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Lego stuff
Mathematical Lego Sculptures (via Slashdot). These are really cool—all kinds of bizzare mathematical shapes are on display, including some that are technically impossible (such as the Klein Bottle). The Slashdot discussion lead me to several other impressive lego sites, including a huge lego stegosaurus and a working full size grandfather clock.
Digital Web magazine
The latest issue of Digital Web Magazine is out, and it includes an excellent case study on redesigning a table based layout to use CSS: Web Page Reconstruction with CSS. They also have a review of Eric Meyer’s new CSS book, mentioned yesterday. Digital Web are currently looking for volunteers to help with the magazine’s upcoming redesign—further information and a contact form can be found here.
Message Catalog definition
Here’s something I picked up on the Sigia-l mailing list the other day, courtesy of Patrick Hunt (reproduced with permission):
[... 108 words]Banging headache
I haven’t finished the Glastonbury writeup yet, mainly thanks to a banging headache and weird flu thing I may have picked up at the festival. Rather than promise it tomorrow I’ll fall back on the good old cliché “it’ll be ready when it’s finished”.
WGET tip
It looks like the Glastonbury write-up will have to wait until tomorrow, but in the mean time here’s a handy tip (presented evolt style):
[... 148 words]Guardian blogroll
I’m listed on the Guardian’s weblog list :) The link is quite well hidden (in the Tech weblogs section) but it’s still pretty cool. The list details some excellent blogs covering a large range of topics.
More on TrackBack
Phil Ringnalda (now added to my blogroll) has posted his latest thoughts on TrackBack, and he seems to have come on an ideal solution to the problems mentioned earlier. He is now considering keeping the TrackBack RDF data in a seperate file referenced via a <link> tag. This gets around the validation problems and the weirdness of embedding RDF in XHTML in one stroke, but it seems Blogger may have a problem supporting it as it does not have the ability to generate external files.
I want this book
Spotted on MeyerWeb: Eric Meyer on CSS has been released. This is one book I’m really looking forward to getting (at least when I can afford it)—Eric is one of the world’s leading authorities on CSS and the new book promises 13 full projects, with particular attention paid to CSS positioning. The advance reviews as listed on the book’s official site look very promising as well.
More tips from Mark
Time to catch up on Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility tips. Four have been added since I last checked, so I’ll go through them in turn.
PHP form problem
I’m suffering from a bizzare PHP bug. For some reason, POSTed form entries over a certain length are being lost when submitted to scripts running on this site. Here is a demo script which demonstrates the problem—try typing in a short chunk of text and it will submit fine, but anything long (seemingly over about 1300 characters) will be mysteriously lost. The server’s PHP Info output is available. If you have any idea what could be causing this drop me a line or add a comment to this entry.
Arial and Helvetica
The Scourge of Arial (via Zeldman). An interesting short history of modern typefaces and how Arial become widespread despite being merely a poor imitation of Helvetica.
TrackBack
MovableType have released version 2.21, which finally introduces support for mySQL and also comes with an intriguing new feature called TrackBack. I’m stil trying to figure out exactly what TrackBack is.. so far I’ve figured out that it invovles embedding RDF information directly in to your blog which can then be combined with a “ping” to other blogs to inform them that you have linked to them, and give them additional information about your blog for display on a special TrackBack section for each of their blog entries. Scott Andrew has already implemented it and many other MovableType blogs are setting it up as well. TrackBack has its own blog, which has an interesting entry hinting that TrackBack could soon become part of a system for distributed taxonomies (a problem that XFML is also looking to solve).
[... 257 words]How Wolfenstein 5k works
I linked to the 5k entry Wolfenstein 5K the other day. Lee Semel, the author of the entry, has written an article describing how the impressive Javascript first person shooter works. The principle method used is the dynamic creation of XBM images using a 3D graphics technique known as raycasting (described in this tutorial). The author incorrectly states that Mozilla does not have the capacity to render XBMs—Wolfenstein 5K runs just fine in my version of Mozilla so I presume support has been added since he last tested it.
Hixie goes open source
Hixie has open sourced his Perl weblog system. It has some nice features but a pretty extensive set of requirements (MySQL, CVS, Expat and a whole bunch of Perl modules). He has also added support for next and previous buttons at the bottom of each entry, but has not yet added <link> element support, as recently described by Mark Pilgrim.
