• Dec 1, 2003

    The beauty of 20/20 vision

    You never realize what you're missing until you experience it for yourself. I'd just bought a new yearly supply of contact lenses with the refractive index amended to the latest -6.00 (right eye) and -5.75 (left eye). Last time I had contacts made, they were -4.50 (right eye) and -4.00 (left eye). Either the last optometrist had the measurements all wrong or staring at the monitor the whole day has worsened my myopia.

    And now with the new contact lenses, everything is so clear. I thought it was a slightly blurry with my old contact lenses, but in retrospect, it was definitely more than "slightly". I can see every blade of grass and every pore in your face (that is, if you ever stuck your pretty face close to mine in real life). I can see the bus number from a greater distance away. I can tell you what the first letter is in the 20/20 row of the optometrist's eyechart.

    To those few of you who aren't myopic yet: take care of your eyes peeps! Stop staring at your monitors for too long! Hmm... What's the point? Nobody ever listens to nagging like this. I know I didn't.

  • Nov 29, 2003

    You don't need a Mac to see your webpage in Safari

    Ever wondered how your website looked in Safari, but don't have a Mac? Well, now you can thanks to Dan Vine's automated online screen capture tool.

    For those not in the know, Safari is the default web browser in Mac OS X, which is one reason you should care how your site looks in it. Safari utilizes the KHTML rendering engine which is the same engine that powers K-Meleon and Konqueror. KHTML is to Safari what Gecko is to Mozilla (and Mozilla Firebird and Epiphany). One thing I can say about KHTML - it's fast. I tried K-Meleon just to see for myself and it's light and fast. Here's what David Hyatt had to say about the merits of KHTML compared to Gecko.

    Anyway, here's this site in Safari: screenshot. Nothing broken so far. Good.

    Source: webgraphics

  • Nov 28, 2003

    Create your own South Park Character

    Create your own South Park Character - here's me:

    My South Park avatar


    Have fun!

  • Nov 28, 2003

    Getting funky with Nice Titles

    Dunstan wrote up on an improved Nice Titles script in his beautiful and very interesting blog. What are Nice Titles you say? They are the brainchild of Stuart Langridge and appear on this site when you hover over a hyperlink with the title attribute set. If you're using Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird, the CSS takes advantage of the -moz-opacity to give the popup div some transparency, and -moz-border-radius for rounded corners (other browsers will render an opaque rectangle).

    Why Nice Titles? Firstly, they are kinda cool. And I like the way the URL is displayed in the popup div. Control over the delay between mouseovers and the div popping up helps to have title dialogs show up faster (or slower) than the browser default - I personally find the delay a little too long for "standard" titles.

    All this is done using purely DOM methods (DOM is a W3C standard) and will work in all correctly-implemented DOM-compliant browsers. Of course, this method degrades gracefully in the face of text browsers, limited browsers in mobile devices, screen readers, etc. Want it for your site? It's as easy as uploading the CSS and JS files to your webserver and linking to them. Any existing titles will magically become a Nice Title.

  • Nov 27, 2003

    Movable Type spam vulnerability

    If you're a Movable Type user, you probably already heard of the spam vulnerability of the "Email this to a friend" script in Movable Type. Six Apart has posted a fix, of course, with a disclaimer that the fix only discourages spammers, not prevent spamming outright. What is the vulnerability anyway, you ask? You may want to read this thread for the skinny.

    What can you do? Well, you should remove mt-send-entry.cgi completely if you don't use it. I doubt too many end users actually use any of that "Email this to a friend" functionality anyway so you probably have nothing to lose. Why do I say so? One word: usability.

    1. Your users have to be able to find the link first to use it.
    2. Your users probably are accustomed to using email or IM to send links (think ICQ's Send URL functionality).
    3. The average surfer is unlikely to be so enthusiastic as to send links to his/her friends. Of course, this assumes that your average surfer has friends.

    The point? Scrap that functionality, delete that file.

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