From Dictionary.com
ho·bo Audio pronunciation of "hobo" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (hb)
n. pl. ho·boes or ho·bos1. One who wanders from place to place without a permanent home or a means of livelihood.
2. A migrant worker.
I'm sitting on the steps behind my favorite coffee office (PCJ). My hands are a little cold, but I think I should be able to maintain about 75-100 words a minute before they freeze over. PCJ should be open by then.
To be trendy/popular in web design you need to put the following things in your designs:
Those are the basics. If you doubt me, check out the new MovableType design, A List Apart, Mozilla.org, and Drupal.
Personally, I think Mozilla.org is the reason for the rounded corners (and much of Drupal's current look). I'm not really sure who started the margin thing. It could have been any one of these guys.
I like all of the above, but I'm still a big fan of flexible designs like SitePoint's and Semantic Studios. The flexibility is definitely an advantage. But I'm sure its value is debatable (Gabe...?). :)
WordPress, one of the other blogging systems I follow (and host), has gone from 1.2 to 1.5 today. The version number jump was well reasoned.
The new version comes with plenty of new features: improved comment moderation, manage page (non-journal content; e.g. "about me"), a dashboard, and the code base shrank in size (following their "Code is Poetry" mantra).
I've pondered switching Ben's Friends over to WordPress. The only hold up is that lack of support for multiple blogs (which is a rather pivital problem). You can technically only run one blog per WP installation/database. There are ways to hack it to work with more, but then you're stuck with nasty upgrade/patch problems down the road. Official multiblog functionallity is planned, but it won't likely happen until 2.0 is released (no date given that I know of). We'll see.
The WP developers are all rather well known, standards focused kind of folk, so their in product is definitely one of the best blogging software packages available.
Internet Explorer 7 was announced recently by Mr. Gates & Co. The article linked to above details what little information was given in the announcement as well as links to a few reactions (some by Mozilla Foundation folk).
From what little can be gleaned at this point IE 7 is being pushed as a giant security fix. There's been little (if any) talk of improving the antiquated rendering engine. We'll see if IE 7 is merely an attempt to get some press and retrieve some of the recent Firefox converts, or if (which is very doubtful) Microsoft actually cares about supporting standardized improvements to the Internet.
I guess we'll have to wait until the beta's hit the streets this summer.
In the meantime Browse Happy and/or Spread Firefox.
For those who haven't swung by CrazyDreamers.com in a while, I wanted to announce that our wedding photos are up. We created a little gallery/PayPal store for those who would like to order online. If you're not able to or would like some other way of ordering, please let me know by either commenting here or e-mailing me.
I hope everyone enjoys the photos.
Specail thanks to Joy for the great photos.
A friend stopped by to chat
for which I was thankful
but then
without thinking hard enough
I looked at my computer screen
trying to multitask.
He, feeling he was stealing my time
(a worthless commodity if not spent on people)
apologized for keeping me from my
work.
My work
what more is it than
people?
Forgive me Christ for
sacrificing
his comfort
his words
his time
to check my screen
worthless waste
to spend Your time
on something less than
a member of your body.
I hadn't thought about it being closed to Easter in a while. I haven't mused on the last few weeks of Christ's life in a long time. Why should it come to my memory? What would bring me to think about it? I might read about it in devotions (that too-small time I cut out for study/meditiation/not-enough-prayer each morning), but not likely since I'm not in the Gospels. Another disciple might bring it to my attention if they happened to be watching the calendar.
As it was, there were two ladies at the coffee shop with something on their forheads. Didn't see what it was. Then a business man walked by, said "hello" to the ladies and then said "Must be Ash Wednesday" and wandered of.
Mr. Business took notice of Christ's last days based on the smudge of smoke-grime on the forheads of these ladies. Did he think about Christ? Did they? I don't know, but it's made me stop to think about why I hadn't been.
What do I do to keep Christ before me? Do I ponder his life based on the day of the year? It would be better than my stumbling along as I am now, thinking about things at random, not pursuing a diligent, disciplined thirst-answer-search, just wandering.
Google does it again: Google Maps.
Incredible DHTML application that's still in Beta, but already rivals anything else out there.
I'm impressed. Anyone else?
A List Apart released a great article (or so I think, though it is "controversial" in the web community) discussing a clean (read standards focused) way of handling JavaScript behaviors.
The JavaScript Triggers article analyzes the current standards/symantec problem with incorporating event triggers in your XHTML. If you are working toward true separation of concerns (keeping logic, content, and style separate) this seems to be the way to go.
The author, building on this conclusion, demonstrates a method to creat custom elements in XHTML to use with JavaScript. He creates a "required" and "maxlength" attribute to use in form validation.
This works "out of the box" until you want to validation your page through and XHTML validator. To get around the errors generated by the new para-standard elements, the author shows how to create a custom DTD to extend the XHTML standard to support your new elements.
This is likely the way I'll be going with any web apps I build in the future. The approach makes the most sense when it comes to balancing separation of concerns on the client side.
There's a new coffee at Port City Java that is excellent. It's known as "Dark Star" and is one of their free trade, organic coffees.
If you're near downtown Greenville, you should check it out.
I drink mine with a good bit of half-and-half and smidge of sugar in it. My wife, recommends getting it as a cafe au lait breve (half and half instead of milk).
Forgot to mention this when I heard it on NPR, but Brazil is making the move to all Open Source software from now on. The NPR summary has a few other links.
Congratulations, Brazil. Please let me know if you need any Open Source web technology consulting/work.