Way, way in the back

After adding a few statistic-gathering services to this blog, I've discovered that people have spiders on their minds. A lot, apparently. Most of the (very rare) search hits that dig me up have to do with them. my previous entry on the subject as the only thing getting me cold traffic.

After more research I've determined that the spiders I had so many encounters with this summer were, in fact, fairly standard orb-weavers, although good-sized for an Ohio specimen. I still don't know the exact species, but one of them rode all the way to work with me on my side mirror yesterday.

My son, Jack, who is going on 21 months old as I write this, has quite suddenly become capable of watching movies. Or at least, he is capable of watching a movie as long as that movie is "Lilo and Stitch". Up till now, he was just too hyper to sit down and pay attention for the requisite timespan.

I'm thinking that he may have even become too good at doing this.

I'm conflicted over this event. On the one hand, I don't want to encourage him to sit there like a vegetable all day. On the other hand, suddenly I can do any number of things while he does so. Things like preparing his dinner, or cleaning afterwards, or sending an email or making a phone call. It seems like forever since I was able to do things like these while he was awake.

The next time I hear someone complain about parents who "let the TV be a babysitter", I'll make sure to ask them whether they just spent almost two years chasing a baby.

I just spent about 25 minutes trying to figure out why this blog was malfunctioning. When the page would come up, it would at first be correct, and then suddenly resize itself to be too small to see many of the posts.

I knew I had caused this problem myself, as I had been goofing around with it on Friday. I spent a little while trying to back out my changes, which had the effect of making the problem intermittant, which was decidedly not an improvement.

Finally I just did a "view source" into a local copy and started ripping and tearing. I came to the conclusion that the links to the stat and directory services that I had placed in my sidebar (where the links are) were making the render of that div take longer, and for some reason IE would resize what it thought of as the entire page size when that render was complete, making the browser only show enough vertical space to fit in the links and images in the sidebar. Although I still don't have any idea why IE would do that, I just worked around it by putting all those links in the main column, at the bottom.

Almost five years now, I've struggled with HTML/browser GUIs. It's not getting better. There was a time in the world of interface design when you could depend on things to work. Everything worked differently, but it worked better. If I had seen a raw Windows or OS/2 API or Swing GUI do something like that, I could almost always find out why. Nowadays, with "thick clients" being almost hysterically out-of-fashion, we're left with HTML and a browser. Increasingly, the process of working with these things is that you just assume that there are ten million spec errors, odd spec implementations, and flat-out bugs that live under the covers, and to carry that analogy one step further, you just do your best to sleep on top of them.

The worst part is that I'm really starting to stick out in my chosen profession for not just ignoring this problem. Hasn't anyone noticed that after these last 5 years of churn, the most basic problems involved in this stateless, view-after-view model of application design remain unsolved? Go on out to TheServerSide and read a little. I love that site, but for the last bunch of years, every day there has brought the announcement of 5-15 new projects and/or products. All of them can be classified as attempting to solve one of the four or five basic underlying problems involved in writing web applications (security, session management, presentation, etc.). What does it tell us that nobody agrees on the solution to these problems? What does it tell us that the various user groups that spring up around each of the implementations of these solutions resemble nothing so much as congregations.

I acknowledge the reality that the web is a fixture now, and that this status makes it extremely difficult to affect change in the basic infrastructure. But all the same, after five years I still can't bring myself to drink the kool-aid on this one. The dream of a universal client is a wonderful one, but we're far from the promised land on this score, and web browsers, I am increasingly convinced, are just not ever going to get there.

I haven't seen much in the way of reporting on this issue, but I wonder if anyone other than me has noted the wonderful amount of quietude recently exhibited by their telephones. I say: thank you, FCC. (And I never once imagined I would ever say such a thing). Until further notice, I'm considering the do-not-call registry a massive success. Exactly the kind of thing that makes me feel a little better about paying my taxes.

Not that there haven't been some neccesary adjustments in my thinking. The other day, my wife and I were just leaving the house when the phone started to ring. For the last several years, I suddenly came to realize, I would blow off that call without thinking and continue on my way. This time, however, it struck me that, since the annoying marketers have been sidelined, the person on the other end of the line was, most likely, someone I actually wanted to talk to. Next thing I know, I'll actually be running out of the shower to answer the phone. I might have to bump up the number of rings before the machine picks up.

Now, if I could just get my email account back...

I scooped these folks by almost two weeks, but their article is much more comprehensive and damning in a general sense than my effort. Of course, they're the ones who got a slashdot link. It's a rare day when I find myself thinking "I need to go more negative in the future".