Author: shun

Safari Transparency

I accidentally found this “hidden” feature in Apple Safari 2.0.1 while messing with the “Debug” menu. For whatever reason, there’s a “Use Transparent Window” option under the Debug menu. In between page loads, the entire window goes transparent — a pretty cool effect.

To get to this feature, you first need to enable the Debug menu, which is hidden by default.

1. Quit Safari.
2. Open a terminal window.
3. Copy and paste

1
 % defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

4. Launch Safari. You will find the new “Debug” menu option at the far right side of the menu bar.

You can read more about the Debug menu here.

Safari Transparency 1

Safari Transparency 2

Internet Explorer Got No Style

Homework from my “Human-Centered Interactive Design” class at SCAD’s e-Learning program is killing me. I wonder how I ever survived being a full time student at SCAD before. I like the class and all, but the amount of work has been overwhelming on top of my classes from UC.

The main motivation behind this post is to complain about Microsoft (again). The latest project is to implement an interface I designed into a working flow of wireframes. That’s the easy part. But inevitably, it was so easy to take that extra step to style the template just a little nicer since I am using CSS for everything anyway. And boy, what a bitch Microsoft Internet Explorer is to style for. Elements/styles that work for other browsers just don’t work on stupid IE. I guess this is not news for anyone who’s worked with CSS for longer than a few hours. But it’s annoying as hell.

Since I was checking my homework via Windows IE, I also checked out my blog to see how everything looks since I did quite a few improvements. Sure enough, the announcement tag line for Bryan’s new pictures below the header was somehow under a white block. A trip to the stylesheet fixed that. But again, it’s annoying. I wish Microsoft can stop being so damn cocky and start conforming to the web standards already. Jackasses.

A Stroll Around the Hood

It was a warm and sunny day on Monday. Since we haven’t really taken Bryan out for a walk in the neighborhood, we decided it was time to meet the neighbors.

A block down the road, we did meet a mother with her 10-month-old daughter on their front lawn. So we did what parents with babies do — exchanging “vital data” on our babies… how old, how big when s/he was born… etc. The mother went on to tell us that the neighborhood is full of young infants. What a surprise!

I guess Bryan is not used to being out for more than 15 minutes. He was exhausted from having seen so many different things outside of his comfy home. Brian was right about one thing though: When you see babies looking at things for the first time of their lives, their curiosity does make you look at things a little differently. Those mundane, boring objects you see day in and day out do look pretty cool.

Having a baby changes everything. And it’s not just the routines of day to day activies. Sometimes it’s how you perceive things as if it was your first time.

Immunize Me

We took Bryan to get his second sets of immunization shots on Monday. He practically cried only for 5 seconds throughout the entire process. There were 5 different immunizations in three shots. He got poked once on his right leg and twice on his left. Luckily he didn’t suffer any of the possible side effects listed on the immunization chart the hospital gave out.

Shots Bryan received were: Polio, DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus & Pertussis), Hib (Haemophilus Influenzae Type b), Hepatitis B, and finally Pneumococcal.

Years ago, some vaccines containing small amount of mercury were thought to have caused autism. Luckily that’s no longer an issue since the mercury-based compound used to produce those vaccines have been phased out.

Bryan immunized

Spam.Art

After some back and forth with my thesis committee chair, 30 minutes worth of “art consulting” with Moto, over an hour of lengthy discussion with Brian, I have finally settled with my thesis topic: World, meet “Spam.Art” (reads: spam dot art… not finalized).

About four or five years ago, I introduced a revolutionary idea (at the time anyway) to make art works open source and even published a paper with Miho for ISEA 2002 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Nagoya, Japan. The paper envisioned the eventual evolution of eletronic art to parallel the open source movement in the software industry. It also described an “evolutionary” element to the project being that only the fittest electronic art will survive the scrutiny of the fast paced electronics world.

Unfortunately, I never really got around to develop the thesis into anything tangible. Little did I know, Creative Commons was also working on something similar that same year and introduced a website that dedicated creating a ” creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works — whether owned or in the public domain — by empowering authors and audiences.” And then this year, I found a genetic art project that pretty much took care of the Darwinistic aspect of my previous thesis topic.

It was time to move on. And I am glad I did.

The “Spam.Art” project is intended to give email spams a different twist in how spams in general are perceived. It’s a software program that creates abstract visual art based on the spam it receives. I won’t discuss the details just yet. But I think the project is going to be a lot of fun to create and promote.

My runner-up project was “Sponsored by Brand X”, a corporate responsibility bashing type of ad campaign targeted at corporate entities that were involved in war crimes. But this idea was doomed to fail because there’s simply too many of this type of art projects going on. I won’t be making any more impact than the existing projects. Besides, Prof. Alan Schechner was already a step ahead of me on his “Holocaust Art”. Mine would have been similar idea but more of a “Rape of Nanking Art”… Not exactly a break through for a thesis. But I think I will march forward with the concept at another time given the magnitude of the holocaust in Nanking, and how Japan still officially denies it ever happened.

