Feed Icons. The popularity of Matt’s icon pack led him to create a stand-alone site to grab them from.
The new Airbag wallpaper
Greg has posted the new Airbag Industries wallpaper to go with his header. Grab it now for halftoney goodness.
Democracy vs Despotism
A 1946 propoganda film comparing democracy and despotism. You feel kind of dirty after watching it. Your community may be headed towards despotism when economic distribution favours the wealthy and information is controlled by the few. Uh oh.
RSS feed icons
The IE7 team recently announced that they’re adopting the Firefox feed icon to create consistency across browsers. It’s about time, those oranage xml and rss chiclets were ass-ugly. In response, Matt Brett has whipped up some fancy full-size feed icons (in Photoshop and Illustrator format) that you can use on your site.
How To: nebulous desktop wallpaper
Creating your own trippy nebulous desktop wallpaper is relatively easy. The only tool you need is a painting program capable of drawing gradients and maintaining multiple layers (Photoshop, PaintShop or Gimp all fit the bill nicely).
My txt setup
Merlin describes his txt setup. I’ve tried a variety of solutions, but will probably end up here in the next little while. So much of my time is spent in a text-editor these days, that it just makes sense. Ideally, it would be nice to get it rsynced to my server so I can access the files anywhere.
The Zen of Web Standards
Today, in the spirit of giving, I bought myself two new books. Umm yeah the giving — they’ll help me give back to the community. My fiction consumption has been pretty dismal this year; I have a list of books a mile long to read and don’t need anymore of them. So, the day’s purchases included reference books of sorts: the Zen of CSS design by Dave Shea and Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm. I’ll call them textbooks for the real world.
Web design books aren’t something I usually spend money on. I’m no expert, but a lot of the design books that I’ve flipped through seemed like they’d been written by a semi-literate twelve year-old who had discovered the view source button in Dreamweaver. I’m not talking about hardcore tech reference books (see O’Reilly’s, I’ve picked those up before), but the books that help you build a decent looking site. I haven’t gotten into CSS Zen or Web Standards yet, but I figured I’d write about them now, as there will probably never be a proper review. I can’t see myself actually finishing them, they’re more likely to become dog-earred natural extensions of my desk.
Growing gender gap in Computer Science
The Boston Globe is reporting that there’s a growing gender gap in computer science. There’s a quote in there from Dr. Maria Klawe (who spoke at my CS convocation), if you get a chance to hear her speak about women in computing, make sure you attend. Supposedly women are better at multitasking, kind of makes you wonder why they’re not the ones designing our operating systems.
Banlieue 13
Update: The movie is now playing in North American theatres under the title District B13. Go see it on the big screen. June 2, 2006
I don’t post that many movie reviews anymore, but sometimes the people need to know. Banlieue 13 (imdb) is a French flick, so it’s not something you’re likely to find in Blockbuster or your local cornerstore. You’ll probably need to send a letter to your local movie distributor asking them to shape up or buy an import.
The movie’s pacing is intense; if the first five or ten minutes doesn’t have your jaw settled nicely on the floor you can have your money back. Banlieue 13 is set in the near future, in a gang-controlled Paris suburb that has been walled off from the rest of the city. Leito needs to team up with a cop to save his kidnapped sister and rescue the inhabitants from a neutron bomb detonation. Good setup? Sure, why not.
Conference in the Snow
Looks like us Canadians have finally figured out that we’ve been getting the shaft in terms of web-development conferences. The ball is rolling and you can vote for a preferred conference location or leave commentary. I’m on board, it’s about damn time.