It's not flat

I’m not sure what’s going on over at Dribbble.com that everyone went nuts over what they called the ‘Flat’ style. One thing that I noticed is that most of them have a shadow. A big shadow. Not really flat then. Since then a nomenclature discussion has started and, thankfully, they are beginning to call that trend ‘Long Shadows.’ I personally think those icons look more like potato stamps. So whenever I see:
, I think of this:
(quick POV-Ray thingie).

On album art

As songs become easier to get ungrouped from the whole album, the notion of "Album Art" becomes less meaningful and relevant. I hope we can start seeing "Song Art" more and more now.

Nine Inch Nails' The Slip does this by-the-way.

Media queries?

CSS media queries are all great and all, until you have to deal with scrollbar widths. ugg.

Fixing screen resize for linux in VMWare

If the screen stops resizing when running Linux under VMWare, check the following:

• VMWare tools are installed, configured and running.

• Virtual Machine Settings for Display are set to Use host setting for monitors

• Check that Xorg is able to load the needed modules

  Search /var/log/Xorg.0.log for possible issues with VMWare, i.e. grep "vmware" -A 5 -B 5 < Xorg.0.log. Such issues could include being unable to load require modules such as vmwgfx or vmwlegacy

  If there are, uninstalling and reinstalling the package xserver-xorg-video-vmware might help as suggested in their forums

8:10 PM

One of the worst ways to make something easier to use is to just claim it is easy to use. Not living to expectations sucks. Just getting rid of the manual and/or help files doesn't automatically make the product easier to use.

On EULAs and terms of service

How unreadable and complex EULAs (End User Licence Agreements) and terms of service have become, that when just clicking on the Accept button without actually reading the text, the user is prompted to 'scroll to the bottom' of the text, instead of actually reading it.

Note about CSS3 transition animations

If your animation doesn't seem to work, check the units used in the property that is not animating. For example: the width won't animate if the previous value is specified in pixels and the new value is in percentages.

This happened to me in RockMelt (version 0.9.68.1362, build 887eaf8). Mozilla's FireFox (7.0.1) seems to cope better with this situation and still do the animation.

For example, if you have something like this:

<style>#testAnim {
display: block;
-webkit-transition-duration: 1.7s;
-moz-transition-duration: 1.7s;
-o-transition-duration: 1.7s;
-ms-transition-duration: 1.7s;
transition-duration: 1.7s;
-webkit-transition-delay: 0.5s;
-moz-transition-delay: 0.5s;
-o-transition-delay: 0.5s;
-ms-transition-delay: 0.5s;
transition-delay: 0.5s;
-webkit-transition-property: border-radius;
-moz-transition-property: border-radius;
-o-transition-property: border-radius;
-ms-transition-property: border-radius;
transition-property: border-radius;
border-radius: 4px; padding: 25px; border: 1px solid red;
}
#testAnim:hover {border-radius: 50%}
#testAnim:focus {border-radius: 33px}
</style><a id="testAnim" href="#">Test by hovering</a>

Test by hovering and by tab'ing into this link. On some browsers the :hover won't animate but the :focus will

The CSS Transitions Module Level 3 spec doesn't seem to mention these kinds of situations

Whatever it may mean

Back in the day when I was a kid me and my friends played a lot of video games. We didn't speak English at the time (counting to 10 in that language was a big deal), so videogame-English was its own language that we deciphered and defined on our own.

Game Over did not mean the game ended, it meant the asshole hogging the controller had to back off and let someone else play. Game Over meant Game Beginning.

My browser is not your billboard

Since the review of Apple’s Macbook Air by ArsTechnica a lot of people have expressed support for the notion that installing Flash directly reduces the duration of its battery. Here’s the relevant part:

We did find (quite by accident) that Apple may have more reasons behind not installing Flash by default other than the stated reason of ensuring that users always have the most up-to-date version. Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably—as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02—with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.

A lot of comments like Josh MacDonald’s, “this [is] a devastating proof of Steve Jobs claims about Flash” or “Two hours of battery life, just by keeping Flash Player uninstalled” directly blame flash being installed for the reduction of battery life. No one seems to bother to direct the attention to what is displayed by flash. Consider reading the quote this way (emphasis mine):

ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary.

It comes down to user activity dictating battery life. In the ‘before’ test the user is running animated ads, in the ‘after’ he’s not. Battery life is dependant on what kind of content the user is viewing. (And calling the ads ‘content’ is stretching it, a lot. Let‘s call it uncontent, or scumtent, from now on). Unfortunately the user has not much choice on what kinds of ads are being shown to him. That’s what should be talked about, not what underlying technology is being used to show them. A lot of the advertisements lately are based on importuning and badgering the person who ends up watching the ads, and wasting their resources such as processor and memory capacity and network bandwidth.

What happens when advertisers get savvy and start using html5 and canvas and css3 and whatever new fun technologies come to replace flash? Sure, we should be asking from Adobe to add controls to Flash so we as users can control what url’s we don’t want to open, how long animations should run, etc. But we should also be asking that from browser developers.

Flash should be pointed at for wasting battery, not because of its mere existence, but because it indiscriminately downloads and plays content that the user can’t avoid or opt out of. Let’s talk about how Flash should empower the user, and how browsers and other kinds of ‘user agents’ should too.

