Amazing Flash-free web page animation techniques: FACE (Faruk’s Animated CSS Enhancements). DOM manipulation via CSS+Javascript. Open source, and with a very clean API. Follow the Examples link for more. “Almost, but not quite entirely unlike Flash.” Wow.
Yes, all is fleeting and transient, life is paradoxical, and all that blah blah woof woof. But still, Macromedia has an odd definition of “permanently:”
But then again, Macromedia makes Dactyl Fractal Zoom possible, so give ‘em a break.
File under Truth Is Stranger:
William Shatner recently passed a kidney stone … and put it up for auction. It gets better. The winning bidder, GoldenPalace.com, paid $25,000 for the rock, which Shatner said “Was so big you’d want to wear it on your finger.” Proceeds from the sale were donated to charity.
This is a bold new addition to our fleet,” GoldenPalace.com Chief Executive Officer Richard Rowe said in a statement. The money will go to Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for the needy.
GoldenPalace.com is the same online gambling outfit that last year purchased the right to name a newly discovered monkey species, and bestowed the hapless creature with the name “GoldenPalace.com monkey.”
Debate on climate change has been shifting from one on whether humans are responsible for global warming to one on whether there’s anything we can do about it. The Washington Post:
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend. … There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent: … widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world’s fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe. The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted.
Meanwhile, one of the few things that could force us to significantly decrease our oil dependence — scarcity of the stuff — is being rapidly nullified by the increasing feasibility of mining Canadian oil sands. The politics of oil may change from U.S.-Middle East to U.S.-Canada. The “keep driving!” message sent by the push to move oil extraction from Iraq to Canada isn’t going to do the world’s oceans any good. And when the oceans fail, we all fall down.
The other meanwhile: Environmentalists are having a hard time convincing American consumers that maybe they don’t need to be wiping their noses (and booties) with virgin timber. This one has always baffled me — why would anyone even consider buying non-recycled personal tissue? But not only do people consider it, they insist on it (except for Germans, who are for some reason driven by common sense).
Fair Trade certified coffee is a great system for ensuring that exploited coffee farmers get more of the due for their labor. Even better is Community Agroecology, a system by which Costa Rican farmers send coffee directly to your house, bypassing all middlemen and ensuring that the farmers really get their fair share.
All funds from the coffee sales are returned to the Cooperative. This returns to farmers over five times more than those who sell their coffee in the conventional system and three times more than certified Fair Trade standards.
Ex-UCB student Joshua Deutsch, via email from Costa Rica, where he’s on currently working with coffee farmers and observing how commerce with America affects local economies: “This organization uses the term “fair trade direct” and aims to create a global network of direct purchasing between producers and consumers. The organization also guarantees that the coffee is grown in an environmentally sustainable manner.
Amy and I are giving it a shot (no pun intended).
Update: Looks like it’s also possible to order coffee directly from Zapatistas.
In 1992, I moved to Boston to become Pagan Kennedy’s pre-arranged husband. Fun while it lasted, but, in retrospect, doomed to failure (I should have known in advance when she sent me a letter with a bug squished on the page, circled in pen and labeled with my name).
Anyway, Pagan had her own TV show on local cable access, and one particularly amazing episode was themed around William Shatner’s delicious 1978 reinterpretation of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards. At the end of the episode, a friend of the family re-created Shatner’s performance note-for-note, puff-for-puff.
If you’ve never seen the original, it’s worth five minutes of your life. Gawker has it. The highlight comes 3/4 of the way through.
Overdue for a thorough going-over of the Hosting FAQs, but before I dove in, wanted a clean publishing back-end for them (I’ve been maintaining them through phpMyAdmin out of laziness — the thought of building yet another CRUD back-end fills me with dread). Also wanted to build in a search engine for users. Flirted with the thought of making the FAQs a Movable Type site, but decided to try something new and employ WordPress as a CMS instead.
(more…)
Designers take note: Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink. Computerworld:
In just one-twentieth of a second — less than half the time it takes to blink — people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.
Unfortunately, no tips there on how to make a positive first impression…
Bedtimes for Miles have become more time-consuming in recent months, as he finds more ways to push all the right buttons. “Please stay Daddy. I love you, and I miss you so much when you’re at work.” Cripes, what are you going to say to that? So I lie with him, tell another story… eventually try to leave the room and “the arm” reaches out, hooks me by the shoulder. “Please… please… stay.” Get firm about it and either he wails or gets up and walks into the living room. Bedtime has become a nightly two-hour ritual.
Then, last week, I brought a CD player into his room and put on Brian Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon.” Suddenly, things were different. He drifted off within minutes. Totally at peace with bedtime. Burned copies of Apollo, Compact Forest Proposal, and Plateaux of Mirrors for him (summary review). Not always perfect, but even when it doesn’t work, few things could compare to the absolutely peaceful feeling of napping at the end of a long day, listening to Eno by night-light with your three-year-old son’s arm wrapped around you.
