CS015 Website Redesign

August 4th, 2009 § 1

CS015 website ScreenshotThis semester I’m a teaching assistant for the CS015 course at Brown that I wrote about half a year ago. My main responsibility this summer has been revamping the course website. If you are reading this blog post any time before the summer of 2010, you can probably see the new layout live. In the case that I’m communicating with you over a year into the future you can see a screenshot.

My brief was to make a website that would fit with the course’s theme (Yes the course has a theme. Read the aforementioned blog post), Star Trek. I decided to base the website off the Star Trek universe’s LCARS computer systems. This was by no means an original take on making a Star Trek tribute layout – lots of fan sites have done similar things – but it is certainly recognizable.

I cherry picked other layout aspects quite liberally from different time points in the Star Trek series. The header text uses the typeface from The Original Series. LCARS itself only features in episodes and movies placed chronologically after TNG. The ship shown is the Enterprise of the 2009 Star Trek relaunch.

I ran into the CSS column issue when making the layout. The dashed line under the navigation buttons was always intended to stretch to the bottom of the layout no matter how long the content was. I originally made this work with positioniseverything’s CSS columns hack but later realized that there would be anchored links in the content presented in the layout. The anchored links caused the layout to break in Firefox, so I was forced to revert to javascripting the same effect. However the javascript I (found via google and) used to do it doesn’t work in some versions of IE. I obviously need to become proficient with a JQuery or another good javascript library.

The layout also uses conditional comments and the ie7-js script to mitigate issues with IE6, in particular the use of a png image with an alpha layer for the Enterprise in the top left.

In closing… if you are reading this and are an undergraduate at Brown, take the course this year! If you tell me you’ve read this post, I’ll give you extra special help*.
*This statement is probably a lie.

A letter to my MP

June 22nd, 2009 § 0

My initial email:

Dear Andrew Slaughter,

It was recently brought to my attention
(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=117055866653) that Margaret
Beckett, the current favourite for the position of speaker, does not
accept emails from her constituents.

I find this rather disturbing given the widespread adoption and the
efficiency of the medium. I believe that in not accepting contact of
this form Ms. Beckett makes it much harder for her constituents to be
heard, decreases transparency and accountability and shows that she is
disturbingly tied to outdated tradition and naïvely close-minded to
notions of innovation.

I urge you to take this into consideration when casting your vote for a
new speaker.

Thanks for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Adam Zethraeus

The first response:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for contacting Andy. I’m not sure where this information originates, but according to the very website you used to write you email -i.e.  Write to Them – Mrs Beckett received an above average number of emails from constituents and responded to them, getting a medium rating, which is pretty good, considering that the sample size used suggests that she receives an well-above-average numbers of emails!

I’ve no reason to suppose that this isn’t still the case – I suppose it just goes to show that  as well as facilitating communication, people can use the web to spread rumours, inaccuracies and falsehoods…..

Yours sincerely,

John Dawson
Parliamentary Assistant

My second email:

John,

Thanks for getting back to me.

Mrs. Beckett is listed as having no email at http://www.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/mps_and_lords/alms.cfm
Additionally the guardian lists her as having no email address. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/person/contactdetails/0,,-319,00.html
Mrs. Beckett has no website so further verification appears impossible.

The website writetothem.com has been developed from the now defunct ‘faxyourmp.com’. Furthermore, nowhere on the statistics page (http://www.writetothem.com/stats/2007/mps) from which you quoted Mrs. Beckett’s ‘medium’ rating does it state that messages were delivered as emails. It therefor seems reasonable to posit that writetothem.com simply faxes letters written to Mrs. Beckett.

I would greatly appreciate if you could relay our correspondence so far to Mr. Slaughter.

Yours sincerely,
Adam Zethraeus

Second Response

Adam,

You’re right. I’ve just checked with Margaret Beckett’s office and indeed she doesn’t do email. Write to them do Fax their emails over, as you suggest, and she apparently deals with them by post.
I don’t need to relay anything to Andy – through the magic of  server-side rules, mail filters,and forwarding, all our correspondence is already in his private inbox!