We the users need to be able to configure a time-out after which the animated ad or whatever stops animating and, thus, wasting cpu cycles and power/battery. We the users need to be able to configure a maximum size that this scumtent can occupy on our screen. We the users need a way to remove stuff from a webpage I don’t want there, call it click2unflash (or click2unimage, or click2unmusic). We the users need an easy way to blacklist websites that won’t be loaded, via flash or another plugin or html5 or whatnot.

Let’s start getting ready for that bridge, and not reach it unprepared and then just pay whatever the guy in the toll booth wants to let us cross it.

9:02 AM

So the new iPod nano has multitouch input. What's the point of that when one finger covers 1 fourth of the entire screen?

Batteries do explode

Today while walking to the office I heard a pop coming from the stack of things I was carrying with me. I couldn't tell where it came from. Once I got to my cubicle I took my media player out to find out that its battery had swollen and burst out of the device. I don't know if the PMC still works, I'll have to wait 'till I get back home to test it with the charger. The battery I don't want to try, as you can see from the picture. Now I need to figure out how to deal with the popcorn'd battery.

Fingers crossed

the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads.

Lets just hope emotion does not mean “fucking hell! that infomercial again” and interactivity does not mean “they keep spawning popups and I keep chasing them and closing them.”

Aha! The completion is now complete

Update to The big jigzaw puzzle is finished.

Found the two missing pieces, they were on top of other sections of the puzzle, camuflaging and stealing secrets from them.

The big jigzaw puzzle is finished

Well, almost finished. It's 99.9375% complete. Out of the 4,000 pieces 2 are missing and 1 is well, half fucked up.

And it would

I still remember what it felt like when I realized that you — that I — could get this computer to do anything by typing the right words in the right order and telling it to RUN and it would motherfucking run.

-Mark Pilgrim

Interesting reading

I found this article, Against Camel Case, interesting, if only because it makes you think about the way yourself read.

From 5 minutes to 10 seconds

So I did some work for our client that reduced the perceived time it takes their product to show a list of content to the user from about 5 minutes to 10 seconds tops. We also moved the "that's enough items to consider" maximum use case from about 1000 to 4000 items. Lots of useful performance optimizations and moving of operations to background tasks.

Sweet.

Hopefully the update comes out soon.

Yeah, it’s a big puzzle

I’ve been working on a puzzle. Cliché mapamundi puzzle; 4,000 pieces. Takes like 3 tables when complete, but at least we’ve got the borders done, and since it consists of vertical bands then there’s also aditional ‘inner’ borders. Sad thing is, the piece pattern repeats itself in very predictable ways. Boo. This is how it looked at July 22nd.

I ate a bug

I ate a bug once. Well I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten more than a few in my lifetime, but in this story I only ate one. Well, I’m not even sure I actually ate it. Just keep reading.

This all happened a long time ago, when I was still young, in one of my teacher’s office.

I don’t really remember the reason I was there, or the reason any of the many people there had to be there, but that’s ok since it doesn’t affect the story. There were quite a few people there, or at least it seemed that way since that office was rather small. I had a drink with me: one of those plastic cups with coke in it. I suppose a bunch of us students and the teacher were farting around, probably bargaining for a better grade or less homework. Most of the time the cup just sat on the desk. At one point a bug strolled by, just idling around the room. To be honest I just saw it walk by once on the desk and didn’t pay much attention to it. It was a harmless, stinger-less kind of bug; didn’t think much of it...

At some point I grabbed my cup to drink some cola and then I felt something bump with the inside of my mouth. It could’ve been a piece of ice, or something might’ve fallen into it. This is where I realized that ‘something’ might be Mr. Bug. What happened next was instantaneous, kind of like it does when something horrible happens, and it happens in slow motion and the only thing you can think of is cutting your losses. And by ‘cutting your losses’ I mean get royally fucked.

Big deal, I got something in my mouth? Just spit it out! Except that among the people there in the office was my then love-interest. Keep in mind this happened during the age when unrequited love is the most terrible thing on the face of the planet, unmatched by plague, famine and a hurricane all happening in the same place and time as an earthquake, a meteor crash and a killer bee attack. All that is just a way of saying I was pretty darn stupid at the time.

Spitting out a bug in front of the most gorgeous, sweet, adorable girl in the universe was totally unacceptable. The chances of getting a kiss from here were scarce as it were; I didn’t need her having an image of a bug being in my mouth. The rest of the other people present would ensure the story would not die down.

So I opted for the course of action that would draw the least amount of attention to my problem. I just cursed both heaven and hell. And swallowed. And cursed heaven and hell a couple more times.

It’s been over a decade since that happened. This is the first time I share this story. Had she found out it would’ve defeated the whole purpose. But hey, I’m older now, I suppose I could start moving into the ‘laugh about it later’ part. So there, I admit it: I ate a bug. Or some ice, whatever.

I like big books and I cannot lie

After having this puppy sitting on a shelf for a few weeks, the wrapper is gone and the awesome Fondo de Cultura Económica smell runs wild. It's got a lot of pages, lets see how long it takes me to finish it. I foresee a lot of unplanned and random order browsing, it's hard to not press the 'shuffle' button on this playlist.