Lair of the Wolf

This is my first entry to my new blog. I'm starting this blog, to put down my thoughts, opinions and comments about my life and the world around me. I'm an opinionated person, by nature, though I do try to respect other peoples opinions and not change them, so some of the posts may be a little bit ranty at times, while others will be just observational, about stuff that happened in my life, or deep/not-so-deep thoughts I've had during the day. My goal is for it to serve as a bit of a look into my life, as it stands, and will change. For more info about me, see my About Me page...

Well, The biggest thing to talk about right now is what i'm doing to PsychoticWolf.net at this point. I decided with this website i'd actually attempt to care about web standards, since I've accused Microsoft Internet Explorer, repeatedly of not being properly supporting, when it may be that i'm just bad at writing HTML that actually respects the standards in some ways. PsychoticWolf.net is being written in HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS2. This, while for those who know about the standards, know it's late to be finally adopting HTML4/CSS, is a major thing for me, as i'm actaully verifying the pages for validity.
When I began designing websites, I was much younger, and HTML 3.2 was still the active standard, as much, the editor I use, and still use, is only a HTML 3.2 editor. I like the editor because it is basically like Notepad+Wizards and helpful toolbars for HTML. I've used it to write alot of my PHP scripts as well. It's even handy for fixing up Apache Configurations, and other Unix/Linux documents as it understands the line-endings, when notepad doesn't. The editor was last updated in 1998. Since that time, HTML 4 and CSS came about. While I've taken the time to learn some CSS and write it correctly. I adopted a bad method for HTML.. I took the HTML 3.2, I knew, and began adding 4 tags to it, as I'd copy/paste and learn new. Never actually fixing the DOCTYPE or even learning the correct doctype syntax for 4. While I still do significant testing, among different browsers for viewability, it's not the correct method. Some I believe have named this practice "tag soup" as it's formed and thrown at the browser to deal with.
I now intend to upgrade all my pages to at least HTML 4.01 Transitional, and stay within spec or at least, try to, but for this site, I decided to test in Strict also, to see what the differences are. The experience has so far, been educational, to say the least. I've learned much of the changes that occured between HTML 3.2 and HTML4 in a matter of a few years, including stuff such as the dropping of the FONT tag, and some of the way CSS actually does a layout. I'm still not quite finished converting the site over, (as of this writing the photos and links pages are still not valid.) Home, About Me, Weblog, and WolfLan are valid though as they stand now. Though, I find that this is more complex than I figured it would be. I didn't realize how off I was from the Strict 4 standard in some cases.

The other reason I've decided to actually work on writing in Standard HTML, is because of the amount of time I've started spending around the Mozilla.org IRC channel and working with Mozilla Suite/Mozilla Firebird as a whole. For those who are aware of the existance of XHTML, and wonder why I'm spending time learning correct HTML4 and not XHTML 1.. Read this article, http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll finish the last two sections and getting them verifying, and fix a few site bugs which have popped up even though the code is valid. Due to differences in the way the browser shows the code, and be then able to finish the initial design/creation of my new homepage. I've got a lot more stuff that's personal and much less technical to do, still to come. :-)

Alright, tonight I finished upgrading Photos and Links to HTML 4.. this site is now, for what it's worth, HTML 4.01/CSS2 compliant. (Some sections are using Transitional and others Strict). I view webdesign as an art, and not at all like i'm scripting or programing, which are more technical or a science in nature. As a result, I tend not to be particularly standards-oriented, especially the strict standard. There are people who would probably criticize my stance as written in this blog entry, but, to quiet them down, I will state the following, I'm not trying to break the standard, I'm just not using the strict version of it, if time passes and the site gets broken because browsers change, I accept that, and will fix and upgrade it to specification then. I do not in any way ask for browsers to bend-over backward to support me. heh. Part of the way I'm writing this site, is to get my site out of what Mozilla calls "quirks mode" where it's not really sure what it's looking at and so it renders it in a common way. By picking some standard, and placing the full doctype at the top, I've now moved it into standards compliance mode.
A few examples of why I don't like the strict doctype is stuff like the following..
(1) I disagree with the W3C that the content and style should be seperate. I use CSS, mostly for it's powerful cross-page styling features.. but I also use older tags like CENTER and FONT. I'm learning CSS though, and will probably use the style="" attribute of tags more often.. I tend currently to only use CSS when linking to the stylesheet via class=""
(2) Sometimes it's a question of simplicity. In CSS2, it appears to center an item such as a image, you must float it as a block, (display : block) then use margin : auto... or in IE, it has to be margin-left: auto and margin-right:auto.. plus a width must be defined, (which for an image has been requirement to define and is done automatically, but for other types of objects, it is new, and not automatic)... Where the hell is something simple? like align : center? why does it have to be so complex? when the old method via HTML to do it was the atrribute ALIGN=CENTER. The closest it gets to something simple like align is a text-align property which doesn't work on objects.. (As it clearly indicates with it's name..) It just seems like an oversight to make it harder)..

