07/24/2002

James McNally reviews the CSS book in Digital Web. I think he liked it. You might, too.
posted 12:20 PM

07/23/2002

The owner of the company whose site so curiously resembled ours has written in again, to let us know that the site was, indeed, pirated, and that they've taken it down. He says he will be pursuing the "designer" with "some gusto". I wish him luck. His company claims to recognize the importance of having a powerful and unique identity. It must have been extremely embarrassing to find that theirs was a weak, bastardized copy of a previously existing powerful, unique identity.
posted 11:02 AM

07/22/2002

Last week, this company was found to have stolen, as of sometime last fall, our site's design, copy, general layout, and various other stuff, including scripts and graphics, which we launched nearly a year prior. They then proceeded to modify it in bizarre and unexplainable ways (I love the drop shadow on their bastardized version of our logo, for example).

For those who would question whether the site was actually stolen as opposed to merely having had a great influence on some impressionable designer, feel free to view source. The DHTML menus are still composed of DIVs named "expertisemenu", "processmenu", and "proofmenu", despite their labels on the stolen site being named "products", "services", and "admin"; the footer DIV is inexplicably named "midfunk" on both sites (I'm not even sure we knew what midfunk was supposed to be when we launched ;); you can see my comments in the script that runs the menus (such as "silly browser specific values"), about which I presented at Web2001 nearly a year later; the graphics for the "case studies" section are tiny versions of the logos of the companies they originally represented, namely Sports-Expo.com, TomPaine.com, RedHat Center, McKinney and Silver, and one other I can't make out. The complex, three-way mouseover behavior on the menu buttons, icons, and so forth is exactly the same (it should be - it's the same source). And, of course, "Are you ready?" which once posed its query as the lead out from "Image is only the Beginning - Today's Web means Business". Even the three curved corner boxes in the main graphic were reused by the thief. Anyway, the site is now listed in pirated-sites.com.

They have taken the site down, claiming they bought the design from a third party, which is, I suppose, possible. You may, if you ware a Web designer, wish to check out their other site, which offers a variety of other designs for license. Not, as you might suspect, to patronize them as a customer, but rather to verify that none of the other designs they offer for sale or license were acquired under similarly lax circumstances.
posted 13:39 PM
Quite a weekend. Jeff and Leslie dropped by on Friday, on their way to the Outer Banks, and Jessamyn and Greg stayed the weekend, and a good time was had by all. A bizarre intermission was brought about by an accident in front of the house that took out a telephone pole, which CP&L had to replace, bringing down our electricity for a good three hours, which time was spent on the porch watching the show. I got pictures, and will post them as soon as I can get them downloaded off the cam. And, of course, after the three days of three square meals, copious cocktails, and general merriment, I need a good long nap.
posted 12:55 PM

07/16/2002

A new article in New Architect this month: Debugging Web Applications. Lots of hints 'n' tips.
posted 11:58 AM

07/12/2002

I'm a complete freak when it comes to headlines. I look for ambiguities, deeper meanings, hidden and unintentional ironies, and sometimes just weird juxtapositions as a result of placement. This past year or so has been a gold mine, it seems. How can editors release stories with headlines like "Bishops planning child abuse strategy" or "Some in GOP moving past Bush on business fraud"?
posted 10:50 AM

07/11/2002

Nothing makes me snort as much as hearing about our "Homeland". Come on, this isn't a "homeland", at least not for the vast majority of us (and most of the few for whom it may well be proper to call it a homeland already have their own homelands within it, and so aren't affected (much) by the new Homeland term.) My progenitors landed from England in 1646 or thereabouts and France in the 1700s. So, I've got some right to call this a homeland, relatively speaking (if you'll pardon the pun). But the word feels wrong, stale, silly. Can't we come up with something that doesn't smack of Hitler, Stalin, or Disney?
posted 12:51 PM

07/10/2002

The real story behind the "under God" business. As you might expect, it was a Scotsman who slipped in the offensive reference to $deity. (Hat tip: Chris "Bubba" Knight)
posted 14:56 PM

07/06/2002

Oh, joy! Sister Mary Rose, of Covenant House in NYC, sent me a chain with a cross on it, for some reason. The chain is too small for my neck, and it broke when I went to pick it up. Just fell apart. That's the sort of thing that really builds confidence that your tax-free donations are going to be spent wisely, eh?
"I gave Sister Mary Rose $50 and all I got was this shoddily made cross that broke the second time I picked it up, as well as the knowledge that some homeless boy was forced to recognize an outdated form of bureaucratic mysticism before they would feed and house him."
Sorry, I'm not a big fan of these solicitations. Makes me wish that back when my aunt died of cancer I had made that gift to the American Cancer Society anonymously. Because now that I'm on the lists, which they sell to one another as part of their fundraising activities, I'm going to keep getting more shoddy stuff from groups I don't care to support. It's a waste of money and time and effort.
posted 17:51 PM
Boy, I sure love the fact that Microsoft has such lousy mail tools that even those of us who choose not to use them are targets of virus writers. I've received nearly 500 copies of Klez and variants since April, and they just keep streaming in. I filter them into a mailbox, and I'm running MacOS X and Linux, so I don't have anything to fear from them, but it is tiresome.
posted 13:17 PM