Delta Tango Bravo

Not able to be in Austin, Texas for SXSW this past week, it seems appropriate that I've managed to have a southern themed food weekend here in Toronto instead.

I just discovered El Trompo in Kensington market with some visiting friends yesterday. It's a delicious taqueria almost up to College street on Augusta in the market. The place was packed when we arrived and now that I've eaten there I can see why. I ordered one of their pork taco plates and was a little alarmed that it looked so small when it arrived — just four little tacos sitting on the plate. Completely wrong. They were incredibly good, with little bits of pineapple in them which was a nice touch, and I was barely able to finish the lot even on an empty stomach. Their guacamole, which we ordered as an appetizer, and their salsa and sauces, which came with the meal, were also fantastic. Well worth checking out.

This afternoon I'm off to the incredible Tacos El Asador out on the west end of the Annex for possibly the best, and certainly the cheapest, El Salvadorian food in the city.

As of today, I'm one step closer to being a full-time mac user. I just bought a pretty little twelve inch iBook that I figure I'll be using about a third of the time in parallel with my Thinkpad. It's really nice having two quiet little systems that can share my desk with room to spare for all of the other clutter around here. I really don't think I'll ever be going back to the obscene fan noise and overall bulkiness of desktop computers. It makes me cringe just turning on the big ole dual G4 I've been borrowing from my brother for the past few months.

This may be common knowledge to mac users the world over, but while installing applications today I discoverd a handy little freeware widget from Everyday Software called Show Desktop, which sits in the dock and emulates the behavior you get in Windows with the same feature. Even with Exposé sometimes I just want to see the clean desktop to find a file there or something and this works really beautifully.

So, I've used macs before, but never for more than basic functions and for browser testing. What little gems are there that will make my experience even better?

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on designing the interface for the upcoming NextMedia International Interactive Media Festival that's going to be in Banff at the beginning of June. It's been a fun, if slightly ironic, project to be working on and the preliminary site was launched just a few days ago.

When we ran our Zap Your PRAM conference in the autumn of 2003 we happened to choose the exact same dates as the NextMedia conference, which happened to be in Charlottetown that year (seriously we had no idea it was on). We admittedly said a few not-so-positive things about what they were up to back then, mostly in favour of what we were doing with Zap Your PRAM. Then, about a month ago I was introduced to Julia Walden, the director of NextMedia, by a couple of friends from Ideé whom I met at none other than the Zap Your PRAM conference. Talk about weird karma. Julia was looking to get in an outside designer to work on the new NextMedia site and explained that the conference had new owners and was moving to Banff to be in sync with another conference their company is involved in, The Banff World Television Festival. And now, in a great bit of irony, the disparaging links from Peter's post now go to the website which I've been designing.

If they manage to secure a number of the speakers they're pursuing, which I think they might, it sounds like it will be quite an interesting conference. And, the price sounds just about right too especially if you're in the area. You might even see a few members of the silverorange crew presenting come June.

As I mentioned, the site only launched very recently and might be considered a preliminary launch. Expect the content to grow as the conference finalizes the speaker list, sponsors, and other aspects of the event.

Just a warning, this post is going to have little or no interest for almost anybody except hopefully for the few beleagured souls on the web who have suffered the same wifi problem I've been experiencing. I'm mostly putting this up here on the off chance that someone will come across it and find a solution to an extremely frustrating problem in their hour of need.

About two weeks ago, the Cisco Aironet MiniPCI wireless card in my Thinkpad suddenly was refused by my Windows XP system on boot. I've had the card installed for over a year and now all of the sudden I started experiencing this problem. All I was left with was a useless CODE 10 error message. Today, I finally found a solution and an explanation of the problem at Experts Exchange. Apparently it's a "registry corruption in the networking section" and is fixable only through a clean reinstall of the OS or the following strange solution offered by Daniel Alexander. His solution worked for me and hopefully will for you as well:

1. Go to Control Panel > System > Device Manager > Network Devices
2. Uninstall the driver for your wireless card
3. If your card also has software installed, go to Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs and uninstall that software
4. Shutdown your computer
5. Remove the wireless card
6. Click Start > Run and type Regedit
7. Locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Enum > PCI
8. Right click on the PCI folder and choose Permissions
9. Change the permissions somehow. I selected Everyone and gave that group Full Access.
10. Reinstall the software and/or drivers for your card
11. Shutdown your computer
12. Put your card back in
13. Reboot your computer

That worked well for me and everything has been going smoothly since. Hope you found this helpful.

