My son loves Curious George. I love pretentious cinema. How can we resolved our viewing dilemmas?

Perfect. No, really, this is inspired.

I’ll admit that, at times, I’d have considered the offer
(From the ever-wonderful FailBlog)

So there’s a tiny tempest at Zeldman.com. Jeffrey Zeldman rightfully condemns the “Pottermore” website for providing a retrograde experience. What’s the problem?

It’s certainly not the sentiment: the site is pretty crap. And it certainly isn’t because J.K. Rowling is under attack: a billionaire can defend herself many times over. Plus, I don’t like the Potter books. For me, it’s simply the title of the article: “Maybe stick to novels, dear”. That chummy “dear” is a standard form of condescension. It’s frequently used to belittle women & their contributions. I mean, come on: Rowling didn’t code the site herself, so why imply that she’s some rank amateur who decided to conquer the world of web development?

Now, do I think Zeldman is sexist? No. Do I think he fell into a pretty common social trap? Yes. I’ll accept that he attempted to make a joke: but it fell flat. We all misspeak; we all say things that, with further consideration, we don’t mean. That’s why I think it’s sad to see him stand his ground. It’s Luther’s “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise”—for a joke.

Serge Keller has compiled a series of screenshots of early websites. How far have we come?

Alta Vista, which used to be the search engine, 1996.

Alta Vista in 1996 wasn’t a million miles away from Google today. Visually speaking, that is. Apple in 1997, however, shows how much things have changed:

Apple, 1997, during its “beleaguered” phase.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen this. I think it interesting the lack of change for “harder” information gleaning, à la Alta Vista & Google. Only recently has Google been modifying its look. Information services is clearly a very conservative field.

Web designers who are interested in providing an optimal experience for viewports of widely-varying width—I’m looking at you, traditional computers, iPhone & iPad—will be very interested in responsive web design.

A term coined by Ethan Marcotte in a revolutionary article (and compelling read), responsive web design takes together a number of elements that have been rattling around recently—CSS3 media queries, fluid grids, flexible images, in particular—and Marcotte showed how they can interact with one another to provide a powerful web presence across widely varying viewports. Since then, he’s expanded upon the subject by publishing a book. It’s the single best place to go in order to get up-to-speed on the subject—although, like all “A Book Apart” titles, it’s woefully small & at best a very general introduction to the subject.

I’ve just completed the process of converting a site I’ve been working on to a responsive design. This site is an ideal candidate for a responsive web design approach in that it’s an academic site & the participants, the prime candidates to access its content, are all around the world. The site provides information about upcoming workshops, meaning that the target viewers (participants in the academic project) are very likely to access the site’s content while using handheld devices such as the iPhone or iPad. As such, I received a nice introduction into the subject, particularly with the real-world repercussions.

Janus Cascade

One thing that I didn’t notice in Marcotte’s article or book is that by wrapping our designs in media queries, a style’s cascade is now two-facing. There are massive implications with this approach, and if you take a pixel-based approach, as opposed to the percentage-based approach Marcotte takes, all hell breaks loose. Here’s an example to show what I mean:

Say you have a DIV & when the viewport is a desktop size, you want it to be 100 pixels & float left; but on an iPad’s portrait mode, you want it to remain the same size & float right; and finally, on an iPhone portrait mode, you want it to be 300 pixels & display as a block. Here’s how you might go about that:

  @media screen and (min-width: 1040px) { /* For Traditional Computers */
    div { width: 800px; float: left; }
  }
  
  @media screen and (min-width: 810px) { /* For iPad: Portrait Mode */
    div { float: right; }
  }
  
  @media screen and (min-width: 320px) { /* For iPhone: Portrait mode */
    div { width: 300px; display: block; }
  }
  

If you looked at the page with the DIV in question in your various viewports, everything would seem to be OK. But for the sake of experimentation, on your desktop machine, resize your browser window.

You’d be in for a shock if you resized your browser window. When the browser’s wide, then the DIV is big & floats left. Shrink the window & the DIV floats right. What happens when you make the browser really small? Well, actually, it’ll still float right because you haven’t overridden the iPad portrait mode declaration. Now refresh your tiny browser window & you’ll see that the DIV now displays as a block. That’s because it’s not cascading the iPad portrait mode’s float declarations, because that condition hasn’t been met in your refresh. As Keanu Reeves would say: Whoah!

Now start resizing the window from that tiny width. You’ll notice that your floats aren’t floating, but displaying as a block; and furthermore, your box has not jumped to 1000 pixels in width, but has remained at 300 pixels. Again, it’s because you’re inheriting the display: block from the iPhone portrait mode declaration. See? Cascades now work two ways, depending upon how you resize. Double whoah! The solution here is to explicitly state in your iPad portrait mode that you want the div at 800px & also declare in each case where you want the DIV to float & how it’s to be displayed in the document flow.

Go With Percentages, Not Pixels

The other implication that I’ve only grazed above: working in pixels is a bad, bad idea. This is the reason why Marcotte exclusively refers to items in percentages: it’s a more elastic approach & won’t fall apart quite as thoroughly as pixel-based approaches. And in my experience, when I switched from pixels to percentages, the site coalesced really quickly.

