RasterWeb!

I should have a HandyTone 486 ATA sometime in the next week, which coincides well with the fact that I have a new phone number. In fact, I’ve got two new phone numbers, one is a SIP number, and the other is a virtual number, which means if you dial it, it’ll ring my SIP number…

So I hereby join the VoIP revolution. Not the Skype revolution mind you, as I really don’t wish to get locked into a single vendor with a proprietary format. I’ve got enough of that in my computing life already, thank you. I also didn’t want to join the Vonage $XX per month with locked hardware revolution, which might be fine for most people, but I’m a freak (and cheap) so it doesn’t work for me.

I’ll report back here on how things work using the HandyTone, my existing phones, and service through SIPphone.

Oh, if you’d like my new phone number(s), get in touch.

I’ve seen a few sites that try to “help” you find your way when you get lost… If you happen to request a page that does not exist, you get a 404 error, which means “Not Found.” The typical response (or at least I think it is) is to present this information to a user, and perhaps provide links to the home page of the site, or a sitemap, or a search box, or something of use, but I’ve seen sites that use a meta refresh to whisk you off to the home page after a few seconds. As the old saying goes “this is broken.”

The first problem is, I may never see this error in time. I often load pages into the background, into new tabs, and by the time I view the page, the message about not finding what I’m looking for, and being automatically redirected to the home page, is gone and I’m at the site’s root, and I don’t know why. Bad.

Bad number two, is that in some cases I can no longer see the URL of the page I requested. I’ve even seen a few sites that seem to redirect the 404 to a page that does not maintain the URL you requested, so you lose that information. I don’t care for that either.

(Don’t even get me started on sites that send you a 200 OK status code with a page that says 404 Not Found because that’s so backwards it makes my head hurt…)

(A good browser should allow you to disable the meta refresh “feature.”)

First Macromedia bought Allaire, and now Adobe is buying Macromedia.

First off, I really wish I could have convinced someone to choose PHP instead of ColdFusion 5 years ago when building a web application I still, to this very day, have to fight with… Really. I really do.

Second, as brought up at What Do I Know, what does this mean for SVG now that Adobe will have all that Flash-mojo under it’s belt? (Note: I am very pro-SVG, and somewhat anti-Flash…)

Once again, this should aid to illustrate why I am so in favor of open-source software and open standards… Sigh… at least things are never boring.

Are you in this photo? Know anybody in this photo?

If you do, please leave a comment or note pointing out who is who… Thanks!

I an teh lame and slowness, but I finally updated the Where Are They Now page.

Updates came from Kathy Belan (aka “dug belan’s sister”), Dan Gatewood, Jason Tertadian, Jay Geils, and a really old one from Julie German that I almost missed… (Thanks everyone!)

There’s been talk of a “Where Are They Now” party sometime in June, so if you’re interested, let me know…