| Interview with Matthew Dent, the chap who designed the... |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
15:22 01.05.2008
Interview with Matthew Dent, the chap who designed the...
Interview with Matthew Dent, the chap who designed the fantastic new UK coinage.
There were plenty of technical issues I had to come to terms with in conjunction with the distribution of metal across the coin and the high-speed striking process. At one point I considered suggesting that half the 20 pence's border -- where it met the shield -- be removed. It would have still been a rounded heptagon, only its border wouldn't completely surround the coin. There were potential issues with this; I learnt that the distribution of metal wouldn't be balanced, thereby possibly affecting the striking of the coins and the acceptance of them by cash machines. Oh well... this competition was a learning curve. And as someone who was unfamiliar with the technical aspects of coin manufacture - you have to ask don't you?
(via quipsologies) (link)
read more at kottke.org
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| When Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky hit her first career home... |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
17:46 01.05.2008
When Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky hit her first career home...
When Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky hit her first career home run in one of the last games of the softball season, something odd happened. She missed the bag at first and when she doubled back to touch it, her knee gave out. Her teammates were unable to help her around the bases so it looked like her only career home run would turn into a single. Then a member of the other team, a senior with knee problems of her own, said:
Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?
(link)
read more at kottke.org
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| Wait, wait, wait. Bob Dylan has a radio show? Yes, he... |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
18:43 01.05.2008
Wait, wait, wait. Bob Dylan has a radio show? Yes, he...
Wait, wait, wait. Bob Dylan has a radio show? Yes, he does...on XM. From the May 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, a list of the topics, movies, recipes, music, etc. that Dylan discusses on the show.
Let me give you my recipe for a rum and Coca-Cola. Take a tall glass, put some ice in it, two fingers of Bombay rum, and a bottle of Coca-Cola. Shake it up well and go drink it in the sunshine!
In the magazine, an illustration tells the tale with a clever wink to a Dylan poster by Milton Glaser.
Glaser on the left, yo. (via hysterical paroxysm) (link)
read more at kottke.org
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| Some say the Disney magic is back. Hit TV shows... |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
20:07 01.05.2008
Some say the Disney magic is back. Hit TV shows...
Some say the Disney magic is back. Hit TV shows (Hannah Montana), increased revenue from movies (Enchanted), and the acquisition of Pixar are all contributing factors, but new CEO Bob Iger is getting the most credit.
Mr Iger's management style is said by many to have unlocked Disney's creativity. "There was already creativity inside Disney, but Bob removed the barriers to it," says Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corporation, a rival media group. "Michael Eisner was all about his own creativity," says Stanley Gold, a former Disney board director who led a campaign to oust Mr Eisner in 2004, referring to the way in which the former boss meddled in the detail of Disney's parks and movies. In contrast, he says, "Bob pushes creative decisions to the people below him."
Said it before and I'll say it again: hire good creative people, let them do their thing, and ye shall reap the benefits. And Christ, no wonder Disney was sucking so bad:
Before Mr Iger took over, Disney had a factory-like process for animation in which a business-development team came up with ideas and allocated directors to them.
(link)
read more at kottke.org
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| Small world! I tweeted/Twittered/twat? a message earlier this evening that... |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
03:59 02.05.2008
Small world! I tweeted/Twittered/twat? a message earlier this evening that...
Small world! I tweeted/Twittered/twat? a message earlier this evening that said I was in Binghamton, NY and within the hour, several people told me I should have a spiedie.
Spiedie consists of cubes of chicken and pork, but it may also be made from lamb, veal, venison or beef. The meat cubes are marinated overnight or longer (sometimes for as long as two weeks under a controlled environment) in a special spiedie marinade, then grilled carefully on spits over a charcoal pit. The freshly prepared cubes are served on soft Italian bread or a submarine roll, wood skewer and all, then drizzled with fresh marinade. The roll is used as an oven glove to grip the meat while the skewer is removed. Spiedie meat cubes can also be eaten straight off the wooden skewer or can be served in salads, stir fries, and a number of other dishes. The marinade recipe varies, usually involving olive oil, vinegar, and a variety of Italian spices and fresh mint.
I wish I'd have known about this before dinner! (thx, twitter followers) (link)
read more at kottke.org
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| Craigslist posting by Rich Bigdollars (not his real last name)... |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
13:28 02.05.2008
Craigslist posting by Rich Bigdollars (not his real last name)...
Craigslist posting by Rich Bigdollars (not his real last name) looking for a lady to spend some time with.
I am so rich. Goodness, gracious. My, my, my. I am so, very, very wealthy. How many dollars do I have? That's a question only my team of ten fat accountants can answer, because they have golden calculators which I bought for them with my money. And what is on those golden calculators? Numbers. And those numbers equal the dollars in my bank accounts, which are huge.
(link)
read more at kottke.org
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| ● Eight things I learned this week, 02 |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
17:33 02.05.2008
● Eight things I learned this week, 02
[Part two of a recurring series...part one is here.]
