 |
Sunday, 13 January 2002 |
No Rest For the Obsessed.
I have just now finished replacing all the lost Navigation links, and have submitted them.
Now to sit back and wait for them to upstream. Hope it does not take too long!
11:05:47 PM 
|
|
This Time It Wasn’t Me.
Now all my Navigation Links have vanished. What the f**k? I didn’t even touch the Navigation Links preference before that happened.
I am going to keep my own local copies of all the code I add, as the backup has also lost its Navigation Links. At least the pages are upstreaming correctly again.
10:01:01 PM
|
|
Whoops, I Did It Again!
Just worked out how to restore the templates to their defaults, within Radio itself. You just choose the Radio/Templates/Restore Defaults… menu item and it does just that. Good one, UserLand.
Now for another puzzle to solve. I have added several new Navigation Links and have hit the Submit button several times, but they have not appeared yet on this page. Hmmm.
9:43:27 PM
|
|
I Did It!
I managed to get the image to appear, with a little fiddling around and sifting through the Radio documentation. The docs could definitely do with a rewrite! That is why publishers like Friends of ED do so well.
Now if I could just work out how to restore the templates.
9:07:48 PM
|
|
Radio Userland 8: First Impressions.
So far I am impressed with Radio 8, and have been spending time today hacking away at it that I should have spent going for a long walk and running errands. I have posted some real items this time, and one of them is illustrated, after I worked out how to link to an image in the image folder. Radio 8 is not without its annoyances, however.
Upstreaming is still a puzzlement, for instance. I successfully published an item a couple of hours ago, but have been making changes since then that simply have not appeared on the home page in the cloud even though I have been hitting the Post & Publish button each time I make a change.
I get a message confirming the page has been published, but when I check the logs there is no corresponding Upstream event. The only recorded Upstream event is of course the one a couple of hours ago. Also annoying is the fact that you cannot accurately preview a page before publishing. Where I have placed an image in my local home page, all I can see where it should be is a tiny placeholder graphic, a box with the word IMAGE inside it.
Lastly, I seem to have managed to have screwed up some code in the Desktop Website and Main page templates when I was modifying the macros so the copyright notice at the base of each page would make my name an email link. I know I didn’t touch any code other than the macro, but when I viewed the changed and rendered pages suddenly images are out of whack and there are exposed HTML code fragments. The Home Page template is OK even though I changed the macro in that as well.
The screwed-up code makes each local page look ugly, but they seem to be functional otherwise. I’d like to fix it by replacing the damaged template source code with clean replacements, but have nobody here I can get it from. My usual fallback is now in Berlin and he is having his own computer problems right now.
Radio 8 would be absolutely terrific if you could be sure that pages would be published as soon as you changed them, but now it is 3 hours since the last actual upstream event. Almost half a day! Not nearly good enough.
I wonder if the problem is between my machine and UserLand’s Radio servers? Does the local version of the site talk to the remote server to see if it will accept upstreaming, then sends the page? But why then does Radio tell me the page has been published when quite patently it has not?
8:22:34 PM
|
|
Ghost From the Past.
A photographer whom I had known years ago through a mutual friend who has gone on to better things in New York suddenly phoned and visited here today.
I had bumped into him last week in a video store nearby. He recognized me and called out my name, told me his recent life history, and we swapped cards. I thought I probably wouldn’t hear from him again. I have a few friends from the old days in this city and the last time we met face-to-face was about a decade ago. Time moves slow here and people even more so.
Robert, the photographer in question, told me about an exhibition he had that was accompanied with plenty of press and TV coverage. After the show his work fell off to a trickle. Essentially he had exceeded the bounds set by the national culture to limit what can be achieved by visual artists, and especially those who choose to use a camera. I have met quite a few others who have had identical experiences. Robert is now painting houses to make a living.
I have taken him on as a project, to see if I can help him advance his career somewhat. Our mutual friend had got to where he is more by hard work and good connections than talent alone, and the rise of the Internet has made things a little easier for people stuck on the fringes than when I used to live in this city before.
Robert doesn’t have a computer or Internet access and has only discovered Photoshop in the last year, so he has a lot to learn. But there is a good foundation in place. Let’s see where my years in magazines and advertising agencies can help him get to. I have enormous sympathy for anyone trying to be creative and earn a living over here.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: Cronos Devouring One of His Children, close-up, circa 1820 - 1822.
5:18:15 PM
|
|
Judge Rejects Microsoft Civil Suit Settlement [MacCentral]
Good on da judge for seeing through yet another crock. This offer of Microsoft to donate old reconditioned Wintel PCs and Microsoft software with a retail price of approximately $US900 million is such a transparent attempt to gain further marketshare at a very low price.
It costs next to nothing to distribute software you make yourself, and the real costs of those old computers would be minimal. Besides which, with Wintel computers’ built-in obsolesence even refurbished old machines are going to have limited useful lifespans.
The schools slated to receive the “donation” are the poorest in the United States. Although the proposed deal was to include some technical support and training, these schools would have been saddled with an endless nightmare of extra tech support bills and training simply to keep the machines running.
A pretty damned poor return on investment even if their initial outlays were nil. So goodonya, judge!
1:05:29 PM
|
|
© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
|
|
|
