The Skunk Works

If you are reading this page, you either fell through the crack* on the index page or managed to stumble across the backroom with a search engine. In Al Capp's Lil Abner, one of the funnies I read as a kid, two of the characters used to brew up some noxious spirits in their hidden still which was called the Skunk Works.

The term has also been used to describe small "unofficial" research/engineering groups working away at creating marvelous new inventions (not sure which came first, the engineers or Al Capp).

This then, is my backroom Skunk Works... a place for experiments and ideas and unfinished business. Somewhere to store things of interest to me as webmaster, but probably sleep inducing potions to folk seeking quilting information (or camera and image information on our other web page -- The Photographic Historical Society of Canada).

*The Eye Bar image. Thanks to author and poet Mary Anne Mohanraj for the little eye_bar icon I used on the Index page as a link to my backroom here in the Skunk Works. It is one of a number of icons she generously offered free in the late 1990s when her web site was on a server owned by IAM, one of the companies that used to support the Amiga. IAM President Dale Larson is an ex-Commodore engineer who moved on to selling the network hardware he was designing for the ill-fated Commordore machine. Dale's book on connecting the Amiga was one of my first references on networking and the internet. Dale is no longer involved with the Amiga. His current interests are noted on his web site. Oh yes, he was publisher for one of Mary Anne's books, hence the connection.

NB. This page originated on the PHSC site, I then cloned it on the Quilters' Fancy site, and now have combined the two on the Quilters' Fancy web site for ease of maintenance..

January 27, 2009 - New Host

This spring I helped a friend of mine to move to a new data base driven site using turnkey software from Winnipeg running on A2 Hosting servers in Michigan. After the site was up, he invited me to give a short talk on the changes. In the process of writing my talk I checked out A2 Hosting and was astonished by the lower prices - a fifth to a sixth of what I was paying my previous hosting service. And the new ISP uses CPanel which is far nicer than the options I was given before. I renewed my domain and signed up on A2 this afternoon and now have everything set up but emails and transferring the nameservers.

January 8, 2008 - XHTML and CSS

Time moves on. The last major face-lift to the web sites was 1999. I completed a course in XHTML this past fall and will take a course in CSS this spring. Going forward, I will try to keep within current standardds which separate page content (HTML) from page design considerations (CSS). Most people are using a high speed connection these days and screens are wider than 600 pixels. The older pages, like this one will stay non-standard for now.

The screen I am writing this on is 1,200 pixels wide. The majority of screens are 768 pixels or wider. The combination of faster access and wider screens make the old descisons on page width and image sizes much less needed today. With CSS page design can look much better. Take a look at Zen Garden to see just how much page layout and design can vary using CSS on the same HTML code http://www.csszengarden.com/

November 30, 2007 - Leopard

Well This month I installed the newest OS X release for the Mac. This is the first time I have upgraded an OS and had system performance improve! My daughter installed the ugrade on her system first with no problem. When I tried to upgrade, I got caught in what turned out to be one of the few installation gliches.

My system went into a loop asking for a password it coudn't see. I reinstalled using an archive option and the system came back to life - it even kept track of all my settings! Amazing. A couple of days later I read that this particular glitch hit those systems that had a Mac patch installed for Tiger (10.4) just before upgrading to Leopard (10.5). My daughter upgraded just before the patch was released while I upgraded just after. A few other patches quickly followed in November fixing a rare freeze in the video card and restoring printing in Adobe Lightroom.

From my viewpoint as a Windows convert, the problems were minor in nature. I can still remember trying to upgrade my old Windows 98 system to Windows ME. No luck. It hung every time and not willing to spend time reinstalling my applications and files, the computer stayed on Windows 98 until it was scrapped.

August 28, 2007 - New Platform

This was the biggest change since moving from the Amiga to Windows 95 in February 1998. I have migrated all the design functions to an iMac running OS X 10.4. This is a stock 24" screen model first released this month. The only add-ons are an upgrade to 4 Gb memory and a 500 Gb FW800 external drive. It is a delight to use.

