Manual for Singer 221K Featherweight

Ah the internet, what a wonderful thing. Here's the owner's manual for my mom's old Singer (photo on Flickr).

Search and Rescue - New York Times

Tim O'Reilley's response to the Google Print lawsuite.

Skidoo : Ruthsarian Layouts

3 columns, each of equal height regardless of the height of their contents, a header, a footer, and background colors of the columns not created using background images. Ingenious! The trick? Short version: the sidebar backgrounds are actually the borders of a wrapper. Clever negative margins pull everything together.

Essential for Serenity

With the movie finally making its public release this week it's time to do a little last-minute browncoat recruitment. Having seen the movie 9 months ago, Cybil and I are lending out the DVDs with a list of "must watch" episodes for those few friends who aren't properly prepared for the movie. Not that I think you need to watch the show to see the movie, but I'm in no position to judge, having watched and re-watched it many times.

So here is our attempt at a required viewing list:

Pilot: Serenity Part 1 & 2

A proper introduction. Once you've seen this, you're hooked.

Bushwhacked

Fear of Reavers: important for the movie.

Our Mrs. Reynolds

This one actually isn't that critical to the overarching story line, but it's the one that we always go, "oh, that quote is from this episode too?" while we're watching it.

Out of Gas

Great back-story. Plus it's got my favorite plot structure.

Ariel

River's story progresses, and the Tams vrs. Jayne conflict becomes very immediate.

Objects in Space

OK, so there's a new bounty hunter in the movie, but this episode's important because it cements the relationship between River and Serenity. And for other reasons, but no spoilers here, right?

There are a couple more that episodes that really wanted to squeeze their way up into the "must see", but we figured letting Our Mrs. Reynolds slide into the otherwise movie-centric list was enough.

Shindig

An exploration into Mal's off-beat sense of honor (*cough* chaotic-good), and his relationship with Inara.

Jaynestown

This episode has my favorite quote about a "special hell". Jayne's character grows a bit, and we see what life is really like under the Alliance.

What to you guys think? Are there any other episodes that are essential pre-movie watching, given that the movie is, to quote Joss, "Mal's story told through River's perspective," and is about the origin of the Reavers? Any that could be taken out?

CSS Maintainability

In response to Simon Wilson's post on CSS Maintainability…

My old partner in crime over here at work, in the ebusiness team where we build web applications, once posted a little something on this subject here @ mezzoblue where he suggests pulling out all the structural CSS that forms the layout of the page and placing it at the top of the document, using indentation to echo the nesting of the HTML.

In my own more recent work I have been doing something like this:

/* General Style - Tags */
body {...}
h1 {...}
p {...}

/* Layout - IDs */
#header {...}
#content {...}
#sidebar {...}
#footer {...}

/* Reusable Components - Classes */
table.columnarForm {...}
table.data {...}
label.error {...}

One item of note: we have found that as stylesheets become larger it is necessary to forsake the old practice of putting properties each on their own line, like this:

body {
   margin: 0;
   padding: 0;
   font: 86% Georgia, Times, serif;
}

and instead pulling them all onto one line so that it is possible to find a given rule, and see the structure of the CSS file at a glance, like this:

p { position: static; margin: 0 0 1em 0; color: #000; background-color: #fff; font-size: 1em; }

But in order to read these long lines of properties it is then necessary to put them in a consistent order. The order that I have been using is in de-bugging priority: position, layout, color, and typography (as shown above).