Home Page Heroics

Wed 13 Sep 200601:07 AM

Notwithstanding my own lack of clarity regarding the five year anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, I’m not immune to the occasion’s obvious significance. It’s as moving a date for me as anyone, and as it approached, I personally wanted to make sure that the NYTimes.com design team should make our own, humble contribution in honoring it. That’s why I wholeheartedly agreed when one of the designers in my group suggested he put some extra hours over the weekend towards some special presentations of the home page for Monday.

Five Years

Mon 11 Sep 200612:02 PM

Five years now since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and, for me, the distance from the event has left me even more at a loss for what to say than before. Time hasn’t clarified much of it at all, good or bad, right or left, right or wrong, at least not much more than what I knew in the days after those planes hit those towers. Whatever the final judgment of history might be on the way the twenty-first century opened for us, it’s my suspicion that we’re not close to knowing it yet. In certain spells — by myself, in crowds, walking around downtown — I feel like we’re almost further from knowing how future generations will regard us — any of us — than we were four years and three hundred, sixty-four days ago.

So I hadn’t planned on writing anything here on this anniversary. But, after walking around lower Manhattan yesterday evening with my dog and feeling that unavoidable, lingering sense of loss, my brain unexpectedly started turning over the lyrics for David Bowie’s “Five Years.” I’ve been listening to this song forever, it seems, and I’ve never known why Bowie wrote it in the first place, what the story behind it was. None of it seems to matter for today, though, because on this date it seems appropriate in a frightening, open-ended way.

A Browser Back from the Brink

Fri 8 Sep 200612:36 AM

The latest version of OmniWeb, which is perhaps best described as ‘the Macintosh browser you pay for,’ is out on the streets, just now emergent from its long beta gestation period. Version 5.5 finally brings us a third-party browser based on Apple’s now open source WebKit framework, which puts it nicely in line with Safari with regard to rendering fidelity and Macintosh fit and finish. On top of that, it faithfully re-creates virtually all of OmniWeb 5’s winning features: visual tabs, page source editing with instant previews, expandable text-entry boxes, etc.

Supersize Me

Wed 6 Sep 200611:30 PM

Challenge to the Death

Wed 6 Sep 200602:17 AM

I’m no one special just because I get a boatload of spam every day, but I do, and it’s annoying. My mail host provides SpamAssassin protection at the server level, trapping most of the incoming junk messages before I ever get a chance to review them. If it catches some false positives once in a while, I long ago decided that life is far too short to bother wading through its harvest, even irregularly, so I leave them there for eventual deletion by the system.

There are plenty of junk messages that do make it through, though, and those are filtered through the reasonably effective junk filters provided in Microsoft Entourage. I’ve always liked this application-level protection; using a custom view, I can easily monitor the spam filter for messages erroneously marked as spam. It’s really the way I prefer to manage my mail.

Over time, though, the number of junk messages that make it through SpamAssassin has gradually increased, as has the number of false positives I see in Entourage. One has to admit, spammers are Darwinian fighters if nothing else; they adapt and re-calibrate with great persistence — their uncompromising vision of a low-finance, Viagra-fueled utopia just won’t be denied. After seven years of this kind of noise level, I’m just getting weary of combing through my email every day.

I know I could add a utility to my computer like SpamSieve to help improve this error rate; I tried it once and didn’t really like it that much. And I know I could move over completely to Gmail or some other Web-based mail program with purportedly much better, centralized spam protection, but I have a low tolerance for webmail as a general rule. So I’ve been thinking about using a challenge/response spam protection system. Is that totally awful? I know there are many drawbacks, but is anyone out there using such a system successfully?

Forest for the Banners

Wed 30 Aug 200611:56 PM

You Can Go Home Again

Tue 29 Aug 200610:33 PM

Message to the Messengers

Tue 29 Aug 200601:29 AM

Please Return Your Battery (If You Can)

Fri 25 Aug 200610:17 PM

Dear Apple Customer: Thank you for checking our Battery Exchange Program page for the eligibility of your 12-inch PowerBook G4’s accompanying battery for replacement. According to our records, your battery is is covered under this program.

So congratulations, it stands a better-than-usual chance of blowing up! And when we say “blowing up,” we mean it in the old school way, not in the way that young kids were bandying about five years ago as a euphemism for “getting really popular.”