Earlier today, while perusing the meme sites to see where the groupthink arrow is pointed today, I came across links to the following highly-ranked (at least by anonymous numerics) page.

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/ahah 

I checked the calendar to see if it was April 1st, but alas it does not appear to be. This actually appears to be serious.

This is where the AJAX-trend has brought us - people who have contributed nothing to the global knowledge pool are rushing to remora off of the creations of others and claim it as their own. Every obvious potential use for a programmatic element can become a cheap acronym that someone can append their name to, desperately hoping that they earn some fame for their heroic act of sitting on the sidelines and naming things years after they've entered common use. The fact that the linked page uses the term "discovered" to describe the "discovery" of the most obvious and prevalent use of the XMLHTTPRequest (and friends) object is mind-boggling.

Today we took advantage of the gorgeous, barely below freezing temperatures, and the fresh snowfall (which is one of the few snowfalls before Christmas in recent years that actually stayed on the ground more than a few hours, though it'll be washed away as temperatures go to 14C+ in the coming days), this time visiting Crawford Lake again.

It was a beautiful day, with some beautiful scenario. To contrast, the following was Crawford Lake on the Canadian Thanksgiving.

I took a few moments today and rolled out some improvements to yaflaColor.

• There are 10 color "save" positions. Drag the appropriate eye dropper to a color you want to persist. The save panels, like all other color panels, can be used to select the current color. Single click on the appropriate eyedropper to clear a position.
• If you want to "persist" your settings, click on the linked Red/Green/Blue link beside the hex string and it'll capture your selections in the URL - you can then bookmark or share this URL
• There have been some speed/robustness improvements to the object handling

http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/yaflaColor/ColorRGBHSL.aspx

Again, I have to add the standard disclaimer I add everytime I mention this: It is a very simple little tool that I created primarily to scratch my own itch, however hopefully it's useful to someone else.

BTW: Why did I "publish" this tool? PageRank. I've gotten a lot of inbound links to it from people who appreciate the usefulness and ease of use, and those inbound links help my pagerank cause. So if you like it and enjoy it, I'd appreciate if you linked it. Thanks!

Motion activated lights are a fantastic way to see nocturnal creatures on the prowl.

Last night, for instance, the lights triggered. My wife looked out to see a skunk on our patio, casually partaking of some delicious French bread (when we have fresh bread I often toss the leftovers out back. Between the birds and the nighttime creatures it's gone by morning, and it's infrequent enough to be unanticipated and non-habit forming for the neighbourhood friends).

Sensing an opportunity to educate our awake-far-too-late Sr. Toddler daughter a bit, I brought her over to look out at the skunk. She burst out crying.

"My toys are outside! Bring my toys in! My toys!" (there was a little plastic bicycle, and a couple of toy gardening implements outside)

After finally getting her to settle down a bit, I got her to tell me what was upsetting her.

"The skunk is going to poop on my toys!"

In a previous entry I spoke negatively about Visual SourceSafe 2005, in particular regarding the internet functionality (functionality that promises the HTTP transport accessibility of a limited number of source control options, in a client/server fashion. This is critical if you want to use SourceSafe functionality over a firewalled connection, or a limited bandwidth connection, and brings a limited amount of SourceOffSite-like functionality to the vanilla SourceSafe).

While my remarks about the server-side configuration of this functionality still stand (it's a terrible setup that fails on anything but a clean OS install), I finally took a few moments and figured out why I couldn't do source control operations with the internet plug-in (e.g. it was reverting to SMB, thrwarting my ability to get some throughput metrics) - The problem was that I had failed to select the Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (internet) plug-in as the current plug-in provider. After setting that, the internet option works smoothly. I'll have an entry about the results of that soon.

To explain how this confusion could happen, consider how you setup a connection in Visual Studio 2005 (which is the only place where this remote option works).

First, or so it appears, you choose which technique you'll connect with for this new source database entry.

Then you tell it where to find the web service, and what database for the web service to use.

Don't worry about that UNC path there - the help tells us...

Note: Because the Web service can serve multiple databases, you must specify the known path of the Visual SourceSafe database. You do not need local access to that path, it is used by the Visual SourceSafe Web Service to communicate with the database.

Great! Easy peasie!

Not quite. Everytime I tried open the new connection, it was working -- but then I looked on the other "machine" (a virtual machine) and noticed all of the SMB connections from my machine. That tricky devil was opening the database the old fashioned way. So I blocked network access to the share (still allowing it locally), trying to force it to use the internet connectivity that it appeared that I was configuring, to get this error when trying to add an internet database.

Of course this is nonsense - it isn't the web service that's having the problem, as the web service on the remote PC can access the files fine. The problem is that the SourceSafe plug-in on my machine was trying to open the files through the file share using old-style SMB.

Finally I came across the provider setting, choosing..

Now the functionality works. On the bright side the same SourceSafe database entry can be used for both SMB and internet connectivity, switching the plug-in depending upon connection, however it would have been nice if the brain-dead configuration and help were a little more helpful with this.

Intriguing article on why we love rounded corners: http://www.basement.org/archives/2005/11/why_do_we_love_rounded_corners.html

Interesting read, but I disagree with the hypothesis given for why we (currently) love rounded corners.

I would guess, and history will prove me right or not, that the primary reason we love rounded corners is nothing more substantial than temporary differentiation.

On the web, for instance, it remains true that rounded corners are a minor barrier-to-entry of "cool" website designs (I had to waste an hour of my life making those silly rounded corners on this blog in Photoshop, and then playing with CSS and tables so they worked properly in the major browsers), so they do, to a very small degree, differentiate a design. By the same token, there was a time when everyone thought that animated cursors, background music, and intro flash graphics were a great thing because each of them required a bit of knowledge and effort. It certainly isn't a given that such preferences remain.

Earlier I said that history would prove me right or not, but really there is plenty of historical evidence already demonstrating this recursion of aesthetic preferences: Design trends have tended towards extreme roundedness ("organic"), back to squared and sharp ("modern"), then back to rounded, then back to squared and sharp, in an endless cycle. You can look in virtually every market (cars given as examples here) where this cycle took place, with each design philosophy welcomed as interesting and fresh looking, but quickly evolving to old and dated as everyone followed suit.

Soon enough everything old is new again, and it repeats ad nauseam.

I would predict that as more and more blog templates incorporate rounded corners, and CSS3 makes them absolutely pedestrian, rounded corners will become the domain of the amateur johnny-come-lately. At that point we'll be talking about our next-generation, ultra-modern square corners.

Lately I've been getting a lot of "we'd love to get your feedback about the [Product you purchased or Event you attended]. Please take at few moments and fill out our survey at ..." request emails. Usually they have the carrot of some trivial low-value prize. Other times they exhort you to help make the world a better place by giving some feedback.

There was a time, quite a few years ago, when I enjoyed filling out these surveys, and I actually participated. I really, truly felt that I was helping improve events and products, and generally making the world a better place. And hey, there's a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of winning a $10 Amazon coupon!

It was on someone else's time anyways (most of these are sent to employees at workplaces who are more likely to give up 15 minutes or more for some random survey), so why not?

Nowadays I never fill out online surveys - I've become too jaded about them. All opinion companies pull the same gross abuse-of-trust scam, which is the old "tell you that it's only a couple of minutes, but really it's 20 pages long with 10 questions on each page, with absolutely no indicator of how far you are. Ha ha ha sucker!". Of course they're hoping that once you've committed the time for the first 4 pages, you're going to keep pushing yourself to finish what you started. "Okay...fine...just one more set of questions," until you've burned 45 minutes of your time to help an opinion company get a commission.