v0.3 - (16 Aug 2006) First major revision. Changes include:

• Bars can now represent days, weeks, or months.
• The background color can now be set via an option.
• The rendering interval can now be set via an option.
• A live preview of the current SparkStats graph is now included on the options page.
• “Invalid foreach” bug fixed.

Many thanks to Steffen S, Joshua W, Stefan P, Eli F, Henri L, Piotr U, Sean H, Adrian G, Lech, Amit K, Billy G, Zac Z, and everyone else who sent be feedback on the first version. Sorry it took so long!

Go check it out! As always, let me know what you think. I’m always open to bug reports and feature requests.

I can’t believe that we’ve already come to this point. It doesn’t seem like very long ago that I was moving into West Hall for freshmen orientation. Now, the senior class (including many of my friends) will be leaving to pursue very promising opportunities at Oxford, Standford, MIT, CMU, and many other businesses and institutions. I’m happy for them, but I can’t help but realize what it means: I’m next. Next year I’ll be a senior, and that’s a little bit scary.

In the meantime, we’ve moved over into the CrazyEndOfSemesterTime, so I’ve been busy finishing all of the projects and assignments for my various classes. Here’s a rundown of what I’m working on for the end of the year:

• Sci-Fi: The final project is writing my own science fiction short story (~5-6 pages) and then analyze my own story within the various frameworks that we’ve been learning about throughout the year. My story is called “Filterware”, and it’s almost finished.
• Math: I’m researching and writing a self-directed paper on the Four Color Theorem for my “6 Theorems that Changed the World” class. The actual proof of the theorem is a little bit intense (it requires a computer to solve the final ~600 configurations), but I’ll be focusing more on the history and controversy surrounding this seemingly simple statement: Any map of regions on a plane can be colored with only 4 colors so that any regions sharing an edge (more than a point) do not share the same color.
• AHS Capstone Prep: I’m finishing up the proposal for the AHS (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) Capstone that I’ll do a year from now. I’m planning on researching the history of online personal publishing (blogging in particular) and creating a final report in the form of a creative website.
• Dynamic Interface Design: For the final project in my Wellesley art class, Jesus F. and I are collaborating to build an interactive cellular simulator. The cells will obey rock/paper/scissors-like rules to decide whether they will kill, do nothing, or reproduce when two colors collide. Users will not have direct control, but will be able to create and destroy colors as well as introduce color-changing hormones into the system. It’s basically an interesting AL simulation, made to look pretty with a lot of mass-spring systems.
• Research: I’m working on finishing a semantic web / RDF powered physical media sharing web application for my school. I’m using an implementation of the Fresnel specification that my friends Chris M. and Katie R. developed. We’re also writing up what we’ve done over the semester in practical application of these specifications and submitting it to a semantic web conference.

Besides all that, Brian, Brendan, Dean, and I are ramping up for our summer plans. We were offered seed funding from Y Combinator as part of their Summer Founders Program to start our own small web business. It was a tough decision, and I ended up deciding to turn down an offer from Google in order to do it, but we’re really excited about this opportunity. I figure, you can only afford to take career risks like this while you’re young, so if I’m ever going to start my own business, it should be now. This essay by Paul Graham really says it better than I can. The four of us will be living in Cambridge and working like mad all summer. Look for more news later on!

Finally, I just wanted to show off a juicy photo of my new monitor setup. I just purchased a second 19″ Ag Neovo flat-panel to go with my original one, so I now have a combined total of 2.6 million beautiful pixels. It’s really going to streamline graphic design and coding workflow for this summer. Pretty.

That’s about it. Don’t expect any more updates from this space until sometime after Expo and finals are over. Maybe I’ll write a post once graduation rolls around and we’re moving into our Cambridge apartment. Summer is almost here!

I just returned from my spring break. Some of my friends from school and I drove up to Toronto, Canada for some fun and relaxation. We found some of the best margaritas in town, toured a few breweries, and generally had a good time exploring the city. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) I didn’t get any work done on the trip, so it’s back to the grindstone.

The second half of the semester has brought with it a new literature class in my school schedule. Science Fiction has replaced “6 Books That Changed The World”. So far, I’m enjoying it more than the last class, both because the literature is more immediately engaging and because the assignment schedule is more laid back. I just finished the reading for Tuesday. Sci-Fi always strikes me in strange ways. Whatever the specific emotion, good sci-fi always seems to have a profound emotional effect on me after I read it. I’m either excited, confused, depressed … but it’s always something. I’m not sure why that is, but it always makes it very fun to read. I’m totally sucked in.

