Alas, newer laptops have abandoned docking stations in favor of USB based universal port replicators. The promise is that by hooking up one USB cable, you can hook your computer up to all your peripheral devices. If you look beyond flashy promise on the box, you will note a few problems including:

1. Your networking is connected – provided your notebook has wireless networking and this is supported in your environment. If you want to use a networking cable, you have to hook up two cables.

2. Your laptop is powered – until your battery gives out. If you want to hook up power, now you’re up to three cables. I’ve seen USB port replicators that claim to charge your laptop while it is plugged into the replicator, but I haven’t seen any that claim to run your laptop.

3. You spent the extra bucks to get the upgraded graphics card for your notebook but as soon as you go to one of these port replicators you have to install software (often Windows only) to burn up your CPU cycles while dumbing down your graphics to a compressed stream that can be pushed through a USB port.

Where are we? Assuming that you could plug in a dedicated video cable (and that’s a big assumption for reasons that will be discussed below), you have now spent $70 – $120 on an on/off switch and USB hub (a $20 value).

Jasmine was a Xolo AKA Xoloitzcuintli (pronounced Show-low-its-queen-tli) AKA Mexican Hairless.

Her early life is unknown although one might surmise that having been born with fur, she was not valued by her breeder and was therefore abandoned.

In any event, she lived her early years on the street – long enough to birth one litter of pups – before she got scooped up by animal control.

Fortunately, my friend Steve, his daughter Heidi, and his girlfriend Elise took Jasmine in and gave her a loving home.
Steve is a runner, so Jasmine would often “go on patrol” with her pack – head up, ears up, scanning for danger – unlike my yellow lab, Cabo, who , nose down, scampers from bush to bush. She loved these walks the way my dog loves swimming after tennis balls.

Although some rescue dogs have hidden psychological damage that can come out, often violently, in the wrong circumstances. Jasmine showed none of these problems. She nipped Steve once, and as he tells the story, immediately got an “Oh my God, what have I done?” look on her face and dropped into full-on submission mode. She even got alone with other dog as soon as the pecking-order was negotiated.

Jasmine was completely devoted to her people.

The first thing she would do at my house is race Cabo to the back yard for a little competitive pee-ing. She would follow Cabo around and lift her leg (a very un-lady-like trait she no doubt picked up on the street) over top of everywhere Cabo had been. Sort of like tagging over top of someone else’s tag. She who pee’s last, wins.

Whenever Jasmine came over, she would also assume Beta dog status and relegate Cabo to third place.

Walking two dogs was a challenge. I walk Cabo on a 25 foot retracting lead and would clip Jasmine’s more modest leash to the handle.

This would present the immediate challenge of Jasmine needing to catch up to Cabo and be out front – and she couldn’t.

They would also conspire to wait until I was juggling two leashes and a poop bag and then dance around my feet, often in opposite directions. This often backfired on Jasmine as Cabo’s leash would sweep her feet out from under her.

I often laughingly referred to Jasmine as a slut. Having found little love in her early life, she was completely focused on getting attention from humans.

If I was on the couch, she’d be crawling slowly into my lap. If I was petting Cabo, she’d slither into the space between my dog and my leg (which was great fun after knee surgery). If I was on the bed, Cabo would take her place down by my feet, but Jasmine would be on her belly, inching toward my chin, tongue reaching out for a lady-like lick. I would often knock her over against my hip and pin her there with my arm. This was enough to meet her needs and let my get some sleep.

Whenever I would walk into a room where she was sleeping, her head would remain down but her eyes and ears would immediately lock-on and track my every move while the tip of her tail would thump-thump-thump against the floor or the couch.

Recently, Jasmine has been suffering from seizures. Not often, not long, and they seemed to be fading with time. This is not unusual because environmental toxins (plants, pesticides, etc.) can trigger seizures and as the contamination clears, the seizures do as well.

