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90% of the links I send to the team mailing list at work are sourced from Daring Fireball, though

June 15, 2010 /

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

June 10, 2010 /

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);
}

June 7, 2010 /

Monica and Sumana came to visit! In the same week! It was a very full week, but I am still very fortunate to have had both my pretend big sisters come see me. I got to meet a nontrivial fraction of the Geek Feminism crew and attend the Beard Team USA National Beard and Mustache Championships, of which, yes, pictures will forthcome. Now: to sleep until August.

I liked it this much despite the fact that it takes place in Kentucky

May 31, 2010 /

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!

And boy are my wings tired

May 31, 2010 /
I did the hundred

I did a hundred pushups! In a row! I had done lots more in a session, just not in a single set. Also some of those reps at the end would have been pretty hilariously sloppy to anyone watching. But it still counts!

I’ve been following this workout plan since, uh, the beginning of March. It’s a six-week plan, and you will note that it has taken me three months to complete! In retrospect, that progression gets a bit suspicious at the end; even on the best-case track, you’re supposed to go from around 60 to 100 in a single week. I had to repeat week six several times, and then repeat week six/day one for a couple more weeks, adding five to ten more reps each time.

I’ve talked before about my complete lack of upper-body strength and how ashamed of it I’ve always been. I know how to maintain cardiovascular shape and build leg muscle–go running–and I have done so, because running is the only exercise that doesn’t bore and frustrate me. It’s also got a pretty low barrier to entry, whereas I perceived upper-body workouts to be fraught with torn tendons and requiring of huge weight sets. And if I want to actually build muscle in any serious way I probably will have to get some kind of free weights someday. I should probably learn to do the Ab Ripper first.

But meanwhile I’m just going to keep doing a hundred pushups every night and see how far I can take it! I hear there’s this fancy kind you can do with one arm.

I realized later I should have made them say “BAD” and “ASSSSSS”

May 15, 2010 /
LOL / BONEERRRRSSSS

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.

May 3, 2010 /

Today begins the thirtieth year of Brendan. At last, my age and the amount of white hair on my head are starting to seem compatible.