Backdoor Tech          

Your daily helping of technology

Friday, October 31, 2003

 

Switching partners in blogging

I have decided to broaden my experience with blogging software. In fairly short order, I will switch this blog over to pMachine. I decided to make the change because Rafat Ali said, "I still think pMachine is the best nano-publishing tool but I am too lazy to move from MT to PM." Also see this version of his opinions. I thought of switching to MoveableType, but I heard of several issues in getting up and running. Rafat describes pMachine as being appropriate for journalism or online publishing. Besides, MoveableType is the hot, trendy property in blogging so I want to find something a bit more skewed. I wanted more flexibility in publishing and classifying stories or entries. I paid $45 for the Pro version because I wanted full access to the online forums. pMachine comes with forums and search already implemented in the architecture, plus a lot of other features (categories, commenting, trackback, pingback, RSS, etc.) that I had wanted to toy with. It also says that it produces XHTML compliant code.

I've grown a bit disappointed with the way that Blogger has evolved. Under Google ownership, it has improved its backend and interface, but the feature set has been frozen since early 2002. It's poorly documented and support is patchy. It's fine for a straight chonological format. I will keep it for La Esquina del Movimiento because I have three years of blogging wrapped up in its format. Besides, maybe Google and Blogger will get around to adding more spice to the product.

This site may go offline for a while when I make the switch because pMachine requires setting up the scripts and templates on the web server. As far as I can tell from the instructions, there is no way of testing on a producting server and then uploading the functional pages. Of course, I haven't read all the instructions.

Thursday, October 30, 2003

 

Making decisions on regular expressions

I spent the weekend working on implementing regular expressions with the applications that I mentioned in my previous entry. Actually, I never got around to to using XReplace32, but put BKReplaceEM and PowerGrep through some pretty serious use in prepping probably 2,000 pages for GlobalSecurity.org.

I was pleasantly surprised with PowerGrep. So much so that I actually bought the program. It provided a wealth of information to explain the application and regular expressions in general. Anyone who put that much effort into documentation (100-page PDF manual, plus a regex tutorial, plus plenty of examples that can be applied to web development work immediately) deserved to get rewarded. Jan Goyvaerts, the author, deserves plenty of credit. I felt that he made a conscientious effort to match up PowerGrep with Perl and its market-leading implementation of regular expressions. That also reinforced the idea that antyhing I pick up in PowerGrep can be transferred to Perl, or PHP or any other scripting language. It has a more consistent, intuitive interface. PowerGrep allows you to save all kinds of settings and results.

Although BKReplaceEM had some interesting features, I lost some search settings because it was not clear what was being saved and what not. I also felt that since the program is four years old, it was not going to mature as much. The nicest feature, however, is the range replace which allowed me to clean up a mess of convoluted code in the header of the web pages. I think PowerGrep could do something like that, but it just jumped out at me in BKReplaceEM.

I did not use XReplace32 for lack of time and opportunity since I had my hands full with work. What put me off was that I read a comment that the regex features were turned off in the trial product.

I will continue to track my learning curve on my regular expressions page. These are first impressions, but informed by real work.

Saturday, October 25, 2003

 

Learning to express myself in regex

I did some work on regular expressions, updating the web page with some new finds. I am looking at three Windows utilities, BK ReplaceEM, XReplace32 and PowerGrep. ReplaceEM is nice because it is free and flexible. PowerGrep is by far the most powerful application, but it costs $100.

The real problem is going beyond book learning to putting regex into practice. Letting loose an operation on 300 files can be pretty daunting when you're not completely sure of what it will do. I've used ReplaceEM to clean up and convert web pages to a new format for GlobalSecurity.org.

The advantage to Windows utilities over a scripting language like Perl is that you don't have to carry the overhead of running a programming environment. With a Windows utility, you can start applying it immediately. If I were comfortable with Perl or PHP, which are free, I'm sure it would be a simple matter. I've start looking at setting up a webserver with scripting languages installed, but it's still an hurdle to get the whole system set up and running correctly.

