Peterbe.com

Google Groups has just had a redesign. Maybe this is old news but it's new for me.

I like the new design a lot. It's more welcoming and warmer. Comparing it to the old design you notice that not a great deal has changed except the colour choice and the cuddly icons. I think the icons are great. Icons is a time-tested proven concept and by making the icons large it'll take less milliseconds for users to click on them with the mouse because they're easier to aim at.

I also like the fact that each group or category gets its own icons. It's something I'd like to have for some of my yet-to-be-released projects but I don't have the resources to get a designer to design all the various icons. I guess this is part of what makes the icons so impressive, that they're not just cuddly but damn hard to do.

Good work Google Groups people!

Maybe the design of csdc.net is just as bad as any other website but what's really unique about this company brochure site is the logo. "We Develop Success" in quotation marks as well. Why? Is that not what you do? Or is it a quote from someone anonymous?

The HTML code stinks of Microsoft-only. There's loads and loads of code like this:

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
if(MSFPhover) { MSFPnav14n=MSFPpreload("_derived/CSAS2 Budget 
Management.htm_cmp_ice174010_vbtn.gif"); MSFPnav14h=MSFPpreload(
"_derived/CSAS2 Budget Management.htm_cmp_ice174010_vbtn_a.gif"); }
// --></script><a href="CSAS2%20Budget%20Management.htm" 
language="JavaScript" onmouseover="if(MSFPhover) 
document['MSFPnav14'].src=MSFPnav14h.src" onmouseout="if(MSFPhover) 
document['MSFPnav14'].src=MSFPnav14n.src"><img 
src="_derived/CSAS2%20Budget%20Management.htm_cmp_ice174010_vbtn.gif" 
width="147" height="31" border="0" alt="Budget Management" 
name="MSFPnav14"></a><br>

You'll get quite a shock when you visit the site with Firefox because the letters "csdc" is shown as <big> to the power of 20!! Here's a screenshot of it in Safari too

I've upgraded RememberYourFriends.com now to run jQuery now instead of tw-sack and my own home-brewed javascript code.

I've also joined the jQuery documentation team to be able to include my little baby site on Sites Using jQuery

Currently it's using jQuery 1.0.4 but I'll upgrade to 1.1 soon. I'm also working on a Swedish version of RememberYourFriends.com but I've only translated 60% of the strings so far.

This has to be one of the best youtube.com clip of the year. It's funny, scary and just outright amazing.

"What currency do they have in the United Kingdom" the report asks.
"I don know. American money?" answers the Texan man.

Sure, there are a lot of people in USA and not all of them are rednecks but those that are scare me more than insurgents in the middle east.

The scariest part of this clip is towards the end when they ask people if the support president Bush on Kyrgyzstan being a threat and whether the United States should invade it.

Disclaimer: I know a lot of Americans and they're lovely people. I do understand that this clip selects only few exceptional cases but that doesn't make the clip any less fun

Art that is arty and difficult from a practical perspective to create is always appreciated. These pictures of pencil art are truely amazing. One of those pictures would have been impressive enough for me to blog about it. But they've made 21! And they're all amazing.

UPDATE If you, like me, found that amazing, check out these metallic animals too wow!

My Ubuntu Linux on my work laptop works great but since I've strayed far away from the default options (own kernel, own window manager etc) some things sometimes don't work as expected. Such as Flash9. The problem I had was that there some some package in there that was broken for some reason: libswfdecmozilla.so

Here's what I did:

# cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
# rm libswfdecmozilla.so
# wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer9_\
update/FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
# aunpack FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
# mv flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55/libflashplayer.so .
# chmod +x libflashplayer.so

Start firefox and enter about:plugins and this is what you should see

That worked for me. Hopefully this will help somebody. The help I got from this page which might also help people with a broken Java in Firefox but they don't say that you should delete the libswfdecmozilla.so driver.

UPDATE

There's a slightly more recent beta now. The November 2006 beta

UPDATE 2

Now there's a final release on adobe.com

I knew had I heard it before but I must have completely missed it anyway and forgotten to test my new Javascript widget in IE. None of the stylesheet worked in IE and it didn't make any sense. Here's how I did it first:

var closer = document.createElement('a');
a.setAttribute('style', 'float:left; font-weight:bold');
a.onclick = function() { ...

That worked in Firefox of course but not in IE. The reason is that apparently IE doesn't support this. This brilliant page says that IE is "incomplete" on setAttribute(). Microsoft sucked again! Let's now focus on the workaround I put in place.

First I created a function to would take "font-weight:bold;..." as input and convert that to "element.style.fontWeight='bold'" etc:

function rzCC(s){
  // thanks http://www.ruzee.com/blog/2006/07/\
  // retrieving-css-styles-via-javascript/
  for(var exp=/-([a-z])/; 
      exp.test(s); 
      s=s.replace(exp,RegExp.$1.toUpperCase()));
  return s;
}

function _setStyle(element, declaration) {
  if (declaration.charAt(declaration.length-1)==';')
    declaration = declaration.slice(0, -1);
  var k, v;
  var splitted = declaration.split(';');
  for (var i=0, len=splitted.length; i<len; i++) {
     k = rzCC(splitted[i].split(':')[0]);
     v = splitted[i].split(':')[1];
     eval("element.style."+k+"='"+v+"'");

  }
}

I hate having to use eval() but I couldn't think of another way of doing it. Anybody?

Anyhow, now using it is done like this:

var closer = document.createElement('a');
//a.setAttribute('style', 'float:left; font-weight:bold');
_setStyle(a, 'float:left; font-weight:bold');
a.onclick = function() { ...

and it works in IE!

My sister, my mom and I just launched a new website for my mom and her wood carving hobby. It's called Thuas Trägubbar (which literally translates to "Thua's wood figurines". The site it unfortunately only in Swedish but hopefully people will appreciate the pictures anyway. Most of the faces done are of course only local or national celebrities but there are some international ones too.

There's even one of me.

UPDATE

It's now www.thuasgubbar.se

Here's a nifty little command I used today to find where my hard drive was being most used:

du -k /home/peterbe/Documents/ | sort -n | tail -10

I'm sure there are even fancier methods and programs but this works pretty damn well. Here's what the output can look like:

root@trillian:~ # du -k /home/peterbe/Documents/ | sort -n | tail -10
4240    /home/peterbe/Documents/Kalle
4852    /home/peterbe/Documents/ChartDirector/lib
7756    /home/peterbe/Documents/ChartDirector/doc/cdpydoc
7764    /home/peterbe/Documents/ChartDirector/doc
13044   /home/peterbe/Documents/*** FONT _ ***/- Font Applications -
14704   /home/peterbe/Documents/ChartDirector
547940  /home/peterbe/Documents/*** FONT _ ***
2171000 /home/peterbe/Documents/MacOSXSoftware/Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium
3262580 /home/peterbe/Documents/MacOSXSoftware
5694808 /home/peterbe/Documents/

I turn 27 today!

If you feel extra generous and want to thank me for all of my hard work in the Open Source area, there's always my Amazon wish list :)