Barack Obama is poised to run the first privately financed general-election presidential campaign since the mid 1970s. One reason for the move away from public funds is that Obama could raise more many than would be available to him through the public financing program. [WSJ]
According to author Clay Shirky and IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg, Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. Compare that to 200 billion hours of television watched in the US every year. [Clay Shirky]
Over the last six decades, the real incomes of middle-class families grew twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. The real incomes of working-poor families grew six times as fast under Democratic presidents. [NY Times]
OPEC members will take in nearly $1 trillion in income because of record crude oil prices. [Reuters @ National Post]
A Berkeley study indicates that children who attend daycare or playgroups cut their risk of the most common type of childhood leukemia by about 30%. [BBC]
The starting price for a 1000-year-old olive tree is around €18,000. The trees are popular as landscpae art for wealthy homeowners, golf courses, and resorts. [WSJ]
SUV sales are down and with them, their prices. The rising cost of gas is to blame. Many dealers won't even accept SUVs as trade-ins. [AP]
Brazilian chica nailed seven. [My inbox, unsolicited bulk email from "Johnna Laird"]
And finally, a bit of housekeeping from last week's post. Several people wrote in to say that Bob Herbert's statement that "roughly a third of all American high school students drop out" was entirely out of line with the actual statistics. I'm no statistician, but if you take 2005's ~10% annual dropout rate and apply it to an incoming 9th grade class for 4 years, you end up with about 66% of the students reaching graduation...or "roughly a third" dropping out. Not sure that's where the number came from, but it's a possibility.
read more at kottke.org
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| After Jim Lee's turtle was hurt in an auto accident, she... |
[05 May 2008|08:00am] |
00:15 03.05.2008
After Jim Lee's turtle was hurt in an auto accident, she...
After Jim Lee's turtle was hurt in an auto accident, she never regained the use of her hind legs. Instead of letting her die, Lee affixed hind wheels to her shell to help her get around. That's right, a turtle with wheels:
After some weeks Little Bit seemed to have made a full recovery except for the use of her hind legs. So some wheels seemed to be the way to go. Some lightweight model airplane wheels on a wire frame did the trick. The removable wheels were secured by a velcro strip epoxied to her plastron. The velcro strips on the carapace were removed after four months. She was eating, drinking, and exploring all the rooms of my house. Eventually she was able to move around outside as well.
(link)
read more at kottke.org
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| Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Using YSlow for Performance Analysis |
[05 May 2008|10:02pm] |
15:14 05.05.2008
Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Using YSlow for Performance Analysis
Kristopher William Zyp has written a post on how to use YSlow to analyze the performance of JavaScript applications.
To understand what aspects of a Web application you need to improve, you must properly analyze the components of the application. This article looks at how you can use the Firebug extension to Firefox and the YSlow add-on to instrument a Web application. After you install these tools, connect to the site that you are developing and click YSlow on the Firefox status bar. This opens the YSlow interface in Firebug. Now click the Performance button. YSlow performs an analysis of your application and provides a report on the different parts of the network transfer time of your application, as Figure 1 shows.
Most of the concepts mentioned are derived from the 10 rules defined by Yahoo! for better web application performance but Kristopher breaks down some of the concepts into examples and provides explanation on how to interpret the data. The explanation of the FireBug profiler is especially helpful to those just coming into the Ajax development space and want a better understanding of how to optimize their code:
read more at Ajaxian
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| It’s Business Time: Free Passes to Google I/O |
[05 May 2008|10:02pm] |
15:17 05.05.2008
It’s Business Time: Free Passes to Google I/O
On May 28-29 2008, we are having the largest Google event of the year: Google I/O.
Ben and I are talking in the Ajax and JavaScript track, which has other great Ajax content with speakers like Bruce Johnson and the GWT team, Mark Lucovsky and the AJAX APIs team, and Alex Russell of Dojo. There are also other tracks at the event covering APIs & Tools, Social, Maps & Geo, and Mobile.
I wanted to get the Ajaxian community involved, and then I saw some free invites on Mashable so I asked the I/O team if we could get some. They kindly obliged and we have 10 free passes!
To get one, please email or twitter with a reason why you should get a free ticket. The show is in San Francisco, so please make 100% sure that you can be there for those dates. Submissions can come in before midnight tonight, pacific time, and then selection will begin.
Finally, Flight of the Conchords will be playing at the event, so It's Business Time:
read more at Ajaxian
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| Compression using Canvas and PNG |
[05 May 2008|10:02pm] |
15:28 05.05.2008
Compression using Canvas and PNG
The image above is the 124 kilobyte Prototype library embedded in a 30 kilobyte 8 bit PNG image file.
Jacob Seidelin had some fun this weekend it appears and created a script that can read in JavaScript code from images. To do this, he used the canvas getImageData() method.
Here are the detailed steps:
The first step was to find the best image format for the job, that means the one that gives the best compression while still being lossless. Here on the intertubes, we don't get a lot of image format choices and since JPEG is lossy, we're down to GIF and PNG.
For PNG we have two options, 24 bit and 8 bit. Using 24 bit RGB colors, we can store 3 bytes of data per pixel while 8 bit indexed colors only gives us 1 byte per pixel.
