Nerdiness

• I beat The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker on Sunday. I’ll be looking to start a new game some time in the next month. Suggestions?
• I am wicked excited about my comic haul on Wednesday. There’s always one week a month where almost all the titles I read seem to come out at once. Due:
• Batman #618: Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s amazing year working on this book is almost over. The final page of last month’s issue was so good. I can’t wait.
• The Flash #201: I loved Scott Kollins’ art in The Flash, so I hope that Alberto Dose lives up. This book has been so good lately that I’m worried Geoff Johns won’t be able to keep it up.
• Green Lantern #168: Sigh. Ben Raab’s a few issues in, and it just hasn’t done much for me. I want Kyle to reignite the corps., but it seem like Raab is afraid of the idea and has decided to draw it out for way too long.
• JLA #85: Aside from #83, JLA is a good book, and has been for a long time. I’m not as crazy about the new team as some, but I wasn’t sorry to see Plastic Man go.
• Superman: Red Son #3: What if Superman had been a communist? The first two issues were smart and fun, I’m sure the last one will be, too.
• Transformers: War & Peace #5: I’ve lost my interest mostly. This is the second-to-last issue for this volume, and it just wasn’t as fun as last summer’s.

Complete Trilogy to Be in Theatres

According to Slashdot, New Line Cinema has announced that they will be releasing The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers into theaters two weeks before the December 17 release of The Return of the King. And, to my delight, they’ll be the extended versions previously only available on the special edition DVDs.

Inner Demons

Via asterisk*: for your nine to five amusement, The Office Space Game.

New direction…

Every once in a while an idea will creep its way into my brain and latch itself onto the gray matter. A few weeks’ time usually suffices to shake the thought from my consciousness, but in the meantime it nibbles away at me as if it were a tiny devil whispering in my ear. The nature of this thought-demon varies. It could be an odd daydream on what life would have been like if I had learned to play the drums instead of the sax, or joining the Army Reserves, or pondering where I’d be if I’d met people from different freshman halls. One such thought is niggling at my brain now. The skeptic in me refuses to defeat it.

Google Toolbar

My company uses Windows. I deal. Yesterday I got very annoyed because Outlook refused to let me make some text green isntead of red. Outlook doesn’t usually bother me, but Internet Explorer does. Once you’ve gotten used to tabbed browsing, auto-fill, integrated searching, and pop-up blocking, it’s hard to go back.

Two days ago day I finally looked below the search bar on Google and read that the new version of the Google Toolbar takes care of three of those features. It even keeps a little counter of how many pop-ups it has managed to deflect! I strongly recommend it to anyone whose IT department refuses to let you install a better browser.

P.S.: You can drag the toolbar around if you don’t want to waste too much screen space on it. Mine hovers to the right of the “Help” menu.

Palm Splits in Two

Palm, the maker of handheld PDAs, just announcede that they will be splitting into two companies. One, PalmOne, will be solely a hardware company while the other, PalmSource, will make software. In some of the worst writing I’ve ever read, C|Net’s Ina Fried says: “Where the biblical King Solomon only threatened to divide a disputed baby in two, Palm has undertaken to actually split its venerable brand in two.” But what can you expect from a company that thought news.com.com was clever?

Demotivators

Katherine has these hanging on her cubicle wall, and she found the webpage they came from: Demotivators from Despair.com. I think my favorite’s Irresonsibility. Do you have a favorite?

Play Safe

Via dangerousmeta via Antipixel: the Play Safe Thong. I think that this might actually succeed in making carrying a condom sexy enough to not be intimidating for girls.

MOSe Use: Generating Amazon and IMDb Favicons

I’ve added a little bit of MOSe to my site. Any links to Amazon or IMDb will automatically have a little favicon after them - unless you’re using Internet Explorer, which can’t keep up with the CSS. This will save me a little bit of coding (and having to remember to code in the img tags after the links). I’ve also done away with the concept of linking the name of a book to its official webpage because, well, who cares? Everyone just wants to go to the amazon page anyway.

