Daniel Pietzsch

Personal blog. Mostly photos.

webkitbits:
“The brilliant Paul Irish built a CSS3 rule generating web app that he calls, “CSS3, Please!” Using automated vendor specific code, you can make box-shadow, gradient, rgba, even rotate, work in IE, Mozilla and WebKit.
The great news is...

webkitbits:

The brilliant Paul Irish built a CSS3 rule generating web app that he calls, “CSS3, Please!” Using automated vendor specific code, you can make box-shadow, gradient, rgba, even rotate, work in IE, Mozilla and WebKit.

The great news is that this is merely version 1.0. Read his write-up on PaulIrish.com.

Real life comics nails the "waiting for liveblog" geekness

pbjorklund:

Comic

So good.

How to create your own global settings in Rails

Very rarely, I need to create my own global settings inside my Rails apps. If you want these settings to be different for each environment (development, test, production), you can use a YAML file to do so.

As I always need to look up how that works, I finally created a Gist, so I can look it up more quickly.

Here it is:

Land of the Long White Cloud - Movie Trailer

The Maori name for ‘New Zealand’ is 'Aotearoa’, which means 'Land of the long white cloud’.
This trailer of a lovely documentary is about a fishing competition and its participators on the 90 Mile Beach at the top of New Zealand’s North Island.
You learn - amongst other things - that fishermen also follow the KISS principle. ;-)

Use ⌘~ to switch between windows of an application

On a mac, you can use Cmd-tilde (⌘~) to switch between the different open windows of an application.
The tilde is conveniently placed right above the Tab key (⇥). So this combination is very similar to the one used to sitch between apps (Cmd-Tab ⌘⇥).

I just found out about this. Woohoo!

(On the german keyboard layout, the default combination is ‘⌘<’, which is not as conveniently placed as on the english layout. You can change this in System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse. I changed it to '⌘^’ which is the equivalent of the english combination.)

“If you’re not sure of what you love, that means you can be talked out of it, and that’s a slippery slope.”
one forty plus.: Depends on Who You Ask. 

But we take pride in our technologies. If I’m not striving for my guru ranking in a particular programming language or design style, then what really matters? I’ve hinted at it throughout the whole article, but let me make it painfully obvious.

People.

People matter. Not users, but people. A user is a faceless entity, robotically performing tasks that we test and optimize. A person lives, laughs, cries, loves, hates—and uses the sites and applications we make. My mom. Your five-year-old. His grandfather. Her best friend. Their science class. They don’t tell us how much they appreciate our progressive enhancement or how we use the drawing API or our impeccable use of attribute selectors. They only say that a website was confusing or hard to read or fun to play with. That’s the real motivation for excellence: bringing ease, joy, and fun to the people around us.

Dan Mall in A List Apart: Articles: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web

The Future of Publishing - created by DK (UK) (via PenguinGroupUSA)
(via jkleske)

“The phrase ‘I don’t have time for’ should never be said. We all get the same amount of time every day. If you can’t do something it’s not about the quantity of time. It’s really about how important the task is to you. I’m sure if you were having a heart attack, you’d magically find time to go to the hospital. That time would come from something else you’d planned to do, but now seems less important. This is how time works all the time. What people really mean when they say ‘I don’t have time’ is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.”

Scott Berkun: The cult of busy (via marco)

There is a lot more good stuff in this article. Go, and read the whole thing!

Memoization

In computing, memoization is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by having function calls avoid repeating the calculation of results for previously-processed inputs.

In Ruby f.e., this can be achieved with the good old ||= operator.

:-)

See the music

bobulate:

Alex Stenweiss invented the album cover as we know it to create a new art form:

I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.”

So:

In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months record sales increased by over 800 per cent. His covers for Columbia — combining bold typography with modern, elegant illustrations — took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold. …. He launched the golden age of album cover design and influenced generations of designers to follow.

His new book, Alex Steinweiss: Inventor of the Modern Album Cover, was recently honored.

cover

[Image: Alex Steinweiss Bartok, Concerto 3]

Tech Journalism Near Death as iPad Coverage Has Unexpected Side Effects

nostrich:

CUPERTINO, CA — Experts expressed grave concern for the health of technology journalism this morning, one week after hundreds of tech blogs suffered extreme, adverse reactions to a routine Apple product launch. One witness commented, “they just couldn’t handle it. I don’t think some of these guys will ever recover.” A spokesperson for Engadget said that coverage of the iPad was “critical, but stable,” following emergency procedures. Steve Jobs was not available for comment.

“Computer nerds got a sneak peek at a largely still world that has never made contact with the “higher web,” the silent majority. The ones that don’t know a browser from the internet or what the address bar does, the ones whose web experience is pre-determined by what their homepage is set to. The ones that disregard most information in a desperate attempt to just find something that seems halfway familiar. The users who figure out one way to do something and get overwhelmed if there is more than one way to accomplish a task.”
Frank Chimero has a blog.: The Attack of Momputing
Is there anything better to start into the weekend than a cold bottle of New Zealand’s best beer?

Is there anything better to start into the weekend than a cold bottle of New Zealand’s best beer?