Geek Beer

A nice cold beer the geek way (look away now manly). Personally I drink them too quickly to bother with this kind of palaver.

Entry 428, Tuesday, July 8th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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Slanty CSS

Rather more information than I hope I ever need on drawing shapes with slants using HTML and CSS. Interesting none the less though.

Update: More CSS via plasticbag - check out drop shaows and title pics. I see I'm going to have to get into CSS in a big way soon as most impressively (for me) all these work in Opera as well as MSIE.

Entry 427, Monday, July 7th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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Moonraker

One of my favourite on line stores is CDbaby, first because it's about the only place I can buy Ephemera CDs, secondly because they're so darn friendly about selling you stuff. It's the kind of customer service I react well to especially when even with $6 of air freight it costs me less than popping down to the shops in the UK.

Anyway with my last purchase they sent me a free compilation CD on which was a song by Moonraker who have an awsome sound which it's difficult to describe. CDbaby take a crack at it: "The spirit of live electronic soul, Moonraker blends elements of drum & bass, house, trip-hop and jazz infused funk to create some of the most fresh and intelligent music to surface in the Boston scene in years.". Not a bad description but listening is the only real way to describe it and there are tracks on-line at the band's site and at CDbaby. My favourite track is still Shalom - the first track I heard.

Overall well worth a listen, especially if you are enjoying a lazy Sunday. Personally it looks like next pay day I'll be making another purchase from CDbaby.

Entry 426, Sunday, July 6th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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Comment Trolls

I'm meant to be programming a comments system for this site (still!) but this will leave me open to comment trolls. Eeek!

Entry 424, Saturday, July 5th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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Stamp It Out

To celebrate my 423rd post the Royal Mail have done me the honour of issuing the lazylaces stamp. A press statement revealed "this is the most important stamp release this year, possibly more so than the Prince William edition". Unlike William I welcome everyone to now lick my backside ;o)

Create your own first class stamps with stamp-it-out by freedom matters [via geisha].

Entry 423, Saturday, July 5th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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Ghostzilla

After Daisy mentioned Ghostzilla yesterday I downloaded a copy straight away. This is a neat way of browsing sneakily - not something I really need to do - but I'm impressed with the way it does it none the less.

The browser runs quitely in the background while you get on with your work. As soon as you want to do some browsing you make a mouse gesture - moving the pointer from the very edge of the screen and back again - and up pops Ghostzilla. Not as a new application though - it appears in a space within the application you already have open. So for example if you had Outlook open it might appear in the inbox list.

Nice. Also it renders in soft monochrome so it doesn't stand out - and pictures only appear (in B&W) when you hover over them.

To top it all off the browser disappears as soon as you move your mouse out of it - returning you to stealth mode. At this point the other developers at work and I were very very impressed. Even if you don't have a need for this much secrecy it's worth using just to see it in action.

There's more though. If you buy the CD version rather than using the free download it doesn't even install (other than a few encrypted config files) it runs off of the CD so no-one will even be able to see you were using it when you leave your PC (as long as you remember to take the CD with you!).

Quoting myself on the topic of Ghostzilla yesterday - "this is the best thing since sliced cheese" - I was a bit drunk so forgive an element of nonsense but this really is an awsome piece of software to see in action.

Entry 422, Saturday, July 5th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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ConTEXT

I've found this great text editor for code development. It has loads of highlighting stylesheets but most importantly for me it handles CSS, JavaScript and HTML very well, although I haven't managed to find one for ASP. It's also free which is a great bonus. I've tried a few editors like this but this is the first one I've found that supports so many programming languages for free.

Update: Tell a lie there is a highlighter for ASP but having using ConTEXT for a few days now I've found that the JavaScript highlighter is actually much better for ASP than the ASP specific one. At least it is if you use server side JavaScript like me - I haven't tried it out with VBScript yet (and I'm not likely to). You still get that server side vrs. client side JavaScript confusion but if you code this way you're probably over that anyway (I am finally-ish).

Entry 421, Saturday, July 5th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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Ming The Merciless

Multimedia insanity [via barnski].

Entry 419, Wednesday, July 2nd 2003, Filed In Stuff
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PhoneBin

What to do with all those snaps from your new camera enabled mobile phone? None of your friends have upgraded their phone yet so you have no-one to send them to. Well fear no more - PhoneBin gives you the chance to share those moby-pics with the world at large (NB. Not safe for work/kids/people of a nervous disposition - evidently early adopters are total exhibitionists).

Entry 418, Wednesday, July 2nd 2003, Filed In Stuff
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Magic Window

Reality gets one step closer to science fiction with the AirSho - "Hitachi's new AirSho imaging system projects dynamic pictures onto nearly invisible glass surfaces, such as a storefront window". I'm really holding on for Minority Report style 3D projection technology though [via gizmodo].

Entry 417, Wednesday, July 2nd 2003, Filed In Stuff
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PawSense

Catproof your computer with PawSense - I await a report from Daisy on whether this is dog compatible [via op-pop].

Entry 415, Monday, June 30th 2003, Filed In Stuff
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How To Dance Gothic

A neat follow on to the Little Goth Girl post from yesterday - a guide on how to dance gothic. Personally though I'm now of an age where I prefer a nice cup of tea and a sit down.