You might wonder at such a seminal change. It was the culmination of frustrations and options. My Sony XP system has a motherboard limit of a half Gb of memory. Far under powered for modern Adobe programs. I decided to wait until Vista was released to get a new system. I waited, and waited, and waited for two years. Meantime Sony dropped its desktop towers and reduced their line to a single modestly configured all-in-one that looked nice but didn't have the power I wanted. My poor old Sony spiraled to slower and slower operation. Disk reorgs and registry cleans didn't help. Tossing out Norton helped a bit. After some Zone Alarm updates, it began blocking me from legitimate sites. Programs took longer and longer to open. Every day AVG, which replaced Norton, took a minute or two to download and install anti-virus updates to block the latest round of beasties plaguing the Windows community. I got into the habit of turning the system on and going for my coffee or doing some other task, coming back later to read the mail etc. My tech newsletters on windows routinely announced the latest Windows patches and work arounds for problems sometimes caused by earlier patches. I shut off the auto update years earlier so I could be selective on the patches.

Finally Vista was released to less than even modest acclaim. And then Adobe announced it wouldn't update its CS2 releases for Vista. My XP system was too under powered to run more that the very basic version of Vista. A search for an alternative hardware box wasn't encouraging. I finally considered going to a Dell workstation in spite of some negative reviews on the construction quality of Dell products (my wife's Dell laptop seems to be well-built).

Then I read a review that noted the Mac Pro was price competitive with the Dell Workstation. This brought me to a detailed look at the Mac. I picked up a few books to find out what I would be leaping into. A few visits to the Apple Store nearby and I was seriously considered the Mac Pro with a 23" Cinema screen. Then the new version of the iMacs was released supporting 4 Gb of memory and equipped with a decent ATI video card, and an Intel 2 Duo core processor. One look at the screen and I was sold. I set the faster Mac Pro aside for another day.

I used an NTFS formatted external drive to move files over from the XP, and I'm keeping some business programs and files on the XP rather than install one of the variety of packages to run Windows on the iMac.

April 19, 2004 - GUI Skins

Been fiddling around with GUI skins. I wanted to change the look of XP. O'Reilly's Windows XP Annoyances mentioned Window Blinds as a third party add-on that simplified the process by adding a skin on the Windows GUI. The programs works and does allow for an amazing variation in the look of XP. After using it for a couple of months, I removed it. It had a few side effects.

it slows down XP slightly
many of the skins cause pop-up palettes to slowly drift off scale as they are opened and closed.
the colour combinations often result in some elements being too dark/light for readability
a very few programs won't work when skinned. One (Nero) crashed dramatically. Another (Norton Anti-Virus) occasionally crashed on start-up and gracefully removed itself.

When removed, Window Blinds set my system back to a simpler GUI selection making the speed improvement more obvious.

Reading Fred Langa's Langalist (a great windows techie newsletter) a while back, I came across a program call iRider. I discovered that it was a skin for IE that added features as well as changing colours. I liked some of the features, like the ability to pre-open links as I read a page, and the use of a single text box for URLs and Google searches, but I found it slowed down the browser slightly and occasionally I had to reboot my physical firewall (may or may not have been due to iRider).

Then, the other day while grocery shopping at Loblaws, I flipped through one of the computer magazines (about 95% ads these days) and saw a mention about another IE browser skin. This one, called MyIE2, sounded interesting. It is an open source program written by Bloodchen, based on an earlier version by Changyou. This program seems to work without noticebly slowing IE down. It has many optional features and plug-ins and on XP supports a few IE plug-ins like the popular Google toolbar. I like the use of tabbed multiple windows and the ability to group a selection of web sites so they all open with a single click. Like Windows, you can set MyIE2 to scoot its tool bars up off screen giving you more screen area for the page you are reading.

