Dave Kellam

I don’t have the best track-record over the last couple years when it comes to cooking. Last year was teacher’s college, the year before that was finishing up a CS degree and running a newspaper, so it didn’t seem like I had the time to eat properly. The result was a lot of take-out and frozen dinners. We’ve been making an effort to do more cooking over the last couple months, and I’ll do the same in terms of trying to post some of the recipes.

My cooking style is relatively haphazard; I make use of what’s around and tend not to be huge on keeping track of measurements. It might be akin to a bull in a china-chop but things usually end up tasting pretty decent. Without further adieu, I present a photo-guide to preparing Thai Chicken and Noodles.

At this point, it would probably be prudent to note that I’m a pasty-white guy living in the frigid lands of Canada and thus have no right calling myself a Thai chef. But I had to call it something, and Thai only has one syllable.

When you’re trying to demonstrate a technique or idea using computers, I find that things go a lot smoother with a visual walk-through. In a classroom it’s relatively easy, you just go through the motions on a projector. Over the internet, video becomes your friend. There are a variety of techniques for capturing screen activity to video, but I’m going to cover creating flash videos on a Mac (most of the steps are probably applicable to Linux and cygwin on Windows). You may have seen flash videos in actions over at Google Video, or any other number of sites. It’s a relatively ubiquitous format these days.

The easiest way to create a the videos would probably be to download a program that lets you do it with a couple clicks. Screenography from Vertical Moon seems to fit the bill, but it costs $40. Now for the cheap bastards, we’ll move onto the free, yet complicated solution.

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I came across this paper folding page from 1994, that had me wondering about the oldest page on the internet. Obviously, I turned to Google for answers. My search turned up this Slashdot thread that posed the same question a few years ago. Stanford also hosts some documentation of the early world wide web.

Digging through the Slashdot thread reveals that Tim Berners-Lee produced the earliest pages in 1990 and 1991 on his NeXt machine, which servered as both the first server and browser. You had to telnet into the computer at CERN (nxoc01.cern.ch) and look at the hyperlinked files on the machine. The pages no longer exist, but here’s a mirror from 1992.

There are some interesting tidbits in there, like this one:

There is no “top” to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points of view. If you have no other bias, here are some ways of looking for information: By subject, by Type.

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Changes are afoot at eightface, I can’t help it. This week, we bid farewell to Bastard, the white grungy/erasure theme that landed the site on DesignShack and CSS Beauty. In all honesty, it was just supposed to be a place-holder design while I dug around inside the WordPress guts. The new layout is called Tool (feedreaders, this would be your cue to launch that rusty browser). It’s based on the Bastard, so there may be odd remenants kicking around for a little while.

Most of the template is in place, the only major thing left is the footer, right now it looks kind of flat and ugly. Parts of the design were heavily influenced by Matt Brett’s current layout; mostly the nav-bar and some of the CSS hover stuff (you could say the grunge, but that’s my territory too). The nav-bar is all one image, that’s uses some clever positioning via styling.

The template started on a whim yesterday afternoon, but there have been a few other major changes over the last week. I’ve introduced a portfolio page, mostly to figure out what I’ve actually produced. I experimented with the live archives plugin, but find that it chugs a bit. The other major change was replacing Jerome’s keyword plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior. It has a lot of nice-friendly options built-in.

It’s been about a month since the last desktop change, so I was itching for something new. I’ve been combing through some of my old stuff, trying to put together a portfolio page and found this wallpaper that I never finished. Made it in March of 2004, seems fine to me. Also had the presence of mind to make it at a nice big resolution, so there are a few different size options.

Download: Hello Goodbye

Glorious 1600×1200
Oddly-shaped 1280×1024
Wonderful 1280×960
Middling 1024×768

I would also like to point out that I seem to have some bizarre stuffed animal fetish for wallpaper. Also, this one has Optimus Prime in it.

MIT has unveiled the production version of Negroponte’s $100 laptop. It’s hard to express how happy I am. It has the potential to make a huge difference in terms of African connectivity. Not just for education but in terms of an expanded business base and a route for freedom of speech.

My interest lies mostly in some research I did for my alternative practicum at teacher’s college. I was looking into the possibilities for internet aided learning in remoter regions of Sierra Leone. Cell coverage is spotty, but it’s improving by the day with new telecomm service. So, getting a data connection is possible, the harder part is maintaining an adequate power supply for your computing equipment. That makes that hand-crank on the laptop one of the most important features.

