Category: Blog

Categories
Blog

Start with HTML

At work, our web site code is becoming a morass of nested <div>, <p>, and <span> tags. Our CSS file alone is nearly 3,000 lines long. Since the CSS is so byzantine to begin with, whenever a redesign comes along, frequently us poor developers — rather than untangle this Gordian stylesheet — simply declare new classes and bolt them onto the end of our stylesheet; hence the 3,000 line CSS file. This has to stop.

I propose a new solution for developing web pages: start with HTML. Imagine you are developing a clean, informative page for Mosaic. Only once your HTML is done do you start mucking it up with CSS. Have we forgotten this is the way style sheets were intended to be used? We’ve let them be perverted to add rounded corners, fix IE bugs, and even add arbitrary spacing. Your CSS will be much cleaner and more meaningful if you start with the information as the structure, and then build on that.

Categories
Blog

We’re gonna need a bigger phone

Nothing wrong with the Windows Phone 7 Phone Something Something OS, but I think they may have designed the titles for a bigger device.

Windows Phone 7

Categories
Blog

“A wakeup call for the Drupal community”

Freeman recently wrote A wakeup call for the Drupal community and I wish I could have put the failings of the Drupal CMS as well as he has:

This is a common theme in the community. You can kludge your way to victory with just about any feature set you can think of if (and only if) you write enough hook_$n_alter() code, can find some contrib modules to pick up the slack, and have a designer who can code php tucked in your back pocket

Freeman’s states that the reason Drupal failed to win CMS of the year over WordPress is because WordPress is simply easier to use.

Continue reading ““A wakeup call for the Drupal community””
Categories
Blog

It’s because Avatar is hopelessly generic

io9 has The Complete List Of Sources Avatar’s Accused Of Ripping Off.

Maybe it isn’t that Avatar is ripping anyone off, but that it’s just another grab bag of obvious science fiction-meets-environmentalism tropes.

Categories
Blog

Creating Timecodes with Counter Display

I forgot to mention, the timecodes in Normal Activity were generated using a versatile Final Cut plugin called Counter Display, created by Piero Fiorani, who has lots of other free FCP plugins.

Categories
Blog

Farscape will not be released in high-def

In light of Sci-Fi channel’s hit 1999 series Farscape getting re-released on DVD, Brian Henson admitted to the crowd at Creation Entertainment’s annual Farscape convention that there are no plans to release Farscape in any high-definiton format.

The series was filmed on 35mm, which is far superior to HD, said Henson, but the visual effects were created for a standard-definition format, and when looking at the costs of re-creating the visual effects in HD, it would have been in the millions of dollars. Per season. Understandable for a series that holds the Guinness world record for the most digital effects in a TV series.

Unfortunately, there was yet another cost that would kill the possibility of Farscape appearing in high-definition. At the end of each season, the original camera negatives were archived, which according to Henson left “a gymnasium of footage” that was particularly costly to store due to the volatility of the film itself. And so, I assume, the original 35mm prints of Farscape have been scrapped.

Henson stated that the Farscape series was produced in both NTSC and PAL formats, and that PAL’s 576 horizontal lines of resolution (compared to NTSC’s 480) was the highest-definion version of Farscape available. This is a far sight less than HD’s top resolution of 1,080 lines, and a sad fate for such a visually stunning and complex series.

Categories
Blog

Drupal Internet Explorer 6 has a hard limit of 31 CSS files

I don’t know what’s worse, that Drupal Internet Explorer has an arbitrary limit on how many CSS files it can include, or that we’re developing a website with 32 separate CSS files.

Categories
Blog

Once In a Lifetime, never online

I have a midlife crisis about every 6-8 months. This time, Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” spoke to me. I read up on the album “Remain in Light” on Wikipedia, I bought a CD/DVD of the album off Amazon and scoured the internet for the video to “Once In a Lifetime”.

You can not find this video for love nor money.

Youtube has 33 seconds of it. MTV Music — where it is the second-highest rated video after “Thriller” — is “doing our best to bring it back.” iTunes doesn’t sell it. iTunes doesn’t sell any Talking Heads videos. Browsing the rest of Amazon I get True Stories or Stop Making Sense. That’s it.

Nevermind the video is considered a significant piece of artwork and is in New York Museum of Modern Art (thanks, Wikipedia)!

Only in the furthest reaches of the internet can you find the video, in all its interlaced, blocky, uh… glory. I mean look at this:

Once In a Lifetime, never online

A fond postscript is that my parents had Remain in Light on vinyl. My parents were cool.

Categories
Blog

It was Nuggit

From the murky depths of my childhood, I dimly recall something so unusual, something as inexplicable as a transformer that turned into a rock. It befuddled my child brain that something made of metal and — I assume — plastic and tubes was simultaneously also made of stone. I racked my memory trying to think of where I’d seen it before. No, it was too stupid to be a Transformer, and it couldn’t have been just a regular action figure. So it was when reading The 8 Redeeming Qualities of Gobots at Topless Robot (the only blog I seem to read, really) that I found that misconceived Gobot I remember one of my friends (or maybe a classmate?) had: his name was Nuggit.

Incidentally, even as a kid I remember the Gobots’ designs being particularly lazy. Take Cy-Kill for example. When he’s a motorcycle, he has a chrome engine attached to his abdomen. When he’s a robot, it’s gone. Where did it go? We’re supposed to assume it just disappeared? It’s a third of his body!

Categories
Blog

In a gadda de Blade Runner

Jen is still arguing with me over this scene in Blade Runner, and it’s got me thinking.

The love scene between Deckard and Rachael is a major turning point for the characters because it is what causes them to fall from grace (he said, making an easy allusion to Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the garden of Eden).

If memory serves, Adam and Eve’s punishment is that they will toil in the fields, endure painful labor, and so on. But given a gnostic interpretation of this scene, the punishment isn’t just that — their punishment is their awareness of these things. Adam and Eve become not the first humans, but rather the first people by becoming aware of their world, their daily struggles, and most importantly their mortality. Deckard and Rachael’s fall from grace is similar in their discovery that they were built, but not to last. By the end of the film, they have become self-aware replicants, whose burden is the awareness of their four-year lifespan, and their journey into an unknown fate is the same as mankind’s after the story of Adam and Eve.

That they incur God’s wrath by refusing to live in blissful ignorance is echoed in Rachael’s line when she comes to get answers from Deckard, who tells her to go back to Tyrell.

“He wouldn’t see me.”

Shunned by her creator, and banished from the only home she’s ever known.

More on this topic: When a robot says 0 she really means 1