Archives for the month of: February, 2004

Redesign in Progress (again)

February 27, 04 //
4

After much thought over the past few weeks I’ve come to the real­iza­tion that I’m not sat­is­fied with the design of this site. I sup­pose my afore­men­tioned Des­ig­nat­i­tus has kicked in once again and the designer in me has decided to do a com­plete over­haul of this site, including:

1. Code from scratch instead of rely­ing on Mov­able Type tem­plates as a basis to the design. Granted, using tem­plates to build from is fine but it’s like mak­ing a cake from fresh ingre­di­ents — in the end it just tastes better.

2. Restruc­ture the lay­out. Rely less on try­ing to emu­late other designs and instead cre­ate some­thing of my own. I’m an artist and intepre­ta­tion of design is immi­nent, but hav­ing some­thing that feels like your own is gen­er­ally more satisfying.

3. Uti­liz­ing more MT code, I would like to have some­thing more robust and fea­ture rich. Focus­ing my inten­tions on build­ing this site to be much more than a blog.

4. Com­press the cat­e­gories into 4 or 5 cat­e­gories instead of the num­ber that exists now. I’d much rather focus my atten­tion and writ­ing on a few choice top­ics instead of try­ing to cover every­thing that comes to mind or things that I’ve found on the Inter­net. Sites like boingboing.net are doing this already and I don’t want to rein­vent the wheel. This site was cre­ated for much more than trivia and moreso to show­case my design work and research.

I’d expect this will take me any­where from 2 weeks to a span of a few months con­sid­er­ing I don’t wish to rush this redesign. I’d much rather do my research mak­ing the end result more appeal­ing to the point where I can focus on writ­ing, instead of con­stantly re-designing this site. 

Curious Passion

February 25, 04 //
1

My wife and I will be going to a screen­ing of <a href=“http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335345/ title=“Passion of the Christ”>Passion of the Christ this Sat­ur­day. Despite the con­tro­versy stem­ming from the reported anti-semitism the movie itself looks like an intense piece of cin­e­matic history.

The film depicts the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ’s life which por­trays the cap­ture, tor­ture and cru­ci­fic­tion. Reports indi­cate that Gib­son chose this par­tic­u­lar time frame in order to focus atten­tion on the sac­ri­fice and early screen­ings and pre­views state that Gibson’s inten­tions have been successful.

Chicago-Sun Times critic, Roger Ebert describes Pas­sion as “the most vio­lent film I have ever seen.” He also con­cludes that this is a film you will either love or hate and pre­sum­ably form your own inter­pre­ta­tion of whether the expe­ri­ence was worth the viewing. 

Do the Time Warp

February 17, 04 //
4

Por­tals, also known as the gate­ways to var­i­ous dimen­sions in time, have been used numer­ous amounts of times in Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions. Their appeal lies in the intrigue of time travel — a con­cept that mankind wishes they had a grasp of. Yet as episodes of Outer Lim­its and The Simp­sons includ­ing movies like The But­ter­fly Effect sug­gest; chang­ing aspects of time will lead to a dra­matic cause and effect situation.

homertime.jpgIn the Simpson’s Tree­house of Hor­ror V plot­line, Homer Simp­son trav­els through time using noth­ing more than a com­mon house­hold toaster. What­ever he changes in the past has a direct effect on the future, includ­ing step­ping on pre­his­toric plants and ani­mals. This par­tic­u­lar episode shares a con­nec­tion with that of the Outer Lim­its, par­tic­u­larly an episode enti­tled ‘Stitch in Time’. In this plot­line a dis­turbed sci­en­tist invents a time machine to allow her the abil­ity to kill ser­ial killers before they com­mit their first crimes.

Other movies like Don­nie Darko and as men­tioned The But­ter­fly Effect strive for a more dis­turb­ing view of time travel as opposed to lighter come­dies like Back to the Future. In Darko, a teenager liv­ing in the mid-80s escapes a near-death encounter when a jet engine crashes into his room. Even­tu­ally a human-sized rab­bit vis­its his day­dreams, fore­telling the apoc­a­lypse. Don­nie is instructed by his rab­bit informer to wreak havoc on his town affect­ing mem­bers of the town’s population.

In But­ter­fly Effect a group of pre-teens are the cause behind a tragic event which changes their fate for­ever. That is until Evan Tre­born fig­ures out he can travel to var­i­ous points in time by read­ing entries in his jour­nal of that par­tic­u­lar event. Despite his attempts to fix the past, he ulti­mately causes more dam­age in the long run includ­ing caus­ing more dam­age to his cir­cle of friends. 

Designatitus

February 12, 04 //
2

Adam Polselli, of http://www.adampolselli.com writes;

One of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of design­ing is tak­ing that first step: when you know what style you would like to achieve, but you just don’t know where to start. We’ve all been there at one time or another, think­ing to our­selves “what col­ors should I use?”, “what fonts would work best?”, and “what are some ele­ments of the style I want?”

This hap­pens more often than I would like. Espe­cially when it comes to design­ing some­thing for my own use, which due to my per­fec­tion­ist out­look, results in out­put that grows stale quickly. Design­ing for some­one else seems to, for me any­ways, come more nat­ural and ulti­mately means I’ll be more pas­sion­ate about the sub­ject mat­ter in the long run. I some­times refer to this as “des­ig­nat­i­tus”, dis­ease of the designer.

