Journal: May 2008

Friday, May 23, 2008

Gristlestick - There and Back Again Tour 2008

According to the Gristlestick schedule on MySpace my brother is in playing in Montana on his way up to Alaska. Here’s a television interview they did a little while back. My brother’s the one in the red shirt.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

have you met ted?

YouTube video of Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Segel singing the Confrontation song from Les Mis.

via: blog for all things how I met your mother.

Embedding Flash

It’s been a while since I’ve had to work with a flash movie, so here are a couple things I’ve learned today (applying my new policy of always researching problems before diving into code).

Using some third party flash embed code and the damn flash movie is on top of all your popups and shit? That’s because the jackasses forgot a parameter: wmode=“opaque”. See Flash content displays on top of all DHTML layers on adobe.com.

Also, here’s an improved version of the Satay Method, which you may remember from A List Apart. How to properly embed flash.

Timeout for Ajax Mootools

Mootools Ajax Timeout from blackmac.de

Mootools 1.11 doesn’t make the distinction between a failure due to timeout or 500 or whatever. This lets you.

Oh, and there’s a New Version.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

JavaScript Session Variables (without cookies or query string)

Link: Session variables without cookies.

Now there’s a dangerously clever new idea. Use the window.name property to store a JSON object (converted into a string), and it stays there as you navigate from page to page. “What’s this window.name property, I’ve never heard of it?” was my first reaction, but then I recognized it from here: window.open(url, name, features). It’s been read/write since JavaScript 1.1, so I’m assuming this works in IE6, but it hasn’t been tested yet.

Of course this is completely insecure, when your visitor navigates to another site, that site will have access to your data. So it can’t hold sensitive user account information, and it can’t hold preferences that you wish to retain from visit to visit, but I’m sure there’s some sort of interface state data that would be handy to pass between pages, but not critical enough to warrant a back-end solution.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Sad Kermit

Sad Kermit sings Creep, by Radiohead.

Sad Kermit sings Hurt, by NIN.

It’s like a dream about pre-school nested within a dream about high school. Creep is worth listening to just to hear Kermit say, “fuck.”

Three Equal Height Liquid Columns In CSS

Presenting this code to demonstrate a couple concepts: gutter images on 3 liquid columns, and a generic column system. It may not work copy-paste. Also, I’m not going to bother explaining anything, or even demonstrating how the classes “double column” work with “single column”. The class clearfix is common enough, find it somewhere on position is everything, and to see what the heck I’m doing with those universal selectors (*) read liquid gutter dilemma.

The HTML:

<div class="section">

   <div class="gutter clearfix">
       <div class="single column">
          <p>Blah blah blah.<p>
       </div>
       <div class="single column">

          <p>Blah blah blah.<p>
          <p>Blah blah blah.<p>
       </div>
       <div class="single column">
          <p>Blah blah blah.<p>

       </div>
   </div>
</div>

The CSS:

.section { background: transparent url(../img/bg_gutter.gif) repeat-y 66% 0; }
.gutter { background: transparent url(../img/bg_gutter.gif) repeat-y 33% 0; }
.column { float: left; }
.column * { margin-left: 15px; margin-right: 15px; }
.column * * { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; }
.single { width: 33.2%; }
.double { width: 66.4%; }