Monkinetic Weblog

Nothing really visible from out there, but redmonk.net is now running Wordpress 2.0. Yummy.

Wow, Adelina started pre-school yesterday. She had a good day yesterday - a bit teary when she realized that mommy wasn't staying, but then she had a great time! Today... man, she did NOT want to get out of bed!! :-) After we got her calmed down and reminded her about her new friends, she perked up and was out the door with few problems. Jodi dropped her off at school and she linked arms with her classmates and off she went!

I'm "watching" the SteveNote over on TUAW and MacRumors.

I *heart* StarGate.

Yes, I want a MacBook Pro. Yes, the name sucks. "PowerBook" was such a strong brand - and it came about long before the CPU had "power" in it, so why drop it now?

Man, I am SO BEHIND on the blogging thing. Since I last posted we've had Christmas, visits from family, a trip to the Christmas fair, and today Adelina started school. Wow.

I've been doing a major filesystem re-org lately in my ongoing mission to Get More Done. In the spirit of GTD, I created several directories starting with an "@" -- @ARCHIVE, @PROJECTS, etc.

Useful: quicksilver:command_keys

Oh, man, this does my designer's heart good. Elements OF Typographic Style Applied to the Web. When I was first starting out in Graphic Design I was studying print design, as there was no Intarweb yet to speak of. Typography was near and dear to my heart, and I could spend an afternoon looking at type samples. Web typography gets us back somewhat to those days when there were rules on how you used type, because they worked.

If you're new to using JSF like me and are trying to figure out how the heck to use javascript's document.getLementById () with JSF's dynamically assigned HTML ids, this might be a solution, if an ugly one:

I've recently been reading UIE's blog again - and I like the short but pointed analyses of how various web sites implement the web design patterns that have evolved over the last 10 years.

Welie.com: patterns in Interaction Design. Also, time-tripper.com: UI Patterns and Techniques

I've recently rediscovered UIE's blog on User Interface and User Experience issues, UIE Brain Sparks. I saw Jared Spool back in '98 at the Thunder Lizard web conference in Atlanta, and was impressed then as well. While I don't agree 100% with UIE's conclusions in every case, I like their approach and attention to detail, and the information is the kind of thing I want to file away for future reference.

Interesting post from Alex Bosworth about the uses of scripting and AJAX in "modern" web apps, and what users have come to expect.

I'm playing around with FAlbum, a Wordpress plugin that pulls recent posts from my flickr account. It's nicely done, though the documentation is somewhat lacking. I've added several recent pics to the top of the blog.

A while back I blogged about Mashuptown, the awesome site and podcast that has been showcasing mashups (two unrelated songs mixed together in some clever way) for the last, oh 8 mos, or so.

Quick idea for an OS X app/hack: How about something that would let me embed a terminal window in a splitview in any OS X application window? Then I could attach a terminal to, say, a Safari window where I have reference materials loaded up, or to the TextEdit document where I'm documenting some process.

Seth pointed me to prototype.js, a handy Javascript library for doing a variety of gee-wizzy things in webapps, one of which is performing a variety of useful AJAX functions. After fighting with it for way longer than necessary, I turned to:

In case you haven't noticed the Quick Links (or haven't cared, as is likely with a large percentage of my reading demographic) I've been working on a rewrite of one of our apps at work, and part of that rewrite is some nifty AJAX-based stuff. I think it's going to make the app quite a bit nicer to use. I've started calling this the "Frankenapp": it's a FileMaker Pro webapp where FMP's template output is post-processed by PHP, and includes several hundred lines of JavaScript, plus the code that handles the XML back-and-forth (also crossing the FMP-PHP bridge) to make it act nice.

When using AJAX, remember that the A is for Asynchronous.