01.16.10
Posted in Programming at 11:08 pm by thomas
The number of changes to HTML and CSS that are now showing up in browser rendering engines as part of the general push towards HTML5 are quite astonishing. If you are a web developer and you are not spending all your time right now learning new technologies, then you are probably doing something wrong.
Among the many changes there is one element that has been implemented in Internet Explorer for years, but only now has made the official cut with HTML5 and now slowly finds its way into other modern browsers: Ruby Annotations.
In short, ruby allows the addition of a short annotation, like a pronunciation guide, to a word in a text. Ruby annotations have been used in East Asian languages in print for a very long time, so this new feature will certainly improve the acceptance of standards-based browsers in Asia.
But it will be interesting to see what other uses web developers will find for these new elements – they allow for interesting layout solutions around online translation, language learning and developmental training that are certainly worth exploring.
Permalink
01.13.10
Posted in Programming at 11:45 pm by thomas
The Web as we know it is based for the most part on ten year old technology.
There are many features that web designers have been craving for since the early 2000s that have been stuck in standardization limbo for many years and still now, in 2010, the web community has to support ancient browsers that just won’t go away. Internet Explorer 6 is now nine years old. NINE YEARS!
Every time somebody builds a big commercial website, some 5-10% of the HTML development time is spent on making the site work on IE6, and there are many cool features that are still regularly cut from designs since IE6 or IE7 or even IE8 do not support them.
But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Even with Microsoft dragging their feet on every new feature, the Web is slowly changing. HTML5 is not an official standard yet, but there are many features that have already been implemented by Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome – and for some of them there are adequate workarounds for IE7 & 8 that allow us finally to stretch a little bit, try something new… to experiment.
Here is a HTML5/CSS3 Cheatsheet that I’ve created mostly so that I don’t have to look up the syntax on random web sites every time I want to use one of these. There’s text shadows, box shadows, rounded corners, inline SVG and Canvas support. Many of these things will make the web a better looking place (and I’m sure we’ll also see many anti-usecases in the near future!), and if you are a web developer you may find a use for these, too!
Permalink
01.09.10
Posted in Culture, Good Stuff, Media at 12:10 am by thomas
Alex Roman has spent a year creating one of the most astonishing CG short films that I’ve seen in a long time: The Third & The Seventh (HD version at vimeo).
The film can be best described as a meditation on architecture, photography and the sense of space and depth in the world around us.
Alex Roman recreated several modern buildings as 3D renderings and then uses some quite amazing craftsmanship to give the viewer a sense of depth with very subtle animations where the virtual camera slowly floats through the buildings, with ever so slight changes in focus.
Many of the effects are so subtle, especially in the first half of the film that I didn’t even believe that I am looking at CG rendered versions of the buildings. Alex has a great sense for lighting and clearly must have spent many hours tuning the lighting set ups to create extremely photorealistic settings. Only in the second half of the film, when he introduces surrealistic effects, does it become apparent that we have been looking at computer graphics all along.
Here is a video with some of the scenes as compositing breakdowns in case you want to see a peek under the hood of several of the scenes in the film.
It should be mentioned that Alex also created the soundtrack for the film, making this all around a major tour de force.
Permalink
12.18.09
Posted in Good Stuff at 12:01 am by thomas
Today I noticed a surprising spike in traffic to FlickrPoet, and after a little bit of digging I found the source for all this sudden interest: FlickrPoet has been mentioned on the Flickr Blog!
It’s been interesting to follow the buzz that the Flickr Blog can create – within hours I saw hundreds of users come to the site, mostly from an ever-expanding tweet cloud on Twitter.
The comments in many of the tweets as well as emails to me and comments left on the Flickr API page for FlickrPoet have been great – it’s fun to think of so many people spending a few minutes on that site and playing with the creative options of the app. Several people mentioned that they wrote small poems right there on the site – how neat is that!
Permalink
12.14.09
Posted in China, Culture, Good Stuff, Photography, Travel at 11:01 pm by thomas
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups in the country, a fact that is easy to overlook when one travels through the major population centers which look dominantly Han. A trip into the countryside very often reveals a different picture, with smaller villages sporting very different faces and sometimes also different attire from the typical Chinese street clothes.
Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups (long page with big photos), from the western deserts to the eastern ocean shore and from Russian enclaves in the far north to tribal villages in the jungle near the Burmese border.
I wasn’t able to find much information about this amazing photo shoot, but it is obvious that serious funding and much work was involved in creating these unique tableaus – each of the photos must have taken several days to prepare and clearly much care was taken in selecting the members of each community and in encouraging them to put on their traditional clothes.
Permalink
12.07.09
Posted in Culture, Media at 11:46 pm by thomas
New York based artist Josh Gosfield has created a quite astonishing piece with his “Gigi Gaston, The Black Flower” exhibition, which just recently closed at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Manhattan.