One of the stories that I just finished reading was “The Weapon Shop” by A. E. van Vogt. Holy cow. I haven’t fully finished parsing everything yet, but it was so good! For some reason, I feel like I can relate to the story. The use of perspective is really effective in keeping the reader riveted to the narrative the whole time. In some ways, I think it reminds me of one of my favorite books, “Babbitt” by Sinclair Lewis. My mind is blown. Wow.

Anyway, sorry for the absence of any posts on this site. I’ve got a new design coming soon, along with the much-needed addition of a seperate photoblogging stream planned. I don’t expect that they’ll go up before summer, but oh well. You’ll see them eventually. I have some exciting opportunities this summer that I’ll be able to talk more about soon.

• SparkStats - This plugin generates small sparkline graphs representing the posting and commenting activity on your Wordpress blog over a certain number of days. Nice, pretty statistics to spice up your blog and provide some sense of what’s been going on. I’m working on generalizing it to also display by week or month for blogs with less activity.

• Extended Tags - This is a very simple tagging plugin. It is intended to be used alongside a more fully-featured tagging plugin to provide more specific metadata for your posts that you don’t necessarily want polluting your taglist. (i.e. tags like “web” belong in your cloud while “foobar 2000 bugs” might go in the extended tags.) These tags can then be hidden with styles so that they are just picked up by aggregators like Technorati.

That’s about all. I’m gradually building up tools and ideas to incorporate into an eventual publically-released Wordpress theme. It’ll be cool, I promise.

Ah! Wish me luck! *turning blue*

The new version of Moo.FX features a few nice cleanups and additions to the base library, as well as a pretty complete reworking of the Moo.FX pack (the more advanced effects.) The base library additions are very nice:

• A new method “clearTimer” has been added to the base effects class that allows you to cancel an effect that is currently in progress and start a new one. I’ve been doing this by hand in the past, so it’s nice to have a method that does it for me in less code.
• Transitions have been added! The terminology is a little confusing, but basically, they allow you to change the function which controls the speed and direction of the changing animation value. The base library includes four, but you can also easily write your own. I love it!

I usually only use the base library anymore, but there have also been some major changes to the pack extended effects library. In addition, documentation for the entire library has been added. There is also support for a lite version of Prototype and a moo.ajax class to handle AJAX (since you may not be using the full Prototype version.) I’m not sure what I think about the lite Prototype. On the one hand, the full Prototype is pretty big. On the other hand, it makes the REST of the code you write much shorter and with caching it only needs to be downloaded once per session. I’ll stick with the full version for now since I actually make use of it.

Go and check it out! The best lightweight effects library on the web!

EDIT: Wow, I must be really blind. The old version of Moo.FX also had the clearTimer method. I just wasn’t using it. The new code IS cleaner, so maybe that’s why I didn’t see it before? I really have no excuse…

EDIT: Apparently it can be uninstalled, based on a new post from the IE blog. I was grossly misinformed.

I’m still torn about the new IE and CSS. On the one hand, initial comments from some people make it sound as if they’ve only fixed a few CSS bugs and left other big ones (multiple-class bug, absolute positioning bug, margin bug) unfixed. This isn’t very encouraging. However, it’s only a beta release, so maybe things will continue to improve in the final release. I’m encouraged by the tone of this post by Chris Wilson on the IE Blog. They are looking for feedback; they are at least trying to fix the problem. Dean’s comment on my previous post is also encouraging. I’m no longer suspicious of the IE team’s intent, but I’m still afraid that they may not be given enough time and freedom by their superiors to fix all the bugs that need fixing in the browser. Corporate higher-ups only need another browser release to boost market-share and awareness. As long as they include enough commonly know buzzwords, they don’t need to worry about little things like CSS2.1 compatibility.

I appreciated Fred’s post at WeBreakStuff about his recent visit to Microsoft. He claims that they’re not as evil as they seem, and that, large as the company is, there are people inside it working to move it in the right directions. Good. As Ben Parker once said in a movie, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

I seriously wish the IE Team the best, and encourage them to keep working on standards-compliance. I’ll work with you guys if you work with me. You have the power to make web dev less of a headache. Go, fight win!