She had one seizure in my care when I took both dogs to the dog park. For Cabo, it’s all about chasing the tennis ball but for Jasmine, I assumed that dealing with establishing the pecking order around 20 excited dogs just may have been too much. So I never took Jasmine back to the dog park.

I had been watching Jasmine for several weeks and was, in fact, within days of handing her back to Elise when she returned to California when on Friday, June 16th at 1:50 AM the dogs woke me up. I let them out back and then went to the bathroom myself. Both dogs followed me and Jasmine was walking funny. When I left the bathroom, I found her in the living room, jammed between a chair and the wall, legs stiff, foaming at the mouth, and bitting the air.

I spent the first ten minutes, comforting Jasmine and waiting for the seizure to end. It did not. It would start to fade and then get worse again.

Then I started looking for emergency veterinary care. The only vet I found had bad on-line reviews (although I found them caring and professional), so this took more time that it should have. So, I iterated on this – searching the web, comforting Jasmine – until I gave up and decided to go to the clinic I had found no matter how bad it might be. Then I struggled with how to move this wiggling beast without getting bit. I finally settled on emptying a big plastic bin, tipping Jasmine into ti, and carrying both out to my car, where Jasmine immediately tipped out of it as soon as I loaded it in the back. Ten minutes later, I was at the clinic where they immediately rushed Jasmine into treatment, administered two doses of Diazepam, and started evaporative cooling – alcohol on the on the foot pads, cold water over her body and neck.

By 3:15, plus or minus 15 minutes, the seizure was over and her core temperature had started to come down.

Shortly afterward, I had managed to get Steve on the phone and the doctor was briefing him, as she had briefed me, on the challenges and treatment options available.

The prognosis was not good.

The problem is that with a body temperature over 106 degrees for an unknown length of time (Jasmine’s was 108.5 when we arrived at the vet) the proteins in her blood would start to de-nature much like the whites of an egg as it cooks.

This left Jasmine exposed to a number of problems including uncontrolled internal bleeding, kidney failure, and liver failure over the course of the following week. Even with the most aggressive treatment, her chances of making it through the week were poor.

Add to that, the effect of the seizure itself which could include profound personality changes, blindness, loss of balance and muscle control, and the increased chance of future seizures which could only be prevented with heavy doses of anti-seizure medications.

Then, there was the underlaying cause of the seizures which were now, clearly, not an environmental toxin.

Steve eventually decided that the kindest and least worst solution was euthanasia and the vet concurred. I could hear it in his voice as he agonized over the decision – it was tearing him up inside.

I’m so sorry I couldn’t return Steve’s dog to him, hearty and healthy but I’m glad that I didn’t have to make that decision. Cabo is now ten years old, so I can only hope I won’t have to face this situation for at least a few more years.

I held my phone up against Jasmine’s ear so Steve could say goodbye and then I stayed with Jasmine while the vet injected her with the sedative. As soon as she fell asleep, I left, having no desire to watch her die.

I cried in the car and then drove home to hug my dog.

Jasmine was a great dog, everyone who knew her loved her, and she will be missed.

The first attempt to resolve this conflict was frames which were problematical in many ways which I won’t get into here.

Web authors naturally turned to the next most obvious solution – to hijack tables and use transparent spacer images as layout tools. Although much maligned by purists (and properly so), the use of tables has been the most widely used layout methodology because of their ease of use and despite their many problems.

There are several efforts afoot to come up with a standard for simplifying CSS based layout. These include the Flexible Box Layout Module and the CSS Template Layout Module. The Flexible Box Layout Module seems “more normal” from a syntax perspective and seems to have the greatest industry support while the CSS Template Layout Module, while weirder, has some, IMHO, significant benefits, much more sketchy support, and because it currently relies on a JavaScript simulation – at tleast the potential to work in Internet Explorer.

Below, I will present my attempts (code and resulting screen shots) using both methods as I try to implement a layout that looks much like the layout of this blog without beings such a total crufty hack. Then, I will propose and try to implement a layout methodology that combines the best of both solutions.