My other issue with the HTML spec, as valid, is with HTML entiies and there interaction with a common method for using the query string... In a URL like.. http://www.psychoticwolf/fakepage.php?variable1=foo&variable2=bar, there's an ampersand between foo and variable2, which is used to split two parts of what's known as the query_string (anything after the ?). the issue is.. in valid html, the & is the starting character for an HTML entity, basically, it's code that prints a nice character.. like > or < and it ends with any non-alphanumeric character. so.. if strictly parsed.. I used an entity in that URL of &variable2 which isn't defined. of course, to the browser, it really doesn't affect anything. unless I called my variable name a name of a real entity, then the resulting behavior would be to replace my &variablename with the character. Makes sense, right? heh.. Only a couple of things.. I'm supposed to change the & to &a-m-p; (the hyphens are to prevent the browser from showing an & ) does this seem redundant to anybody? The stance of the HTML standard is that script authors should use something other than &, such as ; but if you say it, does it make sense with ;... that uri above would really read.. as.. "variable1 equals foo AND variable2 equals bar" makes logical sense.. unlike the latter. Does PHP allow you to change the & to &a-m-p; as it parses the script, to get around the error? nope.. you're supposed to use the entiy for a perfectly valid character. heh. go figure. I have literally hundreds or even thousands of that error on my pages.. heh.. as a result of no good way to easily convert it, for the output.. Bugs.PHP.net bugs # 25901, 15804, and 25248 relate to the topic. all of which have been marked bogus, because PHP says it "isn't a bug".. heh..

Anyways, thats all for now.. Maybe my next entry will be about something else, huh? heh..

