Super powers and Tits Akimbo! Oh, I do like seeing my microfiction RSS feeds wake in the foggy dawn and cast about, noses into the rising wind, mad and bright as raptors.
Category: Pulverbatch
90% of the links I send to the team mailing list at work are sourced from Daring Fireball, though
Standard boilerplate about not necessarily buying everything in the article I’m about to link, but:
“Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.”
Yes, yes, infinite yes. It’s an iron rule. I know they drive pageviews, but if your business model relies on sacrificing the level of discourse to achieve pageviews, you’re in a bad business.
I, of course, have cleverly routed around this problem by never becoming popular, but this is the reason I’ll never turn on the comments on this blog or Ommatidia. (I honestly can’t remember why they’re on at the CHK, but that website is not a sole proprietorship.) The technology of blog comments is a net negative for the human race. If you want to talk publicly about a blog article, do it in your goddamn blog.
iPhone icon gloss overlay in pure CSS
As part of a Not Very Secret Project, I’ve been poking around at how the iPhone picks and generates icons for sites that you bookmark to your home screen (I only learned about Apple touch icons earlier this afternoon). Apparently, unless you specify otherwise, it applies a glossy overlay to that icon when it gets clipped out.
A lot of people seem to hate that gloss, but there are some ways out there to replicate it, mostly using a PNG overlay. I thought it might be interesting to try and get the same effect using pure CSS (note that this probably won’t work if you’re reading this post via syndication; click through to the original to see it). I am indebted to Neven Mrgan’s PSD replication, which I used for comparison purposes.
So here’s a plain 57×57 touch icon:
And here it is with the gloss, which is put together with Webkit and Mozilla border-radius and CSS gradients:
It’s not perfect–browsers don’t let you specify blending modes for shadows and highlights, and the antialiasing on gradients is still a little wonky–but it works at least as well as an image overlay, and now I get to feel superior for doing it with code instead of sprites.
The CSS in question:
#glossy-icon {
width: 57px;
height: 57px;
-webkit-border-radius: 8px;
-moz-border-radius: 8px;
background-image: -webkit-gradient(radial, 28.5 -47, 0, 28.5 0, 700,
from(rgba(255,255,255,1)), to(rgba(255,255,255,0)),
color-stop(10%, rgba(255,255,255,0.2)),
color-stop(10.5%, rgba(140,140,140,0.2)),
color-stop(13%, rgba(140,140,140,0)),
color-stop(13.7%, rgba(255,255,255,0)),
color-stop(17%, rgba(255,255,255,1))), url(http://www.xorph.com/images/ba-icon.png);
background-image: -moz-radial-gradient(28.5px -47px 45deg, circle farthest-side,
rgba(255,255,255,1) 0%,
rgba(255,255,255,0.2) 72%,
rgba(140,140,140,0.3) 74.5%,
rgba(140,140,140,0) 85%,
rgba(255,255,255,0) 95%,
rgba(255,255,255,1) 160%), url(http://www.xorph.com/images/ba-icon.png);
}
I liked it this much despite the fact that it takes place in Kentucky
Recommended: Underground, by Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber. Those of us who are always demanding clever, tough ladies in lead roles will enjoy meeting cave geek Wesley Fischer, and those of you who want exciting comics without superheroes and lasersharking will be equally happy. (I could have stood a little more lasersharking, but my weaknesses are common knowledge.) There’s a hint of a sequel in the afterword, which is an idea I heartily endorse!
I realized later I should have made them say “BAD” and “ASSSSSS”
This is my current setup at work–since starting there last October, I’ve gradually advanced from working solely on my battered white Macbook to a laptop-and-monitor setup, then to a Mac Mini-and-monitor when my laptop got stolen, and now at last to the glorious panopticon you see above. I’m trying the portrait screen for my email client, SQL client, terminal and (mostly) IDE, and so far I really like it. I got the idea from some interview about a high-ranking Google engineer’s setup that I can’t be bothered to find now. Ben (the boss) said he thinks it originated with Flight Simulator junkies.
You can just barely see my tiny, mighty computer and a box of rejected business cards peeking out from under the right monitor stand; on the left are various plastic utensils, half a bag of snack chips, and a ceramic dish Kara gave me for reheating leftovers in the work microwave. The latter contains the Magical Neverending Napkin Supply. I never request or grab napkins from lunch places anymore, I just take whatever they throw in the carryout bag and put the unused ones in there. At this rate, I will never exhaust it.
The headphones are the stupidly expensive ones I bought from a DJ supply shop down the street, where the DJ supplier looked at me askance when I explained that I would be using them for web development. Like all headphones, they still annoy me with trapped ear-heat and weight, but they provide good isolation and I can stand them a lot longer than anything I’d tried before. I would have paid the whole price just to have the padded cups that go around (as opposed to pressing directly on) my ears.
Uh, what else can you see in there? Venerable iPod sitting on the Mini waiting to be plugged in, sexy aluminum keyboard that likes to shock me if I scuff my feet too much, expensive Logitech mouse with the click-and-lock free-scrolling mouse wheel that is fun but not actually that much of a productivity enhancer. Don’t tell Ben, he paid for that too. The little gray wrist cushion doubles as a stress ball / fidget toy. The books in the right corner are copies of the Ruby Cookbook and Mastering Regular Expressions, both of which I will go to great lengths to avoid cracking open. The shadow on the left is my hat.
Raising the level of discourse
The other day Erika got a request to do up a Penny Arcade guest comic and made the mistake of saying so on LJ–and, worse, confessing that she was a little nervous about it–at which opportunity I leapt like a jaguar in a trebuchet. I believe my exact words were “ERIKA ERIKA LEMME HELP I WANNA HELP ERIKA LEMME HEEEELP.” Out of some unknown and misplaced emotion, she acquiesced.
Anyway, it’s up now, so that’s pretty neat! That gag was Erika’s (and Matt’s?), I just helped tweak the dialogue (and, shamefully, truncated Professor Snugglesworth’s name). I did write the little bonus strip mentioned in the post.
This marks the second time in two years that my work has made some kind of appearance on PA. Based on linear progression, the plan is working, and by 2240 my takeover will be complete.
Still playing catchup on my 2009 material
On the plane to Kentucky for Christmas last year, I read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. For the first half of this reading, I was under the vague impression that it had been published in 2008. I found it tremendously enjoyable, and contemporary–a gay protagonist of color and strong female characters, China as the sole world superpower, a mundane and difficult life on a lunar colony–but with some irksome anachronisms, like the way the characters used their wrist-implant cyberjacks to make calls from pay phones.
Eventually I flipped back to check the copyright page. It came out in 1992.
Jesus Christ, Maureen McHugh, you were on top of this shit while the rest of the field was just starting to get boners for steampunk? I will be reading more of your books.
This is an easy test for determining premillennial science fiction from the postmillennial, by the way: the ubiquity of cell phones (and how big a deal the author makes about them).
One of my favorite things of the many, many I’ve stolen from Sumana is the notion that blogs get a “house style.” This, for the record, is the reason long works (novels, movies, etc) get capitalized but not italicized on NFD.