dynagirl

I just installed my favorite WordPress plug-in ever: Shockingly Big IE6 Warning http://bit.ly/15mEI4

RT @WomenWhoTech Where are the Women in Tech and Social Media? http://bit.ly/i5oBz – #FastCompany

“When writers write, they discover what they actually think. When developers develop, they discover what the customer actually needed. Both conclusions happen near the end of the process, and invariably require going back and starting all over again. Nobody knows what the program should do until it doesn’t do it.”

@casey_mk “abandoning web standards” implies MS/Office ever followed them…

No, you can’t have a pony.

{jmac} but that’s not this, ’cause it should definitely at least try, and then fail spectacularly

{me} *hearts it when things fail spectacularly.*
  err, ok by things i mean code
  not life-critical things
  err, ok by things i mean code and by code i mean dev code
  not traffic lights and other important real code

{jmac} new horror movie: br****nt coded your pacemaker

{me} omg i LOLd for real

{jmac} <grin>

[% IF gimmelove > 0 %]

It could be argued that since this application is built with Perl/Catalyst/Template Toolkit, the answer would never be more than zero… but I still appreciate the Easter Egg!

I’d be excited to see the Charles Nelson Reilly one-man-show movie, even if my brother hadn’t designed the gorgeous poster and site. I hope it comes to Sundance 608 soon.

In a foolish attempt to make a quick fix to my CSS, I edited the live file in TextMate via Transmit. I’d forgotten that that feature had been flaking out on me recently, and, well… mah file done got et. There’s no backup (on this machine), and GoogleCache and the Wayback Machine have failed me, so things are going to look a little DEFAULT today.

Eek! Masher!

update! I found this old thing in the closet…

im in ur source code, laffing at ur HTML

Nice short web spot from Europe about blood donation.
via adverblog

HTML entity character lookup and Character Pal.

A Chinese court has jailed two officials after they let a blind contractor build a bridge which collapsed during construction and injured 12 people, the official Xinhua news agency said Monday…. “After the blind contractor changed the blueprint, he carried out the work only using a roughly drawn draft of the plan, which caused the bridge to collapse,” the report said. Xinhua did not explain how the contractor was able to run the project considering his inability to see.

Via Tha Bryzzzah

live every week like it’s shark week
by Wesley Willis

You are my special working hard bish.
You are the best in the long run.
You really whoop a snow leopard’s ass.
You really whoop a snow leopard’s ass.

LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!
LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!
LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!
LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!

Every week that’s like shark week is very special to me.
Shoutlet is the best in the long run.
I like you a lot in the long run.
You really whoop Saddam Hussein’s ass.

LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!
LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!
LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!
LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT’S SHARK WEEK!!!

You can really rock your ass off.
I like you well.
You really whoop a llama’s ass.
You can really rock it out.

Rock over London,
Rock on Chicago.

Shoutlet – we build excitement.

WTF is up with PERL.

Bryan found this neat little php file that you dump into the images directory of a web site and it gives you an index page with a table of thumbnails, complete with file type, size, and date added. Totally handy!

Nifty! Not only is IE7’s File/Edit/View/Etc. menu in a really stupid place below the toolbar*, the Edit menu doesn’t work. If you select a URL from the address bar and then try to copy it from the Edit menu, it loses focus on the address and you can’t copy it. Paste is similarly fucked up. The right-click contextual menu works, so why not this? Click to watch:

You’ll notice that I took this movie on my Mac through Remote Desktop. I tried the copy/paste maneuvering directly on the Windows (XP) box, with the same results. I also tried it in Internet Explorers 5-6 and it worked just fine.

Geeks Are Sexy posted a registry hack to move the File/Edit/View/Etc. menu back to the top. I did this and it worked, in terms of moving the menu bar back to where it belongs, but it didn’t fix the copy/paste issue. Swell!

*”Reload” and “stop” are in the extra-stupid place of after the address bar, and no, they can’t be rearranged.

One of the Big Things on my to-do list this spring is to learn Javascript like a badass. There’s a lot of references out there on the web, and a lot of books… but there’s a lot of really shitty references and a lot of shitty books, and I don’t even really know enough to know the difference yet. My HTML and CSS is tight and poetic (and constantly improving), and I want to make sure that my Javascript is just as awesome. On my shelf waiting for me I’ve got Javascript, the Definitive Guide, and Christian Heilmann’s Beginning Javascript with DOM Scripting and AJAX.

