When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · April
· · · · 22 (3 entries)
Goddess · That would be my wife Lauren. After I b0rked our Win2K gamebox, I tried re-installing the OS and eventually reduced it to complete brick-ness, it recognized neither the video adapter nor the network card. So Lauren brushed me aside and started wrestling with the problem, and to make a long story short, it almost completely works again. At one point she seemed nearly infinite in her capabilities, sitting in front of the computer wrangling software updates while knitting baby stuff and looking up words in a German dictionary for the kid’s homework. Some of the German nouns and muttered curses at the Windows install sounded remarkably like each other. Why would anyone not marry a geek? The only problem is that Win2K won’t auto-switch resolutions to play games any more, it gets the frequency wrong and the LCD goes pear-shaped, you have to hand-select the frequency and switch into the right resolution first. LazyWeb?
Hyatt on the High-Res Web · Check out Dave Hyatt’s excellent write-up on designing and rendering Web pages so they take advantage of the higher-resolution screens that may be coming our way. I emphasize “may” because I’ve seen how slowly we’ve picked up pixels over the years. The first really substantial screen I ever worked on was a 1988-vintage Sun workstation with about a million pixels. The Mac on my lap right now, which has 125 times as much memory as that workstation, has only 1.38 million pixels. Anyhow, Hyatt has some smart things to say on the issues, which are trickier than you might think. I suspect that sometime in a couple of years, if I still care about ongoing, I’m going to have to go back and reprocess all the images so that higher-res versions are available for those who have the screens and don’t mind downloading bigger files. Anyhow, Dave’s piece may be slightly misleading in that he talks about SVG as though it’s something coming in the future. Not so, check out this nifty SVG Atom logo, which works fine in all the Mozilla browsers I have here. Load it up, resize the window, and watch what happens. Then do a “view source”. [Update: Jeff Schiller writes to tell me that Opera 9 does SVG (and Opera 8 “SVG Tiny”) too.] [Dave Walker writes: Though the shipping version of Safari doesn’t support SVG, the nightlies do.] [Dave Lemen points to JPEG 2000 as possibly useful in a high-res context.]
Just A Kid · Last weekend, Lauren felt like cooking up home-made Easter eggs, so the shopping list included “chocolate chips (large bag)”. I was heading down the bulk-foods aisle and realized one of the vertical acrylic bins was full of them. Someone had been sloppy, and there was a little heap of chocolate chips on the shelf underneath it. For a second, I flashed into pure eight-year-old mode, thinking “Holy cow, there’s a whole bin full of chocolate chips, and more just lying there!” I popped a few in my mouth and they were excellent; semi-sweet, dark, strong, and firm. I was still in the state that Buddhists don’t mean when they say “Child’s Mind”, thinking “I can get as many as I want!” The list did say “large bag” after all, so I put a bag under the spout and gleefully jammed the lever all the way over. At home, Lauren said “You went overboard, a bit, didn’t you?” and now we have a plastic canister-full in the pantry which should last us into 2007. It’s a good feeling.