Kind regards,

John

Twitter made Jaiku sad

May 26th, 2009 § 0

I deleted one of my two old accounts on jaiku a today. In the process, it redirected me to its 404 page.Jaiku 404

Really a better caption would be “Maybe a bird was eating it so google stepped in and ruthlessly ‘euthanized’ it with a large rock”.

Experimenting with Lock Picking

May 23rd, 2009 § 0

Padlock I’ve been trying my hand at lock picking for a little while recently. I did some research around the subject and joined a forum called Lock Picking 101. At their advice I bought a set of 14 picks from LockPickShop.com. I also downloaded and read the LSI guide to lock picking, a resource similar to the better known MIT guide but more visual. The picks seem well made and (in all my untrained glory) I’d recommend them to anyone interested. I also found a guide to making lock picks online which I guess would be useful to anyone with a workshop at easy access.

A little while after having my picks delivered, I mentioned my very undeveloped interest to a friend who was then generous enough to lend me a loose door lock she had used to practice lock picking in high school. It is a simple 5 pin ‘Kwickset’ lock with normal pins which I can now consistently pick. I’m considering buying some pins designed to make picking more difficult, or maybe a totally new lock. I’ll probably go to a locksmith in my neighbourhood in the UK (I wonder what their policies are on selling to someone learning to pick) but I’m also considering buying a ‘training lock’ such as the one sold at learnlockpicking.com. » Read the rest of this entry «

The Song of Time played on the iPhone Ocarina App

May 21st, 2009 § 0

As far as cheap thrills go, Smule’s Ocarina application for the iPhone ranks pretty highly. To play a note one blows into the phone’s microphone and touches a combination of the screen’s four hotspots.
I read the notes off the screen as I played. Lots of other Zelda songs have also been written up by the application’s community but ‘The Song of Time’ is one of the easiest to play.

A Short Facebook Miscellany

May 21st, 2009 § 1

Swenglish

This is an email from Facebook. After I switched my language settings it started sending me mixed language emails.

Facebook Event Export

And this is a terrific feature that I just noticed. I’m probably way behind the curve. Clicking the button downloads an ICS file which contains all the events invitation and opens with your favourite calendar program.

Star Trek

April 29th, 2009 § 1

ivyfilmfestivalI saw Star Trek this last Friday at the Providence IMAX cinema as part of Brown’s Ivy Film Festival (that’s right; free, early and huge) and I can confirm that the lens flare was indeed ridiculous – but only distractingly so once or twice. My only other qualm with the movie centres around some frankly distracting attempts at comic relief. Apart from that the movie was exactly what I’d been hoping for, that is to say a re-imagination that holds true to the original whist modernizing it and being a genuinely good self standing film. It has also, as will become very clear to any trekkie at a certain juncture of the film, thrown the door wide open for sequels and franchise extensions.

The casting was great. Kirk’s character shone through without Shatner and Zachary Quinto succeeded in being more than a Vulcan Sylar mirror. It was also nice to see Simon Pegg play a slightly different character for once. Expect a film with plenty of nods to its origins, within and outside of its characters.

My hopes for Star Trek as a whole have been restored. See this film. I award 8 out of 10 possible nerve pinches.

lense flair

Privacy

April 29th, 2009 § 0

A few of days ago I rehashed the privacy-security debate with a couple of friends. We were talking at least tangentially about the privacy rights of politicians and those in the public eye. The conversation culminated with one of us asking, with the caveat that he understood that it was desirable, how the idea of a right to privacy evolved in the first place. I think this is a rather interesting question. » Read the rest of this entry «

Logic > Internet

April 26th, 2009 § 0

I'm a helpful soul. Stroke me.

I'm a helpful soul. Stroke me.

My blind reliance on Google Maps sent me on a 2 hour wild goose chase in the pouring rain this week. I was searching for an engraver in Providence RI to add a name to a hip flask graduation gift for a member of my fencing team. I eventually found an address and a phone number, online but via a friend, and gave the owner of ‘Impressions’ engraving a call. She offered me her address but i turned it down as i was in a rush and believed i already had it.

On the plus side, i found out that it is possible to edit locations in Google Maps, however if you change the address by too large a distance it is not immediately updated. I wonder how Google sorts fraudulent updates from good ones?

So i guess the moral of this story is that nothing is more authoritative about a business than the person who stands to make money from it.

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