According to its bling designers: "Pimpzilla is a theme for the browser Firefox. It's also probably the most tacky & overdone piece of GUI design out there, aimed solely for true internet-connaisseurs [sic]. If you are into fur and lot's [sic] of bling, this is the theme for you." The bejewelled Go button at the end of the location bar is especially sweet and check out those glistening golden scroll bars. There is absolutely no doubt that when Xzibit browses the web, he has Pimpzilla installed. Thanks to the always pimped out folks at Stylegala for the notice. Um, asked in a truly middle-of-the-winter-not-even-a-tan whitebread voice, "does this qualify as shiznizzle?"

Via the venerable boingboing comes an absolutely incredible composite photo of Toronto taken from above the CN Tower. Squiggle (the photographer's Flickr name) compiled this shot of the whole downtown, waterfront, and environs from photos taken from the CN Tower skypod, 443 m above the ground.

Higher resolution details of the image are also posted on Flickr and apparently it took eight hours to process the thing on his computer. I'd love to be able to download a full resolution image of the entire photo. You might even be able to find my apartment somewhere up in the top right. Very cool stuff and to top it all off he's released it under a "Some rights reserved" Creative Commons license. The same photographer/designer has another incredible shot in his Flickr gallery of a World War II bombing simulation. Check it out.

What the heck, here are a ton of additions to the favicon collection I started what seems like ages ago. There are some really stellar examples here. I just ran into the Hotwheels one tonight to top off the new additions at thirty and who would have thunk that everyone's favourite German industrial band Rammstein would have such a great logo associated with them. Other especially notable ones include the National Film Board of Canada who've always had a stylish logo, Automatyk's nicely understated icon, and Jared Christensen's nice icon/logo.

Once again, thanks for all of the suggestions (especially the person who pointed out I had missed Macromedia somehow). Check out the full collection and suggest any sites that aren't there already.

Following a recent announcement from WebSideStory, a company that does web analytics, which expressed that Firefox's adoption rate has slowed somewhat, there have been a rash of news articles on the topic. Basically, this company released stats that suggested that after the initial excitement behind the one-point-oh launch a few months ago people are still downloading the browser, but at a slower rate. That's hardly surprising as you wouldn't expect the huge hype to continue unabated for too long.

However, the interpretation of these findings in the press titles has been remarkable. If you look at the Google News results on the story you get everything from "Explorer douses Firefox flames" to "Mozilla gains on Microsoft" to "Firefox Flame Burning Low" to the sane "Firefox Usage Up, But Slowing". It's indeed incredible how fairly simple data can be manipulated to make a dramatic or entirely misleading statement. This might sound a little bit naive, but when something like this happens in a subject area you're relatively familiar with it just makes you wonder what's being manipulated in areas with which you're less familiar. Another sign of the Dark Age Ahead?

This is an open call out there for a skilled (or not-so-skilled as I'm not so sure how complicated this is) Firefox extension programmer who'd be interested in doing the world some good.

I'd love to see a really simple Firefox extension that recognizes special link types and at the very least gives a warning "Do you want to continue?" dialogue before the link takes action. A more sophisticated extension might change my cursor when I hover over a special link to indicate what will happen, but the simple option works fine for me too. I'm particularly thinking that this would be useful for links to PDFs and mailto links that open a new email message. It's incredibly frustrating when you click on a blind link and all of the sudden your computer freezes for thirty seconds while loading the behemoth that it is Acrobat Reader.

If it needs some interface elements, I'd be glad to help out. Any suggestions? Any takers?