Crumpled

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Venue Songs

Go here. DON'T WAIT!!! GOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! AAAAAAAGRAHHH!

they might be giants

[edit:

One one windows machine the buttons to play the videos didn't load in firefox. If you don't see buttons to the right of the video pane, change browsers.

]

posted by Elex | 11:58 AM | 0 comments

Monday, February 20, 2006

new generation of consoles

My opinion: Wait for the PS3, then buy one.

posted by Elex | 3:07 AM | 1 comments

Friday, February 17, 2006

Toggle Knob

When you take a shower, you usually adjust the water temperature by turning a knob. How come when you turn the knob only a little bit you get a huge change in water temperature?

Nobody wants that.

posted by Elex | 8:11 PM | 2 comments

VBScript

I'm a PHP guy. I love the language. It's nice to me because I can do a great deal with it although I really only use a few different commands.

I really like making websites that are database driven. So I use MySQL for that because it does everything I've ever needed (and more) and I know how to get the data in and out with ease. SO I use PHP and MySQL to build most websites these days. Eventually I'm going to do more actionscript, but I'm not concerned about it quite yet.

Right now I'm working on adding pages to an ASP website that runs on VBScript, and the database it uses is MS Access. I redesigned the web site a couple years ago but I retained all the VBScript because it worked fine, and I couldn't read it anyway. Now I've got the task of adding new pages and features to the site. So What I get to do is add new tables to the Database and email the new database to the webhost who drags the file into position for the website to call on. Then I get to write some new VBScript to call on the data and format it into the HTML.

My first impression of VBScript: It seems like a bad language
granted I don't have any experience with it but it seems to be missing a lot of things that good languages have. not like abilities, but the basic structure is fucked. as in, there's not much logial structure to it. In PHP (or Perl or ActionScript) everything you tell it to do is packaged neat and clean.

PHP example:
if (these are true){ do "this stuff"; } else { do "this other stuff"; and "this stuff too"; }

VBScript example:if these are true then do("this stuff") else do("this other stuff") and("this stuff too") end if

Now, it may seem like vbscript is easier to understand because it looks like can be written more like english without those extra squiggly brackets and semi-colons.
Well, we like those squiggly brackets they tell us where things begin and where they end. We need to know where things start and where they stop. We need to see those semi-colons to know that's the end of that instruction, and the next instruction is a different instruction, and not more details about the previous instruction. And it's easy to see which part of the line is the instruction and which part is the detail. This is really important.

I don't think people really use VBScript anymore now that there is .net. But I get to use it anyway! I gotta get back to figuring this out. bye.

[EDIT: 7:56pm]
It's actually not as bad as I made it out to be. I was wrong about it a little bit. It doesn't ignore whitespace the way php does, so a line break is the equivalent of PHP's semicolon. The example I gave above for VBScript is wrong, because it doesn't have these line breaks. I miss the squiggly brackets, but so long as i write my code using nesting (I always do) I should be able to see what contains what.
Now to figure out how to use "GET" data in my code...

posted by Elex | 3:52 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Dear Belly Dance Community,

Avoid the font Papyrus. It's fucking everywhere, and it's stupid. I'm tired of seeing it. It's not exotic or whatever you think you are expressing. It's commonplace.

You wanna be commonplace? Then go ahead and use it.

posted by Elex | 9:50 PM | 1 comments

Strangest Art Review.

I just read an article from the Washington Post about the emergence of new photos from Abu Ghraib. The article is moving and strange.

You can sense discomfort in the media. It feels like they just got a job they don't want to do.

It's been easy and nessesary for the media to point out ways that the government has mishandled all the things that they've mishadled lately. It's probably even been fun, and they've had to push mighty hard to get the point across to the public.

Now there's this. Horrible images, that will probably disturb almost everybody with very little effort, along with the realization that no good can really come of this. And yet they have a responsibility to report on it. Nobody is going to love them for it, but they are doing what they should.

Here's the article I mentioned. But I don't blame you if you wanna stick to NPR. No pictures on the radio.

posted by Elex | 9:14 PM | 0 comments

PHP Browser Detection
reciprocity

posted by Elex | 6:09 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Suicide Already Then.

I've been checking out the HTML and CSS used to create suicidegirls.com.