Then, tonight, halfway through Apollo, he suddenly sat up and asked, “Daddy, what is this? Sad music for a doctor’s office?”
snodgrass mcfudd jr writes:
foobar isF-U-B-A-R
FOWLED “*****” UP BEYOND ALL RECOGNITION
SNAFU situation normal all fubarred up
asap as soon as possible please correct your spelling!!!!
Dear snodgrass: Since you failed to leave a real email address, I’ll use this space to send you here.
Foobar is a common placeholder name used in computer programming. It has been described as “the association of two metasyntactic variables: foo and bar”. These variables are often used in computer programming examples.
The entry goes on to explain foobar’s probable etymological roots in “fubar.”
Had cause today to strain the heck out of vi — a client wanted some known chunk of a 1GB, 5-million-line log file integrated with another log. Took about two minutes to open the file, but once open, was surprised by how snappy it was. Found a buried string in about 15 seconds. Snagged from that point to the end of the file and wrote out to a temp file in about the same amount of time.
:3976053,$ w newlog_temp
Try that in Word.
vi: It’s not just for breakfast anymore!
Will it be possible to run Windows or Linux on Intel-based Macs? ZDNet has a FAQ summarizing a lot of the discussion out there on the topic. The problem primarily comes down the boot-loader. Current versions of Windows use good old BIOS, while Intel Macs boot from Extended Firmware Interface, or EFI. Until Windows can boot from EFI, it’s not going to be an easy feat. But Windows Vista will include support for EFI, and a version of Windows Media Center already does. And some Linux distributions use Elilo rather than LILO or GRUB, and Elilo already knows how to boot from EFI.
The first entry I ever made in this blog (back when it was on LiveJournal) was on January 20, 2001, right around this time of day, which makes today its fifth anniversary. Sometimes (often) can’t believe I’m still doing this — I’ve threatened to throw in the towel enough times. Must be something wrong with me.
To celebrate, I’ve spent the last few evenings going back to the start of the archive and unpublishing a ton of stuff — almost 1/4 of everything (work in progress - have only made it up to 2003 so far). For the first few years, it seems like I paid little attention to whether posts would be interesting to anyone but me. Heck of a lot of bloviating over the years, trying to trim some of the pointless posts. There’s probably still a lot of embarassing stuff left, but the archives are in better shape than they were.
Sweet Amy even called me on the way to work this morning to wish me a happy anniversary!
When a server at work that should have had gobs of free space suddenly claimed to be running on empty and we wanted more info than we could get from the find command, I discovered this little gem: Disk Inventory X, which quickly drew a map of files and folders on disk by type and space. Culprit turned out to be a 305 GB log file generated over the past few days by an out-of-control Samba process.
Pictured above is the main drive in my home Mac. Rectangles are files, and their containing rectangles are folders. Each color represents a different file type. Select a rectangle and it’s immediately selected in a corresponding file tree (not shown), and vice versa. The region selected in yellow represents my old unused OS 9 System folder. Trippy. And useful.
Been meaning to check out Pandora for a while, and reminded by two Birdhouse readers in a week that I really needed to jack in. “Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.”
Create a Captain Beefheart playlist, and it includes The Minutemen, Shellac, Pere Ubu, Iggy Pop, Love… Had similar experiences creating lists starting from Warren Zevon and Chet Baker. The associations it makes feel incredibly natural - uncanny even. Lather, rinse, repeat the experience starting from nearly any artist or song you can think of.
Pandora plays to your current mood like nothing I’ve experienced. Associations are not based solely on the usual “what other people who liked this song also liked,” but on musical analysis of more than 10,000 artists, building a database cataloguing tonality, syncopation, rhythmic style, vocal style, etc. But you can thumbs up/down individual tracks, so it’s an analytic database fine-tuned by associative listener impressions.
Free version is ad-supported, but subscriptions are affordable. Audio quality is a bit on the lo-fi side, but not terrible.
Tune into my Cheap Thrills station.
Trying to come up with a new business plan, something along these lines:
Step 1: Read email
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
If you have any grand ideas, let me know (Yes, there’s a connection to South Park and garden gnomes in there somewhere…)
A Gedanken for you: How would the web be different today if no browser allowed users to view source?
The perfect antidote to Wikipedia: Uncyclopedia — “The content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Seems to suffer some performance problems, but often worth the wait. From the Air Guitar entry, which comes complete with annotated air guitar diagram:
Air guitars are similar in shape to normal guitars, with the notable difference that they are made entirely out of air. Air guitars typically have 6 strings and 24 frets. Although acoustic air guitars are available, electric air guitars are by far the most popular.
One perspective: Way too many people have way too much time on their hands.
Another: Thank God for that!
Thanks mneptok
This looks like fun (though I cringe for that poor suspension). Indestructible, those things. Remember being fascinated as a kid by the fact that VWs were sealed on the bottom and could float, as long as the door seals held.
Tuesday, January 17, noon: I’ll be offering a one-hour presentation to UC Berkeley’s Webnet group (campus web developers and editors) on the topic of blogging in the educational environment, with emphasis on tech considerations. It’ll be a fairly rushed overview with Q&A on running high-traffic multi-blog installations, editorial concerns, audio/video blogging, RSS, dealing with comment spam, tweaking platforms to work as content management systems, etc. If you’d like to attend, contact me for details.
