:: Personal website of a Toronto web designer
Archive, January 2004
Saturday, 31. January 2004
Miško's friend?
[11:56 pm]
We have another cockatiel at home! The bird came from a person who is leaving Toronto and could not keep it anymore. Let's see how much the two love or hate each other. We keep our fingers crossed.
Friday, 30. January 2004
30-day McDonald's diet
[12:20 pm]
Arch Enemy February, Morgan Spurlock decided to become a gastronomical guinea pig.
His mission: To eat three meals a day for 30 days at McDonald's and document the impact on his health.
An article to think about next time you pay a visit to your local McDonald's. McGarbage, isn't it?
Wednesday, 28. January 2004
Anniversary
[10:57 pm]
5 Years ago, Sasha came to Canada! Yaay!
Tuesday, 27. January 2004
Winter in Toronto
[11:23 pm]
It is cold and snowy in Toronto, and I have a bad back pain, runny nose and headache :-( Aspirin is my friend.
Sunday, 25. January 2004
Flash and PGN
[09:19 pm]
I want to brush up my Flash skills and thought about a little (or possibly big) project I'd like to do. Most of you know that I like to play chess. Chess games are written in PGN (Portable Game Notation) format, which is a standard, designed for the representation of chess game data using ASCII text files. What I would like to do is to use Flash (and PHP if needed) to parse PGN files in a nice way. I didn't use Flash lately, at least not at this level, so that I am not even sure if this is possible. I wasn't able to find an open source solution out there. If somebody knows about it, please let me know, I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Friday, 23. January 2004
20 Years of Macintosh
[08:18 pm]
Macintosh 128k Released with much fanfare in January of 1984, the Macintosh was the first affordable computer to include a Graphical User Interface. It was built around the new Motorola 68000 chip, which was significantly faster than previous processors, running at 8 MHz. The Mac came in a small beige case with a black and white monitor built in. It came with a keyboard and mouse, and had a floppy drive that took 400k 3.5" disks--the first personal computer to do so. It originally sold for $2,495.
1984's commercial announcing the arrival of the Macintosh computer was very powerful.
Getting fractions right
[07:49 pm]
If you are having troubles with fractions on websites you build, Eric and Warren are coming with some interesting solutions.
Wednesday, 21. January 2004
The Web Developer extension for Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla
[11:54 pm]
I stumbled across an excellent extension for Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla, which adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. This extension has been there for a while but I missed it entirely.
Google Tip: If, for some reason, you don't want Google to cache a particular page, you can add the following meta tag to it:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive" />
Tuesday, 20. January 2004
Web Standards
[03:44 am]
Painstakingly updated every weekday, The Daily Standards is dedicated to recognizing sites that have been lovingly crafted with web standards and the future in mind.
Sunday, 18. January 2004
Mystic River
[03:30 pm]
Yesterday was the first time I went to a movie theatre since I live in Canada, which is almost 5 years! Amazing, eh? :-) We watched "Mystic River", a movie directed by Clint Eastwood and I quite enjoyed it.
Friday, 16. January 2004
A patent worth $521 million
[03:43 pm]
Judge rules Microsoft infringed on Eolas patent A Chicago federal judge on Wednesday upheld a $521 million patent verdict against Microsoft that could ultimately force major changes in many of the most common Internet software products.
Wednesday, 14. January 2004
Referral Spam
[09:45 pm]
The time has come to update my refs page, and add a filter against those pesky referral spammers who try to get a higher Google ranking. This method of spamming has become very popular lately. I decided to filter them using a simple PHP script, instead of blocking them via .htaccess file. Let's see how it works, not that I pretend to win this neverending battle.
