December 2007
15 posts
To Infinity and Beyond!
The Amazon Wishlist Fairies came through this Christmas with To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. It’s a pretty expensive book, but I was still surprised by the size of it as well as the quality of the materials (cloth cover, heavy/glossy page stock, bookmark ribbon, etc.) - definitely coffee table worthy.
I’ve been a Pixar fanboy since watching their...
Processing and Yahoo!
I’m not sure how I never knew about the Design Innovation Team over at Yahoo. They’ve got several cool projects going on and a nice blog that would be even cooler if they fixed their RSS feed.
I came across this after reading Jeff Atwood’s recent post mentioning Processing. The Yahoo Design Innovation Team is making heavy use of Processing and it’s long been right at...
2008 Predictions
Dan over at Lextant just asked me for a few predictions for the coming year to put in their company newsletter. Here were the first three off the top of my head:
Even though the stars are aligned for a landslide, the Democrats will win back the White House with a narrow victory.
Heroes will be cancelled after the upcoming season (aka. the second half of the second season).
The Sirius-XM...
Ruby Book Giveaway Contest
A copy of Russ Olsen’s brand new book, Design Patterns in Ruby, just landed on my desk. I know there are some Ruby folks out there who would probably benefit more from it than myself, so we’re going to have a little giveaway contest.
How to Enter
Just add a comment below with your favorite beer, liquor, mixed drink, or non-alcoholic drink (for non-drinkers). ONE ENTRY PER...
Change Is In the Air
Note: In some regards, this is a personal, self-therapeutic type entry. In others, it makes sense to have this read by as many folks as possible.
The new year is almost upon us and this is when I usually try to take a step back and assess where I am in my career. I have been working independently for 2½ years now and I have been fortunate enough to work on a wide range of projects with many...
Tumblr Commenting
Thanks to Bryce for pointing me to Disqus. This is a nifty drop-in commenting system with spam filtering and good admin features. For those with Tumblr blogs, Disqus has instructions specifically for you when you sign up.
Feel free to add comments to any of my older posts.
Catching Up
After a week off the grid on vacation, here are a few of the interesting things I’ve been catching up on:
A tour of the amazing UI work for the recently launched Dopplr.
The beta BBC homepage. Love the analog clock. Interesting commentary from Mark Boulton.
NY Times piece on the challenges of coding for multi-core processors.
Excerpt from Malcom Grear’s book on how to create...
Flickr Adds Photo Editing Tools →
The most commonly used photo manipulation tools (rotation, cropping, color and exposure adjustments, red eye removal, etc.) are now baked right into Flickr. Nicely played, Picnik.
The BBC's Anemic Backend
For as exciting and progressive the BBC is on the design and interaction side, it’s mind-boggling to hear about how archaic and crippled their technology stack is.
A Unique Anti-Spam Approach
The Times has an interesting piece about Steven Kirsch’s new startup, Abaca. His new venture is pursuing an anti-spam technique different from the traditional bayesian approach:
The approach underlying the Abaca technique is the recognition that the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail is individually unique. It is also a singular identifier that a spammer cannot manipulate easily. By...
SuperSleight: Transparent PNGs in Internet... →
Snazzy, non-intrusive Javascript solution for alpha transparent PNGs in IE 6.