« January 2003 Entries »

Stupid Business Practices

After a week of feeling blah, this is one Friday where I just felt like being pandered to. For the first time in well over a year, almost two, I rented a movie.

I guess it’s because of my lack of a TV that I stopped. After my last move, I decided not to buy one, and I’d call that one of my best decisions to date. I have a DVD drive in my computer and a reasonably nice monitor, so I decided that I’d be okay with that and went to get something.

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Time Management

Expounding on a cliche, Jeremy Wright wrote an article for A List Apart last year detailing his strategy for time management: The Pickle Jar Theory.

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Redesign upcoming.

’Tis the season for re-designs, it seems. Fresh new year, fresh new look. Yours truly is no exception, but sadly it’s not as easy as a CSS update for me.

Despite the wonderful promise of a “site-wide redesign done from one single file”, those of us who live a dual life in standards-compliant, bleeding edge code as well as high-end pixel editors and the like know that this promise doesn’t ring true.

There’s far more to a fabulous design than positioning text. An incredibly well-done minimalist approach is something to be admired; I love this style when done right, but have never been able to emulate it myself. I need control of my pixels. I need to put splashes of detail here and there. I need the ability to not conform my design to the rigidity that CSS sometimes enforces.

Sorry, I seem to have wandered there. Point being, here are some (non-clickable) glimpses of Mezzoblue, v3. Daring new colour scheme.

8/22/03 update: ahem.

Let’s all consider this post officially retracted. I’ll leave it up for historical curiosity; I don’t believe in erasing the past.

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Blue Spark Pre–Release

If you’ve ever maintained a web site with an FTP program and a text editor, you know what I’m talking about when I say that there has to be a better way.

Well, I thought about that so long that I finally did something about it. If you are using IIS, make sure to check out Blue Spark.

The past week I’ve been putting together this tidy little self–contained program that allows you to administer your text–based files on the server itself, rather than having to worry about multiple transfers back and forth. Viewed through a web browser, Blue Spark is plain and simple, but effective enough to be useful.

Note: While officially designated v1.0, I thought of a security update this morning that has to happen. I’ll be working on that the next few days, so if you download a copy now, make sure to come back and grab the update if you plan on using it for any length of time.

Comments Closed (0) | posted to Server-Side

Why digital photography sucks.

I’ve noticed through two digital cameras and multiple scanners that something’s not quite right about digital imaging technology. I always attributed it to the inherent differences between CCDs and traditional film, but my knowledge ended there.

Found on Slashdot, this lengthy Discover article details the next revolution in digital imaging, called X3. It turns out we’re only getting, quite literally, half the picture, as CCDs capture only a single channel (Red, Green, or Blue) at a time and interpolate the rest.

Based on the knowledge that the Green channel is used quite heavily in actual image detail, CCD manufacturers create a mosaic of sensors that capture 25% of the red and blue light in an image and 50% of the green. The rest of the colour data is interpolated based on surrounding pixels. This approach introduces complicated, ugly moiré patterns and discards about two thirds of the available colour data.

Using a layered silicon approach, X3 offers digital technology the ability to capture all available colour data for the first time. The resulting images are sharper, brighter, and much more representative of the source image than traditional methods have allowed.

This is the point where digital will really take off as an alternative to film.

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The trouble with Wacom…

I had a Wacom graphics tablet for a while. I liked it at first since it made sense to use a pen for my masking/brush–work in Photoshop. But this was back in the days of the early Pentium (well, for me, anyway — we’re talking 1997 here) and my computer was just too durn slow to use it effectively, so I gradually stopped.

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Apple releases Safari

One more reason to skip silly browser–detection rituals and dish up pages that mesh with the W3C — Apple released Safari today, a brand new browser based on a non–IE and non–Gecko (Mozilla, Netscape) engine that nevertheless supports major web standards.

Suffice it to say the potential audience for such a browser is limited by Apple’s 4% market share. Ever notice how Netscape 4.x enjoys that same tiny percentage of the market these days, and people still bend over backwards to support it? I’m willing to wager Safari support will be slightly less of a priority for the same developers. Just a thought.

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Marketing Bad. Useful Good.

I received an envelope in the mail the other day proclaiming that “Opening this envelope could change your life!” I did what any rational–thinking person would do — I threw it in the recycling bin unopened.

It got me thinking though.

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