Monday, October 20, 2003

 

Pardon the mess

I am in the middle of simplifying the design of this site, as I did with gci275.com last week. I am switching from a JavaScript navigation menu to one based on a simple list with Cascading Style Sheet formating. I just wanted to get ride of the complication of maintaining complicated scripts. But I've run into some unforeseen issues that make the menu function really weirdly in Mozilla and Opera browsers. It's really frustrating because I thought it would just be a few hours work over the weekend. I was wrong. I am going to have to do a much better job of testing things out on a staging server before deploying it to my host. My only consolation is that only a small percentage of my visitors don't use Internet Explorer, but I've joined the push to get people to use standards-compliant browsers. This probably just shows that the newer browsers are less tolerant of loose coding.

The frustrating thing is that I'd much rather spend the time working on content or do work on clients' sites. Web development work can be really time-consuming, detail-oriented and bewildering when you're in the middle of troubleshooting. Since I don't do this stuff full time, I have just enough knowledge to get myself in trouble, but not really master the material.

Postscript

It's 1:00 AM and I discovered the silly little error in CSS coding that threw off my design in Mozilla and Opera browsers -- I had not been consistent with my z-index numbering: some pages had the content section as 3 and a few were 1. The result was that the menu could be seen on the left hand side, but a visitor could not click on the links. Fortunately, I was able to isolate the pages that worked and compare them, but for the longest time, I was comparing the wrong part of the page -- the menu -- when issue lay with the content section.

Saturday, October 18, 2003

 

Interesting tools being developed for Mozilla/Firebird

One plus that Mozilla has over Internet Explorer is the wide range of extensions and add-ons that are being developed for Mozilla or Firebird. I checked out MozDev.org and found several that were interesting for me for web development work:

Please note that the MozDev.org site seems extremely slow. This may be a sign of increasing interest since Mozilla began raising its profile. Some of the extensions will only install on Firebird (streamlined browser) or Mozilla (full feature browser and mail client). Some of these extension incorporate features that are also present in bookmarklets and favlets. What is neat here is that everything is incorporated into the browser interface, either in sidebars, toolbars or context menus.

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

 

Mozilla is going to have hard time making inroads on IE

Mozilla Charts an Independent Course: "Even with its new ambitions, Mozilla is competing in a market where Microsoft Corp. commands a 95.4 percent share with its Internet Explorer browser. It remains to be seen how much of a dent Mozilla can make in that dominance. Mozilla, the third most popular browser, holds a 1.6 percent share of global users, according to Web analytics vendor OneStat.com. 'It's very unlikely that Mozilla is going to make any inroads at this point,' said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research, in New York. 'From the end user perspective, the browser is just a function and not something they think about anymore.'" eWeek More in line with my entry from yesterday. Also see my page on web browsers.

Monday, October 13, 2003

 

Putting my money where my mouth is

I decided to act on my comments about Internet Explorer. I went out and actually laid down money, all of $39, for the Opera browser. In fact, this entry is being edited while using that browser. The Blogger interface looks only remotely like when it is in IE. Some of the shortcut keys that I have come to depend on are not available. I suspect that this has to do with the way that JavaScript is implemented in Opera. I had been planning to buy it some time ago but while I was doing my postgraduate work, I could not justify spending the money in my own mind. I wasn't doing enough web design work beyond my own site.

I have also updated my version of Mozilla and made it my default browser. I will see how it all works out. I can foresee circumstances in which I have to revert back to IE. My first reaction is that I think I could get hooked on using tabs for browsing rather than opening multiple windows for each session.

I have also created a page on browsers and the upgrade issue. I plan on including a simple code add that will alert people to switch to a modern browser. I should also include the Microsoft info that has stirred the latest discontent with the browser arising out of the Eolas case.

Friday, October 10, 2003

 

CSS getting easier than ever, IE's future gets harder

This piece came out today and struck a cord: Developers gripe about IE standards inaction: "CSS has gained in popularity for a number of reasons. By letting developers specify design elements that apply to any number of individual pages, CSS makes Web pages more flexible, easier to change en masse and lighter by half. The end result, developers say, is Web sites that are not only faster to load, but cheaper to build and maintain." CNET News.com However, the way the situation with Internet Explorer is evolving with the recent court decision against Microsoft in the Eolas case, the user experience is going to degrade quickly over the coming months and years. There was also a comment about this in the WebStandards.org weblog. Eric Meyer points out the dilemma. It's all going to turn into a fiasco for MS when combined with all the security issues that are popping up.

