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The technology of the Matrix
Wired have a fascinating article on the technology being used for The Matrix Reloaded. They’ve apparently achieved photo-realistic CGI humans using a technique called “image-based rendering” based on taking a huge number of high resolution photos from different angles and using them to generate the 3D geometry of a scene.
[... 124 words]Easy Python Cryptography
Via Garth Kidd’s Python cryptography roundup, ezPyCrypto is a cryptography API so simple even I can use it. Unfortunately the example code is only available in the download archive (not on the web site) but here’s an overview of how it works:
[... 205 words]Artima Weblogs
Artima.com recently started hosting weblogs, with membership by invitation only. With people like Guido van Rossum and Ward Cunningham already signed up Artima looks set to become a very interesting corner of the blogging world.
Home Improvements
Phil Ringnalda posted a rant about sites that don’t tell you how their comments system works—like this one. I’ve been meaning to add instructions for ages but never got round to it; now I have. Hopefully this will mean less comments with no line breaks or links that don’t work.
The Dullest Blog in the World
There’s something almost Zen-like about the dullest blog in the world.
Opera 7 for Linux
Opera 7.10 is out, and includes the first Opera 7 beta release for Linux. I’ll have to try this out when I get home.
Creating a Collage
As someone with virtually no graphic design skills, Create A Collage With Fireworks on SitePoint is the kind of article I’d love to see more of.
CSS Layout Generators
A tool for generating 3 column CSS layouts that appears to use Big John’s Source Ordered Columns technique. CSS generating tools are a thoroughly excellent idea and I’m surprised no one has done one before; the CSS community is at a point now where there are some well understood, solid layout techniques available and some kind of tool that helps generate frameworks for new designers could really help speed up CSS adoption.
[... 134 words]GNU Utilities for Win32
Via Leonard, GNU utilities for Win32 provides a whole bunch of useful utilities in Windows friendly binaries, without the need for external libraries such as Cygwin, including gzip, tar, flex, bison, make, grep and the ever useful wget. The package also includes diff, which makes me feel a lot more comfortable about using it from within PHP scripts as portability to Windows will no longer be an issue.
Google Accusations Analysed
Search Engine Watch (with a nice new design but horrible markup) have an extensive analysis of the recent “Big Brother” accusations that have been levelled at Google.
Yahoo Search uses CSS
In all the fuss about Yahoo’s new search interface over the past few days, the extensive use of CSS in the results pages was almost completely overlooked, probably because the page still contains a small layout table for the top and bottom navigation. The results themselves are served up as a styled ordered list, at least for modern browsers (thanks to a server side browser sniffer). More information in this message from Yahoo’s Brian Ghidinelli, who is seeking feedback.
CSS Support Charts
Time to update bookmarks: The Web Review CSS Support Charts, which went offline several weeks ago, are back at a new home on Netscape DevEdge. Despite not having been signiicantly updated since 2001 they still are still an excellent reference to refer to for CSS browser compatibility issues. More information from Eric Meyer.
PHP SOAP Documentation
Finally some good documentation on using SOAP with PHP: PEAR::SOAP Client Fast Start and Extending PEAR::SOAP WSDL, both from the excellent phpPatterns.
Lots of RSS Aggregators
Via Ed Tech Dev (and others), an RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators directory and an RSS Readers wiki page.
PHP5 and Questioning OOP
An Interview with Sterling Hughes on PHP5 from the PHP-Con site:
[... 353 words]Verbose Regular Expressions
Ned Batchelder describes Verbose Python regular expressions. This is one of the things I’ve known about (as in known that they exist) for ages but have never got around to using. I’ve been working with some pretty heavy regular expressions recently that could really do with the clarity of being defined in verbose format with comments.
[... 96 words]Isolating Crashing Bugs
CodeBitch’s tips on isolating “crashing” bugs in CSS are mostly common sense, but are well worth reading in any case. Her methods could easily be adapted to help track down less serious bugs as well.
Accessibility and DRM
Via Accessify, Joe Clark’s analysis of Accessibility implications of digital rights management. Also, the new issue of Made For All includes an interview with Joe Clark which focusses on web accessibility.
HEML
Via Ed Tech Dev, HEML, the Historical Event Event Markup and Linking project, looks like a really interesting concept. It defines an XML format for marking up historical events, along with tools based on Java and XSLT that can convert Heml data in to SVG timelines and other useful representations.
[... 179 words]IE6, italics and horizontal scrollbars
And the prize for freakiest CSS bug in the universe goes to... IE6! I was having a problem with the new design and a horizontal scrollbar occuring in IE6 for no readily apparent reason (the same bug had plagued my previous design as well). Bill Simoni on CSS discuss pointed out that the scrollbar wasn’t appearing on the comment / entry pages. After an extensive trial and error session I tracked the problem down to the fact that my blockquotes were in italic. If I removed the font-style: italic property from the blockquote declaration, the horizontal scrollbar vanished. No other changes were needed.
Half Hour Redesign
Redesigned. CSS changes only, took less than half an hour thanks to the zap style sheets, test styles and ancestors bookmarklets. I’m feeling orange :)
[... 58 words]The best bookmarklets on the web
Via Eric Meyer, the best bookmarklets collection on the web. Make a bee line for the Web Development Bookmarklets and grab test styles and shell (both Netscape / Mozilla only)—shell brings up a javascript console shell which can actively modify the DOM of the current page, while test styles (easily the most useful bookmarklet I’ve ever used) allows you to make live, dynamic changes to the CSS currently affecting the document. You type CSS statements and as soon as they are complete enough to be parsed they are applied to the current page. The other bookmarklets are well worth a look as well, especially ancestors which displays the CSS selector hierarchy of the element under your mouse pointer in the browser’s status bar.
XHTML Tips
Via the XHTML-L mailing list, Simon St.Laurent’s XHTML tips archive. An abundance of useful XHTML related information.
Category specific RSS feeds
I frequently check the Python Programmer Weblogs page for an addition to my daily blogging fix. It’s a simple but very effective idea: Subscribe an aggregator to a bunch of feeds about a similar topic and publish the results for all to see. I’m one of the more prolific bloggers of the ones listed there, and since I tend to post a whole bunch of entries in a relatively narrow timeframe my stuff often appears in a big lump on the front page of the site. I’ve been feeling slightly guilty about this, as most of my posts have nothing to do with Python at all. So I’ve finally got my act together and knocked out RSS feeds for individual blog categories.
[... 150 words]The Buzz
Russell Beattie rants with zealot passion about how next generation mobile phones will change the way we live
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LiveHTTPHeaders
Via Sam Buchanan, Daniel Savard’s incredibly useful LiveHTTPHeaders addon for Mozilla and Phoenix. It adds an extra tab to the Page Info dialog with the full HTTP headers sent with the page, and also adds a HTTP Headers tool to the Tools menu which can be used to watch and debug HTTP requests in real time. I wish I’d known about this when I was developing HttpClient.
[... 96 words]Accessible Python
A post on Bryan Richard’s blog about Safari leads to a query about whether or not Py (a Python print magazine) should move to PDF, which in turn leads to a fascinating discussion about the accessibility of both websites and Python source code itself. Well worth taking the time to read.