Warchalking
Warchalking now has its own website: Warchalking.org. Warchalking is one of those brilliant ideas that quickly takes the ’net (or at least parts of it) by storm. The basic idea is a set of symbols which can be chalked on walls in areas with a wireless network node to alert other geeks to the availability of bandwidth. I’d go in to it further but the site has as much information as anyone could possibly want on the subject.
Enterprise Application Architecture
Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler: A fantastic book on Object Oriented patterns and how they can be applied to large software projects. The book is available on the web as a work-in-progress and I can safely say I’ve never found an online resource that has taught me more about software design. Literally 24 hours after finding it my head is swimming with design patterns, domain models and relational database mapping techniques, and I’ve already started using some of the patterns in my latest project. A big thanks to Captain Proton on the SitePoint forums for pointing it out (and also for helping me understand PHP references a few days ago). I thoroughly recommend this to anyone who is serious about learning Object Oriented design, or indeed any OO-capable language.
Cetus links
Useful resource: Cetus Links—18,244 Links on Objects & Components. I found them via their Python page, which in itself lists over 200 Python resources split in to categories.
Use real links
Day 13: Using Real Links (or why you shouldn’t use javascript:). I’m ahead on this one—Scott Andrew convinced me of the dangers of javascript: a month ago and I designed my comments system with this in mind.
PHP auto class inclusion
When developing PHP applications, I usually have a classes directory somewhere in which I keep all of my PHP classes ready for inclusion. I name the class files ClassName.class.php. Normally I have a common.inc.php file that is included in all of the scripts in my application and requires the classes needed by the application, but today I wrote a few lines of code that saves me from having to alter that file every time I write a new class:
Slashdot on XWT
Slashdot has a story on XWT (mentioned previously). Adam Megacz, the author of the system, does an excellent job of defending and explaining the concepts of XWT in the discussion thread attached to the article.
EuroPython starts
EuroPython 2002 kicks off today, and the EuroPython site is hosting an interview with Alex Martelli (comp.lang.python regular and author of the soon-to-be-released Python Cookbook). I haven’t found anyone who’s blogging the conference yet though.
XML in Mozilla
WebReference: XML in Mozilla 1.0. A quick summary of the XML technologies available with Mozilla 1.0, code samples not included.
The 5k
The 5k is an annual competition in which entrants must create the most impressive web site in 5k or less. This year’s competition entries are now online and the quality of the entries is even higher than the previous two years. My initial favourite is Wolfenstein 5K, a texture mapped first person shooter implemented in 5119 bytes of cross browser javascript (I tested it in Mozilla and IE6, and the author claims it runs in Netscape 4).
Semant-O-Matic
Semant-O-Matic—an experimental blog search engine. This is an impressive technology demonstration. The engine indexes eleven weblogs over the period of four months (March to June 2002) using a technique called “latent semantic indexing” or LSI. A full explanation is provided on the site but this basically means that you can type in a term such as “hobbit” and recieve a bunch of results about related topics (i.e Lord of the Rings) that don’t necessarily have to mention the word itself.
[... 145 words]Oh ffs...
Slashdot: Shocked, Shocked at Payola. This is just tragic. American record companies are all upset about the huge amounts of money they have to spend bribing commercial radio stations to play their music... but at the same time the RIAA are killing off internet radio and p2p file sharing, activities that give bands exposure for free! OK, file sharing allows people to keep the copies they download which is something the RIAA have justification to be cautious about, but killing internet radio and then complaining about the costs of promotion on commercial radio is just farcical.
[... 134 words]SitePoint CSS guide
SitePoint have a good new article on CSS layout, which includes some useful tips on how to use position: float and position: absolute to create columns on a page, as well as some tips on providing Netscape 4 with only basic CSS rules and an example of a PHP browser detection script.
Using colour safely
Mark’s latest tip is up: Using color safely. I’m aware of the rule that you should never use only colour as an indicator of something in a user interface, but I had completely forgotten that my own links on this blog were a classic example of that—all that distinguished them from the rest of the page was a difference in colour. I’ve now turned underlines back on for all links except those in the entry footers (which looked ugly with underlines), based on the principle that the text and position of the footer links should be enough to explain their purposes even without the underline.