return of the king for best picture

Another good call by Doug:

You guys still owe us reparations for giving the best picture to Annie Hall instead of Star Wars in 1977.

timex data link

Mr. Gorman was correct I could develop for my new watch. Wonder if I could write foosball lineup picker?

Update: the data link yahoo group has a files section with a number of programs that people have written, like Pong and Master Mind. Doubt Master Mind will be too cool on a monochrome display, but it's probably still a fun little thinker of a game.

first posts

Here are a couple first blog posts via Keith Robinson to go with the new beginnings theme of this time of year, but with the ulterior motive of further harassing Mister Jon Plummer about taking his design chops off the shelf to share his brilliance and innovation with the rest of us.

• Why? (kottke.org)
• Stopdesign | Something New

keira knightley

YUMMMMM!

Seen most of these before, but there are some nice higher-res pics in this multi-page set.

On a similar note, the Christmas Edition of Ass of the Week is also worth a gauk or 12.

region free dvd

Probably a year ago or so we got a Coby DVD player. The reason for choosing this particular model was that it was advertised as region free, so we could play DVDs from different continents, specifically region 2 because British TV and Film is so much better than American. But we hadn't gotten a chance to test it yet until I got Cybil the Cold Feet boxed set for christmas. Let's just say that the Pal/NTSC button failed utterly. But thanks to jfred's link to regionfreedvd.net I found the proper meaningless combination of keys that had to be pressed to make it work. Score yet another successful trouble shoot for Josh! Now if I can just find a copy of Windows 95...

scary image map alternative

Over at A List Apart Stuart Robertson presents a CSS alternative to image maps which you can see in use at Dead Ends (featuring a choose your own adventure, yeah!)

It's clearly the first take on a new way of thinking about coding artistic experience oriented websites. The design is superb which is why a breakthrough technique was called for, but the implementation falls short on several counts.

First, the XHTML is pretty weak. There are a bunch of anchors left to fend for themselves within unnecessarily nested divs. And those anchors have within themselves <i> tags.

I think the root of the problems comes from not thinking about what structure this list of links should have independent of what it was going to look like. It is, clichéd as it may be these days, an unordered list. The elaborate drawing of a book is the background. The div's are just meaningless containers, we don't need them. The links could have span tags inside them if an image replacement technique was strictly required (it is a nice thought to be different and use <i>, but if you really need a meaningless tag use one). Personally, I would have talked it out with the artist to see if they would compromise on the 2 or so link words that are slightly askew and go with HTML text. Plain text has many advantages. It is re-sizable, selectable, loads first (!important with a heavy site like this), and is readily editable. I'd give it the text-transform: uppercase; treatment, pick a font that anti-aliases in most modern browsers, and do the hover effect with background images. It would be a comprimise, but very worth it.

On to the CSS. My biggest beef here is in the shortcuts used in the positioning of the anchors. All anchors are top: 31px; except for these two which are top: 531px;. The anchors are then individually given their left: properties. This means that when you want to figure out the placement of a single link you have to reverse engineer how it is being positioned. I don't think people have been actually working with and maintaining CSS based layouts for long enough to know which shortcuts will be clear to others (or oneself a month later), and which are overkill attempts at efficiency. Shorthand hex is fine, using 3 rather than 6 digits. Shorthand properties defining top, right, bottom, and left in one declaration are also perfectly usable long term. But spreading the layout aspects of a single element throughout the document just isn't helpful when somebody has to go back in and move something.

There, rant done. Über cool idea, could use a little cleanup before I would show it to the folks back home in Maine on their dial-up connection.

carrom

Carrom is this awesome game my best friend in middle school had. It's one of those manual dexterity oversized board games that I dig. Not up there with Table Tennis or Foosball by any means, but fun.

critical element

I just put in a critital part of the interactive contact form that I've been playing with. There's now a cleanup function that fires onsubmit to remove the labels from fields where they haven't changed to prevent them from being submitted as data.

Now I need to write an abstraction function or two in order to get it to work with textareas, and decide how i'm going to handle radio/checkbox inputs. I suspect default label formatting may work (the way it looks with just my CSS and the JS hasn't done its thing yet.) Eventually I'll post it to a form submittal backend so that it actually works.

js alternative

Here is an alternative (by Andrew Clover) to the fixed line length vrs flexible layout question, just use this JavaScript: minmax.js. It brings IE up to speed on the CSS properties min/max-width and height. Coolest thing is it's completely external. I haven't tested it yet though, that's why it's getting posted here so I can find it later.

Blue Man Group & Zumanity

We're off to Vegas to see Blue Man Group and Zumanity!

interactive form

I've been playing with a little DOM scripting to enhance interactivity between form fields and labels in this Contact Form Test.

The fun part, for me anyway, is getting to expirement with this alternative label syntax:

<LABEL>
   <INPUT type="text" name="lastname">
   Last Name
</LABEL>

except I cheated and wrapped a span around the label text to make it easier to style and grab with the DOM. I was careful though to make the form usable before the JavaScript comes in and does it's thing. But with CSS turned off you'll be wishing I put in some break tags or paragraphs instead of just turning the labels into block level containers.

saddam

Wow, they finally got him. Hopefully it won't help Femalegenitalhair too much in the upcoming election, but maybe that's too much to hope.

I may be forced to become involved in whatever campaign is opposing him. The last time I gave a shit enough to do anything about politics was in protesting his father's war.

