Randomize

Richard Tallent’s occasional blog

Human Nature: Politically Incorrect

As a photographer who works with models in most of my work, I found this article interesting, especially #1. I’m more a fan of brunettes personally, so I’ve never really understood the big deal about blonds, but that’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far. Read more →

static.google.com

After playing around with ExtJs over the last few weeks, I had a thought: Frameworks like Prototype, JQuery, ExtJs, etc. are big downloads, yet many sites use them. Google has server space and bandwidth to spare. Google has a strong interest in supporting web-based applications. I think it’d be spiffy if Google hosted a few FOSS Javascript, CSS, and image resources, and encouraged all web designers to link to them rather than hosting the files themselves. Read more →

Free as in Handcuffs

Nat Torkington writes six basic truths about free APIs. The most basic truth, as the late Robert Heinlein said, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” This is why I don’t use external hosting for my blog or my photography, I use my own machine. The only true “My Space” is the one you pay for. I did struggle with this a few weeks ago, though, when I decided to start using the Flickr APIs to host some of the photos on my site. Read more →

Things I don’t like about my Mac

I like my Mac Pro. I don’t regret the purchase, I haven’t missed Windows at all, and I don’t see anything in Windows Vista that I’m going to be jealous of. But there are a few things that Apple needs to get better at. Maybe some of these will be addressed in Leopard, but I’ll keep this a “live document,” adding and removing annoyances as needed. “Preview” sucks for viewing photos. Read more →

Solving the Traffic Problem

Traffic sucks. Beaumont is, fortunately, not too bad, but Houston and Austin are terrible. Here are some techniques you can use to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem: http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/trafexp.html Read more →

Old Blog Gone, New Blog Here

My old blog died with my Windows-based server. I have most of the content recovered in various forms (Google caches, etc.), but for now all posts are unpublished. I can probably dig up an old post if someone *really* wants to read it again, but I have no idea if or when I’ll find a way to pump the data into the new blog software (WordPress). I’ll probably do a lot less politicking on this blog and post more often about photography and programming. Read more →

As I add more DHTML/AJAX to the sites I manage, I’ve been having more and more problems of IE6 locking hard when using the PNG alpha hack (either via straight Javascript or the popular HTC method). The locks happen only when someone’s browser does not already have the page loaded in their cache. I finally threw up my hands this morning and removed all IE6 PNG workaround code from our web apps. Read more →

Motorcycle Stolen

If you are a Beaumont local and see this truck: - White Ford F-150 - two Mexican men - Front license plate bent to make it somewhat unreadable - Beat-up bed (work truck) with tools Let me know. They stole my Vespa LX-150 from the building’s parking lot in broad daylight. There were at least 5 witnesses who tried to call building security, but they weren’t able to do so in time. Read more →

Mac OS X Leopard Mail and RSS

I’m a little disappointed that Apple’s new version of Mail uses the old-style icon rather than the beautiful feed icons by Matt Brett. The arguments for the new icon are a-plenty: 1. IE7 and Firefox both use this new icon already 2. Using “RSS” confuses the question of whether Atom, OPML, or future standards will be supported. 3. Using letters in an icon is usually a Bad Thing, Apple should know this more than anyone else. Read more →

Mac Questions…

My Mac Pro should be coming in today or tomorrow, but I have a few questions for any Mac users out there: - If I connect a standard EIDE (i.e., non-SATA) on the optical drive’s IDE bus, will OS X properly recognize and mount the hard drive, or is that IDE channel limited to optical drives? And is it by chance hot-swappable? - I have a 17” VGA display I’d like to hook up as my secondary monitor. Read more →