Fathom this!

Kernest

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:39:31 +0200

Kernest. A rather awkward-looking alternative for Typekit?

Kaltura.org

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:36:41 +0200

Kaltura.org. An open source video community.

Baseline Magazine

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:28:58 +0200

Baseline Magazine. I'd like to take a look at this typography magazine.

Underscore.js

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:21:44 +0200

Underscore.js. "Provides 50-odd functions that support both the usual functional suspects: map, select, invoke — as well as more specialized helpers: function binding, javascript templating, deep equality testing, and so on. It delegates to built-in functions, if present, so JavaScript 1.6 compliant browsers will use the native implementations of forEach, map, filter, every, some and indexOf."

Helsingin Sanomat adopts new type

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:44:59 +0200

Helsingin Sanomat is launching (in Finnish) some changes on Monday. Aside from the changes to the paper’s organization and section, the biggest change will be in the typefaces used. The new types, The AntiquaHS and QuaText, have been designed by Lucas de Groot, the man behind Calibri and Consolas. Conspicuously missing is the big change that everyone’s been waiting for: switching from a broadsheet to a tabloid format. I wish I could take a look at the revised paper, but I guess that’ll have to wait until I visit Finland next time.

My friend the sudoku master

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:17:48 +0200

I sent my friend this sudoku puzzle, billed as the world’s hardest. I didn’t tell him where I got it from, figuring I’d reveal it once he was stumped. Today he sent me back the solution. When I asked him how he’d found it, he said he solved the first half while sitting on the toilet, and the second half amidst work. It’d taken him just 30 minutes! Update: Well, one of sharper eyed friends noticed that the puzzle illustrating the USA Today story isn’t the one the story’s about. Shame on me for not reading the fine text. This takes the oomph out of the whole thing.

30 tips and tricks in Flash Lite development

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:21:05 +0200

30 tips and tricks in Flash Lite development. Via @jaukia.

PhpDelicious

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:58:15 +0200

PhpDelicious. A PHP 5 wrapper for the del.icio.us API.

NY Times: Turning a Corner?

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:51:26 +0200

NY Times: Turning a Corner?. An interactive graphic illustrating industrial production and the business cycle.

Flooring using double bitwise not

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:59:45 +0200

An interesting tidbit from Thomas Fuchs’ Extreme Javascript Performance: ~~(1 * 12.5) is faster than parseInt(12.5). The ~~ is a double bitwise not, and the multiplication by one forces a string into a float. Via Janne’s Delicious stream.

DHL paid my VAT

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:51:01 +0200

To my online shoe shopping experience, I’ll add that I received a letter from DHL today, notifying me that they’d paid my VAT, and that I’d need to pay them back. The bill is straightforward, and the administrative fee they added on top of the VAT is reasonable (£1.25). (In Finland, your package either gets stopped at the customs, where you pay VAT on pick-up, or it doesn’t.) So, when comparing overseas prices online, this also should be taken into account.

Definition: etiolate

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:59:00 +0200

etiolate, v.tr.

Botany. To cause (a plant) to develop without chlorophyll by preventing exposure to sunlight.
1. To cause to appear pale and sickly: a face that was etiolated from years in prison.
2. To make weak by stunting the growth or development of.

NY Times: The Trolls Among Us

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:20:20 +0200

NY Times: The Trolls Among Us.

Semantic naming in CSS

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:53:10 +0200

Semantic naming in CSS. A good general overview, and excellent links at the end.

Fluid 960 Grid System

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:49:28 +0200

Fluid 960 Grid System. Fluid or fixed, in 12 or 16 columns.

Smashing Magazine: Minimizing complexity in user interfaces

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:59:44 +0200

Smashing Magazine: Minimizing complexity in user interfaces.

The 1KB CSS Grid

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:27:20 +0200

The 1KB CSS Grid. By Tyler Tate. Great idea, fantastic name.

Real-life pixelated porn

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:44:13 +0200

Real-life pixelated porn. Via @dunstan.

Definition: Acrostic

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:50:58 +0200

acrostic, n.

A poem or series of lines in which certain letters, usually the first in each line, form a name, motto, or message when read in sequence.
See word square.

Arial vs. Helvetica quiz

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:30:56 +0200

So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?. I got 18/20. There’s one which is really hard, and one that I just don’t see.