Go Forth Warily

Freaky deaky responsive web design: you probably have a lot more testing to do now. And for Internet Explorer (prior to version 9, which is very good), you’ll need some help for reading media queries.

Make no mistake: responsive design is the future of web design & with the explosion of handheld devices, it’s very much worth it: no longer will you have to design multiple sites for different classes of devices. In fact, the first non-personal site, the Boston Globe, has just launched as a responsive site, and the power of this unified approach is self-evident.

Since we’re coming up to the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks in New York & Washington, and that I’m from the United States, BBC Radio Sheffield interviewed me about what I remember of the day. Specifically, I was called to the BBC studio that day & that’s where I saw World Trade Centre towers collapse; my father was in Manhattan when the attacks occurred & I couldn’t verify his safety for days; and my in-laws, who are physical anthropologists, worked with DMORT to recover bodies for months at the “Fresh Kills” landsite. This is all covered in the interview which you can download.

The thing that really hits me is that so many people saw the attacks live: not the first plane, of course, but there were many watching the aftermath of the first crash at the World Trade Centre when the second plane hit. I think that’s why our reactions are so strong: we saw it unfold, and we all slowly realised the significance of the acts we witnessed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the opportunity to talk about the legacy of 9/11, which includes the war in Afghanistan, the justification for the war in Iraq, the death of countless civilians, the erosion of civil liberties, the advocacy of torture, the draining of the US’s material wealth, the continuing inflammation of anti-American sentiment abroad and the decline of American power. It’s a bloody and unspeakably tragic legacy.

In any event, if you want to hear someone saying “uh” & “ah” a lot, have a listen.

Nigel Thornberry: Keep Calm and Blarghargh

You’re welcome, Internet.

If, like me, you had font problems after applying Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update, there’s a simple solution: delete the font cache. You can easily delete the font cache by using the free tool OnyX—which also does much else besides.

For me, the issue became clear when I went to look at a job in Adobe Illustrator. Opening the file should have triggered Extensis Suitcase Fusion to load a particular font, but it didn’t. In fact, none of my fonts could be previewed in Fusion: instead was a note stating “Font Unavailable”. Once I deleted the font cache & restarted, everything was fine.

With the release of Portal 2, Valve have published this shirt, filled with Internet Meme Win:

Aroooo TAKATAKATAKATAKATAKA

This is totally inspired. Oh, and Portal 2? GOODBYE, PRODUCTIVITY.

Before I started off on my own, I worked for what seemed like an eternity for a graphic design firm. The art director would give incredibly vague orders & was outraged when we didn’t read his mind. I think a four-year-old would have been a better boss.

Step forward, Tiny Art Director! Your commands are far clearer, and your criticism are more reasoned! Example:

The Brief: I want you to draw me a dinosaur! Not a scary one! He's taking a bath.

The Critique: I don’t like him.

Job Status: Rejected.

Wow! It’s been quiet here. That’s for a lot of reasons, but partly because a) I’ve been getting over a long-term illness that had really had an effect on my work (which is now gone, thankfully) and b) my Mac suffered a nasty failure. It experienced weird symptoms, which were fixed when the graphics card & RAM riser boards were replaced. Good thing I got AppleCare for the machine.

In any event, while the machine was in the process of breaking, I realised that my local development databases weren’t backed up. Why? Because Apple’s Time Machine would want to back up hulking single-file monstrosities every time you modified it slightly. In my haste (and panic), I made an imperfect backup. When the databases were restored onto the machine, they wouldn’t work. I could see that they were there, the databases were listed, but attempts to access them inevitably resulted in failure.

It turns out to have been a permissions issue (Errno 13 in MySQLspeak: I now know that gzipped tarballs won’t preserve permissions). It took some hunting to get to the root of the problem, but if anyone else experiences this problem, the answer is that the MySQL data directory is likely to be owned by root, when it needs to be owned by MySQL. In my example, I’m assuming that the data directory is the one specified in a MacPorts installation:

  
    sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /opt/local/var/db/mysql5
  

Restart your MySQL server, and everything should work!

Uhh, no thanks, I’ve lost my appetite.

So, who thinks that the designers were pranking the client?

Apple iOS Veep Scott Forstall; and,

Professional creep Steve Buscemi?

By “Professional Creep”, of course, I mean he frequently plays creeps. Whatever, this has been digging at me for a long time.

So I’m catching up on True Blood—which has generally been good—when it decided to not only jump the shark, but perform a particularly frenetic fandango mid-vault.

I wish I knew, Jean-Luc. I wish I knew.

The artist nina Maria Kleivan dressed up babies as famous dictators. Kleivan says she’s exploring the meaning of evil:

Anyone who doesn’t think that kids can be dictators doesn’t have a child.

As Kleivan says, “We all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil.”

Graydon Carter, founder of Spy Magazine; and,

Bozo the Clown?

Oh, Graydon—how your children cannibalise you…