There are a variety of cosmetic skins which can be easily changed without affecting the programs speed or functionality. I have set my copy to be my default browser.

February 16, 2004 - HTML 4 Transitional Standards & CSS

Mark Singer called me in early February to get a current copy of the PHSC membership form. I took my current copy and converted it to PDF and linked it from our home page. Mark left me a message to say he couldn't access the home page so he manually blanked out the outdated info on an old version and used it for the fair mailings.

Puzzled, I followed up with Suzy after Mark told me this was his new Macintosh system. My daughter told me at least one version of Safari, Mac's OS10.n browser, followed strict adherence to W3 standards. I called her and we spent two hours going over my page and the badly outdated and just plain wrong code. She felt the first line comment from downloading the page a few years back after she had revised it, may have caused Safari to choke .

In any case I got a quick lesson on using CSS, not misusing <address>, and taught myself how to run a GoLive validation. Since then I have validated every page on that I've had to change on both my PHSC and Quilters' Fancy sites.

December 8, 2003 - New Software

Bought Photoshop CS (version 8). It has a number of improvements over version 7. In particular, the more elaborate version of the tool to separately adjust shadow and highlight gamma that I first came across in Photoshop Album. Pleased with the further utility of the product.

November 12, 2003 - New Software

Adobe has changed its strategy. A selection of its products are now grouped into a suite and will share a single release date. Individual programs are available. The suite adds a Version Control program not otherwise available. I found the price too steep to justify since I had purchased Photoshop 7 a few months ago and more recently Acrobat 6. I purchased InDesign CS and GoLive CS for the moment. The speed has improved and the interface is more practical. It was nice to see some annoying features/bugs on GoLive have disappeared in this release. Reading this page over, I realize it is a pre-blogg blogg.

August 31, 2003 - Update

Seems like I skipped a year. I still use Go Live, Photoshop and Acrobat for web design. All are newer releases. In November 2001 I moved to a Sony Vaio computer with a Pentium IV and Windows XP. I have been very satisfied with this system. It is well engineered. And runs noticeably cooler than my previous system.

I am still using a Nikon Coolpix 990 camera, adding a wide angle converter lens this month (increases the angle of view to that equivalent to a 24mm lens on a 35mm camera at the expense of poorer resolution). Switched to a Lexar 128meg "12X" CF card that is about triple the speed of the Sandisk CF cards I use. The camera is showing its first problem - the little function wheel behind the on switch wheel now skips settings.

After upgrading to Photoshop 7, I've been working on making better use of the program's capabilities. There are a wealth of books available offering in depth training in all aspects of this fine program.

The present update to quiltersfancy.ca adds to and better organizes our fabric pages. My next target is to improve the book pages making them current and adding cover shots. Over the past two years I have scanned most books when they first arrive to be sure I have a suitable selection of images.

GoLive 6 is clearly another step up in quality and capability as Adobe adds its fine touch to this product.

August 10, 2001 - New Colours

Carol worked with me today to redesign the colour of our site. We used Photoshop to design new background images. And I sorted out how to use Cascading Style Sheets. We always had a CSS file on the new site, but it was a copy of the CSS designed by my daughter Suzanne for the remake of the PHSC site to years ago. Somewhere in moving things around, the CSS file ended up clashing with GoLive which doesn't handle such things gracefully! It simply crashes with an incomprehensible message "GOLIVE caused an invalid page fault in module SCL.DLL at 0257:10015be8.". After a night of careful experimentation I discovered eliminating some style elements specific to the PHSC site stabilized the CSS file and we were on our way. I use four Adobe applications and GoLive is by far the most problem prone -- possibly the designers just didn't think about how users would test the system. The biggest booboo so far to me was the decision to bury the FTP set up and default it to acsii uploads in a program designed to use Javascript which must upload in binary mode. Took another day or two to figure this one out.

