Journal
June 26, 2008 | General
My outlook on life is quite liberal. In general I am happy for people to do whatever they like, as long as it doesn’t affect others in a negative way.
However smoking is something I am very much against. To start with, the whole idea of smoking just doesn’t appeal to me. I have never smoked… and I never will. More importantly I have seen the effects of excessive smoking - about a year ago my Grandfather had one of his legs amputated in part due to smoking.
This new advert from an Anti Smoking group in Florida gets the message across in a mildly amusing way that is more likely to be noticed by teens - the likely target audience.
As a piece of marketing this is great. Visually it looks like many games out there now (the HALO series in particular) and you have no idea what the message is until …
Ever since the first betas of WordPress 2.5 I have been making my own version of the admin panel. I like a lot of what they have done but there were some very basic things missing in the design, and I could see a number of ways to improve it. Every now and then I will add something new to tweak it a little bit more and then last week Eric Meyer released his own version of the admin redesign which gave me a few more ideas for improvements.
Making the changes is easy, it’s simply a wordpress plugin. I also don’t touch (many) colours so any future changes to the Wordpress core should go unaffected.
I’m not sure if this is something people would want to use or not so I thought I’d post some screenshots of what I have done so that I can get some feedback.
The dashboard (click for …
A fantastic house designed by an incredibly creative person. It all started because a rich bloke, Steven B. Klinsky, wanted his house redesigned and asked an architect, Eric Clough, to embed a poem in his childrens bedroom. A year goes by and suddenly a new house has been made, with a complex series of puzzles waiting for the occupants to unlock the secrets within.
But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.
The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code†(without the funky religion or buckets of blood)
This …
Big Buck Bunny tells the story of a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself. When one sunny day three rodents rudely harass him, something snaps… and the rabbit ain’t no bunny anymore! In the typical cartoon tradition he prepares the nasty rodents a comical revenge.
Big Buck Bunny is an animation, created in Blender - an open source 3d art program. I tried Blender many moons ago and it was painful to use. I suspect that’s because I was warped by my excessive user of 3d Studio Max. However the unintuitive interface doesn’t seem to have slowed down the amazing artists who created Big Buck Bunny.
The animation was commissioned by the Blender Foundation and has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license - which means you can do whatever you like with the video, as long as the credits are left intact.
The animation is fantastic, even …
Google have recently announced they are hosting popular open source javascript libraries for everyone to use in their projects.
My first thoughts were, “Awesome, they can suck up my bandwidth charges and I can have fast access to javascript libraries”, but now I’ve thought about it a bit more I’m even keener.
Before I get carried away I’ve read a few negatives, the biggest being “Google will be able to track your site”, and to that I say “I use Google Analytics and Adsense, they do it already”!
The bigger implications for me are this - if everybody loads their core javascript files from the same place, then they will be cached on every site that uses them, speeding things up across the web. This would be fantastic for everyone, the only issue now is convincing people to use the libraries on the Google site.
Whilst I am a fan of jQuery, …
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