After at least a year of being held hostage by Network Solutions, Stink.com is finally back online! (yep, I’m a monkey!)

The following linked articles deal with WebDAV support under earlier versions of OS X, but the basic ideas should still be useful for enabling WebDAV on current versions as well. When iCal is released, WebDAV will allow for syncing of calendars without a .Mac account. I was expecting WebDAV to be something much more complicated, I’m surprised it’s basically just an Apache extension.

What a day. Bad start: Posted to an utterly crappy Metafilter thread on the middle east early today, but I was rushed and disgusted, so I didn’t include any links to back up my comment. Only two personal attacks this time. I understand why people don’t use their real names online, it’s one thing to have a pseudonym insulted, another thing entirely to have your real name used. I didn’t think what I said was that inflammatory or exaggerated, but I guess I’ve just read too many disturbing things. I did go looking for supporting links, but reading the Saudi Arabian and Syrian national papers tends to send my mood into the toilet, especially when searching for articles containing words like “jew” or “american”.

Lila had four shots this morning, which is just no fun to watch and left her feeling lousy all day. Several bags of frozen milk smelled bad so I was scrambling to defrost more while Lila was screaming from some unknown combination of hunger and residual effects of the inoculations. On top of all that, our building’s masonry is being repaired, which means there are men outside the window (on the 9th floor) with jackhammers. That hammering resonates all the way through our apartment, loud enough that I have to shout to be heard over it. Phone calls were overlapping, and I never managed to find time to eat anything. My nerves were completely frayed before noon and my first set of clothes had already been thrown up upon.

Thankfully two glasses of wine with dinner smoothed over all of that.

I have a perverse talent for pushing technology until it breaks. Currently Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 have both stopped acknowledging the space-bar, shift-key and option-key constraints. Working with these applications without those tools is like trying to tie your shoes in ski mittens. Other users are having this problem too, but Adobe’s forums are filled with apologists and sycophants. Anyone who questions their design decisions or reports an issue tends to be castigated and shouted down, in some cases even by one particularly loathsome Adobe employee. Here are links to two threads about the problems I’m having, though neither offers a solution (require registration):

• zoom in/out hand tool
• the hand tool doesn’t work in OS X…

My current solution workaround? Photoshop 6 in Classic. Ugh.

I’ve been using Photoshop since version 2.0, and I even have a copy of 1.7.3 on floppy (the whole thing fit on one single floppy disk) I’m not using it much at all anymore, because with each version it gets a little more frustrating and less and less fun. Adobe needs competition.

This is one of the things which worries me about OS X; legacy applications. After researching my current problem and writing this out, I started to want to install Photoshop 4 again. Of all the versions I’ve used, I think that was the closest to perfect. It was before the nightmare of color profiles, and had a clean, fast and logical workflow which seemed to be a perfect extension of the ideas in Photoshop 3. But back to OS X. When we finally lose Classic, which seems like it will happen in the near future, our options are cut off. Photoshop 4 and thousands of other programs won’t be options anymore, even though their still a completely viable applications. Hopefully the same spirit which keeps dragging old technology forward will keep things running into the future.

I was planning on slamming Adobe’s nearly unusable although visually pleasing web site some other time, but it just started to flow. Due to a lousy information architecture, finding information on their site takes forever. Just getting into their forums to browse was a convoluted mess of clicks and pages. One page said I could browse without logging in, but then connected me to the login page. Repeatedly. But the site’s problems don’t end with the unreadable content it displays. The pages themselves are a non-standard mess. They’re still not using DOCTYPE declarations. Their HTML is a disaster. Their CSS is a disaster. Adobe seems to have a phenomenally poor understanding of and lack of respect for the web, it’s amazing they can still sell web tools. Or maybe that’s why most people I know don’t rely Adobe tools when building sites.

The situation of purchasing fonts from Adobe is equally frustrating, and barely seems to work. (no surprise, it’s a web service) Several different attempts have ended up in calls to font sales support because their system either doesn’t download the file, downloads an html file instead of the fonts or eventually sends a corrupted archive. In the end they ended up emailing the files. Keep in mind that all of this trouble is to legitimize the use of a font I already have a copy of. It’s no wonder there’s software piracy…