The night before Chris Pirillo sent out a list of automated, online CSS generators in his Windows newsletter, which I have added to my CSS page. These services provide the code that can be pasted into the heading or in a separate file.

 

Joe Firmage makes an important argument about open source/science

An open-source letter: "Public and private organizations around the world are now choosing the fundamental character of information infrastructure likely to serve human civilization for decades to come, possibly for centuries to come. The stakes of this choice reach far beyond the trivialities of the case of SCO vs. Linux. They reach far beyond the market cap of Microsoft. Our choice will inevitably shape the very purpose, freedoms and ethics of the medium through which human beings will communicate, trade, govern, learn and play in the 21st century and beyond." Cnet / News.com Joe Firmage is a former manager at Novell and knew about the build-up to the dispute between SCO Group and the Linux community. He provides some compelling, knowledgeable reasoning, the best I've heard so far, about why the SCO Group's claim is unfounded. But he also broadens the perspective to look at what's really at stake.

Thursday, October 09, 2003

 

Dueling Tech Blogs

Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation now has a blog, a kind of group grok with postings by four contributors. We'll have to keep our eye on this one. MIT may have gotten jealous of the folks over at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Certainly, law and engineering produce different takes, but the Berkman Center has had major impact in the blogging world, especially after the BloggerCon gathering earlier this week.

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

 

Daily read

I spent part of my lunch hour going through Corante's weblog cluster. Starting with Many2Many and on to Instant Messaging and Ideaflow, there are interesting people writing about ideas that excite me. I almost makes me shut down this blog and leave a permanent link to Corante. I also receive their news summary by e-mail so they are also doing a news survey every day as well. I just hope that the business is viable.

I continue to beef up the regex page by reorganizing the material and adding links about JavaScript and regex. The use of regex in JavaScipt is fairly widespread and since most web developers start fiddling with JavaScript early in their learning process, it should be easy to pick up in that way.

Saturday, October 04, 2003

 

New additions and old thoughts

Although I have not added many entries to this weblog, I have been beefing up the other parts of the site. First, I added a page on outliners and organizers. I found a lot of instructional material on Inspiration, my main thinking tool. In some previous entries here, I had made some initial comments, which I've now augmented.

I also started up a page on regular expressions. That may seem like I'm going off the deep end since I'm not into Perl, the main scripting language for regular expressions, or some of its peer languages. But for my main client, GlobalSecurity.org, I have to convert tons of pages. I suddenly figured out that I already have lots of tools that can use regex: HomeSite, Dreamweaver, HTMLKit, Textpad, and BK ReplaceEM, for a start. It's kind of like learning a foreign language -- syntax and vocabulary.

I've also tried to add a little more consistency to the site structure, adding index pages to the web and XMIT sections. I've also shuffled around sections of pages to more appropriate places in the site organization. Stuff coming off gci275.com and eliminate duplications. For instance, my CSS page is getting a once-over.

My goal is to make this site an extension of my learning process, both at the OAS and with my consulting clients. Write it down, record it, fit it into a framework so that I don't have to learn it again or go to Google and sort through 40 links. In other words, I am writing for myself, but sharing it with anyone else who might want to look over my shoulder. My one concern is how much of the specifics I can put out on the Web without betraying my employer/client relationship.

Friday, October 03, 2003

 

Cover your back

CFO Magazine surveys the advantages of Voice over IP for corporations. The article came out before the Hurricane Isabel disasters in the Mid-Atlantic states which resulted in loss of power for more than a week for some people. I was without power and Internet access for about three days. That meant I could not use my Vonage VoIP service. I have kept my landline so we still had access to a phone during that time. The lesson is to cover all options so that you are not trapped by technological choices that boomerang.


Where We're Coming From

In October 2001, I was a member of a group of 17 IT professionals that took their first tentative steps together towards a graduate degree in information technology. Over this period, we learned together, we griped together and we ate stirred-fried vegetales together for lunch until fast food started looking good. Our classes took place at the Shady Grove campus of the Maryland University System.

In April 2003, we finished our course work and we graduated on May 17. But our professional journey does not end with that ceremony. This site is meant to be a landmark for the classmates who shared 18 months. I also intend to use this site as a learning area. It's part of my mental makeup to register things on the Web as part of my continuing learning process. After all, the technologies that we studied are in constant evolution and flux.

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