For more information on the idea of MOSe’s, see:

• Mezzoblue
• as days pass by
• webgraphics
• MyDimension
• Mike Pick

Here’s the CSS I that I have:

a[href^="http://www.amazon"] { background: url(http://www.davextreme.com/davextreme/mt/ archives/Amazonlogo.gif) right center no-repeat; padding-right: 12px; } a[href^="http://www.imdb"] { background: url(http://www.davextreme.com/davextreme/mt/ archives/IMDblogo.gif) right center no-repeat; padding-right: 22px; } a[href^="http://us.imdb"] { background: url(http://www.davextreme.com/davextreme/mt/ archives/IMDblogo.gif) right center no-repeat; padding-right: 22px; } 

It doesn’t validate at the moment, and I’m not quite sure why, but it still looks nifty!

Manmade Diamonds

Wired is running an excellent article about manufactured diamonds. There are two labs, one in Florida and one in Boston, that can now make diamonds that are indistinguishable from nature-made ones. And they can make them perfect, every time, for under a hundred dollars. These aren’t artificial - they’re real diamonds - they’re just made in a lab in a few days instead of underground in thousands of years.

This is an amazing thing for me because I’ve come to learn how evil the diamond trade is. De Beers has the definition of an evil monopoly over the market. They intentionally keep the prices high on a gem that isn’t very rare at the expense of many African lives a year. I think I’m actually morally opposed to buying a diamond from how much I’ve learned about this terribly industry. Now it seems that these labs can make them, and do it for cheap.

And even more important than the potential for cheap jewelry is the prospect of using diamonds for scientific purposes. Computers are getting to the point where they’ll eventually run hot enough to melt silicon. Diamond-based semiconductors will open up an increase in computer speed in orders of magnitude.

According to the article, this is a prospect that has De Beers scared. So dangerous to them is the upcoming availability of cheap diamonds that Apollo Diamond president Bryant Linares was once told that his “father’s research was a good way to get a bullet in the head.”

Extenuating Images

I think that this is pretty funny. Someone took a picture that this guy Dan Hon took and made it into the background of their page. They haven’t attributed it to him and are linking from the copy on his server instead of copying it to their own site (so every time someone goes to their page, they use up some of his bandwidth). He’s mad and has asked the person to stop with no response, and so is soliciting ideas for funny replacement images.

Templating MFop2

When I bought my new cell phone last month, the store had a bundle deal for an attachable camera at 50% off. Half-off is a good deal, but that would have still meant spending $50 for the camera. And while having a camera-phone would be cool, I wasn’t sure that it would be $50 cool when I already own a camera.

A few days ago I realized that eBay might be able to hook me up, so I did a quick search and, after losing my first three auction attempts, won a Communicam Mobile Camera MCA-25 for $20. I haven’t gotten it yet, but assuming that my eBay luck improves it should be here pretty soon.

In anticipation, I looked around online until I came across Mfop2, a free online service that lets you post to your website via email. And since my phone is email equipped, I can put up pictures as soon as I take them. Configuring the service wasn’t very hard and the instructions were plain and easy. I did have one problem, but an email to the developer was met with a response within hours and fixed minutes later.

I haven’t rolled the code into my main site, mainly because I don’t have the camera yet, but it’s working on the test page. In the extended entry I go through how I set up MFop2 to work with my MovableType templates.

I didn’t want to have my photos go right into the main section of my page with the rest of the entries, mainly because I don’t think the design of my page looks too good with lots of images. I’d also prefer to keep the size of the main page smaller, so loading lots of images isn’t too good of an idea. I decided that I should just put a thumbnail of the most recent picuture in the sidebar of the page along with a link to the full-sized image and accompanying text. I also wanted the header to be a link to the photo archives, and wanted links to the five most recent photos. Those links go to the individual page for each photo.

I’ve recently put most of the sidebar elements from my page into a seperate weblog called “lists” that gets imported to my main page via php includes. Information on how to do that can be found in “Movable Type tutorial — How to add a ‘sidebar’ to your blog.” With that implementation already in place, I made a new category in the sideblog called “moblog” and configured Mfop2 to post everything into it.