I’m looking forward to digging into those, and this
DOMAss – The DOM Assistant library looks useful as well.
via 456 Berea Street

<object width="425" height="350">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gx-NLPH8JeM"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gx-NLPH8JeM"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
wmode="transparent"
width="425" height="350">
</embed>
</object>

Really?! Aw, come on. Thanks for fucking up my perfectly gorgeous and really carefully-written code* whenever a visitor posts a video in a profile or blog comment. Even without addressing bullshit Eolas patent problems and various workarounds, what’s so hard about dishing up the Flash satay that’s been on the menu for oh, five years now? Google video does the same. Feh.

It probably wouldn’t be too tricky to write a little thing for Rails that would automatically rewrite that crap into something prettier. Dave? Bryan? Help a girl out…

* not on this site, a community with non-web-geek users

• Smashing Magazine’s collection
• Essential Bookmarks for Web Developers
• link thumbnail
• annotating images
• styling input type="file"
• web design inspiration on Flickr
• HTML/CSS boxes and arrows

We’ve been so busy that I haven’t followed the Internet Explorer 7 betas; from what I was seeing, there were enough changes between each even after they said that all of the layout/rendering development was frozen that it wasn’t worth chasing. Now that it’s out, and being pushed to a good share of Windows users, I spent the morning setting up our testing boat anchor laptop (WinXP/SP2) with IE7, the ability to handle multiple versions of Internet Explorer, and older versions of said devil.

While I first thought that running a virtual machine would be the only solution, it’s pretty crazy to have to do that (and pay for a whole other XP license and whatever extra RAM you need) just to test your web sites in crappy old browsers. I have to say HOOOORAY to Yousif Al Saif for putting together Multiple_IE: a bundle of standalone versions of IE that don’t interfere with each other. Installation was fast and it works great.

When the mere presence of the bell is not enough.

Looking through all of these, I had a nasty flashback to usability testing. It’s easy to imagine the four-hour, five+ people meeting that would ensue–mostly entirely a discussion of why the labels should read “push button” instead of “ring bell,” since really, there is no bell present and the user is not directly ringing anything. At the two-hour mark, the group would seem to be in agreement that the labels should read “push button to ring bell” because “push button” would be too ambiguous to the user as to the results of such pushing, and would therefore cause the user discomfort, possibly resulting in the user never pushing the button because they were afraid of what might happen. After four hours, everyone would be in agreement–until, inevitably, someone points out that the bell is neither now nor ever visible to the user, so that “push button to ring bell” would be equally distressing to the user because they would never know exactly what bell they were ringing if they pushed the button. At that point, the web designer rips the bubbler off of the wall, heaves it through the window, and runs. [Scene.]

People who have heard me on my soapbox may think that I think that Macs and Firefox are perfect. I never said that! (Even though they’re totally better.) I’ve just spent the afternoon chasing down tab order wierdness in Firefox on the Mac, and dang! that was annoying.

Automatic pullquotes with JavaScript and CSS, from 456 Berea Street. Cool.

Test your sites on a PSP Web Browser Simulator. (Windows only.)

Stockholm – The musical. Neato.

I can set the measurement units in CICEROS.
I can set the measurement units in DIDOTS.
hours, minutes, seconds, too.
miles!
feet!
kilometers!
BUT NOT FUCKING PIXELS! ! ! ! !

A nice Photoshop tutorial on cleaning up a face so it’s pretty / normal-looking. (Mouse over the “final result” image.) This is hardly Photoshop plastic surgery stuff, but it’s what I have to go through pretty much EVERY DAMNED TIME I’m given a person’s photograph for a site or brochure. Please! Look in the mirror. Comb your hair, powder your nose (men, too… and you might want do your shiny head while you’re at it), and do something about those eye bags — the five minutes you take will save a very expensive hour, and god forbid your company doesn’t have the budget for those hours and THEN THE INTERNETS WILL THINK YOU’RE UGLY.

Oh, and if you’re a smoker or drink a pot of coffee every day? Two words: whitening strips. You don’t have to go Ross-Nuclear-White, but it’ll take five years off of you.

Want a less lame looking mySpace profile? Mike Davidson (he of sIFR fame and many fine web sites) shows you how. He also has 57 billion friends.