Have you ever sat done and thought about what it meant to be able to speak? Just for a moment. Considered what we take for granted every day of our lives, the ability to communicate. Whether it's just having a conversation with a close friend, or speaking in front of a crowded room. Our voices make a difference in this world, when we use them. I'll start with a simple example we'd rather not think about... talking a friend out of suicide. Alot of us have considered it, maybe not seriously, but at some point, things probably got down and it seemed like a viable idea, for a moment.. When those close to us have these thoughts, for longer than a moment, we have a voice to tell them, that they shouldn't, not because we can give them a good reason. There's alot of not-so-good ones, that we hold to though. Sometimes we use religion as a reason not to. Truth is, we just know that the person needs somebody to be there, so they don't feel so alone anymore, and maybe just maybe, they'll come around. Though, the power of a voice, can also drive somebody to action... it's called, inciting a riot, if it's a large group... If it's between two people, it could be causing a fight, on the negaitve side... On the postitive side, you can give encouragement, that yes, somebody can do something.. that the goal they set for themselves is reachable. If it's a group, then it's probably to promote a common cause. to raise awareness of something wrong in the world. We know there's so many things wrong with the world... each of us notices some of them, some of us notice more than others. I feel like I notice more than the people around me. Sometimes it's difficult for me to even look outside, and face a world that seems so cold and harsh most of the time. We do though. I do and you do.. at least I hope you do.
People sometimes waste their voice, by using it to cause harm, singling out a person in a group, to pick on for being different, whether it's because they're smart, dumb, their race, sex, or sexual desires, or maybe it's because of a ethical or religous view. Intolerance is one of the biggest problems that plague our soceity today. Some may call it fear, fear of something different, fear of no longer having the status quo. That they may lose their person who's different, and not have somebody to compare to, to say "I'm better than you because i'm ___________" (you fill in the blank). Others just say, to change in this way or that way is wrong. Wrong because they don't agree? To disagree does not make it wrong. It makes it, not your opinion.
In our soceity, we're bombarded daily with voices... so many voices... Whether it's a TV anchor telling you the horrors and joys of your local hometown. A commerical for the latest product you probably don't really need to make your life better, but just should want it, because the people on TV say so. (or maybe because somebody fed their family or themselves by working on making it. They never mention that? How often do you pick up something and think, I wonder who made it, and what were they like? ) If you listen to the radio, you're probably hearing voices, and melodies.. Whether it's a song, or the DJ who might be in your town or in New York or Los Angeles telling you about your local shops and what's gonna be played next. It all starts to lose it's character. It becomes, life... It's not personal, it's... just there, sterile, and feelingless. Sometimes monotonous. We have the technology to connect us in ways we never before imagined, to share our voice with others... Cell Phones, Computers, the interenet, even older technologies like the TV and the Radio... Some of these things it's obvious to see how they can connect you.. others, it may not be so easy.
The Cell Phone enables us to speak to a friend or somebody we know whereever we happen to be, it;s like a lifeline of communication, some people never go anywhere without it. We take them to an extreme though, to the point that a good thing becomes a bad, they're talked on while driving, endangering others lives on the road, they ring in restraunts and movie theaters, when you ask youself, why can't that person llive without it for a little while? If they're alone, you can understand, but when they're with somebody, you must wonder, if they value that person, and if they do, have they taken them for granted, that they'll always be there when they get done with whatever they happen to be doing.
Computers and the Internet, enable interconnection in a seemingly cold way. Though, it connects us with people that you otherwise would never meet. There are those people out there who say that the internet is bad, that all it is, is a porn ridden wasteland of filth. I believe you get what you look for out of it. If you're looking for filth, for whatever reason you're going to find it. If you're looking for friends, you'll find them. There's boundaries, things we should not look for, but do.. and are shocked they're there. but, would they be there, if people didn't look for them?
TV... so many places to go with it... it's a breading ground for ideas, a way to communicate feelings, through artistry, or a way to transmit mediocrity to the masses... with things like Reality TV which are so far from real reality, that it's a joke that nobody laughs at. At the same time, there are shows and movies that can inspire or enrage you, and bring you to action. Recently it's been higlighted that people arent prepared for the unexpected, with events like the recent Superbowl halftime show and the resulting chaos. (You know what i'm talking about). So many people were shocked... that something like that could occur, it broke their delusions that it was a safe haven. and now they turn to government to save them from that broken delusion. To restore the falsity of an enviroment where the few control what's seen. That they can hide from the world, and say, this is the world. just these parts.. and not that, that, that , or this. These people ignore things until it bites them on the ass.. Then they claim to be shocked... Are they shocked because of what happened? Yes, but it's deeper than that, they're shocked because they never knew it could, or didn't want to know.. they didn't want to know that things had changed. These are half-voices, voices who speak, but do not always know the whole thing.
The last piece of technology on my list.. the long and forgotten radio. There was a time, when people paid attention to what happened there. Now it's turned, rapidly, into a glut of the same, no matter where you go. The art of music thrives there, but it doesn't thrive as well as it used to. Stations are owned by fewer and fewer individuals. Stations are no longer programmed locally, where the culture and opinion of the local listener, make or break a song on that station, instead it's national charts, and industry executives, record companies, payola schemes, under promoted new artists and over hyped lifestyles of the popular. but it's all the same.... The radio yearns for something new and different, before it dies of boredom. The better stations are the stations that are different, they attract the attention. Instead, it's more of the same, where stations are marketed as advertising tools.. and the art of music dies with them.

