Webonaut

We've just completed our first foray into HTML5 at primvintagefashion.com It's a simple HTML5 intro, true, but for me it was an education in what is possible / what is not with HTML5. There's lots of HTML5 functionality crammed into this small space - the CANVAS tag (which scales to fit the screensize of the device visiting) - animation loop - CSS3 (that Typewriter font is downloaded - and rendered - by your machine on the fly) and the AUDIO tag. SO, HOW WAS IT? Well, the javascript extensions for HTML5 are actually pretty fun. Lower level than AS3 but way more powerful than what straight javascript/jQuery offer. It's always going to take longer to build something than with Flash, but with practice you could probably get it down to about 125% of the effort. That sounds bad, but it's much better than my original thoughts of double the effort. DRAWBACKS? - Well, the big one - and a surprise - was the differences between HTML5 engines. It's not as standard as Jobs ...

Facebook is close to jumping the shark. IMO it is where MySpace was it '05 and steaming towards it's own doom. Why? Two things... 1. The cool kids will shortly not be thinking that hanging out with their parents (or other dweebs) is what they want to do, and fickle, shallow scenesters want exclusivity - or at least to be PART OF an exclusive group 2. People naturally have (in these days at any rate) multiple, fractured groups of real-life friends - and have a persona with each of these groups that is inherently different. You have your parents on Facebook and suddenly you don't want to post pictures of your night out; or tell your work-colleagues what you get up to, etc. Whichever service comes up with a slick way of offering these multiple personalities will be next to take up the batton - (so long as they are also cool to fulfil 1. and drive the early adopters)

Not a great deal of thought seems to have been expended about what the wider effect will be when hard-drives, SSDs, Processors etc reach their natural limits. Our storage devices go up in density (according to Moore's law still?) and our processors accelerate because with each new cycle they are further miniaturised - packing more TB in and reducing the distance travelled by electrons round a circuit. So what happens when they reach the molecular level? I'm thinking of two things here - 1. Whether or not a theoretical physical barrier exists and 2. If it does, what are the implications for human progress, the economy, society as a whole. 1. Is There A Physical Limit To The Speed & Storage of Computers? - At first glance, you would have thought that things cannot be miniaturised past the atomic level. This may be true - or can smaller sub-particles support computation? - Will there be work-arounds - for example Quantum Computing taking over from traditional Von-Neumann CPU a...

After some considerable mucking about, I've cracked a particularly annoying and not much documented issue with sending HTML e-mails (in my case via PHP, but applies to any sendmail system) to Outlook Express / Windows Mail boxes. It's all to do with the headers - and specifically what characters you use to escape them. ALL lines should end with a \r\n escape sequence EXCEPT the MIME-Version: 1.0 which should be ONLY \n. Got it? This PHP works (certainly from a *nix server): ini_set("sendmail_from", $fromAddr); $headers=""; $headers.="From: ".$fromAddr."\r\n"; $headers.="Reply-To: ".$fromAddr."\r\n"; $headers .="Cc: ".$ccAddr."\r\n"; $headers.="MIME-Version: 1.0\n"; /* v.important NOT to put \r\n at the end as Outlook ends up escaping the WHOLE header */ $headers.="Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1\r\n"; $headers.="Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit;\r\...

This is amazing : http://www.ted.com/talks/carter_emmart_demos_a_3d_atlas_of_the_universe.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-07-06&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email I love anything that takes a complex subject matter and makes it simple to understand without removing that complexity. It's a trick to "Add Simplicity" but these guys have done it, and I admire and aspire to that.

As my pal @davidpye notes, Google Chrome now has geo-positioning on my laptop. Not just any old rough guess based on my IP address, but on the button within metres positioning. (Try it out - visit Google Maps in Chrome and click the little circle under the compass). So, how does this work? Triangulation of WiFi signals, I hear you (probably) shout - only there ARE no WiFi signals around me out here in the countryside - only MINE. The combined hardware surrounding me has no ability to geo-locate - all that Chrome has is my IP address and 1 wifi name. Related service, Skyhook say : "This involves analyzing the Wi-Fi access points around you and your computer's IP address, and sending this information to a Google server to then be translated into a location... WPS determines location based on Skyhook's massive worldwide database of known Wi-Fi access points. " The only technical explanation I can figure out - and correct me if I'm wrong - is that my wi-fi network has...

There are several jQuery sliders / carousels out there, but none did what I wanted, which was basically to take a really simply block of HTML and turn it into a really nicely animated, automatic slider with a simple bit of jQuery, such as: $(document).ready(function(){ $("#mySlides").jKlikFlow({ width: "638px", height: "223px", easing: "easeOutBack", prev: "#jFlowPrev", next: "#jFlowNext", duration: 1000, pauseBetweenSlides: 2500, auto: true }); }); So here it is: KlikFlow jQuery Slider plug-in demo | source code This is my first attempt at a jQuery plug-in (I thought it about time I put something back into the open source community) so your feedback is appreciated.