Saturday March 23, 2002

Truckers are techies too. Why truckers make the best beta-testers discusses the high tech world of trucking. I did a little research into this a couple years ago and found that not only do the truckers have access to some cool technology, but the trucking company's are really digging it too. We talked with companies that setup communications with the trucks to find out their location (onboard GPS), load status, and even to tap into the engine electronics. With some rigs the home office can find out if there are any problems with the rig, download statistics, and tweak a few of the parameters (max speed, jake brake rules, etc...). Companies use wireless and spatial techniques for correlating their network of goods to the location of trucks and drivers, optimizing for mileage, cost, and regulations. In one of the truck stop magazines I read about truck stop parking lots with 10baseT plugins. Check out the Mobile Office setup guide from truckstop.com



I've been using the latest build of Mozilla on OS X for about a week now. So far it hasn't been bad. There's some obvious bugs, but none that are showstoppers and nothing that causes it to crash any more frequently then IE did.

Mozilla has some sweet features:

IE and Opera each have some of these or similar features, but none of them quite as extensive. Rendering isn't bad, at least on my G4, and navigation is easy.

For anyone who cares (browser programmers I would hope) here's what I look for in a browser:

Mozilla goes a long ways towards this and so far I haven't felt like going back to IE. I've tried Omniweb (nice looking, but beauty is only goes so deep), Opera (bad handling of links/dragdrop), and IE. Before Mozilla IE was the best for what I do and how I work, but it always has at least two or three really annoying bugs (Win or Mac) that interrupt the flow of work. I tried Netscape on Windows a month or so ago and after picking all of the AOL detritus off of my hard drive I'm happy to say I won't ever make that mistake again. IE may be annoying but AOL/Netscape takes annoying to a whole new level.



Phil Ackley over at Thingumabob suggested that I add a comments feature to this weblog. So we'll give YACCS a try and see how it goes. Of course I'll be futzing with it for days and days...

Seems to work, with or without javascript. With javascript you can see the number of comments left without clicking the link. The link, yes, that would be the dog toting a bullhorn next to the mail & permalinks.



Happy Trash

We've had this wooden trash container for at least ten years. Yesterday a bread tie fell onto the lid and now we'll never see it quite the same again.



Fun tricks with very high voltage: homemade lifters defy gravity...sort of.