Flexible Box Layout Module

I started with the Flexible Box Layout Module by adapting the code from How-To: Full Page CSS 3 Layout (Desktop) to present something that looks like my business cards layout.

Here’s the CSS …

… here’s the HTML …

… and here’s the result …

If you want to try it, click here (best viewed in Firefox). Please note that I have replaced the copyrighted images I used for the vertical and horizontal stripes so I could share the code.

Although I could continue to tweak this code and get a better result, my interest in this topic is largely driven by what tool set yields an “easy to get it right” experience. Neither did, so after devoting a couple hours to each method, I eventually copied my VernMcGeorge.com theme over to my (SparkofIdeation) website and hacked together new background images to get the equivalent result.

Anyway, what worked well and what didn’t?

What worked well:

• I got a good, solid layout with well positioned layout with a footer fixed to the bottom of the browser window (which I’ve never been able to do before and which is wonderful for web applications that want to use the bottom edge of the screen for useful purposes (such as navigation or mode selection) just like installed applications do. Very cool!
• I got full coverage of all areas of the layout using standard background-color and background-image CSS declarations – no funky faux-columns or negative margins here!

What didn’t work well:

• The footer overlays the main content (in Google Chrome).
• Still a ton of mark-up devoted to layout. Rather than non-tabular data pretending to be tables, there are a bunch of nested div tags. While this may be better from a semantically pure point of view, the effect on the readability of the markup is same. Fully 67 of 100 lines in the HTML in the body is about layout and only 33 lines are actual content. Although I can (and did) do better in a later version (see below), there’s no getting around a significant fraction of non-content code.
• This can only work on moz and webkit engine browsers (which is to say all the good ones) and fails miserably on Internet Explorer.

The first two problems could be coding errors on my part (which I will resolve later in this article if possible) but the third issue in intrinsic to this solution.

Template Layout Module

Next, I tried the CSS Template Layout Module.

Here’s the CSS …

… here’s the HTML …

…and here’s the result …

You can look at a live example here, although because of problems which I have not yet identified, the solution has degraded from the screen shot. I have copied this example into two new HTML and CSS files and reduced to down to the simplicity of “Hello, World!” (hoping to delete the problem at some point and thereby identify it) but have not been successful. It’s clearly some stupid little thing that I have grown blind to, so I leave the solution to you, the reader.

When I tried this a year ago on a different project, I got a better result. Obvously, I made some mistakes this time around or the solution that allows me to experiment with this method has degraded with time. I’m betting on my mistakes as the cause.

Regardless of any mistakes, there’s enough here (in the screen shot) to look at some of the pros and cons of this solution.

Let’s start with the cons:

• This solution relies on some fairly heavy duty JavaScript to interpret and apply the template after the page is loaded.
• Because of this, users that disable JavaScript get an ugly result.
• Everything has floated to the top and overlaps other content – yuck!
• The post-processing to apply the layout positions everything absolutely and renders the resulting page virtually unreadable using developers tools and consoles such as Firebug.
• While this solution looks like it might apply background-colors well enough, it didn’t do anything for background images until later – when it stopped doing layout. Not a good trade in my book.

Now, let’s consider the pro’s:

• Although the nested “content” divs remain in this markup, all of the rest of the layout has been relegated to the CSS file where, IMHO, it belongs. Each section of content can then be wrapped in a single div with an id attribute that identifies what it is and can be used to position the content within the layout.
• The sections of content are order independent from the layout and can be presented from most important to least in the HTML markup. In contrast, layout that depends on tables or nested divs must be presented in a left-to-right, then top-to-bottom format (at least in English).
• Although the current proposal for the Template Layout Module is restricted to rectangular slots (into which content is positioned), the spec foresees the possibility of non-rectangular and dis-contiguous slots in some future version. Wouldn’t that be sweet?