A quick test in Photoshop tells us that a 100x100 image with random 24 bit colored noise compresses down to about 20 KB while a 300x100 image with random 8 bit monochromatic noise compressed down to just 5 KB. A regular 8 bit GIF comes in a bit heavier than the 8 bit PNG, so we go with the PNG option.
Now we need to convert our Javascript file into color data and stuff it in a PNG file. For this purpose, I crafted this quick and dirty PHP script, which reads the Javascript file, creates a PNG image file and simply lets each pixel have a value 0-255 corresponding to the ascii value of the character in the script.
I ran into a problem here, since the image is created as a truecolor image and we need it to be 8 bit indexed and PHP won't make an exact conversion. I guess there are ways to create a palletted image from scratch in PHP/GD, but I haven't looked into that yet. The solution for now is to simply run the generated image through something like Photoshop and convert it to 8 bit there.
So now we have the Javascript all nice and packed up in a compressed PNG file and now we need to get it out again in the client. Using the canvas element, we simply paint the picture using drawImage() and then read all the pixel data using getImageData(). This data is given to us as a large array of values, where each pixels takes up 4 elements (RGBA), so we just take every 4 value and tack them all together into an eval()-ready string. And we're done.
And the reading function is here.
NOTE: This is for fun, and isn't meant to be used in the real world. That being said, see it at work in the mario game.
read more at Ajaxian
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| HTML Parser in JavaScript |
[05 May 2008|10:02pm] |
15:51 05.05.2008
HTML Parser in JavaScript
John must have had some downtime on Sunday afternoon, as he implemented an HTML parser in JavaScript. The library, that you can play with via this demo, lets you attack HTML in a few ways:
A SAX-style API
Handles tag, text, and comments with callbacks. For example, let's say you wanted to implement a simple HTML to XML serialization scheme - you could do so using the following:
JAVASCRIPT:
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var results = "";
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HTMLParser("<p id=test>hello <i>world", {
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start: function( tag, attrs, unary ) {
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results += "<" + tag;
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for ( var i = 0; i <attrs. length; i++ )
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results += " " + attrs[i].name + '="' + attrs[i].escaped + '"';
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results += (unary ? "/" : "") + ">";
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},
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end: function( tag ) {
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results += "";
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},
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chars: function( text ) {
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results += text;
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},
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comment: function( text ) {
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results += "<!--" + text + "-->";
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}
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});
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results == '<p id="test">hello <i>world</i></p>"
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XML Serializer
Now, there's no need to worry about implementing the above, since it's included directly in the library, as well. Just feed in HTML and it spits back an XML string.
JAVASCRIPT:
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var results = HTMLtoXML("<p>Data: <input disabled/>")
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results == "</p><p>Data: <input disabled="disabled"/></p>"
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DOM Builder
If you're using the HTML parser to inject into an existing DOM document (or within an existing DOM element) then htmlparser.js provides a simple method for handling that:
JAVASCRIPT:
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// The following is appended into the document body
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HTMLtoDOM("<p>Hello <b>World", document)
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// The follow is appended into the specified element
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HTMLtoDOM("<p>Hello <b>World", document.getElementById("test"))
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</b>DOM Document Creator
This is a more-advanced version of the DOM builder - it includes logic for handling the overall structure of a web page, returning a new DOM document.
A couple points are enforced by this method:
- There will always be a html, head, body, and title element.
- There will only be one html, head, body, and title element (if the user specifies more, then will be moved to the appropriate locations and merged).
- link and base elements are forced into the head.
You would use the method like so:
JAVASCRIPT:
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var dom = HTMLtoDOM("<p>Data: <input disabled/>");
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dom.getElementsByTagName("body").length == 1
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dom.getElementsByTagName("p").length == 1
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</b></p>
</i></p>
One place that you could use this API would be on the server-side. For example, using Aptana Jaxer. Although, you could also interface directly to Java, or just use the Mozilla utilities directly.
read more at Ajaxian
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| Ajax Pioneer Week: Sam Stephenson of Prototype |
[05 May 2008|10:02pm] |
16:16 05.05.2008
Ajax Pioneer Week: Sam Stephenson of Prototype
We are having a special week at Ajaxian. Ben and I are giving an Ajax talk at JavaOne this week, and decided to put a little video from Ajax pioneers. As we worked out what we wanted to do, we asked the pioneers for a little time to do an interview. Although only a piece of the interview will be used in the live presentation, we wanted to get the full interviews for the community here.
During the week you will hear from:
- Sam Stephenson of Prototype
- Bruce Johnson of GWT
- Alex Russell of Dojo
- John Resig of jQuery
On Wednesday, we will have a special video that features Ben and I having some fun with a new type of Ajax application.
Let’s cut to the chase, and listen in to Sam Stephenson. Although we couldn’t get to him in person, he kindly recorded himself via his laptop. My voice quality is poor, but we are all hear to listen to his thoughts on:
- The future of Prototype
- What excites him about new versions of Prototype, and what problems are they trying to solve
- Thoughts on the current crop of browsers, and what he wants to see
In the interview he discusses pdoc, a new inline documentation tool, Sprockets, a tool to help package Prototype, and new event delegation techniques.
read more at Ajaxian
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