Satisfy that selector

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:58:10 +0200

Satisfy that selector. An interesting way to create DOM elements in javascript.

Our own little SMS gateway

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:23:24 +0200

One of my favorite projects at Kielikeidas, and stories to tell from those days, was when we created our own home-grown SMS gateway. (Kielikeidas was a small Web agency I worked for 2004–2007.) When a longtime client of our’s asked if we could set up a weblog in a hurry (to start in six days), I said “no problem.” What the client had neglected to tell me was that he wanted the weblog to be updatable via a mobile phone, and from anywhere in Russia. Reporter Tuomas Karhu was taking the Trans-Siberian train to Vladivostok and back, and was to keep a blog of the journey. These days, setting up a weblog that can be updated from a mobile phone is trivial. In 2005, this wasn’t exactly the case. First of all, mobile phones weren’t as advanced as they are today. More significantly, though, it was unlikely that there would be data network coverage on the train and for the entire trip. My colleague Marko Samuli Kirves and I investigated several alternatives, but the easiest solution seemed to be to update the blog with SMS messages (this was way before Twitter or Jaiku, remember). Our first choice was to contact commercial SMS gateway service providers. Unfortunately, it was the height of the Finnish summer vacation season, and none of the providers were able to set up a service for us on time. Also, there was the problem that the short code numbers used in Finland by commercial service providers don’t always work from abroad. In addition to pursuing several alternatives, we started considering setting up our own makeshift SMS gateway. If we took a regular Nokia phone with a regular operator plan, we could hook it up to a laptop. Using the open source library Gammu to read the messages off the phone, we could parse the messages and send them on to the Wordpress weblog through its XML-RPC interface. This would perfect, we thought — if we could get it to work. There was one big hitch: Gammu only knew how to read phones through a serial port interface. Older Nokia phones used to have USB cables with built in serial port emulators, but newer models used the USB interface natively. We did have an older model phone that Gammu supported. All we needed then was a cable. I looked up a bunch of mobile phone shops, and started calling. The first place I called looked up the cable on their computer and said yes, they had one. So I went to the store and asked for the cable, and the guy gave me one. But it’s the wrong cable. “This is the wrong cable,” I said. “Oh. Well, that’s the only Nokia cable we have,” the clerk said. So I called the next store. They had two, the guy said; but, of course, they didn’t. Losing faith in the inventory systems of the stores, I just started visiting the stores to look through their bins. I went to four more stores that day, and none of them had the type we needed. (I did learn a lot about the deficiencies of inventory software that day. Some shops label similar products under the same product code, while others share the inventories of multiple locations. How they’re able to keep their shelves stocked, I have no idea.) In the end, it was over the phone that I finally found the cable we were looking for. It was in a store at a shopping mall, and I asked them to reserve it for me. The next day, when I went to pick it up, they sold me the cable for half price because it was a return. I didn’t tell them I would’ve paid ten times more. We wrote some middleware PHP scripts to handle the messages, and the cobbled-together “SMS gateway” was in use. It understood multi-part SMS messages, which meant the message length wasn’t fixed. It also recognized the sender’s local time, and would fix the timestamp of the entry appropriately. We ended up using the gateway for several years with multiple blogs (including this one) and other SMS-triggered applications. The only time the gateway went down was when a salesman from our company had unplugged the power source at our office to charge his own phone. Later on, we built a system for posting videos shot with mobile phones and digital cameras to Wordpress blogs. It involved transferring the video files from the blog server to another server where they were transcoded into the FLV format (using the open source ffmpeg library), and moved back to the blog server and added to the media library. But that’s another story altogether.

FFXporter

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:19:59 +0200

FFXporter. A free Flickr eXporter iPhoto plugin. Note: doesn't currently work with iPhoto 09.

Powazek: "FAQ you SEO!"

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:40:45 +0200

It’s a bit amusing that Derek Powazek’s own rant-rebuttal is currently the number two result on Google for “SEO FAQ.” And oh my, his URLs aren’t even optimized! As a designer-slash-developer, I can definitely understand where Derek’s coming from. But I’m also willing to admit that there’s a legitimate place for specialized SEO experts. Maybe it’s like consultants and lawyers?

Why I'm not getting a Pre

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:15:23 +0200

Why I’m not getting a Pre.