Client-Side Template Layout

Next, I asked my self, “How can I get the best of both these solutions? Just how much of the markup devoted to layout could I remove if I was willing to pull out all the stops?”

The solution I can up with uses JavaScript to support the loading and application of a client-side template based on the Flexible Box Layout Module. This both removed most of the markup from the web page itself and allowed for order independence between the content as it is loaded and the content as it is finally presented to the user.

JavaScript is used to demonstrate this process although with two small extensions to the HTML specification, JavaScript would no longer be needed and the end result will be improved.

I started with the code from the Flexible Box Layout example above split the markup into a template (which includes default content) and the actual page content. I then added JavaScript to load and apply the template.

Here’s the JavaScript Template Loader…

… here’s the CSS file …

… here’s the HTML of the client side template …

… here’s the HTML of the web page…

… and here’s the result …

If you want to try it, click here (best viewed in Firefox).

The key to this solution is found in the class attribute values for certain divs in the HTML template, for example …

… where the value of the class attribute is interpreted as follows:

• “container” is used in the CSS to apply any specific styling desired to all containers. This takes the place of the nested “content” divs in the original.
• “contains” is used to tell the applyTemplate(); function to look for content and move it into the template.
• “center_content” is used to specify the id attribute’s value for the content to be moved.

… which means that the following will be moved from its starting position in the page and placed in the container, thus replacing any default content specified in the template …

Anyway, what worked well and what didn’t?

What worked well:

• Everything good about the Flexible Box Layout.
• The order independence and the minimal markup of Template Layout.

What didn’t work well:

• The footer overlays the main content (in Google Chrome).
• Significant flicker on load.
• This can only work on moz and webkit engine browsers (which is to say all the good ones) and fails miserably on Internet Explorer.

I’ll address the flicker problem when I talk about how this could be implemented without the JavaScript hack.

First, let’s look at two obvious problems – content that doesn’t match a container and problems loading the template.

If content does match a container in the template, as shown below, …

… then the content will be rendered at the top of the page and the template and its content will be pushed down.

If you want to try it, click here (best viewed in Firefox).

If the template cannot be loaded …

… then an exception will be raised, the page will render “as is”, and the template will not be applied.

If you want to try it, click here (best viewed in Firefox).

More subtle errors caused by malformed HTML after the page, template, and page contents have been merged are the not considered here, nor is the impact on tools and validation.

Now could this technique be implemented without JavaScript? It would require two small changes to the HTML specification as shown below.

First, the link tag would have to be extended to allow the browser to load the template inside the body of the page without JavaScript. This could be done at the start of the page …

… or it could be done a the end of the page (which is, in effect, what the JavaScript hack is doing …

If loaded that the start, the browser should build a “hit list” of containers to be filled. If loaded at the end, the browser should build a “hit list” of content to be inserted. In either event, the code is not complex.

Note that the link tag is defined for other things besides spreadsheets (but not rel=“template”) however, browser support is only broadly available for loading stylesheets.

The second change is to define an explicit contains attribute for containers so that the class attribute does not have to be overloaded with this function …

If you want to mess around with this, I have included all the code and images in this zip archive – I ask only that you link back to or otherwise attribute my work to me.

Feature-wise, I thought it was brilliant – and I still do.

Performance and reliability-wise, not so much – which is why it made sense to open wave to a community of thousands rather than billions.

But Wave is back, it’s open to the public, and I’m looking forward to digging back into it again.

So you can have a taste, I have created a wave that is open to the public and embedded it below.

DISCLAIMER: The contents of this wave are unmoderated and I take no responsibility for what others type into this conversation, although if I find objectionable stuff, I will remove it when I see it.

Enjoy.

NOTE: If you don’t see a wave here – its because something broke – that’s not good.

