Keith du Cros.com

Another classic from XKCD

I don’t know how I’ve missed this over the past few weeks. Out of the loop again. Anyway, I picked this up from a wired story this morning. Seems theres a bit of a ‘little’ revolt going on across the internets. All stemming from a petition to “Stop Dr. Uwe Boll” (almost 230,000 signatures so far). The director of such videogame-movie classics as Bloodrayne, Dungeon Siege, and more.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen any of the films (seems I’ve gotten away lucky on that one - particularly as I can admit I was a fairly big fan of the original Dungeon Siege)… and I’m not always trusting of the tomatometer, but when a director cant push any of his movies past 20%… its ‘revealing’ to say the least.

Lets just hope that the petition gets something done before its too late.

Like practically everybody else whose seen Heath Ledger’s take on the Joker from the newest trailer, I’m eagerly looking forward to The Dark Knight.

Got to say I thought Batman Begins was a pretty decent film but nothing hugely special. That is, until I saw this disaster. Batman and Robin was released in 1997. I’ll do the sums for you - more than a decade ago. Being young and generally not being able to choose a decent movie from a bad one, I didn’t actually notice how damn awful it was. Actually, I don’t think being young alone can account for not noticing this… thing.

I have a newfound appreciation for where the series has been taken and where its going. I’ve got no doubts that The Dark Knight will continue the trend.

Edit: Should note I originally picked this up from a cracked article on some of the worst comic book moments.

Ever think of an awesome domain/business name only to find that its been parked? Well, this isn’t helping the situation. Picked this up from a tech crunch article this morning, reporting on a list released by royal pingdom of the massive amount of .com’s that Google have picked up. More than half the list is just GooglePRODUCTHERE.com or different variations of the company’s name and products.

Its preventing both typosquatting and cybersquatting taken to the extreme… Don’t know the reason behind registering mariolovespasta.com or thesecretofburritos.com, though.

And this was just looking at .com names… I wouldn’t be suprised if they’ve gone ahead and done similar things for .net, .org, etc.

Quickie. Was just reading up about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its supposed safety concerns. If you haven’t read about it before - its definitely worth a look. First thing I thought of was fry holes.

Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? Cause if I’m the first I want them to call it “a Fry Hole”. - Phillip J Fry

When working on the right hand navigation pane for this blog I really wanted to keep things simple and clutter-free. Too many blogs try to throw a million links at you on their sidebars. I don’t have an extensive topic list yet, but an example would probably be Ajaxian … plus the millions of other blogs out there that use WordPress. I’m not aware of any plugin or setting that fixes this… suffice to say though, if one does exist, Its not used widely enough.

The choice I made was a simple drop down menu, but theres nothing particularly fascinating about that (I just used a couple of Appear Effects… I’ll touch on this a bit more later).

There was a problem that i quickly faced with the implementation, and that was the lack of a link to attach an event to. As an example, the “Archives” header on the right.

1. Theres no Archives ‘root’ that I’m aware of, so I couldn’t just whack a link in there.
2. I wasn’t going to create a link with no target URL. Not nice to people with JavaScript disabled.
3. CSS could be used by assigning cursor: ‘pointer’ to the header. But I don’t consider that best practice for usability when JavaScript is disabled. Users without JavaScript could think it was click-able.

We’re going for proper graceful degradation here. For this implementation, we’ll be using my favourite frameworks, Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

Getting it fixed.

Theres two ways I could think of that you can go about fixing this, and its really just a matter of preference (please do make a suggestion If I’ve missed something). One would be to wrap a link around the Header using javascript, then adding events to the link. Assuming categories is the header2 element you want to manipulate. You could employ a method similar to this:

$('categories').update('<a href="" id="categories_link">' + $('categories').innerHTML + '</a>');

Then add an event to the a link, as such:

Event.observe('categories_link', 'click', function() {
// Do stuff
}

I didn’t use this method, and haven’t tested it myself, but it would probably work just as well.

The method I implemented was to basically add the cursor style to the h2 element, so the element is shown to be a clickable object.

$('categories').setStyle({ cursor: 'pointer' });

Then add the event:

Event.observe('categories', 'click', function() {
// Do stuff
}

And thats it! Done. Damn simple stuff.

We solve the issue of having a pointless link for those without JavaScript and we also simulate link behavior for those with JavaScript. Simple one line of code that makes your site just that little bit more usable.

Note for this example I’ve used completely different code to illustrate my point. You can see how I’ve implemented it in my run.js file.

I’ve been following the recent news over at the official richard dawkins website on the upcoming Pro-Intelligent Design (ID) film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. Describing this film as controversial would probably be an understatement, and I assume thats the effect the producers are after. I’ve got to say I haven’t had the ‘pleasure’ of seeing it myself… but really, I could imagine it would be similar to seeing something like cup chicks. You would only see it because:

1. You’re told, forced, or feel like you need to, even though you think its going to be bad, and;
2. You’re uninformed/out of the loop if you don’t.

Ultimately, i assume both probably have similar reactions.

Following the numerous controversies the film has attracted, the most recent one grabbed my attention. The film has supposedly ripped off (or, recreated very closely) a Harvard video on the inner life of the cell. If you haven’t seen it before, its really quite fascinating. Its available in two versions, one with music and one narrated (most of this goes over my head, but the complex words at least make me feel smarter). Check out the you tube version below (with music) for a taste. But be sure to grab the high def versions of the music and narrated versions though. Definitely worth the download.

All this goes on inside one white blood cell. Worth checking out molecular motors also if theres any disbelief… I know at first i thought that ‘vesicle’ at 1:16 was pretty nuts. Guess what, you have about 100, 000 of those inside each of your 100 trillion cells (if you’re really interested, check out the presentation one of the creators does).

Update: Looks as though Harvard got the video pulled off youtube. Try doing a search if you’re after it still.