Mike's blog

Our daughter, Catrina, has completed her first all-digital work. This is a digital portrait of "Honey", her Grandmother's Apple-headed Chihuahua. Catrina loves Chihuahuas...

"Honey", by Catrina Curry

You can see more of her works in her gallery.

The Wacom CINTIQ 21UX (DTK2100) 21-Inch Pen Display is just awesome. I'm thinking of ordering one soon.

Seems like many online vendors are backordered one to two weeks. Is this due to popularity or is there a production issue that's preventing shops from restocking?

People are talking about Catrina's beautiful drawings.

My daughter, Catrina, has been working on more of her fantastic portrait drawings. You can see some of them, including her more recent works, on her gallery.

I've been working on web site performance optimizations lately (though you might not believe it when visiting this site...)

I've come across a few useful performance-related resources that I've been using lately:

• Optimizing Page Load Time–An excellent overview of many issues that can affect web site performance
• Online web page benchmarking tool (webpagetest.org)
• Benchmarking APC vs. eAccelerator using Drupal (2bits.com)

My daughter bought a Samsung Impression A877 AT&T cell phone the other day. It's an interesting phone, and it looks like a high-quality mobile device (at least so far.)

She decided to connect it to her computer. She inserted the CD-ROM in the computer's CD-ROM drive and was greeted with a nice Flash-based menu which included links to install USB drivers and the 'friendly' PC Studio application. She clicked the link to install the software -- and was rewarded with a web browser opening up to visit the Samsung website in order to download the requested software. Same with the USB driver and documentation -- each resulted in a web browser directed to a Samsung web page to download the requested items.

Ok, I'll admit it. I've been living dangerously for the last several years.

To be blunt: I refuse to install any kind of antivirus or personal firewall software on most of my computers. This includes a Windows XP Home system that was used by my children as a web surfing / email / game system. I've suffered zero infections during this time. (The only time I ever suffered a malware infection was before, when I did rely on Norton Antivirus to protect the kids' computer.)

Why do I refuse to use these massively popular widely-used products? Simple. I am convinced that in my case, they may cause more harm than good, and that they foster a false sense of security - leading some users to engage in riskier behavior. Further, antivirus software is almost always behind the curve - by definition, the antivirus people are playing catch-up with the malware writers. It's a good living for them, but I choose not to contribute to it.

As a software developer, I cannot afford any downtime due to buggy software, and yes - antivirus software has bugs. Not long ago, one major antivirus package ran amok, causing widespread damage by deleting harmless user data and programs.

One or two bad apples may not spoil the whole bunch but they sure do make a foul-tasting pie

I've built, from scratch, a few useful Drupal contributed modules for my own use, and shared them via the Drupal.org contributed modules system. I shared them as my way of supporting the Drupal community (since I benefited from the freely-available Drupal core and other contributed modules).

While the vast majority of users have been polite and reasonable, and a few have offered support, on the whole I find that the majority of users seeking help or reporting bugs do so without offering much in return. Most of the time it seems like a one-sided relationship.

I do appreciate the information most issue reports have to offer but I am unable to respond to all requests in a timely manner. I've been very busy with other priorities over the last year or so, so I've not had much time to dedicate to maintaining the modules I've contributed. The support requests and bug reports have been piling up. As a result I'm seeking new maintainers for all of the modules.

Further, I've decided that I will think twice before sharing future custom Drupal modules via Drupal.org's contributed modules project hosting.

Many years ago, I worked with a firmware engineer. We'll call him 'Bill'. 'Bill' was an interesting character, for he was fond of saying provocative things in order to observe your reaction.

I walked in to Bill's office one day, and he was sitting there with his feet on the desk, leaning back in his chair. Hands clasped behind his head. I'd have thought he was napping except I noticed that he was staring at the ceiling.

"What's up, Bill?", I asked.

Bill replied: "Oh, I'm working on the firmware for the new color printer, and I'm thinking about what to do if someone opens the cover in the middle of a print cycle. It's giving me fits."

He continued: "Sometimes I wish humans were descended from dogs instead of apes." He paused.

"Why's that, Bill?" I asked, taking the bait. By then, I was on full alert.

"Maybe then they wouldn't be messing around, pushing buttons when they shouldn't." Bill said. Clearly, this was the punch line he was waiting to deliver.

"Yeah", came my immediate reply, "but then, you'd be sitting here, pondering what to do when the user urinates on the printer with the power on."

Bill broke out laughing. Clearly, he wasn't expecting that response.

Mission accomplished.

I found this one one of my classified ad sites today:

Join one of the best Advertising Company of India. We pay you for your hard work. 100% Payment urance. Its a Ad Posting job (copy-paste work). Unlimited Monthly income. For Details visit : www. [spammer-site]. com or Email us at [email deleted] or Call us at [phone number deleted]

This is too funny - spammers dropping spam ads for spam ad droppers who will then drop spam ads onto more sites. It's "copy-paste work". Indeed. This is recursion run amok.

Here's a nifty tool for your bag of tricks: JavaScript snippet that tags HTML elements with browser- and OS-specific attributes so you can target browser- and OS-specific 'peculiarities' without resorting to the usual bizarro selector tricks or Internet Explorer-specific conditional comments.

Using this script, you can target browser-specific elements via simple CSS selectors as follows:

.ie6 #targetElement { border: solid 1px #eee; }

OS Codes

win - Microsoft Windows