Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 0 and counting

I wasn’t in the mood for Colony today so I made a new splash page based on the W3 tip about confetti menus. If you look at their stylesheet, you’ll see that’s it’s all done with margins. Unfortunately, I was having a lot of trouble with WinIE cutting the words in half (vertically) and both WinIE and MacIE mispositioning them (presumably by adding up the pixel values incorrectly), so I switched the whole thing to absolute positioning. Now it looks more or less the same in IE and in competent browsers.

The splash screen is pure CSS, using your system fonts. For example, if you have Final Frontier or the Stargate letter font, then Voyager and Stargate will show up in their respective font. Colors were picked from the color table of the background image for the main FicML page. I also added a dotted border as a hover effect. You can see the CSS at the bottom of my stylesheet, jp_tab.css.

Word count: 1025

I made a few changes to the preference picker to allow users to see the generated CSS code. You can also view the PHP source. Soon users will be able to save their preferences as well.

The color wheel is missing some colors, as I suspected. I’ll have to figure out the algorithm and fix it, but not today. Today I’ll just list a few cool links: NASA’s Flash Mars page, Destination: Mars; the latest cool designs at CSS Zen Garden, Entomology and Hedges; and a cool new, somewhat free landscape generator for the Mac, terragen. Check out the image gallery, especially Mars.

The 4096 Color Wheel is new and improved for Version 1.2 with a sidebar of clicked color choices and some basic instructions. It still needs a blurb about the 4096 web-smart colors, or at least a link to moreCrayons, home of The Cube.

The new image and a choice of wheel sizes will have to wait for later versions - I’m all geeked out tonight.

I’ve been looking for a nice 4096 color picker forever. Yesterday I found one by D10n, somone who is long 404, which was close to what I wanted. Unfortunately it didn’t work in Mozilla or Mac IE, which meant it was useless to me. After a lot of struggling with javascript events (for which mozilla.org and Experts Exchange were quite useful), I managed to get the script working in modern browsers.

I also changed the script to display both the nearest 4096-ed color and the true hex color. I may add added the nearest web-safe color as well. So, without further ado, click on over to the 4096 Color Wheel, Version 1.0 1.1.

Another improvement I intend to make is in the image quality and size. I’m going to make a full-color 512×512 pixel PNG to replace the rather compressed 256×256 JPG I got with the original script. eDev Cafe seems to have all the information I’ll need to do that.

For a note on web-safety of the 4096 colors, see Web Color’s 4096 Color Picker and screenshots.

Word cound: zippo

I know what happens next in my story, but I wasn’t excited enough about it to write today’s scene. Instead, I’ve been playing with Javascript color pickers like this one. It’s an antique, so it won’t work in modern browsers, but the concept seemed cool. As far as I can tell, though, it doesn’t actually show the 4096 colors - it shows either a different set of 4096, or more than the 4096.

Speaking of antique Javascript, the moreCrayons color cube was updated to work with Mozilla a while back, and they’ve linked Eric Meyer’s color blender in their blog.

I discovered a flaw in my clever scheme for handling the move-induced renumbering of my blog entries. Due to the oddity of MovableType search templates, my search results were formatted with pad=”1″, while my other blog templates don’t use padding. The upshot was that the search result links were broken.

The best solution for this sort of thing is to use individual entry archiving. I didn’t use them back at Freeshell because of their limit on the number of files per account. That’s no longer a problem here, so I’ve added individual archives with user-friendly file names, based on Anders Jacobsen’s instructions. Check out the permalink to see one in action.

This change will break yet more links, but I have a clever scheme to fix them…

I’m still dreaming. You can see the new, 64-bit, faster-than-a-speeding-PC PowerMacs at Apple, but new G5 PowerBooks have yet to be announced. I can’t buy a PowerMac - I’m just not the boxy type - so this could be a long wait for me unless my old G3 dies of shame.

[An aside to Veronica…] Never, ever let mom talk me into doing that again. It was a nightmare of kitsch and cattle, and I don’t mean the milk-producing kind.

Rumors are flying fast and furious about WWDC 2003, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference next week. Rumormongers expect announcements of new PowerMacs and possibly PowerBooks based on the long-awaited 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip from IBM.

New hardware looks like a sure thing - a German shop is already advertising it. (See the Mac in brown wrapping on the right side.) 3cmug is hosting a countdown timer until Steve Job’s keynote address at WWDC Monday afternoon at 1pm (Boston time). You can catch the keynote at the Apple Store at the Cambridgeside Galleria, though not at the new store in Chestnut Hill.

You won’t see me there, unfortunately - I have a day job. I may run down there afterwards if they really have PPC970 PowerBooks in. I think the guy from As the Apple Turns will be there updating by wireless. I’ll be away this weekend, so if all goes well, my next entry will be Monday night from a new PowerBook.

A girl can dream…

I’m trying to move the blog over to the new host without doing anything fancy involving moving the databases around. Just doing an export and an import in MovableType is likely to break your permalinks, especially if you’ve deleted entries, imported in non-chronological order, or run more than one blog out of the same MT database. This misnumbering problem has been amply moaned over in the MT forums. However, one post suggested a way to keep your entry ID’s the same by hacking both the old and new MT implementations.

That wouldn’t work for me because only this MT on Freeshell is hackable. So what I did was hack CMS.pm as directed, but instead of making a new field called POSTID, I added anchor links to each entry for the old ID. You can export exactly as directed and then query-replace to insert the anchor links, which is more or less what I did.

That still leaves one problem - old entry id’s could conflict with new ones, so that on the same page one anchor linked to the old #209 and one to the new #209. You’d probably get the first one on the page no matter which one you were after.

The solution is simple. I was padding my permalinks (so that #209 came up as #000209), so all my hacked-in anchors are of the #000209 format. By removing the pad=”1″ from my templates, I’ll make my new permalinks look like #209. The link for 000209 will never conflict with 209, since I haven’t yet made it to 100,000 entries.

I do realize that this entry won’t make much sense unless you’ve had the same problem. If you have the problem and still don’t understand, feel free to email me. My address is around here somewhere.