#21

Ass of the Week - nice ass in the sun. I must be getting soft, it's gone down into the upper 50's and I'm looking at that ass thinking it'll be nice when it's a bit warmer here.

quiz

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? - I got 8 out of 10, didn't trust my gut on 2.

pen tricks

Now here's a useless skill that I'd pick up if my job were boring.

ie vulnerability

So if you haven't downloaded Firebird yet, check out this Internet Explorer Vulnerability and then go download it! That's what happens when undead browsers are allowed to go around infiltrating operating systems.

ha

Man 1, Bank 0 (because it's so long i can't finish it now but so outragious i want to read it later)

checkershadow illusion

Jon showed me this illusion as an extreme example of what's going on with some colors in this design I'm coding. I'd seen this happen many times, even (accidentally) used it to create artificial gradients, but this example is just mind blowing. Squares A and B are both #6B6B6B, drag it into photoshop and check out the hex values yourself.

ain't it cool news

HOBBIT-MAN: THE KING RETURNS

[at an early LOTR ROTK showing] I saw the one dude in front of me who was with this girl, and the President of Warner Brothers came out and said, “This movie is three hours and twenty minutes,” and before I could say, “So what, gaylord” the chick says to the dude she’s with that she has to GO. And he LET her go because this movie kicks so much ass you can SENSE it even before it starts. And this chick was a stone fox, and he probably could have made out with her, but he was like, “I’m going make out with this movie,” that’s how good it is. See ya, hottie.

One cool thing about the Lord of the Rings movies is that early reviews can't be spoilers because we already know what's going to happen.

photos

Autumn in Kyoto

craig's list

There are some really hilarious writers hanging out on craig's list, this love letter for instance is an excellent peice of satire.

1 down

I did the first thing on the list below (adding the events from outside using only the DOM) which is good enough for me. Now I've just gotta apply this to my links page. Here's how I used the DOM to isolate the anchors in the main list from the anchors in the sublist to apply the events.

First I grabbed all the anchors in the list:

getElement('linksList').getElementsByTagName('A');

Next I had to loop through all the anchors and see how deeply nested they were. With the DOM there are two directions to look, down into the children or up at the parents. To me the simplest way to determine how deep a given anchor is was to create a negative test case looking up 3 levels. What is up 3 levels? Well, if you are an anchor in the sub-list there's a list item up there (a > li > ul > li ). If you are one of the main list anchors you outside of the lists altogether (a > li > ul > div ), but that doesn't matter because I just tested to see if you are not in the sub-list:

a.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.nodeName != "LI"

and then assigned my events

a.onmouseover = function(){showSiblingList(this);}
a.onfocus = function(){showSiblingList(this);}

Here's the JavaScript: linkList.js

3rd dhtml menu type

So we have DOM based menus that do the tree collapse thing, and DOM based horizontal drop-down menus, but what about those sidebars that pull out lists to their right? I've been running out of room above the fold on my links page for some time now, and that 3rd type of menu is well suited for such out of control link collections.

Here's a first cut of a remake of my Links page. Rolled it out in like 30 minutes, so there are a number of things left to do:

1. figure out how to add the onmouseover and onfocus events using the DOM without adding IDs or classes to the links.
2. button styled links, which will bring up the cursor path problem (accidentally mousing over the button above and opening a different category on your way to the sub-list) which I'll have to mitigate with a setTimeOut.
3. if this is the left sidebar navigation instead of the main contents of the page I'll have to work out a way to hide the subnav, it never goes away as I've mocked it up here.
4. oh, and I guess it would be cool if the subnav could come in to the right of the particular nav item instead of all top aligned.

blo.gs

My blog reading habits just got more efficient yet more complicated at the same time. I have given in to the blo.gs trend, so now I will be instant messaged whenever a blog I follow is updated. But not all of them. So now the People section of my Links page is broken into two groups, those who ping blo.gs, and the rest. Hopefully this will mean less time wasted loading pages over the crap network at work. But then again it might just encourage the habit and have me reading even more.

P.S. I could never stomach the idea of reading RSS feeds, for me the visual experience of the page is an important part of reading a weblog.

ass of the week

Here is the latest addition to the ongoing quest to find ass not blocked by websense: Two Tall Socks: Ass of the Week Archives

logo design contest

Breath & Shadow Logo Contest
A design contest with some money behind it for a change. Not much mind you, but how many entire site re-design contests are out there with no prize at all?

mtg

Hello. My name is Nils and I'm an addict. Even without cards I continue to build. It is sad.

Vischeck: Downloads

Vischeck has a Photoshop Plug-In that simulates Deuteranope, Protanope and Tritanope color blindness. Yes, I go out of my way to support physical impairment, while gleefully mocking geographical impairment.

onion article

continueing on the confederate state bashing theme: New Alternate-Reality Series Puts 12 Strangers On Island Where South Won Civil War

bad santa

Random brief movie review. In theaters now, Bad Santa is a must see. We saw a rough cut early last summer, since then they've really fleshed it out as a movie (character arcs and such) while keeping it up there among the most vulgar films I've ever seen. Vulgar as in a mall santa that likes to fuck big&tall women up the ass in the changing room, not vulgar as in toilet humor (except for the snotty little kid, the boogers were just in poor taste).

black horn nut

A souvenir from Thanksgiving in a confederate state, the one with Atlanta in it. Why the hell was I down there? A friend recently moved out there for some reason, beats me why anyone would want to live down there. I guess if you grow up in the California you aren't taught in school how evil (cotton/slaves) and slow in the head (from the heat) people are in the South East. Ayup, that's my Down (i.e. North) East education shining through ;-).