Via MissingMatter, The Blue Marble, "true color global imagery at 1km resolution", from NASA.

"This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public."

Permalink | Comments? | id 1443

23:50 (utc-5)

 

Oh my God I think today has been one of the most boring days of my life.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1442

22:05 (utc-5)

 

I'm now watching Blast from the Past with Brendan Fraiser and Alicia Silverstone. It's really funny so far.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1441

21:57 (utc-5)

 

MySQL's crappy handling of default values

Dude, I just realized that MySQL's handling of default values sucks. A query I was writing kept failing and I didn't see what was wrong, so I took the query down to just one field. It succeeded, even though I hadn't specified values for NOT NULL fields. So I checked in phpMyAdmin, and it turns out a bunch of default values were set. I figured phpMyAdmin had set them without me telling it to.

So I took a dump of the SQL to create the table, took all the default values out, renamed the original table, and ran that SQL to recreate the table.

I ran the query with just one field again, and it succeeded! So, I got out my MySQL book, looked up "Default" in the index, turned to page 239, and found this in the section on the CREATE statement:

DEFAULT value
This attribute assigns a default value to a field. If a row is inserted into the table without a value for this field, this value will be inserted. If a default is not defined, a null value is inserted unless the field is defined as NOT NULL in which case MySQL picks a value based on the type of the field. (emphasis mine)

That's ridiculous!

Permalink | Comments? | id 1440

20:07 (utc-5)

 

Via Slashdot, Hewlett Packard sucks. I never want to buy any of their products again (and not just because of this... I'd made that decision awhile ago).

Permalink | Comments? | id 1439

19:51 (utc-5)

 

Bad user interface design: Alarm Clocks

I went to get a new alarm clock tonight as we were waiting to get into Houston's for dinner to celebrate my dad's birthday. Some of the alarm clocks had the buttons for setting the time and the alarm inside the battery compartment. The worst offenders actually had the buttons set up on the back of the clock, so it was impossible to see what you were setting the alarm to while you set it, unless you memorized where the buttons were and pressed them from around the front. Who could have possibly thought that was a good idea? Don't they test these things with real people?

Permalink | Comments? | id 1438

03:07 (utc-5)

 

Table-less web design with CSS

I'm (still) trying to figure out how to update my website to not use tables. Mark Pilgrim was nice enough to get back to me, and he gave me some advice, but I don't think it's enough to allow me to reproduce my current design with no tables.

If I find anything on the web that helps I'll post it here.

WebReference.com: Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step - this looks like it might actually tell me what I want. I'm surprised, I didn't think it would be possible.

Glish.com: CSS Layout Techniques, a very useful resource.

Westciv.com: Positioning with CSS2 - a pretty good explanation of, well, positioning in CSS2. Though, to me, the specs were clearer.

BlueRobot: The Layout Reservoir. They have examples of two column and three column layouts. Their layouts illustrate what I wanted to avoid. Getting the three column layout was never a problem. Getting the three columns to be the same height, was. As you'll notice in their three column layout, the three columns are different heights (they don't line up on the bottom). Somehow (I still have to read it in detail), the WebReference article seemed to avoid this problem with nested DIVs.

Web Nouveau. Here are a whole bunch of CSS designs. Here's a site I found from there that I thought had done what I wanted, but it turns out he didn't. I didn't analyze the code enough to find out exactly why he didn't, but it's not what I wanted. Also, here's a really complex layout which uses no tables, Big Baer "the Urban Alternative Music Magazine". They too seem to have done what the WebReference article accomplished (but I haven't checked their code yet to see if they did it in the same way).

Lastly, here are two articles from A List Apart which I haven't gotten to read in detail yet to see if I can really learn something, but they seem generally useful, and if I post them here I'll be able to go back to them A CSS REDESIGN IN FIVE EASY PAGES, and Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks and Techniques.

Finally, I don't know enough yet to be sure, but after reading the CSS2 spec and seeing how Mozilla actually renders some of it, I think the developers have interpreted the standard wrong. Of course, I'm probably wrong, since they're very smart people and they've spent more time looking at it than I have, but then again, they have come to see my side of things before. I plan to post more after I do some more research.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1437

00:24 (utc-5)
edited: 03:01 (utc-5)