a broken thought

I tweaked the layout of font of my blog a bit. It’s now 100px wider and the font and line-height are a little larger. Hopefully it’ll be a little easier to read on high resolution monitors while still fitting nicely at 1024×768. Check out the Before and After, and let me know what you think.

The current generation of browsers is looking pretty good.  Not all of them support all of the features that I’d like to see (WebSockets, WebWorkers, HTML5 Forms, full CSS3, etc…), but they all have fast Javascript engines, canvas and audio tag support, which makes makes things like video games a lot easier to build on the web.  A few weeks ago, I built this little page to play around with drawing some animation on a canvas tag.

Canvas Sparks

One thing I like about it is that it gives me a sort of a benchmark to compare the different browsers.  For example, I had some real trouble getting the hidden footer bar to show up when you move the mouse over it in Internet Explorer 9 until someone from Microsoft suggested a workaround*.  I’m also able to measure the frame rate, which is a good indication of how fast the browsers are at rendering (at least for this scene).  Here are the numbers on my PC running maximized with the default settings:

While this makes Chrome look pretty bad, it’s actually quite fast and comparable on most tasks. I’ve come to prefer it for most of my browsing (although, that was before IE 9 and FF 4 were released, so who knows if I’ll switch again). I tried Chrome with GPU acceleration enabled, but it actually rendered slower and incorrectly (there’s a good reason Google hasn’t enabled this feature by default).

On my iMac, here are the numbers:

I’d be curious if anyone else is getting different rankings. Just mouse over the footer area to see your frame rate, or to play with the other options.

* Oh, and if you’re interested in the workaround. The problem was that the content of the footer DIV was hidden with display:none, so IE wouldn’t register the mouse being over it. Apparently, IE uses something called hard and soft hits to trigger the :hover selector. An “empty” DIV is treated as a soft hit. The workaround is to set a transparent background on the DIV, either with a transparent image, or with background:rgba(0,0,0,0) in the CSS style.

After less than a year in service, Vapurl.com has been shut down.  I haven’t been monitoring it very closely for a good six months, but apparently a Russian spam network was using Vapurl to mask their URLs.  Spamhaus figured out what was going on and reported our domain as bad.  Apparently, GoDaddy.com doesn’t like to be the registar for anyone listed on Spamhaus, so they suspended our account.

If we wanted to bring the site back up tt would have cost us at least $75 just to reactivate our account to transfer away from GoDaddy, and then we would have needed to figure out a way to keep block the spammers; a very time consuming battle, I’m sure.  It just wasn’t worth it to try to fight the spam.  We could have probably engineered the site differently from the get-go to make the site less appealing to spammers, but we were really just looking for a fun weekend project to play with Google App Engine.  At the end of the day, I’d say the site was a success.  It was a fun learning experience, even if it didn’t last very long.

Apejet.org has moved to WebFaction.  Most of the site moved without any trouble.  They don’t support the PHP mail() function for sending email (probably a good thing), so I had to convert some stuff to use a library to send email.  I expected WordPress to be a bigger problem, but it was pretty straightforward.  I just created a new WordPress app in the WebFaction control panel, exported my conent from my old server using a built-in WP tool, imported it, and loaded up my theme.  That should be about it.  I made the DNS changes last night, so this post is going out on the new server.  No looking back!

Oh, and if you happen to switch to WebFaction, why not use my affiliate link?

http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=ookium

My latest web application is up at www.spellingthing.com.  I’ve never been great at spelling.  Actually, I was pretty terrible at it in school.  Over the years, I’ve been slowly trying to work on learning words as I notice that I’m making mistakes (thank you spell checkers!).  SpellingThing is designed to help people focus on the words that they have trouble with until they’ve gotten it.  You can add your own words to learn, or let the website choose words for you.

I’m trying to get people to beta test it because it’s new to the public and I’m looking for feedback, suggestions, complains, or anything.  Eventually, I’d like to charge for access to premium features, but only if people find it valuable.  For now  it’s completely free, so please check it out and let me know what you think.

I wanted to play around with the HTML 5 Canvas tag, so I’ve started building this little web application to render the Mandelbrot Set.

Read the rest of this entry »

Following in my tradition of periodically taking an online Myers-Briggs test and posting my results.  I’m still an INTJ with the following percentages:

Introverted – 89%
Intuitive – 62%
Thinking – 88%
Judging – 22%

For those with less time or patients, here’s a quick four question version of the test which is pretty much guaranteed to be less accurate.

I was playing around with solving the N-Queens Puzzle in JavaScript and thought it would do nicely as a browser benchmark.  I’m not using much in the way of heuristics or optimizations in this version.  In summary, Google Chrome 4.0 is fast.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like everyone else has dumped their thoughts and opinion of the iPad on the internet, so I guess I will too.  I may not provide anything insightful, but this post could be fun to look back at a year or two from now to see what I got write and wrong (post your thoughts in the comments to play along).

In case you’ve missed it, the iPad is Apple’s new consumer gadget.  It has a 10″ touch sensitive LCD screen (give or take) and is half an inch thick.  The operating system (for those who care) is basically the same one that’s on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.  This means that it’s designed to be used with your fingers, and that it can only install applications that are downloaded through the App Store and approved by Apple.  The basic 16GB model starts at $500, and there are 5 additional models (depending on storage space and 3G connectivity) topping out with a 64GB version at $830 plus $30 per month in wireless charges. Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer I built a little recommendation engine for people to follow on Twitter.  I’ve been meaning to build a new one since Twitter added the ability for users to group people into lists.  Well, this past week I finally found some time to give it a try.  For comparison, here’s my new top 40 suggestions (again, *’s are people that I don’t currently follow):

I can also target specific users.

Followers of John Resig (jQuery) might like:

codinghorror
kevinrose
kevinmarks
spolsky
yahoo
dondodge
stephensaber
scottdlowe
adenhepburn
ryan

Followers of Chris Blizzard (Mozilla) might like:

BillGates
ioerror
beltzner
GoogleCode
BoingBoing
grantbow
Ben_Teitelbaum
googlemaps
googleapps
mozillaweb

Honestly, it’s not as good as I expected. Just glancing over the results, I don’t think it’s as good as the follower based version from last year.  Part of the problem could be list spammers, part could be that I don’t do anything do dilute the influence of people that create a lot of very broad lists, and part could be that Twitter has changed.  I’d really like to try a blended version that uses both lists and followers.