cookiecrook²

12:54 PM #

I saw this job posting laughed at on geekaustin.com.

Location: Austin
Title: Linux Guru
Skills: 10+ years of Linux experience. Strong C with ... blah blah

Hellooo? Wasn't Linux just released in April 1991? If they want more than that... well, there's just one man for the job. Well, at least if Transmeta tanks, Linus knows that he's got a job waiting.

2:38 PM #

Have you ever wondered how Adobe came out with LiveMotion and was able to use the Macromedia .swf file format? After all, it seems that Macromedia would want to keep their biggest competitor a little further away.

I was reading Flash 5! Creative Web Animation the other day and it turns out that Macromedia made the Shockwave Flash format available to the public way back in early 2000. Essentially they were requesting that the W3C incorporate it as a web standard along with Scalable Vector Graphics. One stipulation is that any web standard has to be open source. As a result, Macromedia released the source for both their .swf format and the Flash player. This means that now any software developer can write programs that will export content in the Flash format!

Adobe was quick to jump on the boat with LiveMotion. In my opinion, it doesn't compare to Flash, but it does have the awesome AfterEffects-style timeline. Adobe Illustrator can now export directly to the Flash .swf format as well as SVG. For more current info about the openSWF format, visit the tech developers open-swf newsgroup.

12:14 AM #

Not that it's really relevant now (cuz it's not supported in IE 5), but just cuz ya'll might be interested: There is some cool CSS2 stuff that's supported in NS 6 and should be supported in the final release of IE 6. First off, the attribute selector.

  [attribute="value"] {/* styles in here */}

Whatever element you want to select, you can now do it by an attribute in the tag instead of just by tag, class, or id. The best example of this I can think of is for forms. There are so many different types of inputs that you could do this instead of having to use classes in each tag.

  first, in your stylesheet:
  input[type="text"]{
    background-color:#ffcccc; /* pink */
  }
  input[type="button"]{
    background-color:#ccccff; /* light blue */
  }

  then, in your html:
  <form>
    <input type="text" size="15" /> would be pink
    <input type="button" value="test button" /> would be light blue
  </form>

Another cool thing is the use of regular expression character selectors like [alt="*"]. Actually this is not supported yet but I found another way to do the same thing, so if you wanted to check which of your images had alt tags you could do this:

  img {border:solid 2px red !important;}
  img[alt] {border-style:none !important;}
  /* any image without an alt value would have a 2 pixel red border */
  /* of course, all images would have that border in IE 5 */

Cool stuff huh? My friend YiMay asked me why I'm so neurotic and fascinated with this type of thing. I don't really have an answer but this short stream-of-conciousness non-edited auto-biography might explain a little bit.

11:58 PM #

Patrick Curry asked me to try something last week that turned out kinda cool. It's a JavaScript event that would modify elements selected by class. Here's the script if you care. I've tested this and verified it works in IE 5.5, NS 6, Mozilla 0.9, and Opera 5.11. Essentially what I did was grab all paragraphs, getElementByTagName("p"), then ran a for loop to check if that element had a certain class:

  if (document.getElementByTagName("p").item(i).className == "foo") {
    // set item(i)'s style attributes to whatever
  }

It's supposed to work with regular expressions: getElementByTagName("*") would return an array of all the documents elements. RegEx support works in Opera 5.11, Moz .9, and NS6. Hopefully it will work in IE by the time 6 rolls out the gate.

11:59 PM #

The 5k winners have been announced. I have to admit I was surprised by some of the winners even when I reread the judging criteria. Some of the entries I thought were sure to make the top five did not even place in any category.

The other odd thing about the contest was that some of the entries were viewed several thousand times while others were only viewed a few hundred times. For example, Bartleby Snore didn't do much to impress me but somehow it was the highest user-ranked piece and number 7 overall in the judges ranking. I'm not trying to offend anyone or suggest foul play; maybe I just missed the point of the winners. After all, last year's winner was a shopping cart...

Or maybe I'm just bitter that mine didn't rank higher.

10:48 PM #

Up until a few weeks ago I used to be a co-producer and resident vj of a weekly Wednesday web broadcast show called UltraSound. Alas, UltraSound is no more but the archives still remain. Check out some of the broadcasts in RealAudio. Guess what my dj name was and get a prize!

UltraSound was produced by MKUltra and hosted at the Blastro studios. Blastro stopped doing the nightly shows in favor of a weekly which is now live every Thursday night from 8-10pm Central time. Click on the link that says "Blastro Live!"

12:36 AM #

Those of you who check out the World Domination Design Group (WDDG) regularly will have spotted this already, but I thought the rest of you should know. Matt Anderson of the wddg, konstruktiv.net, and Vancouver Film School has put together an amazing video entitled anamorph. Download the 40meg one if you can.

11:01 AM #

Linus Torvalds, creator of the linux kernel, defends open source against the rants of Microsoft's Craig Mundie in this interview from SiliconValley.com. In a related story, former MicroSoft executive, Eric Engstrom, says "linux is the future." Sounds like good news to me.