July 29, 2001 - Photoshop 6 and HSA

I finally capitulated the end of June and ordered the Adobe Photoshop upgrade to 6.01. I am concentrating on learning the tools to tune images. Getting more comfortable with the program as I create more fabric images to up load. I use an Ott Lamp or sunlight and record each fabric with a Nikon 990 digital camera. The Ott Light gives the most consistent results. With my set up, the results usually lack some yellow which I add with Photoshop. I compare the screen image with the bolt until I am satisfied with the colour. Unfortunately, at this stage, colours will vary from one monitor to another.

On July 20th, I installed an ether net card and connected to Bell Canada's High Speed Access via a Nortel Networks Modem. It has vastly improved my browsing and uploading. The speed varies widely depending on the internet route and the chosen site. The best I have seen is downloading at just over 1.2 meg... over 20 times faster than my 56 kb dial up. We are near the telephone office which does help when using the phone lines.

June 16, 2001 - GoLive 5 and Javascript

I am writing these notes in GoLive so you know I am still using the product. It is a mixed bag of very powerful features and hair pulling frustrations. I discovered just this week that some of my pages which use Javascript to pull up a new window were not working right. The pages worked correctly on my local system, but not on the server. After two days of experimenting, I discovered that pages containing Javascript and uploaded with WS_FTP worked okay but the same page uploaded with GoLive showed errors in IE and refused to display the second window. The GoLive user forum FAQ solved my problem.

I set WS_FTP to upload all files in binary to avoid corrupting any code. The creators of GoLive in their wisdom(?) defaulted all HTML pages to uploading as text which was "compressed" in the process. This resulted in some lines being combined including some Javascript joining a comment line and hence disappearing as far as IE was concerned. Neither the GOLive manual nor its online help made mention of the way files were uploaded. In fact, unlike WS_FTP, there seemed to be no mention and no means to adjust how files were treated. The user forum FAQ noted that the settings were in a window called "Web Setting" under a tab cryptically called "file mappings". I also struggled with constant messages about "no document encoding" even though the correct line was in the HTML. The same Forum FAQ solved that too -- I had the encoding command buried too far down the page.

On the other hand the link testing tools, components, and links to Photoshop are wonderfull helps. My Notions navigation bar is set up as a component so if I add a Notions page GoLive will change the navigation bar on every page for me. Cool.

April 12 2001 - New ISP.

I wanted to have our store name as our URL when we closed the store front. My original ISP, Onramp, wanted $250 to register me so I had to find another ISP. I ended up using EasyHosting provided by Look Communications who bought out Idirect.

January 2001 - Background.

These sites started out in April 1996 (PHSC) and December 1996 (Quilters' Fancy). They were originally hand coded with a text editor on an Amiga 3000T. I couldn't see the images at the correct resolution or colour depth. By early 1998, my Amiga was so badly out dated, I moved to a Pentium II/Windows 95 system and edited the sites with Front Page. Not happy at all with Windows 95, I moved on in June 1998 to Windows 98 which was more stable on my system. In the summer of 1999, my daughter Suzanne revamped the PHSC site to add cascading style sheets, a cleaner look, and a more suitable scale of pages and images for fast loading.

In the summer of 2000, I took a course in Java and decided to try Dreamweaver 3, which my youngest daughter Cher has. It was much more to my liking than Front Page. In the fall of 2000, I decided to get my own web design program and chose GoLive 5 by Adobe, since I was very pleased with their page layout product, InDesign and their Acrobat Editor.

GoLive made me realize how quickly my snappy Pentium II had aged in under three years. I had to update my video driver and directX just to get it to work. I like the way it interacts with Photoshop to pull copies of images and rescale them on the fly as I adjust the image size on a page. It has helped me tidy up the sites and clean up internal bad links.

This latest revision of the Quilters' Fancy site will replace the original look which has been up for four years now.

Well, thanks for visiting me here at the skunk works. You can click on the camera or bear's paw icon to find your way back to the regular part of our web sites (both were drawn on the Amiga in 1996). Bye for now....