So, I’ve just spent several hours on the new and improved Google Wave:

• No crashes!!! Yeah, this is a big deal.
• Decent ability to find waves to play in (for example, copy this …

with:public about:google&about:wave

• … or something like it into your search bar and hit return. I still think they need a “find waves” button and a pop-up that looks like Google Advanced Search – this incantation is still a bit geeky for the general public to embrace anytime soon (like ever).
• They still need a better way for me to find the waves I want and ignore the ones I don’t – sorting the results of my search by time from last edit as the sole criteria doesn’t cut it. They need a blend of context, popularity, and activity level – but if anyone can figure this out, it’s Google.

All in all – more fun than I remember. Now all I need to do is capture my stuff on the sandbox and get it over to the production Wave. (Which I have now done!)

According to this test, my top 5 strengths are:

1. Intellection – People strong in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.
2. Ideation – People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
3. Learner – People strong in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.
4. Strategic – People strong in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.
5. Input – People strong in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.

If I want to play big (and I do), I should play to these strengths.

I would guess that from Microsoft’s position, “There are some updates that are just so super-important that we must install them immediately.”

No, you arrogant SOBs – what’s important, what’s really important, is that you not lose my work.

I run VMware with Ubuntu and Win XP guest systems on top of a Win 7 host. Furthermore, there is a TrueCrypt repository mounted on the Win XP guest. I’ve already had guest operating systems get munged up and I’ve been able to recover from that. What I dread is the day that I find one of these systems (or worse yet, my TrueCrypt data) irretrievably corrupted.

The kicker is that with a gram of creativity, Microsoft could keep my system safer and significantly reduce the risk of losing any of my data.

How you ask?

Simple, rather than rebooting my system, display a pop-up that tells me I must reboot to install an important security update and then kill my network connections — thus isolating my at risk system from receiving, or causing any further harm. Please note that the patch is already loaded and partially installed on my system at the point where Microsoft traditionally jerks the rug out from under me – I don’t need the network connections.

I come in, I see the popup, I snooze the popup, and I start saving all my data locally. After I’ve saved everything I need and shut down anything that might get corrupted, I reboot my system.

I might still be upset at this invasive 10-20 minute process, but not nearly as enraged as I get when Microsoft wastes several hours of my time unscrewing the screwed up or replacing hours, days, or weeks worth of lost work.

I wish that today was an isolated incident, but it’s not. I get this 2-3 times per month. Multiply that by the tens of millions of Windows machines out there – this process is worth getting right guys!

It’s been an adventure and it ain’t over yet.

The good news is that the grand scheme works pretty well. I run a host OS with VMware Workstation  and two guests systems – Ubuntu for as much as I can and WinXP for the rest. The transition from Eudora on WinXP to Evolution on Ubuntu was difficult but the end result is better. I would like to figure out where Evolution stores its stuff and make sure that it is under My Dropbox for backup purposes and I am still doing too many things under Windows as I climb up the learning curve on Linux alternatives. But using Dropbox (see Loving Dropbox) makes switching back and forth and working between platforms pretty painless.

I even, for grins and giggles, used the various sources around the web to create a Snow Leopard virtual machine. It’s completely against the Apple license, but it was a fun experiment and it runs okay by itself. But as one of three VMs, it starts to degrade the performance pretty severely. I only run one program on the Mac (Scrivener – highly recommended for writers) and it runs just fine on my Mac Mini so there it will stay (although I can see buying a small, used Macbook instead of a new netbook for just this program — yes, it’s that good).

The bad news is that I gave up a lot when I swapped Win 7 out in favor of Ubuntu as the host OS. Win 7 on the physical hardware is quite deeply integrated with the Blue-ray player, all the functional buttons above the keyboard (media player controls, sound controls and wireless controls), and the cute little remote tucked into the side of the laptop. All that falls by the wayside when I use Ubuntu for the host. Fortunately, my VMware Workstation License will work for either host, so switching back to Win 7 was a no brainer.

