The Man in Blue > footerStickAlt: A more robust method of positioning a footer

I'm always looking for ways to use CSS to enable layouts that weren't possible using other coding methods. Often I'll create the design first in Photoshop and then challenge myself to come up with a technical solution. This is how I came up with Emulating Position: Fixed; when working on Jade Lee's website. But sometimes it's nice to find a pure CSS solution to a common layout challenge that somebody else has come up with, and add that layout to the list of possible layouts next time you're designing in Photoshop.

As someone who steadfastly charges hourly for freelance work I try to avoid creating unnecessary code challenges for myself while in the design phase because when it comes time to code I'll either have to compromise the design or decide to put in extra un-billed hours because I want to solve the problem for personal reasons, but that would be bad business if I were doing freelance sites for a living rather than as a hobby to work on my design skills.

Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive

parasites, placebos, the list of things that manipulate the brain continues to grow.

Cybil's Site #1 for a New Zealand Google Search

She doesn't have the same rank in the .com version of google, is there something I don't know about Cybil and New Zealand? (à la Susan and Australia from Coupling)

SonSpring Design

This site's one where you'll want to hold your breath and activate that IE View plugin. As much disdain as I do hold for American Christains, I link to this site for it's excellent message for Internet Explorer users (which for those not running IE on XP looks exactly like the warning messages in that woeful browser).

Newton Canyon on Bike

Location

From the 101, 7.9 miles up Kanan Road (becomes Kanan Dume Road at Mulholland Hwy) park right before the 3rd tunnel. Head west down the trail into the canyon.

Misadventure

This trail fucking kicked my ass. I walked the bike halfway back up out of the canyon sweating profusely. There are plenty of excuses, the heat, the washout from this spring's heavy rain, but it all comes back to that I'm horribly out of practice biking and horribly out of shape. Oh well, I'll get there.

I think I'd better go back to Las Virgines and Malibu Creek and get a little better at this biking thing before trying the Backbone Trail again.

Alaskan Wedding - a photoset on Flickr

My dad got married

Preventing JavaScript File Caching

"I can't reproduce the bug you entered. Clear your cache, you must have the old version of that javascript file."

I don't know how many times I've had to say this as a front-end developer. But the problem of cached outdated JavaScript files is only going to get worse as we get better at separating Structure from Presentation from Behaviour. And it's also worse when you are doing more frequent updates to a production environment (just a dream when it comes to secure apps, but maybe a possibility for ongoing development of internal-facing apps). The biggest problem is that users can't be expected to know how to clear their caches. Things will just break and magically fix themselves if the user even has the patience to wait around until their cached file gets updated.

I googled around and found a theoretical answer in a forum somewhere. Based on what I found here is the solution that Josh and I put into practice:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/webLibrary.js
?buildtime=@BUILD_TIMESTAMP@"></script>

...where @BUILD_TIMESTAMP@ is a variable to be replaced by the back-end language / build script of your choice. Here are the issues that this solves:

• Browser does not pull the JS file from cache when there has been a new deployment.
• Browser cache continues to function as it should in between builds (speeding up page loads)

The Long Tail: "Just enough piracy"

...putting forth the theory that there is an optimal amount of piracy that is actually beneficial to the industry, whether it be software, music or motion pictures.

Bow man (flash game)

skip the practice and go straight to the killing part.

Google Map Visitor log for Divine Blog

just plugged this thing into my site. why not?

Master Lock Street Cuffs Bike Lock

wow. now that's a bike lock.

Lust For Bust

now this is what flash was meant for!

Trail Central Listing for Los Angeles County - SoCalMtB.com

while lookin for bike shops to figure out what size frame i need came across this fairly extensive trail listing.

Replacing Line Feeds in IE and Mozilla

Line breaks, carriage returns, new lines, form feeds, whatever you might think of them as, browsers have their own ideas. I'm talking specifically about the character(s) produced when you hit Enter within a textarea and then try to manipulate the value of that textarea with JavaScript using regular expressions.

IE (internet explorer) on a PC

\r\n

Firefox (mozzilla) on a PC

\n

So, if you wanted to replace all the "line feeds" in a variable whose value was pulled from a textarea with a single space this is the code you would need:

val = val.replace(/\r\n/g," ");
val = val.replace(/\n/g," ");

On a related note, IE also has a funny idea about what character a single space is represented by when written to the page from a database (but not when typed with the space bar). If you want to strip out all of the spaces from a field in IE try this bit of hex:

val = val.replace(/[\xA0]/g,"");

That concludes this geeky interlude. Now back to our regularly scheduled nerdiness.

The Christian Paradox (Harpers.org)

This is why, with apologies to Josh and Doug, it is so easy to say, "American Christians fucking suck" without feeling too bad about it. But I will try to remember to include the "American" at the begining of that statement in future.

Knot Book

Had a dream about knot tying last night. Ok, so I'm a rather obsessive about the things I do; on the nerd side of geek. Today I digitized the knot book that I wrote in 1998-99 and uploaded them to flickr. I'll update this post as I add descriptions and category tags (bend, loop, hitch). I also plan to update the knots page on this site with highlights of the most practical knots and their applications.

So take a look at my photos tagged with "knot", but stay tuned for better organization and more information.

Update: I've updated my Knots Page to feature the best knots for a variety of purposes. But sorry, I still haven't done anything about improving the quality of the knot photos themselves. Someday I'll bust out the drawing tablet and the camera and do it all up proper like, but not today.

adaptive path >> an interview with ludicorp's eric costello

wow, i didn't know that Flickr evolved from The Game Neverending (which I dropped a blog post about a couple years ago but never actually played), which was in turn built by the creators of the 5K contest.

Flickr: Photos tagged with wettshirtcontest

now there's a tag we can cross our fingers that it takes off

Critique: The Alphabet

Uu

I have nothing good to say about this lazy piece of rocking shit. Both of them. Probably designed by whoever did the C.

Flickr: Explore interesting photos from the last 24 hours

some brilliant photos. particularly like the colors in this batch, not just a bunch of artsy black and white portraits. have to come back tomorrow and see what the rotation is like.

The Word Nerds--A Weekly Podcast About Language

traffic is particularly unpleasant during the summer, or maybe I'm just getting bored by the same drive every day, either way I was looking for something to shake it up a bit. So I commandeered Cybil's mp3 player and started downloading podcasts. Between this new one (new to me) and Science Friday I've got my commute covered for a while just catching up on their back lists.