Category: Geek Stuff

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.

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.

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.

Thirty-six Stratagems

“The Art of War“, a military strategy book written by the great military general, Sun Tze, has been re-interpreted to apply its concepts on business and fields other than military. It’s arguably one of the most famous literary exports of China.

However, there’s another collection of lesser-known strategies that are equally useful but perhaps easier to understand and apply in real life. They are often called the “Thirty-six Stratagems“. I remember growing up in Taiwan, the grown ups would often refer to one of the strategies in their conversations about work and about life.

Ancient China was basically a bunch of huge warring states. It’s no surprise that our ancestors took the brutality of wars and systematically came up with organized methods in order to win more frequently in battles.

Here’s the list with rough translations. Wikipedia apparently has the same list with brief explanations as well.

瞞天過海: crossing the sea under camouflage
圍魏救趙: relieving the state of Zhao by besieging the state of Wei
借刀殺人: killing someone with a borrowed knife
以逸待勞: waiting at one’s ease for the exhausted enemy
趁火打劫: plundering a burning house
聲東擊西: making a feint to the east and attacking in the west
無中生有: creating something out of nothing
暗渡陳倉: advancing secretly by an unknown path
隔岸觀火: watching a fire from the other side of the river
笑裡藏刀: covering the dagger with a smile
李代桃僵: palming off substitute for the real thing
順手牽羊: picking up something in passing
打草驚蛇: beating the grass to frighten the snake
借屍還魂: resurrecting a dead soul by borrowing a corpse
調虎離山: luring the tiger out of his den
欲擒故縱: letting the enemy off in order to catch him
拋磚引玉: giving the enemy something to induce him to lose more valuable things
擒賊擒王: capturing the ringleader first in order to capture all the followers
釜底抽薪: extracting the firewood from under the cauldron
混水摸魚: muddling the water to catch the fish
金蟬脫殼: slipping away by casting off a cloak
關門捉賊: catching the thief by closing his escape route
遠交近攻: befriending the enemy while attacking a nearby enemy
假途伐虢: attacking the enemy by passing through a common neighbor
偷樑換柱: stealing the beams and pillars and replacing them with rotten timbers
指桑罵槐: reviling the locust tree while pointing to the mulberry
假痴不顛: feigning madness without becoming insane
上樓抽梯: removing the ladder after the enemy has climbed up the roof
虛張聲勢: putting artificial flowers on trees
反客為主: turning from the guest into host
美人計: using seductive women to corrupt the enemy
空城計: presenting a bold front to conceal unpreparedness
反間計: sowing discord among the enemy
苦肉計: deceiving the enemy by torturing one’s own man
連環計: coordinating one stratagem with another
走為上策: decamping being the best

For you Chinese readers, explanations with historical context can be obtained here and here. For business-related application, some good examples (also in action in Chinese only).

via [不辣哥的 BLOG]

Mail Bouncer

Apple Mail Bounce Every morning when I fire up my favorite email client, I usually get in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 spam messages. And they just continue coming throughout the day. The upside is my mail server was setup so that 90%+ of the junk mails are appropriately labeled as “:SPAM:” in the beginning of the subject line by the time they reach me. And at home, I setup my Apple Mail to filter everything with “:SPAM:” in the subject to go directly to the “Junk” folder. It’s a nice setup. But It’d be nicer if the junk mail can just simply stop coming.

Recently I’ve been painstakingly using Apple Mail’s built-in “Bounce messages” feature. It bounces emails back to the sender, tricking it into thinking my email address doesn’t exist. The effort seems to be paying off. Now I get no more than 10 junk mails in the morning. And I have been experiencing a reduction of spams throughout the day as well.

Now only if Yahoo, Google and Hotmail can catch up and develop something similar, that would be great (in the voice of Lumbergh from “Office Space” ).

Google Maps Maniac

When I started noticing useful implementation of the Google Maps, I compiling the links into a master list, not knowing why the list would ever be useful to anybody… until I found another maniac crazier than me… a whole blog dedicated to collecting and commenting on various Google Maps related whatever.

I lose. The Google Maps whore wins.

WordPress UI Improvements

Following changes were made to the blog… some may be noticeable to readers…

1. Updated the colors of active/hover/visited links in CSS. I think the new colors fit the New York skyline picture from POV of Brooklyn heights (a.k.a. DUMBO) rather nicely. But I’d love to take any suggestions on ideas to improve the look and feel.

2. Moved “Archives” to the top nav bar. The process wasn’t as easy as pasting the “display archives” PHP code in the nav page. I had to make a new and modified “archives.php” template to fit “pages.php” layout in it because standard “pages.php” does not allow PHP codes to be inserted directly into the text field (in fear of hackers, I am guessing).

3. Some moron kept spamming the comments with a link to his mortgage, home loan and refinancing sites. It’s similar to what some other moron did to his online poker and casino sites. So I just banned those keywords (and his IP address) from the URL in the comments so that they’d have to be approved by me to be posted. This makes it easier for me to batch delete them on one go. God, I hate jackasses.

4. Added “Get Recent Comments” plugin. But it didn’t really work right “out of the box”. I had to modify it by following this tip to get it to work. Now it works like a champ.

5. Put a brownish tint to the border graphics.

The Joy of Steve Jobs Stanford Speech

I finally came around to do a quick grep of all the log files since I put up Steve Jobs speech at Stanford. The total tally came only 3,000 shy of 50,000 downloads. Impressive.

Last time I checked, I am still the first site that shows up on Google with a downloadable speech.

Let the inspiration spread.