The underheard voices...
Have you ever felt like there was no platform to get how you feel out there? In our soceity we're faced with a challenge. The underheard voices... Those of minorities who're never noticed.. and the youth. who're ignored, like they're uninfluential, who're marketed to, but not listened to. How often do you truly listen or hear a young person speak their mind on the trouble facing them? Whether it's trouble in school, violence, or anything. There's no outlet.
What if? You could get the youth, and a community involved, in something. local, and live.. So those views and issues get out. and get heard... It may surprise you to think, that there is a platform for this.. and it isn't the internet... try low-power radio or low-power TV.... These stations were created in the US by the FCC to provide more localised focusing channels on the air. In theory, anybody could own one, even somebody as low-budget as a school.

Then the reality happened. Lobbyists and other corporate interest groups, afraid of the falling of their bottom line. Successfully Campaigned the FCC to alter the LPFM and LPTV service, instead of it being affordable to obtain a license for anybody, only larger non-profit organizations can even afford such a station. and to make matters worse, commericial radio stations are so heavily protected, from intereference from anything, that these little brother stations, are very restricted from using frequencies near them.
So, what could've been a useful service, is now, yet another unrealized ideal. Voices still unheard, still look for a way.... to be heard, to get attention, and the question remains, how long, before somebody does something drastic again to be heard?

This past Monday marked the release of the Mozilla Firefox 0.8 web browser. It features a new change from Firebird to Firefox and a lot of changes since 0.7. To find out more and to download, go here.

I can only describe the aftermath of that announcement as a flood of people hitting the mozilla.org and the other related servers of mozillazine.org, mozdev.org and texturizer.net, which hosts the Firefox Help site.

Mozilla.org hit a bandwidth high of using 24.4Mb/s and was partially unavailable for a bit, because of the flow of traffic, but returned quickly and responded very well under such an intense load. MozillaZine.org also suffered slowness under the load, having to disable the Forums to get the site responsive. Texturizer.net went down entirely, and Mozdev.org as of this writing is just coming back, but is still slow.

I've been recently paying more attention to the extensions-side of the Firefox project. Mozilla.org does not maintain a website for extensions, as most are third-party developed. A lot of extensions are mozdev.org projects, and the MozillaZine forums provide some user-to-user support for help and troubleshooting. There are two sources that are trusted, in general for Extensions; they are Firefox Help's Extensions page and The Extension Room. Both sites use the same database of extensions maintained by the MozDev database project. During the release, and even before that, stuff that needed improving had been coming to me, with the way that Extension Room itself is laid out and works. I pick Extension Room to discuss specifically here, because it hosts extensions for all Mozilla products that support them (Mozilla Suite, Firefox and Thunderbird). It's a good concept, but it really needs a lot of changes to make it more usable for visitors.

The most critical of which is that neither site seems to be truly reliable. Especially during releases, when the servers they're on get loaded with traffic, and become unavailable. This is to be expected to a point given the increasing popularity of the releases, but is not really acceptable when it comes to trying to serve people with add-ons to the new product. It passes a feeling of unreliability on the availability of extensions to the user. Both Firefox Help and Extension Room both have been down a lot, during the release. Though, Firefox help is down by choice, as far as hosting extensions go, to focus on the help content and keep the server, which is private, and has a corporate website also hosted on it, operational. One problem which has been an issue with the Firefox Help Extensions page in the last month was a problem with syndicating the database to texturizer.net for Firefox extensions. The database would be incompletely transferred, breaking it entirely, or listing only half of the extensions. Though, this has not occurred in the last couple of weeks. Extension Room has also had some database-related downtime, because of errors with human-error in entry to the database.

The other issues I've found are usability issues, with the sites. Starting with the most serious, and more or less going to least important'

