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Links for 2009-1-05

Posted by mattc at Jan 6, 09 05:05 AM

Watir - Installation
Ruby functional UI test automator

Links for 2009-1-04

Posted by mattc at Jan 5, 09 05:05 AM

Dynamic CSS | Ruby on Rails for Newbies
Interesting, especially colour mixing. What other simple Photoshop-like features could be modelled by a more dynamic CSS language?

Links for 2009-1-03

Posted by mattc at Jan 4, 09 05:05 AM

Beautiful Soup
A Python html/xml parser.
Friedrich Hayek - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spontaneous order
Uploading Data with Bulk Data Uploader - Google App Engine - Google Code
Playing with Google App Engine this afternoon. It's got a one-click install local development environment, one-click deployment (!), Python is fun to use, the documentation actually reflects how the thing works, and it's currently got a small but beautifully formed set of service API's (user, datastore, memcache). For small weekend projects this beats any DIY hosting arrangements. The only downer is that code.google.com keeps routing me to the Japanese documentation rather than UK.
Internet Archive: Details: Hypercard

Links for 2008-12-30

Posted by mattc at Dec 31, 08 05:05 AM

Volkswagen UK > New cars > Fox
VW thing #2. The way the driverless car pops over the hill and winds it's way towards me, then sits there all attentive and in need of an owner, like a puppy at the dogs home. Clever piece of interactive design.
Volkswagen UK > New cars > New Golf
I'm buying a new car. The VW site wins the award for the most persuasive site, I love how the colour selection on their pimp-a-car section is performed by the same machines from the adverts. I think we'll end up getting a 3-series though :)
Forget the Film, Watch the Titles
Archive of file title sequences. The Michael Riley ones are so engaging in the way the web/interactivity almost never is. How can we create artistic, meaningful but functional interfaces.

Links for 2008-12-23

Posted by mattc at Dec 24, 08 05:05 AM

XQuery Update Facility 1.0
Bonza. I was just reading the XQuery 1.0 specification thinking, 'what's the point of a language like SQL without the ability to INSERT and UPDATE?'. Saxon support this apparently.

Links for 2008-12-21

Posted by mattc at Dec 22, 08 05:05 AM

SeleniumTests - gmaps-api-issues - Google Code - Main page for information on the maps api selenium tests.
Google Maps Selenium test suites. We've been writing them in testng, junit rather than html tables so we can log results in a format compatible with our CI system.

Links for 2008-12-18

Posted by mattc at Dec 19, 08 05:05 AM

CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future
Copyright quite relevant to what I'm doing at the moment, or at least making people understand that copyright is painful.

Links for 2008-12-16

Posted by mattc at Dec 17, 08 05:05 AM

The Elements of Computing Systems / Nisan & Schocken / www.idc.ac.il/tecs
Building an operating system.
Hackszine.com: From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps
Building an operating system.

Web Fonts & Wingdings

Posted by mattc at Dec 7, 08 07:11 PM ... Comments (0)

I noticed Opera have just shipped an alpha version of their next release that includes support for CSS3 web fonts, which amongst other things adds the ability to distribute fonts with your pages, TTF, OTF etc.

Most people use fonts to express the alphabet, punctuation etc. but typographers also ship some very pretty symbol typefaces known as dingbats.

Here's a demo of using an embedded dingbat typeface to add some bullet makers to a list via css3.

After setting up the font description,

@font-face {
  font-family: "Sarus";
  src: url("http://commuterjoy.co.uk/resources/ttf/sarus.ttf") format("truetype");
}

I can attach a letter to any node using the :before selector,

li:before {
 font-family: Sarus;
 font-size: 2em;
 content: "A";
 }

Then toggle the color & style of it using the :hover selector.

li:hover::before {
 color:red;
 content: "B";
 }

The best thing about native web fonts (unlike, say, image icons) is that they scale well and respond to standard CSS properties like 'color', 'font-weight', try upping the font size of the example.