Now, for the ugly part …

The Ubuntu host pops up in a few seconds (okay, maybe 20-30) but Win 7 takes twice as long. Similarly, Ubuntu takes 20-30 seconds to shut down. Since a recent update on Win 7, shutting down takes somewhere between “forever” and “longer than that” (okay, I exaggerate, ~2-5 minutes). Updating Ubuntu is just as easy and less invasive to update (fewer updates and fewer reboots after updating) than Win 7.

Every now and again, the Win 7 host just loses the USB connection to my external keyboard and mouse. Ubuntu never lost this connection. The connection is long and circuitous (wireless keyboard and mouse <–> wireless receiver <–> 4-port KVM switch <–> PS/2 cables <–> PS/2 to USB converter <–> 4-port USB hub <–> HP laptop) so, no I don’t exactly where and why things drop out, and no, I can’t make this simpler without sacrificing the infrastructure that supports three other machines in my office.

Sometimes, if I am very lucky, I can unplug the last USB cable from the hub to the laptop, plug it back in, and get everything working again.

If I am not lucky I have to suspend my Win XP virtual machine “as is” so I can resume it later “as was” (not too painful and one of the key motivations for my “do all the useful work inside a VM” strategy); shut down by Ubuntu VM (as suspending it makes the time wrong when it comes back); reboot the host; reboot Ubuntu VM; and resume the Win XP VM. All this takes ~10 minutes and it stops being fun after the first time. Yesterday, I had to do this four times, this morning once (I got lucky the second time).

I’d love to find a solution to my time problems with Ubuntu. Even with administrative privilege, I cannot resynchronize the time with an outside NTP server. I’ve beaten PolicyKit bloody to no effect. Fortunately, if I shut the system down out from under Chrome, it will offer to bring back all my open tabs. That’s a blessing – not all programs are so forgiving.

The long and short of it is that I’m on the cusp of switching back to my Ubuntu host if I don’t find some way better solutions to these problems very soon. The hell with Blue-ray.

As it happens, I traveled to Buffalo several times in the 1980s on business. While there, the local HP field people introduced me to “Buffalo Wings.”

I’m not talking about the crap we get here in California restaurants where the part of the chicken that used to be thrown away is mixed into a concoction of  three parts sauce, three parts bone, two parts cartilage, and one part meat, served up on a bed of lettuce with watery ranch dressing, and called an appetizer.

I’m talking about 2-3 chicken fillets, fried or grilled, served with fries and a chunky sauce that could run anywhere from spicy to hot to thermonuclear. Yum!

I’ve looked in almost every city I’ve ever visited since for these kind of Buffalo Wings – without success.

In the report they described Obama’s order – a dozen of this BBQ, a half dozen spicy, and a half dozen of something else. One of two things seems true. Either he was ordering for his entire entourage, or Buffalo has sold out their famous local delicacy.

A tragic day indeed if this is the case.

I’ve also been thinking for months that I needed an offsite backup solution anyway. A friend suggested DropBox.

Now, with a few exceptions, I keep most of my stuff in the My Dropbox folder which is directly under My Documents (or under my home folder on Linux and Mac). The two exceptions are my music collection (which would put me over the limits of my 50GB plan) and private stuff (journal, Quicken and TurboTax, etc.).

For private files, I either keep them on a single computer, or I keep them in a Truecrypt volume. The Truecrypt volume is stored on the disc as a data file which you can mount just like you would mount another disk or a network share. While this file can’t be in My DropBox (Truecrypt needs exclusive access to it which DropBox will not allow), I can, after dismounting the volume, drag a copy of the data file to My DropBox for backup. Be forewarned, keep these volume small. My 2GB disk image takes about 40 minutes to upload. Fortunately, DropBox is smart enough to redirect all my other machines so synchronization on my local network is done via system to system transfers on the local network instead of multiple downloads from the DropBox servers.

I love that fact that I can change a file on any platform (WinXP, Win7, Mac, or Ubuntu running on physical hardware or as a virtual machine) and the change is quickly reflected across all my running systems.