I'm humbled by "cute little goth girls on their macs." (the meta tag "author")

Conjures up an image of little succubi-cherebs coding away on thier imacs at a desk covered with hello kitty merchandise.

It's all bloody perfect. A stylesheet for the overall site, a stylesheet for the page you are on, and a stylesheet for the particular browser you are using. so they can fully control the awesomeness based on how good your browser is at displaying awesomeness. Showing a deep understanding of what CSS features are fully supported and which ones work with which browsers. All the public site content has proper XML/RSS feeds for syndication. And it's all nearly valid XHTML. (the w3 validator says it isn't but looking at the complaints of the validator, you could imagine the html element that it complains about as regular xml elements and the validator is invalidated, it's perfect.)

This all started when I saw the page in firefox and noticed the little shadow around the main window in there. I've never done something like that, and didn't know it could be done (yes, I know, it sounds simple, but there are a lot of limitations in browsers and in HTML.) I had to investigate and discovered all the stylesheets and other stuff. If you do look at the page in Firefox, and then Internet Explorer, You'll notice the shadows aren't in IE. Because IE doesn't support transperancy in PNGs, they left it out, maximizing awesomeness by holding back what wont work.

Plus the coders are hot. You can see them naked on the site if you subscribe. I'll just bask in the sexyness of the code. To each their own. Sexy HTML for me. I wanna get with it in the worst way.

posted by Elex | 11:22 PM | 0 comments

Monday, February 13, 2006

Epic

I don't like chuck norris as a meme.

Sometimes I distract myself on the internet from my work, on the internet.
Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

Back. To. Work.

posted by Elex | 1:08 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Chutney

Go here:

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/chutney/

Nevermind why!

posted by Elex | 1:21 AM | 1 comments

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

panaramarama

check out my office.
locate the cat and count the video game consoles (pong is just a screensaver clock, so that doesn't count).

I made the panaramic using this program called autostitch. Here it is, pc users.

posted by Elex | 7:53 PM | 0 comments

Choco-Rex

posted by Elex | 6:03 PM | 1 comments

Monday, February 06, 2006

Insomnia, and the internet

I probably should follow up my last post with this one. I'm going to be damned to the title of nerd for it; I swear I know how to have sex, I've studied charts and done calculations.

I knew before I watched this thing that I was going to blog about it. But, I thought I was only going to say this:

I'm only acting as a node on this one. I'm not here to reiterate what they had to say about them.

But I've decided to add: reading the article is more important than watching the show, if you aren't sure where to start. If, after the article, you decide you want to watch the show, watch the trailer first. It really sucks. Then you'll be prepared to appreciate the episode. Sort of.

The old show was pretty campy, that's for sure.
Nerd hell, here I come.

posted by Elex | 12:54 AM | 1 comments

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

background tiles

I'm starting to see the beauty of not creating every peice of every website absolutely from scratch. Sometimes the people who offer their code really know what they were doing. Especially in open source projects. Anyway I just completed my newest client website, which is at least partially based on an open source project, circle.sierraspiraldancers.com.

Every once in a while I experience the joy of creating image tiles. Image tiles are graphics that can be repeated infinitely on one axis or two to create a seemless background or texture. I like making them and I like finding them in the realworld, and then pixelizing them.

I took a picture of the linoleum in thalisha's grandparents house because I thought it would be a good one. and I once had a small collection of envelopes that had printed insides (security envelopes). I look for these tiles in video game textures, all linoleum floors, all wallpapers and textiles.

When a pattern designed to look random, cluttered, or disorganised doesn't repeat itself too often I take it as a sign of good craftsmanship. The further the distance before the inevitable duplication, the better quality the pattern.

On the web, the use of these patterns exploded as soon as browsers and html accomodated such a thing. and they sucked. they sucked sucked sucked. People were bad at making them, (designers weren't all that prominent on the web at the time.), any good (not repeating too often) one would load much slower than any bad one in the time where graphics took forever on your super slow dial-up modem. The good graphic software, and the computers that love them weren't readily available. The display of these crappy images made them a barfy nono upon the internets puberty. they were gone for a while, replaced with the more palateable solid colored background. But now all those old issues are gone, and the stigma against the background tile has expired.

I'm glad, because I like making them so much. If you ever doubted that I was a dork just consider my envelope collection. It's gone now, but you hadn't doubted anyway.

posted by Elex | 12:36 AM | 0 comments