Gosfield manufactured the life story for an imaginary 1960s French singer, complete with posters, records, many magazine covers and even a music video and documentary material. All of it done to excess.
I would have loved to see the pieces in real life and really hope this show makes it to the Bay Area sometime – the style of the artwork on the records and the magazine covers captures the feeling of the 60s in every detail and the range of the created evidence of Gigi’s existence is amazing.
Gosfield spent more than a year working on this project and not only must have photoshopped his heart out, he also commissioned songs to be written and created a short film documentary about the life and times of Gigi.
What is interesting to me is that while browsing through the pictures and looking at the videos, knowing all along that this is fake history, every now and then doubt sets in – maybe Gigi Gaston did exist! And if so, where is Gigi now?
Permalink
12.06.09
Posted in Culture, Good Stuff, Media at 9:47 pm by thomas
Due to some random link-clicking I ended up on the Star Trek Phase II website, which I had not been on for several years… This is the site of a group of Star Trek fans that spend considerable time and energy on creating new episodes of the original series. It is interesting – and frankly quite amazing – how far fan-films have come!
Their latest episode – Blood And Fire – has amazing production values way beyond any of the original Star Trek episodes and probably even better than most of what you’ve seen on Next Generation. The torrent site at the link above has both parts 1 and 2 of the double episode.
The story of Blood And Fire is very deep and is based on a script that was originally developed for a never-realized Next Generation episode. It deals in one story arc with homosexuality, and in a pretty action-packed main story line with a rescue from a bloodworm-infested research vessel while the Enterprise is under attack by Klingons.
But what is really standing out is the technical quality of the show – the props, the lighting and the color coordination are spot-on and the special effects are quite impressive.
Permalink
11.28.09
Posted in Navel Gazing, Programming at 12:16 am by thomas
#haiku is a new little experiment for my Stories In Flight site – a mashup of Twitter and Flickr: The page searches for tweets with the #haiku hashtag and then visualizes the results by searching for each word in Flickr photos.
It’s a evolutionary step from FlickrPoet, and while it removes the interactivity, it certainly adds a meditative quality to the experience: You can sit there for a while and see the words and pictures dance past, with both Twitter and Flickr delivering near inexhaustible material.
I’ll have to work a little on the code that cleans up the tweets, since there is quite a lot of variation in the formatting of the haikus, with links, hashtags and response tags freely peppered across 140 characters.
Permalink
11.22.09
Posted in Culture, Games, Tech Nostalgia at 12:54 am by thomas
In November 1979 – 30 years ago – the Atari 400 and 800 computers went on sale to the public.
Atari 800 (wikipedia.org)
The Atari 400 and 800 were both based on the 6502 CPU and had a number of custom chips that definitely pushed the envelope in the late 70s and meant that close descendants of these machines were still being sold in the late 80s.
I very much remember the first time I saw an Atari 800 in person back in a office supply store in my hometown in Germany – it must have been 1982, when most affordable home computers where small plastic boxes with the simplest possible keyboards, often no sound, and quite often black-and-white TV video output.
The Atari 800 towered over these other machines, with cartridge ports under a neat lid in the top and the large keyboard in an extremely heavy case. And that machine was able to provide very robust graphics and amazing sound for the time.
Many hours were spent “testing” that machine and the few games available in that store, but I never bought an Atari 800 until much later when I got myself an Atari 800XL in the mid-80s when they were on sale for ridiculously little money after the Atari ST series machines had come out.
The 8-bit Ataris, during most of their production time, were overrun by cheaper competition, chief among them of course the Commodore C64, which had a slightly simpler architecture and a cheaper price, which helped in attracting huge sales numbers worldwide and as a result of that the full attention of software developers everywhere.
There were many great early arcade game conversions for the Atari 800 and I have very fond memories of both Mr. Do and Dig Dug among others. An original release for this machine was Lucasfilm’s Rescue on Fractalus – which made the most of the limited 8-Bit machine and certainly was one of the highlights of this era.
Permalink
11.19.09
Posted in Books, Good Stuff, Modern Life at 11:39 pm by thomas
Ariana Osborne has some great advice about Print-on-Demand projects over on her blog. I can pretty much only say “What she said!” about that post – read the FAQs for your publishing service, proof read the layout, order a proof copy for yourself first… all of that is important…
…and then there is her previous post, which has the one crucial advice that will make or break your POD project:
DO IT!
No matter how late at night you have stay up to get some quiet time from the kids, no matter how early in the morning you have to get up to write a page/edit a photo/draw a picture before you go to work, just do it. There is nothing worse than unfinished projects – with one exception, and that would be Projects You’ve Never Started.
And this is really not just true for Print-on-Demand, but for any kind of maker projects you’ve been dreaming of. Every day you haven’t started that dream project of yours is a day lost in a corner of the space-time continuum that we can’t access: The Past.
Don’t lose your precious projects to The Past, stop reading the intertubes right now, sit down and make something!
Permalink
