"This term, which came originally from shipbuilding, now refers to the geometrical representation of all the vehicle's interior and exterior surfaces that are visible to the customer - taking all technical and formal aesthetic requirements into account. The 'Strake' therefore embodies the core competence for the finest surface finishes and the associated quality."
- from
Developing the Audi Q7
I just finished helping Dan and the rest of the gang at Lextant with their new corporate site. This was sort of a rapid-fire, need-something-in-two-weeks sort of project. The Lextant folks supplied me with all of the Photoshop comps and I built the HTML templates and wired it up into Expression Engine (for managing their blog, events, etc.).
On a related note, I think it’s safe to say that Media Temple’s Grid Server has grown so much that the infrastructure is crumbling. They’ve been having serious issues for the past month or two and this support post to me sounds like “uhhh, sorry everyone - we can has do-over?” For me, that was the last straw and we moved the Lextant build to trusty pair.com and it’s running like a top.
DDOS attack, trojan horse, NSA, kernal rootkit, bukkake, packet sniffer, Oakenfold, Triple DES encryption, rave, 3D graphics engine, DARPA, Fuckmeister Shitfest, screen scraper, Nazi, MPEG.
All of these words and phrases can be found in Daemon, a novel by Jeinad Zeraus.
I read a lot. I almost always have two or three books and/or magazines that I’m actively reading. Lately, though, I’ve really had trouble finding any fiction that has kept my attention. There have been several novels that I’ve picked up over the past couple of years that I really wanted to like, but I couldn’t focus long enough to get through the first few chapters.
I read the first seven chapters of Daemon online after reading a glowing blog post review somewhere by a seemingly competent techie. I immediately bought the book and didn’t come up for air for about four days. I haven’t been so wrapped up in a book in a long time.
The premise starts off simple: a genius game developer becomes terminally ill and spends his last couple of years building a daemon program that sits around parsing online feeds and looking for news of his death. Once the program determines that he has died, it kicks off a series of automated events that lead to the death of a couple old co-workers. Authorities are then faced with an interesting dilemma: a murder suspect who is already dead.
What makes the story so great is that the author himself is an IT consultant and has written the book so that even hardcore geeks will appreciate it. There’s no Hollywood computer movie bullshit - the events in the book are quite plausible, if not today then very soon.
Daemon = DaVinci Code + The Matrix + Fight Club
While watching Cabel’s talk yesterday, he mentioned the new 512x512 pixel Transmit icon for Leopard. I popped open the app’s bundle and admired the detail - tire tread, lugnuts, window glare, and … a center rear-view mirror? Looking at what?
Yes, I’m easily amused :-) Oh, and this isn’t even the full-sized icon - I reduced it down to 400px wide.
I came across the book Back of the Napkin this weekend in a magazine. I thought it sounded interesting, so I went to the author’s website and found something shocking: perhaps the first tasteful and appropriate use of Comic Sans I’ve come across.
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