Evil Mad Scientist Actually, I am quite happy.

Disenchanted with the Hardy Heron

Okay, I like Ubuntu… or at least I did… well, I still do… it’s complicated. I like all the new features of Hardy Heron, but it seems to come at the price of performance. I can almost go so far as to say my Dell C400 running OpenSUSE 11 outperforms my desktop running Hardy Heron.

My laptop is a Pentium M @ 1.2 ghz w/512mb RAM. My desktop is an AMD64 @ 2.2 w/1.5gb RAM.

WTF.

… and don’t get me started on when I had HH running on my laptop. It was totally useless for just about anything useful. Not even running XFCE could save the day.

That said, I’m downloading Linux Mint with high hopes — but not expecting miracles, as it’s based on Ubuntu.

SASS Blueprint Grid on Github

I started a github project for those of you following the SASS Blueprint Grid.

SASS Blueprint Grid

HAML 2.0

Just reading about HAML 2.0. Man. I wish I wasn’t packing up for a move. I wanna play with it! Suffice it to say, I’m more of a SASS junkie than a HAML fiend, and the new SASS 2.0 features alone are enough to make me salivate.

Mix-ins is by far my favorite new feature in SASS 2.0. Now you can write chunks of reusable code:

=clearfix
  display: inline-block
  &:after
    content: "."
    height: 0
    clear: both
    visibility: hidden
  * html &
    height: 1px

… And place it within whatever rule you like

#sidebar
  +clearfix
  border: 1px solid black

Talk about leaner, meaner and more productive. Holy crap!

I’ll be rejiggering the SASS grid generator in SASS 2.0 in the next few weeks. I also have a new SASS project underway for when I have more time, SASS 2.0 will play an integral part in making it all work… without tipping my hand too much, it involves color schemes.

SASS Gridification – Part 2: Blueprint

I have extended my initial SASS grid to work with the Blueprint grid library. Now I can leverage the Blueprint grid in a completely SASSy way.

Please refer to Blueprint CSS for instructions and tutorials on how to use the grid.

Feel free to download, use, distribute and modify my work as you like.

[dm]2[/dm]

Mission:Canonical — Western Union

I just noticed this and thought it was more noteworthy to my blog than to Twitter;

If you go to the non-www westernunion.com, it does not load. It just sits there and eventually times out at the DNS level without sending a 404 message. This is by far one of the worst cases of poor canonicalization I’ve ever seen. Obviously it’s not hurting their ranking, but still — I would be horribly embarrassed if I was the website manager.

So far, so good: Microsoft Live Writer

Trying out Microsoft Live Writer for blog posting now. So far it hasn’t borked my shiny green W3C validation, so maybe Microsoft has scored two points with me today. First OneNote, now Live Writer, and I’m working on some design and front-end projects for a Microsoft employee group using SharePoint.

I guess I should stop bashing MS, they’re really trying to dig themselves out of the hole. Vista really didn’t help, but if you ignore the glaring mar, they’re pushing out some pretty darn cool applications. So I will begrudgingly give a hat tip to Microsoft, after years of sucktitude, they are finally coming around.

The right tools for the right job, I suppose. *grumble*

Using Microsoft OneNote instead of Evernote

Since my primary use of Evernote is to jot down music ideas while I wait for something else to process, I’ve decided that it’s too many steps needed to use Evernote effectively. Until a direct audio recording and playback plugin is developed, it’s pretty clunky to record in Adobe Audition, save the file, open the folder then drag+drop to Evernote. I’d rather just press a button to record, then move on… especially since I’m usually doing something else when music ideas come to me.

It was a natural progression to go to Microsoft OneNote as audio recording is one of its main features. I can put as many ideas on one ‘page’ as I like, which is especially useful to me as I might come up with several variations on the same theme in one setting. I do this quite often.

OneNote also has text-within-image recognition and indexing, though I’m wondering how Evernote and OneNote stack up against each other on that front. Evernote was able to recognize handwriting fairly easily, and while I haven’t done any comparison, the demo of text recognition in OneNote only shows computer fonts being recognized, which doesn’t impress me.

I’m not sure whether I will switch over entirely or keep using Evernote for textual notes and to-dos etc. I’d much rather keep all my notes in one place, but seriously… Evernote rocks the kazbah as far as search and tags.

Liam Anthony Tackett

My first-born son arrived May 3rd, 2008 at 4:13pm via C-Section. He is 9lbs 10oz, 21½ inches long and 14¾cm at the head. He’s huuuge. =)

He’s been in the NICU since he was born with some respiratory problems. He was on oxygen and was breathing too fast. Now it’s the morning of May 4th and he’s off the oxygen and doing much better. He’s still in the NICU, we’re in there with him as often as we can be. He’s such a beautiful baby boy. I will post pictures as soon as I have them. He does this one-eye-open pirate face that is so freaking awesome.

Mephisto

Why don’t I ever hear about things as cool as Mephisto sooner? Write my blog templates in HAML? Yes, please!

God dammit, why can’t I stick with one CMS for longer than a month before getting bored?

SASS Gridification – Part 1

A common problem faced by many CSS developers is the grid layout. In this example I will be using SASS arithmetic to create grid calculations.

If you just want to see the end result, here are two beautiful 8-column grids generated entirely using SASS arithmetic:

Fixed: 8 columns 100px wide with 10px margins
Fluid: 8 columns 12% wide with 0.5% margins

Also, if you haven’t the foggiest notion what SASS is (”… now there’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”) you should probably read up on Hampton Catlin’s site about HAML and SASS.

To start things off, I looked around the net for what was already available on the subject. I already knew about Blueprint, though I had never really worked with it, and I learned about the YUI CSS grids toolkit.

Both of these CSS frameworks are very powerful. Personally, I don’t need that much power for this proof of concept, and it probably would have taken more time to adapt one of the frameworks into SASS than it would to program something from the ground up. So instead I just whipped out my text editor and started hacking.