Stefan Hayden

I noticed an interesting quirk of Firefox today. It happens when you are on a page that requires a login to view.

If you wait for your login to expire and then view source you don’t get the source of the page you are looking at. Instead you get the html of what ever page you get kicked to when your login expires.

When you view source in Firefox it seems to go back to the server and re-download the page source. The Server see that you are not logged in and serves you the login expired page. So the HTML it shows you is different from the page you are looking at.

This seems like a really weird quirk. I have no idea why it can’t just use the local copy it clearly has already downloaded. I suppose it would not be an issue in most situations. Though it can be confusing when you are trying to figure out what in the world is going on.

firefox, quirk, viewsource

About Design asks what counts as entry level designer? Basically asking why all entry level designers suck.

I find this question interesting as well. I just graduated with a BFA from a liberal arts school, TCNJ. It was a hard program and there were many night where entire classes stayed up all night to finish projects.

I’ve heard lots of talk about how sub par design students are these days and how they don’t have the wide range of skills they used to.

I’m not entirely sure if that’s true or if the times have simply changed. I can say that a lot of time is spent at school simply learning the basics. A class in web design, a class in illustrator, a class in photoshop. it’s easy to see where other things can fall through the cracks with some much time just learning the tools.

Was there more time in the past with fewer programs to learn? I have heard people say that it’s the people who are the problem. that the golden age of design is over. I have a hard time believing that and think it has to have something to do with the process. Where does the education break down?

design

With Microsoft aggressively opening their new Live email accounts to colleges, the war is on. It was only several months ago that google announced that they were opening Gmail to colleges. The service they both offer is both slightly different but the interesting part id the push to get market share.

Giving email accounts to college students is a good way to get them to keep it forever. Google didn’t seem like they were actively going after colleges to join their program but Microsoft announced their service with 72 colleges read to join.

While this seems like a good thing it also seems rather redundant. Most colleges offer an email address even if it is only for the 4 years you attend the college. High Schools on the other hand do not offer email as a rule and could benefit from services Microsoft and Google could offer. Being able to create school mailing lists and perhaps even class groups would be invaluable.

google, gmail, live, microsoft, email, college, highschool

The NYPD are installing 500 of these high tech surveillance unites. Wasn’t there a science fiction movie with those things? When do they start flying and shocking me every time I jaywalk? I can’t wait to hear about the NYPD using them to see if there is a long line at the corner pizza shop or if the rumor about girls hiding bombs under their skirts is really true.

This is going to go horrible horribly wrong. (via BoingBoing)

With web design so new there is a lot of talk about people coming to it as a second career. Many with out any design training at all. This of course has advantages and disadvantages, letting you come at web design with a fresh perspective but lacking the technical knowledge to back it up (though Dan Seems to do okay). Others, like Patrick and myself, are young, out of design school, and have wanted to work in the web as a first career choice.

Recently at SXSW Mark Bolton and others had a panel about design and art direction on the web and how it is really lacking. In my mind this has to be partially be because of the lack of people who understand design at a very high level.

It’s my hope that in the future, as the web matures, that more focus will be put on higher education and deep understanding of design principals. Education that doesn’t stop at a BFA but continues to a MFA.

Ricardo Miranda has a great introductory post up about how to start thinking if an MFA is a good idea for you. If you’re in design and never got a degree in it getting an MFA might be a good way solidify your foundation in design. And if you’re like me and already have a BFA an MFA might be a great way to make those formal skills razor sharp.

I still hope to make it to an MFA one day and every good guide and how to I can find will only make my decision that much more informed.

mfa, gradschool, sxsw2006, ricardomiranda

“I’m counting on medical science to cure everything in another ten years so that as I grow older all I have to worry about is which dialect of Chinese I need to learn in order to shop for groceries, pay bills, and play World of Warcraft.”

- Greg Storey

That’s such an awesome quote from Greg that it needed repeating. I have often wondered the same thing. Though sometimes instead of Chinese I think of Portuguese since there is a huge tech movement in Brazil to rival America.

I wonder if once people can live an extremely long and healthy life if they will be less likely to throw it away in a war. I can keep hoping.

Google calendar is awesome. I’d review it but you can read a review over at Techcrunch.

My quick notes are that I love the tiny blue menu in the top left. I like the idea of easily switching between the different google services. If only it was on the other google pages. It’s much more useful then the current account info on the top right corner.

So far there is no Gmail integration but I’m sure they want to get the bugs out of it and get it working before they grind both services to a halt.

There also doesn’t seem to be a way to group edit a calendar. Hopefully this does become the feature they never implement. The ability to create groups in Gmail took over a year.

Update: They added the blue menu to gmail! But doh! They made the links open in a new window! I wanted to SWITCH between them not open more windows. At the very least I’d like to be able to edit that in the settings.

google, googlecalendar, gmail, calendar

Dan Cederholm has a podcast feed on Odeo with zero shows and 159 subscribers. Some where small podcasters hate Dan Cederholm.

Finished the last book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy today. I’m a horrible book reviewer but I liked them a lot. The last one really seemed to stick out as exceptionally good. The last page really seemed to cut to black a bit quicker then you might like. Fantasy books tend to have epilogues and long drawn out endings but this one just stopped. It was sad but nice for a change.