Extensions Listed on Extension Room are not really marked as being compatible with a new version of Firefox. This has created problems and some confusion for new Firefox 0.8 users recently, who expected any of the extensions on the list to be 0.8 compatible, because nothing said otherwise. The site assumes that the listed extensions are current, and does not have a maximum version they're verified as being compatible with listed. They list the fact that the extension is for Firefox, and in some cases starting and ending dates for which builds it works with, but those cases are few. This is misleading, users assume that because the site says it works with Firefox that it works with all versions, and most are quite surprised when they have problems. Rather than assuming the max version, it should be defined, the current version it works with when the extension was added, as it's better to assume it may break in the next release than to assume it works. Testing the extension with the newer release, once the code freezes for the release, would enable someone to update the information for the extensions with either a works (Verified) or a doesn't work (Incompatible), for the newest release prior to it's release date. Any extensions that remain untested should show that state (Untested). and not be listed by default, but it should be possible to find a list of such extensions, fairly easily, since they do need testing by more experienced end-users, who are capable of dealing with problems if they're incompatible, and reporting back that information, and to bury them would create a wasteland of lost extensions, after each release. The default state for a new release for all existing extensions should be Untested, unless otherwise noted, as it's possible for nobody to have time to do such testing, and defaulting to incompatible make that state more ambiguous by creating a degree of doubt, is this extension actually in incompatible, or just untested? This three-state system makes it very obvious to the end-user if an extension is or isn't going to work. Though the middle state, untested, is still ambiguous, and encourages testing prior to a release. It also allows for expandability, for other states, such as certified extensions, in the future. As for the UI for the website for a list broken down like this, the page should auto-determine the version the visitor is visiting with, and present them with the list of verified extensions for that version of that product. With links to also view the other states for that version of the product, keeping a clean layout, so that the extensions on the page, are what's emphasized, and not the links.

The next problem, which has been recently improved, with Extension Room specifically, is by being verbose and trying to give as much information about the extensions as possible, the page is way too large, and took too long to load especially on dial-up connections, as the page was 250k to load, before images. Now the page is not verbose enough, furthering the problems with point 1 above and gives a short description and extension title only, though it is grouped by category. In order to get any more detail you have to click the name of the extension and go on to the 'more-info' page. One extreme is as bad as the other. In theory, at a glance you should be able to see the Extensions Title, Date, Version, and Compatibility info (or at least the simple version of it for the version of whatever product you're viewing), more info and download/install links. The other flaw with page size is the fact that the page attempted to show the entire list on one page, which is not feasible by any means, once the list gets above a certain size. To make such a list viewable by the most clients, is has to support the ability to customize the number of extensions per page, depending on the total number, anywhere from 5 to 20 per page should do it, to allow sufficient customization for dial-up to broadband users.

The last point is subject to debate, though some users might find it useable, and that would be the ability to sort the extensions in multiple methods, specifically by name, category, and date (newest to oldest), with the default being by name, as people looking for a specific extension are most likely to find what they want quickly, and those casually browsing won't be hindered by the organization. Given a good placement, such options should not over-complicate the interface and make it cumbersome, in my opinion. Though if such options aren't feasible while maintaining a clean user-interface, then they should be dropped in favor of the default alpha order.

Overall, the user-interface of the site should be clean, with good graphics and an emphasis on the content, while not being hard to use, the placement of links being where they're easily accessible from a usability standpoint.

A point that may be a problem with the first point above, that I'm thinking now, the auto-detection of the browser that's being used, may create problems for people hoping to just download the extensions in one place and install them on another machine. Particularly if that machine is running a different version of the product. Also, this would apply to Thunderbird users, who don't qualify under auto-detection, for obvious reasons, therefore, there'd have to be some way to be able to generate such a list from user-selected product/version values as well. Such items may be more likely to complicate the interface, but unfortunately, are most likely required.

My last idea for how to improve the way extensions are handled from the website is a feature similar to the PHP project's my php.net page, where most of UE settings are storable as cookies in the browser. That way a user could customize their view of the extensions pages to suit their preferences and store them. So they don't have to customize that view every visit like with some sites of a similar nature. Options such as sort order, extensions per page, and other customizable options in the final layout, should have an option to be set permanently, to make it useable quickly. For those cases where the defaults don't work for the user, such as a broadband user who prefers more than 5 extensions per page, while the default shouldn't be higher than say 10, else making it difficult for dial-up users, such a page would solve the problem.

With these issues addressed, I'd say that an Extension website would be much more useful to the new and current users of Mozilla products, and considering the growing emphasis on extensions with Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird over the Mozilla Suite, the issue of lacking a good usable site grows.