I investigated a number of solutions, eventually settling on handheld pdas and portable solar arrays. The power consumption is fairly minimal, the batteries are rechargable and you have the possibility of using a laptop as a central base-station. The laptops and/or pdas could come from anyone really. There are relatively inexpensive portable solar arrays available now that are capable of powering most of those devices. My ideas were partially inspired by Ben Saunders’ trek to the arctic and his blogging via pda (he used this rollable solar array).

The Junction Box is also an amazing piece of hardware. Combining a few of Negroponte’s laptops and portable Wifi router with direct cell-network capabilities creates some pretty cool options — like a mobile classroom. You could slap one of those in a jeep, but a pile of laptops in the trunk and drive around from school to school.

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Just wanted to post a few photos from the roll of film I got back recently. They’re not news to those valiant flickr stream observers, but my posts over there aren’t as freqent with the semi-broken digital camera.

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Notice the ads on this site? Probably not. Advertising has been one of those things that has been hard to nail down properly on the web. What works for some won’t work for others. Not to mention the devious nature that 90% of the ads seem to have; punch the monkey, useless smilies, Windows errors. Most of it is crap.

Google style text-ads are everywhere. You see them arrayed haphazardly across many a templated weblog without too much thought and proceed to read about the webmasters that are disappointed by poor results. I’ve generally avoided slapping a bunch of ads all over this site because people aren’t going to click on them. At least not the regular readers — you’re just punishing them by displaying useless ads on your site. The people coming in via search engine are a different matter though. They’re transient, have little attachment to the site and are looking for something specific anyway. I don’t really mind showing them pseudo-random search-engine generated ads. And that’s what I’m doing.

Search Engines and WordPress

How do you go about doing something like this? For WordPress, I hacked together a plugin using Ryan Boren’s Search Hilite as a base. It’s kind of ugly, could be done better and I’m not going to support it. But I’ll make it available if you want a basic building block for your site — download.

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I haven’t posted much material related to Intelligent Design, mostly because the argument seems so stupid. It shouldn’t even be called an argument. This Esquire article (full text) was too good to pass up though. It focuses on Intelligent Design, but also touches on the broader dumbing down of America.

The Creation Museum ranks up there as one of my favourites from this whole debacle. This is a photo of one of their displays, featuring a giraffe and Adam naming a Sabertooth tiger. Nice kitty.

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This may be faulty logic, but follow me through. The Globe and Mail is supposed to be Canada’s high-brow, more intelligent newspaper, the New York Times of Canuckland if you will. As such, you will find me doing the challenge crossword on any given day of the week (like any good igloo-dwelling citizen). Now, we all know the Times invented the crossword, but they stay away from cryptics — it promotes a weird level of pomposity. For good cryptics, you want to turn to the New Yorker and Fraser Simpson (he authors the Saturday cryptic in the Globe).

So, what does all this newspaper name-dropping have to do with comics? Well, the Globe publishes a view comics next to their challenge cryptics. We can only assume that’s it’s some vain attempt at reproducing the cerebral air of the New Yorker’s strip. Long story short, the Backbench comic next to the cryptic wasn’t particularly funny until I made a few changes. See if you can spot them!

We have loads of new Seal Club action coming at you. First off, a quick redesign. Got rid of the old look in favour of a cleaner, whiter layout. The page is now entirely swathed in Garamondy goodness or some other serif font.

Now for the fresh meat. Two new interviews for 5Q: Naz Hamid of Absenter and Joen Asmussen of NoScope. They’re fairly short and won’t take too long to read. While we’re on the subject here’s a quick visual recap of the five interviews so far:

That is all.

The last month or so has been an interesting one for the site. I started the redesign about a month ago and it’s still going strong. This time around, it’s not just about looks, most of my efforts have been concerned with structure; thinking about how people visit the site and ways to keep them around. It’s not easy. If you’re really interested, read the change log. The site will never be finished but this layout should stabilize within the next few weeks, I still haven’t figured out how Michael is actually quantifying his progress.

Despite my best efforts at becoming a structural whore, eightface has managed to pop-up on the radar of a few CSS gallery sites — most notably, CSS Beauty, Design Shack and Fadtastic. So, hello to all the new visitors and thanks for the constructive comments and feedback. I’ve made a few changes a result, namely toning down the grunge on some of the headers.

A few people have mentioned their love/hate of the grunge stylings. I’m inclined to agree that a lot of the grunge and erasure sites popping up are a direct response to the austere 37 Signals school of design that we see so much of these days. And yes, it is a fad. One of those things that floats across the internet every few years. Usually in response to an outpouring of corporate work and people wanting to do different things with their personal sites. The vintage, worn look is very forgiving and has been one of my staples since the days of Photoshop 4 on the family P90.

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