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 Today while riding the bike to work I saw something suprising. For years the only occupants of the siding off the Port of Redwood city branch leading to Lyngso building materials have been various pieces of MOW equipment. But today a BNSF hopper car was spotted at the end of the track and some kind of pellet like material was being offloaded into a truck via a conveyor belt. The local must have had a nice time switching this, because they would have had to move the MOW equipment out of the way, and then put it back afterwards to slide this car in. All in all the line to the port is an interesting reminder of what freight railroading was like all over the peninsula in the post war years when the Southern Pacific ran lots of short industrial leads all over the new industrial parks, almost of all of which have vanished in the mean time. However of late the port has been quite busy with both Granite rock and the metal recycling people taking lots of cars, and the chemical folks guzzling the occasional tank car. So it’s nice to see Lyngso actually using their connection again too!
Ever since the divergence between Netscape and Internet Explorer browser compatibility has been a major challenge for web designers. At Art in Action I’ve been very concerned about this, since our users are often very technically unsophisticated and we can presume run wide range of browsers on sometimes fairly old hardware. Proof of this comes when we ask some users about version of the browser they’re using, and they respond with: “What’s a browser?” .
As I’ve dug into things though I’ve discovered that this is one problem that’s actually becoming fairly manageable. Simply, the newer browsers are better behaved. If you stick to very pure, syntactically correct html and javascript, you actually get very predictable results on the modern browsers. (I should point out, as I described in earlier entries, that I rely a lot on portable html design patterns and deep syntax checking of the html to make sure I have a good starting point.) What about the older browsers? Not wanting to setup lots of machines, I found two useful tricks. First, Adobe Browser Lab is an excellent tool for comparing web pages in different browsers. You simply register on their site, indicate which browser versions you want to try, give it a url, and off you go. This confirmed that actually most of the browsers were producing perfectly equivalent results. I was still concerned about IE 6 which is the oldest and worst of the browsers still commonly in use. I wanted to test it more thoroughly. I then remembered my Microsoft Virtual PC instance. When I got my new computer it has Vista on it, and discovered that unlike with XP I couldn’t run a lot of old software anymore. So I installed Virtual PC with a Windows 98 instance. That runs old stuff like the wonderful complete National Geographic collection perfectly. This was running IE 5, which was current back when Windows 98 came out. I then realized that early versions of IE 6 still supported Windows 98, and upgraded the instance to IE 6. Now I could try out the site using a really old browser and OS combination. Interestingly, it all worked fine, which confirms my belief about the value of writing very clean, portable html. Just for fun, I did try IE 5 too, but there the lack of modern Javascript did things in.
That said there are still subtle rendering differences between browsers which will certainly drive a true artist nuts. However, if you are a pragmatist like me, you’ll find that by being disciplined in your work and being a little flexible as to what the precise outcome is, it’s actually not too hard nowadays to produce very portable applications. I will also say that this discipline is greatly eased if you are not producing ad hoc html, but generating it via an engine according to fixed rules. The rigourous use of stylesheets and the fact that in our application almost everything is generated from a higher level representation makes all of this vastly more tractable.
So I got snow leopard today and upgraded my computer. Actually, the whole install went very smoothly, which I think was one of the design goals. Mostly everything just worked. I installed the OS and xcode. Most things simply worked. I had had the foresight to upgrade the Cisco VPN to the latest version BEFORE I did this, since it usually breaks on an OS upgrade. The first real challenge came with the printer, an Epson 600 Workforce. It uses ppc code, and rosetta, the emulation layer, is no longer installed by default. So I had to install that, and then reinstall the printer driver, having updated it from Epson’s site. It now works perfectly. The next challenge came with the unix applications. I had to forcibly reinstall and rebuild everything in macports, but that went ok. Where I got in trouble is with Wine, which depends on a version of Freetype that’s being only built for 64 bits when it’s needed in 32bits. What’s going on of course is standard Unix dependency hell triggered by the migration of much of OS X to 64 bits in Snow Leopard. Well since others have already logged the bug with macports, I’m sure it will be gone in a few days.
So now that I did, do I like it ? Visually the most obvious change is conforming the default gamma setting to the same value as in Windows. The colors on my desktop are noticeably different. There’s lots of other little changes too. John Siracusa’s review on Ars Technica gives an in-depth look at what’s new. The new finder and dock/expose features are nice, it feelds speedier, and lots of other nice little things. It’s not a revolution, but a good incremental improvement. And at $29 the price was right.
We did it! It’s always a great feeling to launch a new product. The new Art in Action online program has been a very interesting project, not only allowing me to try out different technologies like Symfony, but for the interesting management challenges the project has posed. In particular, using our team of high school interns (all girls) was quite the challenge. It turned out great and they were both smart and productive, and a lot of fun to work with. But it required a lot of preparation on my part to create appropriate tools so that they could be productive.
It’s also kind of a unique system. Although Art in Action exists to teach students art, this project is not about directly having students go online, rather it’s focus is on teaching the parents and teachers who deliver the curriculum how to teach art themselves. It’s also an interesting mixture of art history and art application. The common hierarchy of concepts in terms of which all the art works are explained is actually a fairly interesting concept from a theory-of-art perspective. It provides a common, reusable framework in terms of which a broad range of works from many different times and cultures can be examined.
Of course, like all 1.0 releases, we have a long list of stuff we didn’t get into the first version, but that’s the fun of software projects. We’ll fill more of this in coming months, and we do have a lot of very interesting ideas.
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The funny little tractor I saw a couple months ago next to the track reveals its power as a mighty locomotive. This interesting little beast can drive on its tires on the road, or pull a train. The pictures here show it coupled onto a set of Caltrain construction cars. As always, these guys tend to run mostly on weekends or off hours, and then spend the day time parked here.
A few days after the tractor arrived, this tamper also showed up.
As with many experiences in life, to casual passers by this may appear a static scene, but close examination day after day reveals a wealth of detail and change.