Now that I’ve read all three I felt safe to roam the web looking for any additional info that might be out in the wild. Wikipedia has a nice collection of articles about the series, books, and characters. In general the book has enough mythos to build on and so a community coming together to put this together isn’t that surprising.

Finally I made it over to the official web site. My goodness that is the ugliest web site that I’ve seen that wasn’t made for a high school. If I was the book publisher I would be embarrassed to have a website so incredibly horrible. It’s not even good for an old website, like early 90s, and these are very recent books abd YA books at that! And last I heard young adults are using the internet.

book, bartimaeustrilogy, jonathanstroud

I just called the Boston Transit Authoritie’s customer service. The number was easy to find on the web site. A human picked up after only 2 rings. This has to be the best experience I’ve ever had with customer service in years.

mbta, customerservice, boston

how long will it be before Mac fanatics start say Macs are better cause they can dual boot Windows (edit: about 4 hours or so)? I’m counting the minutes before I read an article about that.

It’s not secrete I’m not a big Mac fan. What I really want is an easy way to dual boot OSX on my PC. When it comes down to I only want to do that for browser testing.

With the operating systems slowing coming closer and closer together how long before it’s easy to run windows, OSX, and linux all at the same time on any computer?

Update: Khoi Vinh, for the most part, agrees with me.

Update 2: Robert X. Cringely makes the most sense out of everyone:

Boot Camp makes no revenue for Apple and never will. IT IS BETA SOFTWARE. I doubt that its existence, especially as a beta product, is going to make some Fortune 500 company suddenly sanction the purchase of Macs because they can, with some effort and an extra $100, pretend to be Windows machines. While Boot Camp might help show prospective purchasers the superiority of Apple hardware, those purchasers would have to buy their Macs first and then convince themselves that they had done the right thing, which is totally backwards.

mac, windows, intel, dualboot, bootcamp, linux

Is it just me or are these martial arts fantasy movies looking more and more like Final Fantasy games? Or perhaps the other way around. Either way I love them both. The Promise looks awesome and I can’t wait for it to come out.

movie, trailer, thepromise, finalfantasy

With so many changes in store for the upcoming $100 it must be earlier in production then I thought. Here is a choice excerpt:

Negroponte said one meeting with an unnamed display manufacturer spotlighted the importance of high-volume manufacturing.

“I said, ‘We’d like to work with you on the display. We need a small display. It doesn’t have perfect color uniformity, it can have pixel or two missing, it doesn’t have to be that bright,” Negroponte recounted. “The manufacturer said, ‘Our strategic plan is to make big displays with perfect color uniformity, zero pixel defects and to make it very bright for the living room.’”

“I said, ‘That’s too bad, because I need 100 million a year.’ They said, ‘Well, maybe we can change our strategic plan.’ That’s the reason you need scale,” Negroponte said.

Too funny.

laptop, Negroponte

If you change the HTML and the CSS of a page there is a decent chance that a user will get the new HTML but not the new CSS. This is especially true for sites with high usage and users that come back to the site several times a day.

If they only get the new HTML but not the new CSS then the site will break, the user will get confused, and you will look unprofessional. On the development site of this the problem is already solved. Having a Dev server as a place to test code is standard practice but how does this translate to CSS?

The problem is that the CSS is cashing on the client side and there isn’t an obvious way of telling the browser to un-cache it. Luckily the key word is obvious. Though it’s not in wide use there is a quick hack that will keep your CSS as fresh as your HTML.

The trick is to pass a variable on the end of the CSS file like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" xhref="http://www.stefanhayden.com/style.css?version=1" type="text/css" />

What does ?version=1 mean? This is what a URL looks like if it’s passing a GET variable from one page to the next. To the browser it means the page is dynamic and it needs to get a new version because code may have changed. The browser has no way of knowing if the CSS file is actually dynamic or not.The trick is to change the number each time you update the CSS file to make sure the browser always downloads the new code.

When a browser looks to see if it has anything cashed it compares file names. If you have “style.css” in your cashe then it’s not going to download it again. But if the browser compares “style.css?version=1″ to what the new HTML is “style.css?version=2″ then the browser thinks they are different files and needs to download the new CSS file.

The other reason this works is because you can add anything you want after the ? and the web page just ignores it unless it’s an actually variable on the page.

This seems to be a really good solution to version css and yet so few seem to use it. The only 2 sites I know of who do is Odeo and Sconex. Yet clearly we are in the middle of a big web boom with CSS being used every where. How are other people versioning their CSS so it doesn’t break the user experience?

In general I can’t see to many other solutions. You could make the CSS file parsed by the web server and pass headers with different cacheing info. I have not tried this but I’ll bet the browser would still cache the file as it does not know it is dynamic even if it is. You could rename the CSS file with .php but clearly no one is doing that and I’ll bet there is a browser out there that would not apply the styles because of that.

No every one gets to work on a large production site but with so many jumping in the area and quickly updating the service I’m surprised this subject has not been covered.

odeo, sconex, css, versioning, hack

Two years ago Google announced 2 projects. The lunar hosting and research center and an Email service that offered 1gb of storage space for free. We all laughed and then Gmail tuned out to be real. If only that could happen every year.

gmail, google, moon, aprilfools