Sachertorte

Andrew L. Russell explains why today's internet doesn't have seven layers: the good-enough, interoperable TCP/IP eventually won out over the more ostensibly open, standards-based OSI.

OSI was devised by committee, but that fact alone wasn’t enough to doom the ­project—after all, plenty of successful standards start out that way.

Screen shot

What is a screen? A thing that divides. A thing people undress behind. A thing every computer has, in fact a thing computing has distilled itself increasingly into. A thing we all carry around with us in our pockets, a thing fundamental to western-world human information-gathering and a feature now fundamental—unimaginable this, only ten years ago—to a telephone. A thing that has an appearance of transparency and that divides us from bankers, ticket sellers, post office workers, people with money. A thing people project onto.

—Ali Smith, Artful, p. 121

Fun with CQ5: 4

I picked up a new (to me) CQ5 site, and as I walked through the authoring instance, I noticed that the pages loaded into the editor without the Content Finder. In URL terms, that fussy little /cf# wasn't there. How did this team disable the Content Finder by default?

Well, at least part of the answer is that the content pages have this property defined: cq:defaultView="html". The opposite setting is cq:defaultView="contentfinder". Here's the Adobe KB entry on the topic.

Back from the store

Ellen Ullman takes an unvarnished look at her ups and downs as a "woman programmer:"

...the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response.

I was hooked by her lede, which uses a musical simile to describe the sort of work I've done for most of my working life:

I was an ordinary computer programmer. I wrote code that ran at the levels between flashy human interfaces and the deep cores of operating systems, like the role of altos in a chorus, who provide the structure without your taking much notice of their melodic lines.

Tamara Shopsin provides a clever illustration, too.

Blink and you miss it

Vijith Assar tells the story of one of the web's most reviled tags.

ᔥ The Morning News