Working with CSS: Dave Shea

Last night I attended Dave Shea's talk Working with CSS. The talk was put on by the Vancouver XML Developers Association, and hosted at ActiveState.

I thought Dave provided a very good overview of how CSS can be used to separate the design from the content of a site. Using simple examples (and some more complex ones from his CSS Zen Garden site, he really demonstrated the power of CSS to an audience of very mixed technical backgrounds. After showing us how CSS operates in ideal terms, he spent much of the latter half of his presentation talking about the realities -- browser bugs and incompatibilities. While some of the questions from the audience were possibly a bit too techincal and esoteric for the evening, Dave's talk stayed on a level that I felt was accessible and interesting to the entire group.

Even though I'm the complete opposite of a web designer -- I feel much more at home hacking c/c++ server code than doing HTML -- I came away from this talk having learned something and feeling inspired. If this feeling lasts, I might eventually get around to turning this blog into something more presentable!

• Tags:
• css
• vanxml
• web
• html
• activestate

Spaghetti Arms

My arms feel like cooked spaghetti. My legs are tired and my core muscles feel dazed and confused. Last night was my first training session with Carmen from Human Motion. Kerry has been doing these sessions for quite some time and finally convinced me to give it a try. So, I'm signed up for a total of eight of these -- every Tuesday night.

The stuff we did sounds pretty simple if you don't think hard about it: we stood on one leg, twisted around a bit, did some partial push-ups, and other similar things. What makes this so hard is that we did them with our core muscles, holding positions for some duration and going through motions slowly. A push-up isn't a particularly difficult thing to do "normally". Half a push-up (the down phase only) is pretty tiring if you do it extremely slow, making sure that your core is engaged the whole way down.

I may end up feeling sore by tonight, but I'm already looking forward to going next week.

• Tags:
• core
• fitness
• workout
• spaghetti

The Coming Banana Apocalypse

Bananas are currently the number one fruit eaten in North America. That may change in the very near future.

In the last few years, a strain of fungus affecting bananas has started to spread. Many plantations in parts of South-East Asia have already been wiped out, and it is only a matter of time before it spreads to the South American plantations where we get virtually all our bananas from.

The disease is spreading this fast because of the lack of genetic diversity in commercial banana plants. The banans we enjoy are a seedless fruit and new plants are created from cuttings and other "cloning" techniques. Every single banana plant is essentially genetically identical, and thus vulnerable to this disease. There is no genetic diversity which would allow some plants to have higher levels of resistance to it.

As Popular Science reports, banana growers and geneticists are currently scrambling to develop new varieties of banana that are resistant to this disease and are commercially viable.

What I find interesting is how well this situation enforces the point of how detrimental a monoculture can be for agriculture. Bananas are certainly not the only crop being farmed with a very small genetic diversity. The number of different varieties of cattle, chickens, pigs, grains, and fruit has steadily dropped over the last hundred years. Many of the varieties that were common a century ago are now all but extinct, confined to niche markets if we're lucky. It is probable that a disease could evolve in the near future that all but wipes out another type of crop. This time it may not be a fruit we consider a luxury, but could very well be a staple food for much of the world such as rice or wheat.

• Tags:
• food
• banana
• diversity
• genetics
• agriculture
• farming

Say hello to my little friend...

No, not this one:

This one:

This weekend, I switched. This is the first time I've seriously used a Mac in well over ten years, and in a way it feels like I've come home after a long absence. I already feel more comfortable using the Mini than I do using a Windows machine.

Coming from a string of Linux boxes, this machine does all that they did and more: Full Unix commandline shell? Check! Unix dev tools (Vi!) and scripting languages? Check! X11? Check! The list of Unix happiness goes on and on. But what really gets me is that, as everyone says, "It just works". Scanner, digital camera, wireless network settings, sound sharing between apps -- everything worked without any issues. I didn't have to tweak any kernel modules, compile extra apps or hack config files by hand to get everything up and running.

Having used WindowMaker as my Linux desktop for many years, the OS X UI feels surprisingly familiar. The dock, the mini-windows and app-icons are all represented in almost the exact same way. You can really feel the NeXT history there. Even the "new" finder (which some people hate) can be run in a way that looks a lot like the NeXT file manager (or the GNUStep GWorkspace.app for that matter).

What has really made my day though is how easy it is to install and uninstall applications. With a few exceptions, you just drag the whole thing into (and out of) the Applications folder. That's it. Nothing like Windows where you run an installer that defecates files and registry entries all over your system. Or Linux where you spend a good part of a day looking for a package of the app you want, trying to resolve 15 dependency packages for it, and then finally grabbing source and compiling it because for some reason the only package you could find doesn't like your version of libfoobar.so.

The hardware is pretty spectacular too. It's small, quiet, and feels like it's been put together much better than any PC hardware I've ever seen. The old "beige-box" PCs I have sitting around look like massive, ugly dinosaurs beside the mini.

The verdict: I'm keeping it!

• Tags:
• Mac Mini
• Mac
• OSX
• Linux
• Unix
• windowmaker
• NeXT

Where There's Smoke...

We're finally getting a bit of a break from the smoke from the Burns Bog fire here in Vancouver. All last week we've had orange sunsets and occasionally thicker smoke blanketed the area, giving everything an eerie yellow glow in the middle of the day. Waking up in the mornings to the smell of smoke permeating through the closed windows isn't particularly pleasant either.

Biking to work has been a bit of a challenge too. Yesterday I found myself fighting the urge to cough while going up the final hill on the way home. Tonight should be much better, especially if some of the predicted rain showers materialize.

• Tags:
• Burns Bog
• fire
• vancouver
• cycling

Computers in the Livingroom

I've decided I hate computers in livingrooms. Beige boxes and monitors on desks just don't belong. Up until last weekend, a small "office" had been growing in the corner of our livingroom. I finally got around to moving the ugly little Ikea desk with the awkwardly large CRT monitor on top of it into into the second bedroom, which is now my new office. In their place is a small end table with a lamp and an futon chair. Much better looking, even though I want to replace both the lamp and the chair with better furniture.

For better or worse, there still aren't any less computers in the livingroom. My Linux desktop machine has been hidden underneath the TV to live as a MythTV PVR. I've also moved my 486 firewall/webserver/mailserver behind the couch, although that can easily be moved into the new office as well. The way the computers are positioned, fan noise isn't terribly loud unless MythTV is recording something. The 20 year old fridge in the kitchen masks any computer anywhere in the apartment when it's running, which seems to be most of the time... I'm still thinking of building a cheap, silent system to use as a dedicated MythTV frontend, and moving the backend server out of there.

The geekiest fun I had was setting up a workstation in the new office though. A few years back I installed RedHat 7.2 on Kerry's old P2 machine. A bit of hacking has cut bootup times in half (with more to come!) and turned it into a very nice X terminal that I can use to log on to the machine in the livingroom using XDMCP. That should give me enough tweaking to do until I go and buy the Mac Mini I've been drooling over.

• Tags:
• mythtv
• home office
• xdmcp
• linux
• silence