Posted on by lhl

Seeing the recent spat of rounded corner articles (kalsey, meyerweb, mezzoblue), I decided to give it a shot.

Rather than adding rounded corners, my goal was to try to be able to dynamically knock off corners from an image. I was originally trying to experiment with -moz-border-radius, but unfortunately, while this property works on background colors, it doesn’t affect background image clipping. I suspect this is a bug; CSS3 border-radius behavior specifices that the property “causes the element’s background to be rounded,” so eventually this behavior needs to be implemented.

In any case, having been stymied by the easy way, I’ve proceeded to do it the old fashioned way way; writing a Javascript function that adds the four corner images dynamically:

This will look funny in IEPC because of its crap PNG support (I coulda used GIFs I suppose, but having real alpha makes the edges look nicer - I'll probably add a switch for IEPC people later); This probably could have been written in XBL/CSS, but I don't think there'd be much benefit.

Posted on by lhl

So, was down in SD for SIGGRAPH today. Spent almost more time driving than at the conference, but well, it was worthwhile. Can’t wait for it to get back to LA. Much less travel-time that way.

Posted on by lhl

In case this comes in handy for anyone: touchoff is a little perlscript I hacked together last night b/c I couldn’t find anything that would already allow time offseting by default. Perl has sort of lackluster date-handling functions for doing offsets by default (say, compared to PHP); Dave Rolsky has been working on DateTime modules, but honestly, that would’ve been overkill for this thing.

Usage: touchoff +/-TIME FILE...
Change the modification times of each FILE by the specified offset.
  +/-TIME    TIME is a decimal number appended by: d, h, m, or s
             for respective units.  Defaults to hours.

todo: try a python version; also, just for fun, a php version

Posted on by lhl

UCBerkeleyNews: Researchers help define what makes a political conservative:

Four
researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about
the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political
conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for
inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to
political conservatism include:

  • Fear and aggression
  • Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
  • Uncertainty avoidance
  • Need for cognitive closure
  • Terror management
Posted on by lhl
  • Usability tip: Pad Little Links
  • Styling forms
  • Class:XPath = adds xpath matching to object trees
  • via MozillaZine: OneStat.com have released their latest browser usage data. It’s as expected, IE6 has made big gains at the expense of IE5, Netscape 4 has made losses and Mozilla and Safari have made gains.” thelem adds that IE now has a global usage share of 95.4% (up 0.1 percentage points since February), Mozilla 1.6% (up 0.4 percentage points), Netscape Navigator 4.x 0.6% (down 0.4 percentage points), Opera 6.0 0.6% (down 0.1 percentage points) and Safari 0.25% (up 0.14 percentage points). “These figures show similar trends to those being reported by thecounter.com, although thecounter.com puts mozilla usage at around 2.2%
  • Kinetic Typography