Friday, July 19, 2002

It was great to meet Dave, Scott  and his wife Kat at the blog get together.  There should have been more bloggers there and I hope no one left unable to find us.  There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence as people who barely knew one another grasped for things to say.  It was strange to meet people after reading their blogs for a few months and knowing they read yours.  You can't pull the same crap you usually pull when meeting new people, either boasting or inventing a new personality on the fly to suit the needs of the situation.  Fortunately, I have pretty much stuck to the facts on this log and so I didn't have to struggle to remember what lies I had written.  Lying is too much work, I have decided.  It was very interesting to hear about Scott's house and the history he is trying to uncover about it.  Also interesting to hear Dave's experience as an Apple guru.  I am glad I backed out of my plan to go up to each table at the Rock Bottom Brewery and ask, "Are you guys here for the blogger get-together?"  because it looks like no one else came based on my reading the other Minnesota web logs. 4:20:20 PM    comment []

I just installed the Mozilla 1.0  browser and tested some of the applications I am working with as well as some sites I visit.  It seems to work OK.  Handled all the javascript and DHTML I commonly work with.  This weblog looks like a sack of crap in Mozilla, however (and I don't know why it has to, the calendar is the worst offender and it is just a simple table).  The installation was very easy.   The Mozilla web site says that Mozilla is for developers and general users may use it as long as they don't expect support.  There are two reasons reasons to use Mozilla as my browser.  One is to increase the percentage of visitors to sites using browsers other than IE, and the other is to get better javascript debugging information that IE. An attempt to visit a site with a Java Applet caused Mozilla to explode and refuse to start again until I rebooted.  I may need to clean up my system since I seem to have 5 different JVMs of various ages whirring away in here.  Still, after all the fuss about IE dropping Java support, I was surprised that Mozilla wouldn't have it by default.    Adobe PDF plug in is installed by default. The Composer is disappointing but only when compared to products that cost money.  I thought maybe there would be PHP support, but you can't even save a file as .php when editing with Composer.  Also, it does not have WEB DAV support.  Can't complain too much.  Homesite doesn't even have WEB DAV in version 5.0 and Dreamweaver is only just now providing PHP support.  Composer just does not try to be an IDE. 3:39:06 PM    comment []

Friday Word of the day: Otolith:  N Also called Earstones. A calcareous concretion in the inner ear of a fish. Rings on an otolith can be used to judge the age of a fish after the same fashion of counting the rings of a tree. The rate of growth of the fish for a given year of its life can also be calculated. Looking at old otoliths can give insight into the climate that the fish endured as environmental signals pop up in the data. For example, tightly packed rings (or annuli) indicate a series of very cold years. One of my coworkers studied historical fish growth data for upper and lower red lakes. The samples included Freshwater Drums or sheepshead caught in 1950 that were 73 years old at the time they were caught. So these otoliths give clues to what the environment was like back to the late 1800's. They were able to pick up the signal of an picked up an El Nino year this way. My other co-worker studied the otoliths recovered from indian village sites that were dated to the early part of the 1800s The data on those otoliths matched the data taken from tree trunks in the area. Slow growth in trees matched slow growth in the fish. 3:31:28 PM    comment []