Vim Regular Expressions #

1:50, Monday December 15th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments

A useful guide to using regular expressions in Vim, which is bit different from Perl or Posix systems.

Proce55ing #

3:28, Sunday December 14th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments

I think I've written about Proce55ing before. It's a cool little Java tool for making graphics applets really easily. It's a veneer over Java's own graphics functionality (and other stuff, sound, networking), but an extremely fun and useful one. Kind of like Flash in a way, but more programmery. It's a great piece of software, it makes it fun to play in code.

Today I messed around with the 3D functions. They're pretty basic, but they're extremely simple to use. I realised that if I'd taken the time to write myself a library of simple rotateY, translate, etc. functions, like p5 has, I would have had a much easier time with 3D. It's always been the maths that raise the entry price too high, so I should have done it once and left it behind me. Being able to visualise the operations I'm doing by way of outputting them as cubes has also increased my understanding of the maths as well.

Anyway, I made some nice vector 3D stuff, will show it off when the time comes. Nothing new has gone into the content section for a while.

Site-specific stylesheets #

3:08, Tuesday December 9th, 2003 • feeling webmasterly • no comments

A new thing that's coming around, I think perhaps down to Eric Meyer, is giving the body tag of your pages an ID related to your URL so that people can create styles in their user sheets that specifically tackle issues they might have with your site. E.g. this site now has <body id="aftnn-org">, you can put a style like the following in your user sheet, if you can't read my fonts:

body#aftnn-org * { font-size: larger; }

This idea found it's way to www-style today. Apparently something similar has been proposed before, in 1999! Way to go W3C. This would be a valuable technology for users with accessibility problems to leverage. It's a bandaid, yes, but one which empowers the user to make good on the individual mistakes of each author. However, it's only valuable if those users can actually find and use the feature. At the moment there is no form of site-specific syntax in CSS itself (although it does lend itself to the above hack) and I think that a push from the W3C will be required if this is to help the minority of users who really need it. It gives user sheets the power they really need to be useful.

I'm arguing in favour of the addition of something along the lines of:

@scope url="http://www.yahoo.com" {

color: red;

Which is very close to the original proposal, but we've been discussing some potential enhancements as well.

Partay! #

2:39, Tuesday December 9th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments

The Superflat party was a success IMHO. It was quite a lot of work and fairly tiring, but I had a really good time and I met some cool new people as well. Louise and I spent a good chunk of Saturday evening tidying up in preparation and then another chunk of Sunday tidying up the aftermath. Hell, the floor needed washing anyway.

Mat, Ben and Greg came down from Norwich and arrived at about seven, just as we finished getting ready. We promptly took Mat to the supermarket and left Greg and Ben in charge of the venue. We bought a stack of booze and headed back, to find that the passive man had turned up in our absence, with a dangerous looking bottle of Tequila in tow. After that people started turning up in dribs over the hours. Adam played a mix of tunes to kick things off, including some tracks from his prize, the Italian Job soundtrack. It was a really good warm up set, good natured and fun. Ben played some hip hop, which was also really enjoyable. Then I played tongue-in-cheek electroclash, which went down OK I think. We let Adam play more and then Tom and I played all of our jungle classics (well favourites anyway).

So that was the party in music, and that was much of it anyway for me. Playing two sets you kind of miss things. JC and a whole bunch of people turned up just as things were getting a touch quieter and revived everything nicely. I didn't know most of them either, so it was cool to talk to new people. Ted's friend Brian and his American chums who were around earlier were cool to talk to and I think we're going to try and find them again.

At it's peak it was a pretty good party. It wasn't a student party like we used to have. No dancing, practically no drugs, better booze and less passing out, but also fewer people. I made everyone take their shoes off as well! The end part was funny though. The last few of us hung around until dawn. They did lines off the coffee table, I sat and played Mario Kart and completed it on 100cc, thus opening up the special cup. I kept offering the controller around, but nobody took it off me. Just as well, I was in the zone. The next day the general state of fried brain lead me to actually hallucinate Mario Kart whilst in the shower.

The next day was obviously a total write off. I was really shaky for some reason. We managed to get things cleaned up, again with Charlie's help, and when we sorted it all out we'd made a pretty good profit in booze form.

Hooray for parties, but it'll be a while until we have another I think. I have only good feelings from it, but it was exhausting.

Mac OS X Panther Mail.app Junk Mail bug and workaround #

12:42, Friday December 5th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments

Panther's copy of Mail has a bug where junk email is recognised but not moved to the Junk folder, even when automatic mode is selected, if no other rules are present (i.e. non-junk rules). A workaround is to create a dummy rule. Mine says something like:

if from is equal to "vdssb 1 3208222vb3vb33097"
and from does not equal "vdssb 1 3208222vb3vb33097"
set the text colour to red

Silly, but effective.

Thanks to "Jon" who posted this workaround on Jim Bassett's weblog.