The Blog that Noone Reads

I’ve been doing some guest blogging over at Scribe Labs lately, mostly on the topic of Amazon Web Services.

The new flickr uploader

The new upload utility on flickr is damn brilliant. File uploads have always been a challenge for web developers. There are a lot of things to consider, and you constantly have to fight with the browser sandbox. Look ye around on Google for ‘upload progress‘ and you will find one million-jillion ways people have attempted to provide just a simple progress bar. For PHP, it means hacking the internal C code of the language runtime. For other languages, it’s as bad or at least near as bad.

There are other things to consider as well such as timeouts, maximum file sizes, incorrect file types. There’s nothing as frustrating as uploading a 20MB file with no status indicator only to be told the server won’t accept the file format you provided. Also, the built in file selection widget in the browser only supports selecting a single file at a time. People have long since attempted to get around this with IE only Active X components or even the dreaded Java applet.

The newer version of the Flash runtime open up the sandbox a little bit to allow Flash itself to upload files. Flickr uses this magic behind the scenes. It’s really fantastic. The file browser allows you to select multiple files using your OS native file chooser. It limits the selectable file types to ones that are accepted by the service. It will show you the files you’re going to upload along with their sizes. It shows you the upload progress on a per file level as well as for the whole process. It’s the by far, the bestest in browser upload experience I’ve had.

Somebody just sent me a link to an article entitled A Girl’s Guide to Geek Guys. It’s actually quite offensive. First of all not all geeks are into Star Trek. It’s a stereotype.

I’ve noticed there have been a slew of articles written of late that explain to women why they should find themselves a nice “geek guy.” Being a geek myself, I’m not entirely opposed to the concept of dating a geek. What I’m opposed to is an article that tells a woman that she should find herself a geek and continues to describe how to “snare yourself one” and “how to care for your geek”. Ladies, there’s a whole lot more to dating a geek than “feed it some Cheetos.”

While we do tend to share a lot of common culture, there is a wide spectrum of geekery out there. I’m not interested in defining more stereotypes here, so let me tell you a little about what to expect from dating me.
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I finally got a copy of Adobe CS3. So far, I like it a lot, though, I’m having some issues with getting Fireworks to do what I want. When I imported an Illustrator document, the layer settings and fonts were all fucked up.

To test out my new apps, I decided to start working on the face lift I’ve been wanting to do to my website for a long while. And here it is! Well, the first part anyway. There are many more things I want to do now that I actually have software I can do it with.

The new look.

Okay, okay. I know what you’re thinking. It looks the same, right? Well, not really. The theme is obviously based on the Kubrick theme that ships with Wordpress, but I’ve remade it from the ground up. I did this for several reasons. First, I wanted the source materials so I can make changes more quickly in the future. Second, I wanted to make many subtle changes to the look including changing the gradients, borders, shadows, and roundedness. And third, I wanted to fix a defect in the original design that really bugs me.

In the original version of the theme, the light gray coloring of the sidebar cuts off abruptly below the header graphic and above the gradient in the footer. I cleaned this up by exporting two versions of the assets. One version that consistently has the sidebar and one that doesn’t. Then, I just updated the header template to use the proper assets in all cases.