Next I made a new template, called “moblog” whose output is “moblog.html” and checked the “automatically rebuild” box. Here’s what the template looks like:

<MTCategories> <MTIfCategory name="Moblog"> <div class="title"><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"> Photos</a></div> <div class="side"> <MTEntries lastn="1"> <div class="moblog"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title="<$MTEntryTitle$>"><$MTEntryBody$></a></div> </MTEntries> <ul class="nobullet"> <MTEntries lastn="5"> <li><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title=" <$MTEntryTitle$>"><$MTEntryTitle smarty_pants="1"$></a></li> </MTEntries> </ul> </div> </MTIfCategory> </MTCategories> 

The template uses the <MTIfCategory> tag that comes from a plug-in by Brad Choate. It lets the template output entries from only one category instead of listing them all. If you can read MT tags, the template isn’t all that complex. The first two lines tell MT to only display entries of category “moblog.” The third line makes a heading called “Photos” that is a link to the category archive for “moblog.” Next, I use to show the first entry, which will display the picture below the heading (more on this later). After this I make an unordered list which will contain the titles of the five most recent posts to the photo page. <MTEntries lastn="5"> gives me the five entries, and then each <MTEntryTitle> is an item of the list, generated by the loop.

The key to making this all come together is in my stylesheet. Since the above template is being imported into my main index, its gets styled by the CSS for the main page. I use the class “nobullet” to make my ul show up without bullets. More information on styling lists can be found at (no pun intended) A List Apart. Here’s what I use:

.nobullet    { list-style: none; padding: 0; margin: 0; } 

The most complex part comes with the .moblog style. It does three things: hides the text of the most recent post, resizes the image into a thumbnail, and styles a border around the images that changes color when moused-over. I’ve set Mfop2 to place <span> before the body of the post and </span> after it. This is because Mfop2 only puts stuff into the main entry body of MT, so it’ll have both the photo in it and the description text, but on the main page we only want to show a thumbnail of the image. Solution: we have CSS hide the text inside the span.

Mfop2 isn’t able to generate thumbnails (but claims it wll soon), so I’ve taken the unfavorable approach of setting the height and width of the images manually. I’d rather not do this, as it makes you load a large image when a small one would do, but for the moment that’s how it goes.

Here’s the style for the moblog class:

.moblog  { right: 0; margin-left: auto; } .moblog span     { display: none; } .moblog img  { border: 3px solid #2d2b5a; height: 90px; width: 120px; } .moblog img:hover   { border: 3px solid #99cc66; } .moblog a:hover  { border: none; } 

All that’s left is putting it into my index template, which is accomplished with one line of code:

<? include('http://www.davextreme.com/ davextreme/mt/lists/moblog.html'); ?> 

An important note is that the main index template for my page is now index.php instead of index.html - this seems to be required for the import method to work.

All in all Mfop2 seems to be a great service. It’s free (but I may PayPal some money in appreciation), not too hard to configure, and very customizable. Have fun enjoying my poor photographing skills!

Mushy Squash and Carrots

Sometimes being a vegetarian is about eating fast enough so that you fill up before getting too bored with your meal.

TypePad TOS

I’ve been playing around with TypePad off and on all day, and so far I give it a shiny gold star. The interface for posting entries and designing pages is clean and simple and quite WYSIWYG. I love that you can preview what your page will look like before you post it. The photo album feature is wonderful as well and produces similarly beautiful pages.

Of note are the Terms of Service which are satisfyingly lenient. Basically you can post whatever you want on your page and accept responsibility for what you put up. So you can’t break the law. But it doesn’t expressly forbid pornography anywhere!

Ahem. You can check out my TypePad page if you’d like. I’ve imported my entries from this page so that there’d be something to look at, and have created a photo album of my niece. I don’t expect to keep using TypePad once the 30-day trial ends, but I will strongly recommend it to anyone looking for web space.

Arlingtoniversary

Today marks one year since I moved to the DC area. The next day, as I was still unpacking my toy chest and discovering that I’d have to live without high speed internet for a while, the sniper attacks started. It wasn’t the best welcome for me, nervous about getting a job and about starting my adult life. It was the first time that a current event had directly affected my safety and worried me. Not that I was walking in zigzags and avoiding white vans, but it was scary. Scarier even (for the moment) than sending out resumés.