This will be my first public presentation using Keynote, which is a deep breath of sweet, compressed air compared to PowerPoint.
Reader Kiernan recently contacted me about my old (and apparently much-linked-to) Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea document, saying:
I do not believe HTML email is going to disappear any time now. In fact, I expect we will see an increase in HTML email which suggests we need guidelines, not proscription. I think in the interests of furthering discussion on this subject, a poll would be useful.
Personally, I care a lot less about this subject than I used to. I’m still no fan of HTML email, but it doesn’t bug me the way it once did. Formatting in email can be useful and attractive. The security concerns it raises aren’t very relevant to me since I use a Mac (though I’m still concerned for all the Outlook users out there). Even command-line pine displays the plain-text alternate properly for most HTML emails these days.
At its best, HTML email highlights the strong points in a message. At its worst (for me), HTML email is a minor annoyance, sometimes resulting in tiny font displays — but nothing I can’t get around by punching Cmd-+ on the keyboard. There are a thousand things under heaven and earth more worthy of getting het up about. What about you? Have your feelings about HTML-formatted email changed over the years?
I’ve been musing on and off about this topic for years, but now there’s some research to back it up:
“Internet downloading and MP3 players are creating a generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or musical performances, British researchers said.” Music downloading creates listener apathy. A combination of forces is at work here, but there are three I’d put at the top of the list:
1) Quantity. Once upon a time, you’d save up your $7.99, buy the LP you had been wanting for weeks, and listen to it dozens of times over. This saturation fostered a personal relationship with a piece of music that I just don’t think people are experiencing today — or at least not as much. When people possess way more music than they can possibly listen to, there’s a tendency to wade through it all in a random fashion (guilty!), and the music has a resulting tendency to become background. This is one of the reasons I’m now trying to put more emphasis on pruning my MP3 collection than on growing it (though I have only been mildly successful, and am in fact currently planning a multi-jigabyte RAID storage solution just for my music; collecting is far easier than pruning).
2) Cost. The bulk of most people’s MP3 collections has come to them for free. When you can download 40 albums overnight rather than purchase one or two or even five a month, the personal investment in the music is further devalued, and you never get around to fully digesting all the new music before yet more arrives.
3) Aesthetics. The visual involvement of the LP cover gave way to the lesser involvement of the CD sleeve. But at least we still had something. When you go all digital, you give up the visual aesthetic accompanying the music altogether (with the possible exception of the tiny album cover thumbnails stored in ID3 tags, which are no replacement). Not to mention all of the extra information you get about an artist by reading liner notes and lyrics, which was always a big part of developing a relationship with an album.
Quantity and flexibility are so seductive. It’s so easy to not notice how much we give up.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes reelblue.net, a starter site promoting the coming documentary film “Reelblue” by J-School graduates Sachi Cunningham and Jennifer Galvin. The film investigates the relationship between healthy oceans and healthy humans, as seen through the eyes of surfers.
The monetary value of minerals is generally predicated on how rarely they occur in the natural world (though this value is sometimes faked; diamond companies sit on large stockpiles to artificially inflate rarity in the marketplace). But expand your definition of “natural world” to include the universe, and the formula gets turned upside down. The value of the platinum, iron, nickel and cobalt deposits in an asteroid could top $20 trillion. Cambridge Conference (halfway down page):
John Lewis, who co-directs the Space Engineering Research Center at the University of Arizona at Tucson, studied one C-type asteroid, a 2-km-wide NEO called Amun. He concluded that the monetary value of Amun’s platinum group metals (pgms)-platinum, iridium, osmium, palladium, and so on-is more than US $6 trillion. Amun’s iron and nickel might be worth something on the order of $8 trillion. Add another $6 trillion for Amun’s cobalt deposits, and the asteroid’s value totals a spectacular $20 trillion! … Some M-types, like the unassumingly named 1986 DA, are mountain-sized blends of iron, nickel, and cobalt — in other words, naturally occurring stainless steel. In all, roughly 2000 NEOs [near-earth objects] about the size of 1986 DA are known to exist, with as many as 50 more being discovered each year.
Was thinking today with a cow orker that at those prices, it would probably make financial sense to crash an asteroid into [name your city]. Sell the asteroid, pay back the city for damages, and pocket the diff. But don’t do it too often, or you’ll drive down the price of platinum!
Apple kindly provides RSS feeds of “Top 10″ and “Recently Added” items to the iTunes Music Store. The version linked above is for the general public. Partners/affiliates use a separate interface to generate RSS feeds with embedded affiliate IDs. Either way, the feeds they generate display by default as … wait for it … a series of HTML tables including all kinds of information you probably don’t want to display on your site — stuff like price, release date, and copyright holder all seem locked into the feed.
I’m using Magpie to display columns of genre-specific artist images on pages in The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. At first thought I’d have to scrape the feed to get just the data I wanted out of the tables, but then discovered that all of the data elements actually are atomic - they’re just stored in a subarray. Since this isn’t documented and Google turned up nothing useful, thought I’d share the code I came up with for the sake of future searchers.
