Category: General

Gotta love our international testing group members who use English as a second language. They logged bugs about a “cingulum” when everybody locally used “gap”. This was a problem where a paragraph break on a web page caused an object to be pushed down that was supposed to be aligned at the top of the window. I’m intrigued by the worldview difference expressed in the two words: Cingulum identifies the problem as a marking while gap points to the absence of something. I’m probably making much of something that is just a translation accident. In art you are trained to think in terms of positive and negative space. Cingulum describes the empty space in positive terms, as if it is part of the design. The use of the negative word gap reinforces that it is the problem.

The JavaScript programming language—the language I work with most often—is simply terrific, a sentiment that was reinforced after recently programming a simple applet in Java. I love that JavaScript is available on practically any computer by virtue of being a part of modern web browsers. Unfortunately, few people recognize the value of it. Douglas Crockford does. I found his article JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language quite enjoyable and helpful.

In working on a web-based application that needs to support unicode and other DBCS encodings, I created a simple bookmarklet that converts a string into HTML entities. You can find it on the bottom of my bookmarklets page if you happen to need it.

On a somewhat related note, I keep forgetting to write about the reasonably successful conclusion of my quest to find a way to URL encode UTF8 characters for Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 5.0. Several people wrote excellent comments and even kindly sent me example code for reproducing the JavaScript encodeURIComponent() function on those browsers that don’t support it natively. Thanks for the help!

…because I keep finding more and more interesting open source projects that are using it.

I’ve been fascinated by the Chandler Personal Information Manager (PIM) being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation and have been following its progress since I first heard about it in this post on Mitch Kapor’s weblog. We all want a better email program. Chandler is working to make one that lets you manage and organize messages (and other data) the way you want to. It has been said that it will have the spirit of Lotus Agenda, but will use a graphical and web-like interface.

I also found the Pyzzle game development engine, which allows you to create Myst- and Riven-like slideshow games. It supposedly also has support for objects, embedded movies, text overlays like the books, and custom pointers. Looks like fun.

I guess I better get started learning Python.

I was amused and enthused to accidentally find that there’s a whole car hacker culture on the web devoted to making Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT) car replicas. Check out the Knight Replicas web site for building tips, discussion forums, links to parts suppliers, and information about the Knight Rider Television show. Of the parts suppliers, Mark’s Custom Kits was by far the most interesting—despite the terrible web design—and seemed to have the best quality parts. I was fascinated by their description of restoring a car from the tv show. The Convertible Project also looks fun—what a beautiful car!

Back in the Fabulous 80’s, KITT was the coolest car ever. KITT could talk, drive himself, and do killer stunts. The trademark glowing red “eye” and crazy instrument panel were totally awesome.

What blows me away is that many of KITT’s capabilities are a reality now or very close. They’re also more and more affordable. Voice recognition is old hat and GPS guidance systems are available now. Moble phones are available everywhere, and video call functions are coming along. Self-driving cars aren’t quite here, but there’s been much more research into it. How quickly science fiction becomes everyday fact.

I’ve had schematics for KITT for years now. Perhaps someday I’ll build him. I can dream anyway. It’s good to recapture some of that boyhood wonder.

It appears that Thursday is blog day this month. Ah, well. Blog as you can, not as you can’t, right?

At 13% for everyone, Russia’s flat tax sounds like a bargin.

The anticipated new design for the $20 bill has been revealed. It uses a subtle background color with blue, peach, and green. I’m not convinced that it will make it any more difficult to counterfeit. The design seems tolerable—at least it isn’t hideous monopoly colors—but I’ll refrain from additional comment until I see one in person.

The Wilmore Newsletter is getting updated reasonably frequently now. Yay! It’s frustrating that the past issues archive keeps getting removed. Of course the archive should include the recent issues as well.

EasyRGB’s Color Harmonizer makes it easy to find color complements and harmonies. It uses the full RGB palette to find the colors, so it’s not web-safe or even web-smart. Still very useful, even if you have a good eye for design. This would be visually stunning and powerful if combined with the moreCrayons tool I mentioned earlier.

Kirk Franklin created the nifty MoreCrayons tool to help web designers more easily visualize the color palette. He recently made fixes so it works with Mozilla as well as other DHTML browsers. I found it a bit surprising that he suggests a 4,096-color Web-Smart palette instead of the traditional 216-color Web-Safe. The color depth available on even 3-year old computer systems is generally better than 256-color, so it probably is past time to be worrying about that limited palette.