Wacky. My Underlapped gets it’s own category. I’d be even more excited if Fontage knew about anti-aliasing, but one cannot be picky while ego-surfing.
Category Archives: blurb
Announcing PottyMouth
I’ve just released PottyMouth, a tool for transforming completely unstructured and untrusted text to valid, nice-looking, safe HTML. Check it out.
Spiro
Spiro 0.01 is finally out! Spend ten minutes learning how to edit Raph Levien‘s Cornu spiral curves and you’ll see that they have the potential to complement or even displace Bézier curves in vector and font design programs.
Spiro will be the native algorithm for Fontly.
BitTorrent filesystem
Wow. There’s a FUSE plugin to mount a BitTorrent swarm as filesystem. I would be speechless, but I’m waiting for the FUSE plugin to mount my neighborhood as a file system so I can just grep for my car (by license plate or VIN, of course) rather than walking around trying to find it before the street sweepers ticket it.
Get out of the way
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the W3C is stuck in 2001. Shape up. Quick. We don’t need to wait another five years for a grand unified theory of document presentation and mark-up. We need incremental improvements, and we needed them six years ago. If you don’t get with the program quickly, the industry is going to move on (CSS 2.2) without you (HTML 5).
Move over, timecube
Programming in GIF
I just got a spam job offer in email. One of the responsibilities was:
7. Programs in all common Web HTML formatting tools such as animated GIF and Java.
Guess I am behind the times with my Python and XSLT ski11z and PNG.
Ooh, and this position is in St. Louis, Missouri. Rad.
Reinventing the sixteen-sided wheel
I found this while Googling for the way to convert an integer to hex in JavaScript. Not only is it basically unreadable code, but it’s stupid: this functionality is built in to the language — just pass the desired base into the toString() method:
i = 255;
i.toString(16); // 'ff'
But who am I to contradict about.com and “Stephen Chapman, your Guide To JavaScript?”
Update 2008-01-20: about.com has updated the page linked above and removed their long, obtuse code, in lieu of our friend toString(). Keep up the good work!
Introducing the San Francisco Typography project
I’d like to introduce my San Francisco Typography project. Every day I’ll post a new photo of some notable typography found around San Francisco.
Time traveling with Hotmail
I hadn’t logged in to my Hotmail account in a while. Here’s what I got:
Now, look closely, at the bullet points describing why my account has been deactivated. Apparently I either last signed in tomorrow (-1 days ago), or I deleted my account tomorrow (-1 days ago). Guess what happens when I click “Activate Account.” It redirects me about twelve times, and eventually redirects me back to this page.
I can only assume this is the product of time travel experiments at Microsoft Research. Good job guys!