Thank­fully, Adam Polselli real­izes this exists and has gra­ciously donated his design guides, spec sheets to pro­vide inspi­ra­tion. He calls them “Get the Look”:http://www.adampolselli.com/getthelook guides and each con­tains a help­ful sec­tion on font, color and lay­out options. My favorite for the moment is “Vintage”:http://www.adampolselli.com/getthelook/vintage.php , which exudes a 60s-ish flavor.

If you’re suf­fer­ing from “des­ig­nat­i­tus” uti­lize these sheets for inspi­ra­tion. You might shake your­self from this dis­ease and cre­ate some­thing that you’ll enjoy for a life­time. Or, you might not. Who really knows. 

Firefox released

February 9, 04 //
1

firefox.gifThe devel­op­ment team at Mozilla.org have offi­cially released the next incar­na­tion of what was orig­i­nally named the Fire­bird browser. The soft­ware has been updated to ver­sion 0.8 and in the process has been renamed Mozilla Fire­fox.

The logo on the other hand was report­edly inspired by the Fire­fox, or “another name for the Red Panda, also known as the lesser panda or the cat bear. The name, fire­fox, is trans­lated from the Chi­nese name for the Red Panda, ‘hon ho’ which means ‘fire-fox’.” (ref)

An expla­na­tion on the process of brand­ing Fire­fox can be found at hicks­de­sign.

If you haven’t jumped on the Fire­fox band­wagon, now is the time. The browser includes a slew of new fea­tures with the 0.8 build but most impor­tantly tabbed brows­ing, auto-block popup man­ager, improved CSS ren­der­ing (much improved over Inter­net Explorer) and much more. I use the browser in addi­tion to Net­cap­tor, which uses the IE engine, and can hon­estly say that Fire­fox is an excel­lent browser.

So much in fact, I write most of my arti­cles within the Fire­fox browser. It’s leaner, meaner and cleaner. 

Feed Software

February 5, 04 //
1

softbox.gifOut of all the soft­ware installed on my com­puter there are a hand­ful of pro­grams that I just couldn’t live with­out, for func­tion­al­ity and every­day use;

  • Adobe Pho­to­shop for it’s ease of use and func­tion­al­ity, not to men­tion being able to suc­cess­fully trans­late my designs to print and the web seamlessly.
  • Dreamweaver despite my pref­er­ence to han­droll sites over ‘wiz­zy­wig’ there are fea­tures of Dreamweaver that stream­line the process.
  • Fire­bird for it’s inge­nu­ity and bril­liant ren­der­ing code. Believe me, I was not a fan of Netscape and to think that FB is built on Gecko amazes me.
  • Diskeeper 8 for it’s beau­ti­ful GUI and how it keeps my hard­drive run­ning via it’s excel­lent defrag­men­ta­tion engine.
  • Textpad (or Meta­pad) for it’s ver­sa­til­ity. Whether you need to cre­ate a full-fledged web doc­u­ment — be it XHTML/CSS/PHP/ASP — or just a sim­ple text doc­u­ment this pro­gram is sim­ple and extremely useful.

Some­day I hope to add Nick Bradbury’s well-received and award-winning apps, Feed­de­mon (for RSS feeds) and Top­style (for CSS editing). 

URU Live Dead

February 5, 04 //
0

The Cyan Worlds web site reports that URU Live is offi­cially dead. That’s right, due to lack of sub­scribers the online por­tion of Ages Beyond Myst has been canned.

In their own words:

Even with all of the time, money, resources, code, peo­ple, sweat, and heart that were poured into Uru Live, we needed a cer­tain num­ber of sub­scribers to pay the bills. We didn’t get there. Uru Live is inno­v­a­tive and unique; its online uni­verse is one of the most beau­ti­ful and com­plex ever built, any­where. The idea of ongo­ing con­tent was dra­matic and forward-looking, but it required a sub­stan­tial con­tin­u­ing effort to sus­tain. We were just not able to sign up the num­ber of sub­scribers (even for free) nec­es­sary to pay for that effort.

The good news for those who own URU is the devel­op­ers plan on releas­ing a series of expan­sion packs that include the con­tent that would have oth­er­wise been down­loaded via the online por­tion. The first of these, enti­tled To D’ni, will be avail­able free of charge while sub­se­quent packs will incur a fee.

Update: There is an online peti­tion to res­ur­rect URU Live, look­ing to con­vince Cyan Worlds and Ubisoft to rein­state the online por­tion of Ages Beyond Myst. 

Tribes Alike

February 4, 04 //
0

Cory Doc­torow (of boingboing.net) has released his sec­ond novel, East­ern Stan­dard Tribe. Once again, he is releas­ing it simul­ta­ne­ously as both a free down­load in var­i­ous dig­i­tal for­mats and the stan­dard paper and ink ver­sion at a price.

Cory’s expla­na­tion for releas­ing a free format?

bq. estcover.jpg“I don’t believe that there’s any market-demand for teasers or for “Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment” tech­nol­ogy: none of you woke up this morn­ing and said, “Damn, I wish there was a way I could get less of the books I enjoy and a way I could do less with them once I have them.” My goal here is to fig­ure out what peo­ple actu­ally want out of elec­tron­i­cally deliv­ered text.”

Expand your mind and down­load the free ver­sion. If you like what you see, pay a few pen­nies for the book format.

Nev­er­the­less, Cory is an excel­lent author with a rich imag­i­na­tion and prose to back it up.