when I encountered a bunch of questions about how to do such and such in Dreamweaver, I just answered with a WAG. I thought for sure I was going to fail - but I passed!

Bookmark for Web Developers

If you're a web developer and are constantly looking for good backgrounds, fonts, or icons on the web, check out http://www.grsites.com. They have a ton (4,300+) backgrounds that will tile seemlessly on your web page. If you know of any others, let me know.

Roller Referrals and NetNewsWire Images.

I found out today that my referrals get reset to 0 when my website crashes. Doh! Oh well, it was interesting to see that most of this site's hits come from Google, or at least they did today. I don't want to record them for historical purposes anyway, that's what these stats are for.

I also figured out the problem with displaying images in NetNewsWire - you have to use an absolute reference (i.e. http://yoursite.com/images/... vs. /images/...). I'll see if I can get Brent to change this, how bad would it suck to move your site to a new domain and lose all your images?! This first issue in this bug has been solved by Roller 0.9.6. Looks like Ranchero Software needs to use JIRA, you can't update or comment on a bug once it's entered!

What else am I doing tonight? Drinking a Fat Tire, cooking some Rosemary Chicken for dinner and getting ready to watch the World Series. Go Angels! I really don't care who wins, but I bet my mom $10 since she wanted the Giants to win. My mother-in-law is coming into town tonight, so it might be a light blogging weekend.

I tried to make this site XHTML-compliant by escaping the HTML in the bookmarklets. This caused Javascript errors, so this site will simply have to remain invalid for a few days.

RSS Validator.

I wish I could say that my RSS feed validates, but alas, it does not. I guess it doesn't like HTML in a site's description. I don't know where I'm getting the language error from, Dave doesn't appear to get it.

Update: I updated my website description in Roller to be text with no markup and hard-coded the HTML-rich version in my page template. Now I'm complying with yet another web-standard, yee haw!

New XHTML Validator.

There is a new (beta) version of the XHTML Validator at the W3C. This new version offers a much needed improvement - explanations on why things don't validate, rather than cryptic error messages. This site is not validating mostly because of the bookmarklets - looks like a good 1/2 hour to fix if I do it now (from the library). I'll wait until I get home and have a good HTML Editor to assist me.

Macs and the 1-button mouse.

The most annoying thing about my Mac (G4 Titanium Powerbook) is that it only has 1-button on it's built-in mouse. This is especially annoying because I can plug in a two-button mouse and it is recognized and usable by OS X. Why didn't they include a 2-button mouse by default? My wife (a very savvy Windows user) hates it so much she refuses to use my laptop.

This morning, I found an article (via MyAppleMenu) about Apple's history with the one button mouse and the possible move to a 2-button mouse.

So while Apple’s decision to go with a single button was one of the many choices that made the original Mac such a groundbreaking machine, it’s time for Apple to reconsider.

Longtime Mac devotees may disagree, but an official Apple two-button, scroll wheel-equipped mouse has, in fact, no apparent drawbacks. [1 Button, 2 Or 3?]

Roller Upgraded to 0.9.6.1!

I upgraded this site to use the latest Roller version and everything appears to be humming along rather nicely. I did run across one issue in that I had to re-number all my Blogrolling bookmarks. It appears the priority now has the opposite effect it did in the last release. I also somehow (I don't remember updating it) managed to set my homepage to the Contact page when testing everything, so I don't know if that's an upgrade glitch or human error. Probably the latter, updating it via the Editor UI fixed the problem (after I downgraded and the problem was still there!). Update: it appears there is a bug in this release, where only pages that don't have an underscore (_) show up in the drop-down of available homepages. This bug has been documented in JIRA.

BTW, the blogs are rated by update frequency, and I have some new ones to add soon. Since I'd like to keep this list at a reasonable size, the once-a-week updaters will be gone. I've been using NetNewsWire lately to read blogs - so I'll still be reading, just not referring.

I especially like the new referers feature, (Dave Rules!) which can be called using macros.showReferers(), macros.showReferers(max) or macros.showReferers(max, maxWidth). To get rid of the dot to the left of each link, simply add the following to your site's stylesheet:

ul.rReferersList {
    list-style: none
    margin-left: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

Enjoy!