I’ve always thought it would be really fun to start a group blog. Writing by yourself is fun; blindly sending out messages into the black space of the internet and occasionally getting comments back. However, there’s just something more fun about posting and commenting back and forth in rapid succession with friends, letting ideas mix and evolve rapidly.

Towards that end, my friends and I have just launched alwaysBETA, a brave new foray into the dangerous world of reading things and writing stuff. It’s a group blog where we can be free to write about anything that interests us. Some of the other authors are pretty funny, so you know you’ll want to check it out.

We’re sure to be the next buzz worthy new blog. Or if not, at least we can go down in a blaze of standards-compliant glory. Come, consume our content, and enjoy.

First, the latest Techcrunch post from Mike Arrington about the E27 startup summit in California features a small writeup about them. It incorrectly states that they are “college dropouts”, which is funny since they’re only taking a semester off. Well, either the post is wrong or they’ve been lying to us.

Second, Scoble happened to be there when they pitched their startup to Mike, so they also got a mention in Scoble’s post about the event. Scoble even took their photo with Mike! So cool!

Way to go guys. Your hard work is paying off. I hope everyone signs up for their mailing list. They’ll be launching soon.

Yes, Microsoft is going to release IE7, and their developer’s blog shows some encouraging signs. Native XMLHTTPRequest support (without ActiveX)? Great! Support for PNG transparency? Great! Improved support for CSS? Well… It turns out that if you dig into what “improved support for CSS” really means in IE7, you’ll find mixed blessings.

For those readers who don’t know, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the standards-compliant way to style web pages. The idea is to keep content (in the XHTML) separate from layout (in the CSS). This has many benefits, one of the most important being the increased ease with which you can change the presentation of a website (namely, by altering one file instead of all of them.) In the past, Internet Explorer has had absolutely abysmal support for CSS. Certain things don’t work, or only partially work, or work in totally wrong and unexpected ways. A CSS-styled page that looks completely normal in standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox will probably look totally broken in IE unless you spend hours of extra time debugging it.

How does one debug CSS for IE? Funny you should ask. A large community has sprung up dedicated to finding ways around IE’s many CSS bugs. In most cases, you kill IE CSS bugs with other IE CSS bugs. (One example of this is the well known “holly hack”.) Thus, a large community of developers committed to standards and the use of CSS have carefully crept around IE’s issues and continued to support the crippled browser with such an unfortunately large market share.

However, times are changing. The IE team has announced that they are eliminating the “star-HTML” hack (at the core of the “holly hack”) along with many other IE “band aid bugs” that many developers use to fix more serious problems. Now, assuming that they actually bring IE7 up to the level of standards-compliance as, say, Firefox, this would be great. It even sounds like they are on the right track. But when they start talking about using conditional selectors (a non-standard IE-only feature) to feed IE with CSS fixes instead (which is more of a headache and requires multiple CSS files instead of just one), I start to get a little bit nervous.

Are Microsoft and the IE Team’s motives pure? I’d like to think so. So much of my time as a web designer has been wasted experimenting with hacks to fix their humorously broken CSS rendering that I really want to believe them. However, if they were really building a standards-compliant browser, then it would just render pages the way Firefox currently renders them (correctly), so there would be no problems. So why are they complaining about developers using hacks and warning them about issues with IE7? This might suggest something more sinister: IE7 isn’t going to fix all the issues, and thousands of developers will be forced to go back and fix countless websites to make up for Microsoft’s pigheadedness.

Alper has a much darker theory about what IE7 actually means to Microsoft. He predicts that the probable partial support of CSS in IE7 is actually just part of a plot by Microsoft to further fragment and disrupt the standards community with new headaches while they continue to push the .NET platform as an alternative to the new web application boom. Sounds plausible to me, although it makes me very sad. I hope he’s wrong. For every developer’s sake, I hope that MS makes IE7 the most standards-compliant browser on the market. But something tells me that they’d rather push for ownership of the web than cooperate with standards bodies and encourage cross-browser compatibility. Drat.

Some people might argue that designers should just lay off the pretty-juice and design simple cross-browser compatible pages that are ho-hum but functional (some might say Nielsenesque.) However, I refuse to have my creativity restricted. I can and will find ways to let the designs in my head out into my browser and the web. Even if I have to start refusing to send my stylesheets to IE browsers altogether and giving a large portion of the market a purely textual experience. Or maybe I should just go against accessibility and start using Explorer Destroyer on everything I do.