More info, Wired News: When the Spam Hits the Blogs
Tuesday, 13. January 2004
Bette Midler in Toronto
[04:05 pm]
Yesterday, we got two free tickets with very good seats and had a very entertaining evening with Bette Midler at The Air Canada Centre in Toronto. Sofia always liked Bette, and after the concert, I must say, I like her too. It was a spectacular evening and Bette was absolutely gorgeous! Too bad they didn't allow us to take pictures, but the site above has a recent photo of Bette and the girls she performed with.
Monday, 12. January 2004
Abandoned Bicycles of New York
[02:32 pm]
Great gallery of NY's abandonded bicycles. You can find many in Toronto too, but it is not a good time to take pictures outside, it is freeeeeeezing cold.
Saturday, 10. January 2004
Kefir grains
[11:52 pm]
Kefir grains are those cute little creatures who give me a daily portion of the real Kefir. All they need is lots of milk and, just like any other pet, a bit of care.
No, don't worry, I am not planning "Kefir grains weekly photos" section.
Thursday, 08. January 2004
Banknote Images
[01:11 pm]
Current versions of Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro refuse to open images of the more recent banknotes such as the pound, mark or euro. As explained by Markus Kuhn, the software will search for a geometric pattern, consisting of five 1 mm large circles that appears on many more recent banknotes. While this is pretty cool, I am sure many users will get edgy with this. Those with illegal intentions will eventually find their way anyway.
For more info, take a look at Facts about using banknote images.
Wednesday, 07. January 2004
Spam
[10:40 pm]
Sometimes, I play the role of a Webmaster and I quite like it. Can you imagine deleting 1.8GB mailbox file that contains 99.99% of spam messages? That is what I've just done. I feel so relieved now, I must tell you.
UNIX Tip: To count files in your current directory, there is a handy command:ls | wc -l
Tuesday, 06. January 2004
20th anniversary of Apple's Macintosh
[11:54 pm]
We're All Mac Users Now This month is the 20th anniversary of Apple's Macintosh. To mark the occasion, Wired News is running several stories this week about the groundbreaking machine, the people who created it and the Mac's impact on computing and culture in general.
I use PC but this anniversary is definitely worth mentioning. Computer history is a fascinating subject, especially now when I am taking a course covering topics such as Turing machines and Automata Theory.
Monday, 05. January 2004
PHP coding guidelines
[08:22 pm]
Good scripts and programs may still look ugly. Code you write may look nice to you, but terrible to somebody else. I always liked the idea of programming guidelines, but noticed that not so many developers and programmers stick to them.
There is an article at Evolt.org worth reading, PHP coding guidelines. I pretty much agree with everything said there, except of the tabs vs. space issue maybe.
PHP Tip: Not much known but very useful for debugging purposes are two functions, print_r() and var_dump(). They are both similar in their behavior, print_r() will print the contents of any variable, array or object. var_dump() will additionally print out the data types for each element in an array or object.
Sunday, 04. January 2004
Depressing
[08:24 pm]
As already noted I have my "irrational" fears; stories about plane crashes make things much worse. Safety and reliability are the motto of the company, . . . Each flight will be an enjoyable journey.
[www.flashtour.com/airline.htm]
America Online Releases Top 10 Spam List of 2003
[01:37 pm]
Company also announces it blocked total of 500,000,000,000 spam emails in 2003.
I personally dislike their spam filters though, simply because they also block much legitimate email. I send out a monthly newsletter for one of my clients; it never gets through to the subscribers with the *@aol.com email addresses.
Photoshop Tip: When working with some other tool, you can temporarily access the hand tool by pressing and holding the spacebar.
Friday, 02. January 2004
Accesskeys
[12:43 pm]
Dave Shea says: "I Do Not Use Accesskeys" Over time, I've come to the conclusion that Accesskeys are more harmful than good. Until browsers allow a user to override a document's Accesskeys, I won't use them.
Actually, I came to the same conclusion a while ago. I wanted to implement the accesskeys here and gave up for the same reasons.
Thursday, 01. January 2004
Sir Tim
[12:10 pm]
Web's inventor gets a knighthood The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work.
