Over the weekend I picked up another crackpot project — inspired by PlotKit, I resolved to build a lightweight API (based upon Prototype) for doing client‐side charting with the canvas tag. This could be seriously useful at work, so tomorrow I’ll find out just how well ExplorerCanvas works.
Category: Tumbles
The buried message of the film, perhaps, is that our political system resembles “American Idol.” … The winner is not necessarily the deserving contestant from an objective point of view, but is the one with the best poll numbers. A candidate from either party will be defeated if he is not entertaining. His intelligence and matters of right or wrong don’t have much to do with it. In this scenario, satire plays the role in politics that Simon Cowell plays on TV.
Is it me, or does the process of downloading a single file from any project hosted on SourceForge take about nine clicks too many?
SXSW: Free Beer
A leftover from SXSW. The “free beer” tent had a different DJ every day.
You can add Spotlight queries to the Quicksilver catalog. Add “date:today” to the catalog and your QS searches will include any files on your drive that have been created or modified today.
Thank You for Smoking
I wish it had had more meat to it (a lot of the characters could’ve used more dimension), but Thank You For Smoking is an excellent commentary on spin, bullshit, and diffusion of responsibility. Aaron Eckhart is, as always, one part hilarious and one part creepy.
Plainly, the human fetus presents a practically unlimited number of utilitarian scenarios.
My MacBook Pro arrived today, ahead of schedule, as if to symbolize how goddamned fast this thing is. It can run laps around my iBook. Everyone who uses one of these has been saying how “snappy” and responsive the interface is — “snappy” is the perfect way to describe it. “Snappy” is one of the things I like about Windows XP, despite all its flaws. If this is the future of OS X, then I’m all for it.
At work, I’ve started to test stuff in IE7 in addition to Firefox and IE6; this has forced me to figure out how to pass certain CSS rules to all versions of IE and nothing else. (Virtually all known CSS hacks for IE have been fixed in version 7.) I know conditional comments are usually the way to go, but what if you need to override just one or two rules? Not worth the trouble of creating a separate stylesheet, in my opinion. After some hunting around just now, I realized that IE’s expression property is what I want: instead of postion: relative; one can do position: expression('relative');. Tell your friends!
My iBook has died. Actually, it’s just got whooping cough, or something like that, and I’m unwilling to expend the energy and/or money to fix it. It’s two years old, and I’ve loved every moment of using it, but a brand‐new MacBook Pro is on its way and should arrive on Tuesday. I’m giddy.