Swing the Baby

While talking to Ee-bin about baby swings, both she and Grace got excited about a traditional Malaysian baby swing made with sarong. It basically is a crudely made cradle that’s hung about three feet in mid air. Apparently it’s a very common type of swing in Singapore as well.

And then the other day when we had dinner with Hanny, Widodo and Chee-hoi, once again they mentioned it. So I guess it’s pretty common in Indonesia as well. Curious, I wanted to find out if this magical swing made out of sarong was available for purchase somewhere online.

No luck with the sarong swing. But I did find an improved and westernized version of it (Amby and Baby Hammocks). The inventor is an Australian Chinese who admited that he got the idea from “other cultures” in conceiving his design. Because of hammock’s (or swings in general) shape and natural “mid air” movements, experts say that it reminds the infant of the good times back in mommy’s tummy.

Here’s a quick look at the “designs” between the two hammocks….
LEFT — Sarong Swing | RIGHT — Amby Swing
Traditional sarong swing=>Amby swing

As cheap as sarong swings may be, they seem to be a health hazzard by Western standards (here and here). As for the Amby cradle swing, parents have sworn by its effectiveness in putting even the most difficult children to sleep. But it ain’t cheap… a basic setup costs $200.

Speaking of sleep, don’t some parents also swear by the Ferber Method?

Continue on with the sarong. It’s also a common practice to make baby carriers out of them. What a multi-purpose low-tech answer to everything! And of course, for everything low-tech, there’s a “designer” Western counterpart to it.

LEFT — Sarong baby carrier | RIGHT — Nojo baby carrier
Sarong baby carrier Nojo baby carrier

🙂

Made in Taiwan, with Oversized Ego

Taiwan contracted the world’s most ambitious “Build-Operate-Transfer” (BOT) jobs of its kind back in the late 1990’s to build a high speed bullet train project. The construction has been cursed with political scandals and corruptions ever since.

The total cost of the project has been estimated at about $2 trillion Taiwan dollars (or roughtly USD $61,538,461,000) by the time the construction is completed in late 2006. It will be 2 years late and billions of Taiwan dollars over budget — a laughing stock in the world of construction business.

The interesting thing about the scandal is, it’s an open secret of corruption and political favors. The Taiwanese media has repeatedly reported the details of the scandal. But yet nothing has been, and, with the way things are, ever will be, done about it because it involves both the sitting and previous presidents of Taiwan and their cabinets. It’s also clear the people of Taiwan fell asleep at the wheel having reelected the same morons who blindly passed the provisions of the project in the legislature. That’s why I think the South Koreans really got their shit together when they arrested, tried and convicted their former president for his criminal acts. As conflicts of interest continue to taint the construction, it’s not hard to see those elected morons will continue to gain the support of the businesses working on the project.

This sort of mirrors Enron’s ties to Bush Jr.. And it also echoes how Dickhead Cheney’s former company easily won the bids on the reconstruction projects in Iraq.

On a related issue, even though Taiwan has projected itself as a democratic and free society, the lawmakers in the parliament continue to demonstrate their shameless and childish ways of resolving political issues by literally brawling each other. I mean, if they truly care about their issues, I dare them to really challenge each other over a duel, like the good old days of America. That Alexandar Hamilton had some balls; in comparison, most of the Taiwanese legislators are a bunch of legalized criminals whose brains are the size of peanuts with no room for EQ.

Singing the Opera

After having to endure Safari’s short comings, I applied some remedies to address its most noticeable problems — memory leaks and abrupt crashes. But I made my last draw yesterday after its memory issues affected the rest of the computer again.

I have been looking into using other browsers full time, namely Firefox and Camino, both from the Mozilla Foundation, a spin off of good old Netscape (well, actually, Netscape has sucked for the past few years). But they suffer the same problem as to Safari — extremely poor memory management. If you open more than 5 or 6 tabs at the same time for a day or two, you can notice the whole computer slow to a crawl, or worst yet, they crash without saving sessions on the existing tabs.

A few weeks ago, I took advantage of Opera Software and its free download offer and kept the serials just in case. I have used Opera before and it sucked. But it’s been a couple of years, so maybe things have changed.

Indeed, things HAVE changed.

For the past day or so, I have had eight tabs or more open at the same time, and I have not experienced any slow down to my aging PowerBook (knock on the wood). What’s even more impressive is its memory foot print hasn’t creeped up like all the other browsers. Furthermore, Opera came with features that I have had to download extra plugins/tools for with the other browsers (draggable tabs, saved sessions, easier to manage bookmarks… etc). Opera has some user interface inconsistencies. But I’ll happily live with that and just zip through web pages the way I want to — lots and lots of tabs.

I am not ditching the other browsers just yet…. will still need them for testing and such. But Opera is going to be my primary browser from now on.