Journal

here's a starting point for some IE7 launch repircussions research, when/if I decide to care.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 5:03 PM 0 Comments

I see a fair number of PHP forms in my near future. Now the thing about me and back-end programming, I'm extremely lazy. It's not what I do, so I don't care if I do it "right" I just want it to work (and not getting hacked is nice too, as I've learned). Thus far I've been so lazy I haven't bothered with validation, which is totally crappy. So here I am poking around google for the laziest possible solution. What do you think of this one? I'm looking for something re-usable that I can just hack the demo. Least amount of time/effort to setup possible. Other suggestions?

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 3:56 PM 0 Comments

a data analysis contest, don't see that many of those. and this one's on a totally relivent main stream topic.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 2:14 PM 0 Comments

This is so like the shared community bike program they had at Hampshire. Except if they started up in 1999 this might have come first. Wonder what their association with the 5-college valley is, since they're rather conspiciously present in the small city / large towns of Amherst and Northampton. Could just be the colleges.

Makes me wish we lived in a real city. I went from living in a half-assed suburb (Wilton, ME - suburb of nothing, one hour drive from anything/everything) to living in a half-assed city (Los Angeles, CA - a city so poluted that nobody walks anywhere and its sprawling nature makes public transit difficult), guess I'm just a fool.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 8:39 AM 0 Comments

Help speed the development of new contraceptive options for men by participating in a 5-minute survey!

We (the couple's we, not the royal one) beta tested this survey a few months ago, looks like they worked out a lot of the kinks from the earlier version.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 8:29 AM 0 Comments

History's becoming more interesting as I get older, perhaps because current events are getting worse?

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 10:47 AM 0 Comments

They're coming! Now if we can get the Fit in automatic (for Cybil), then we can get one of these and have 2 compact cars, one with carrying capacity, the other with 60pmg.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 9:20 AM 0 Comments

Back to school with you. Berkely picked the winner.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 2:37 PM 0 Comments

Doing research for the other night's tanga.com puzzle, I got to exploring wikipedia (can't help it when you know as little geography as I do) and I happened upon this little bit of trivia: Fort Western, where my dad used to do the reinactment thing, is the oldest standing wooden fort in the united states. Pretty cool, eh?

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 7:31 PM 0 Comments

Dude. I'm feeling dumb right now. It took this diagram for me to finally recognize the connection between the Fibonaci Sequence and the Golden Section.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 11:07 AM 0 Comments

Back in Maine, where the houses are older and barns are the default play-structure of choice, hidden lofts and crawl spaces are common. There are so many things that can be done to improve a home, from simply improving the insulation to installing solar panels, that this may never become a practical reality, but it sure would be damn fun.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 11:56 AM 0 Comments

Store Firefox to hard drive when minimize. 'Cause I lost the link and had to find it again.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 8:44 AM 0 Comments

Wind turbines join cell phones in the global game of technological leapfrog. Some of us in the United States would like to be "off the grid", but it's an expensive proposition. Buying land, building a house, and then driving to work from who knows where, I don't see how it could be done without a high-paying job that you could telecommute to (and I'd rather not live in that kind of isolation these days). In India and other countries there isn't a grid, at least not a reliable one, so industry becomes self-sustaining out of necessity.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 12:48 PM 0 Comments

I'm not a fan of the other techniques on this site using behaviour (javascript) to tweak presentation (css/images), but this one had me looking twice. It requires ZERO changes to the HTML markup, the script just runs and creates Drop Caps. If I were to impliment this on a project I'd probably have to make 2 changes:

1. Only add a dropcap to the first paragraph (could be accomplished via CSS from Applied to the Web and my next point).
2. Embed the dropcap via an image replaced span (<span class="dropCapA">) rather than an actual image element so that I can control the context in which they appear i.e., #content .dropCapA but not #sidebar .dropCapA.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 11:22 AM 0 Comments

I've gotta get my copy of Bringhurst back from my friend. If I'd had it when I commented that the last post to "Applied to the Web" was a little light, I would have seen that the meat of the subbject would be in the next post. Which it is.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # 9:11 AM 0 Comments