RasterWeb!

We installed ethernet in the house recently. For those of you unfamiliar with network cabling, here’s some background: In the old days networks had to be built using ‘wires’ to carry data from one point to another. I know, it sound strange, but I swear it’s true. While today you might be able to just open your iBook and be on the internet, some of us actually have to plug a ‘network cable’ into the back of an old Wallstreet in order to connect it to other computers or download RSS feeds…

So luckily I got an electrician friend of ours to help. Beside having the right equipment, he also had a spool of Cat5 cable. That helped quite a bit. Another friend supplied a jack crimping tool, and after spending somewhere under $15 for jacks and connectors, and way too much time trying to make our own network cables, we’re wired. (Or weird, depending on who you ask.)

Yes, now we can send email from the basement to the bedroom, we can run an aggregator and alert others to our presence while on the couch. It’s all quite amazing, and fairly affordable as well. (Not to mention the 100Mbit speed of it all…)

The next step is to move the office back into the basement. I don’t even want to calculate how many times we’ve moved the office, but I’m guessing it’s well into the double digits…

My children got to see their first anti-war protesters over the weekend.

(That’s something I wished I would never have to say…)

Time to break things around here, and by that we mean new features. Or is it new bugs. Or Both.

Anyway, we’ve added a strip of photos on the main page. We’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but haven’t quite gotten around to it. So like most things, we’ll throw it out there and refine it as it goes. Things of note. It’s not done but that’s ok, things on the web are never really done, right? Also, it looks like things are borked in Netscape 4.x in a most peculiar way, which might be just fine, though it is a puzzle as to how the borking manifests itself.

On the bright side, you’ll start seeing more photos around here. Yay.

In other news, I’m close to patching ht://Dig 3.1.6 to produce valid XHTML output. Just… need.. more… time…

Ok, on with the show…

Forwarding Address: OS X talks about designers, OS 9, and QuarkXPress:

In many cases this is the only thing binding design pros to OS 9. They want to migrate to OS X, but they can’t.

One of my designer friends recently told me that his shop was moving to OS X and InDesign. Granted, it’s a small shop, but still, it’s a start. I’m not sure how the other design shop I’m familiar with is handling the OS X transition.

As for my own experince, when Safari was released, I told a few people, and one person was heard to ask “Does it require OS X?” which tells me a little about the view from the design/OS 9 trenches around these parts…

Dave says this of Teoma:

Teoma appears to be as good a search engine as Google.

I’ve looked at Teoma a bit, as I’m just as nervous as the next cat about Google being the only game in town. (Competitions is a good thing, remember that!) Currently if you go to Teoma and attempt to submit a url, you are sent to ask.ineedhits.com where you are presented with an order form you can fill out, and pay to be included. This is not how the web works. This is not about equality. This is about money. From what I can tell, unless I’m missing something, a new site can’t just say to Temoa “please index me” unless they pony up some cash, or get some other site to link to them so the indexer follows the link. Though it takes a few click to find, Google has a simple (and free) way to submit a site for indexing.

Also of interest, from the About Teoma page:

Search results appearing under the heading “Sponsored Links” are provided by Google®, a third party provider of pay for performance search listings.

I’m not even sure what to make of that, besides the fact that Teoma seems dependant on Google for some things…