February 2011
1 post
January 2011
1 post
The song Happy Birthday recorded by yours truly in...
September 2010
1 post
For those about to Regex. →
Just building a regex to match my name in Campfire and came across this. I’m sure it’s well known, but posting it here for myself.
August 2010
1 post
April 2010
2 posts
Beautiful Buttons with Sass Math
Just recently I attended a Ruby User Group meeting where John Hwong of Mutually Human gave an excellent overview of “Unobtrusive CSS”. He made the case for using tools like Compass and Sass to build CSS stylesheets cleaner, quicker, and with less fuss. Compass is a framework built on Sass that allows for quick CSS authoring using sass-ified CSS Frameworks available through the use of...
February 2010
4 posts
Python Gowalla API Client
To commemorate the first version of my Python Gowalla API Client, I’ve created a mock item for it. I plan to make a small intro/how-to page for it, but now I’ll just tease it with this banner.
If you haven’t already, check out the client here:
http://github.com/sentineldesign/python-gowalla
Box Model Study
After looking at a the instruction manual for a Lego set, I got an idea for representing the peculiarities of the standard and Internet Explorer 6 box models. These will be used in a CSS “anti-framework” I’m developing. More on that soon, but for now, here are my box model diagrams.
The layers represent the stacking order of each element (something other diagrams come close at...
Gowalla API out!
Last week I noticed that the Gowalla site expose some API GET calls that were yet to be announced. So, on the weekend I made a wrapper for these calls in Python and packaged the code up in order to release it on Github.
So, now that the Gowalla API is officially out, I believe I have the first public Python client. :) Check it out here:
http://github.com/sentineldesign/python-gowalla
Updated CodeIgniter DB2 driver
If you fall into the extremely unlikely event where you both need to access DB2 with CodeIgniter and have run into a situation where the latest database driver doesn’t work, I’ve got the fix for you. This may be because you are setting the charset or you require a different port than 664 (50000 being the port used by many for DB2).
Hence, I have updated the driver to heal all that...
December 2009
6 posts
Why isn't Blueprint (or any other CSS framework) a...
Let me start by saying I really love the idea of saving time when I design and develop a site—I use all kinds of time savers. Any well thought out system that results in cleaner, more maintainable, simpler code is definitely a good thing. Thusly, I’ve used CSS frameworks in the past to save time building layouts and creating grid-based, standards-compliant websites. So, why isn’t...
SDG + Typekit
Last night I did some regiggering to the Sentinel Design Group site in order to do a bigger redesign quicker and easier in the next few days. Part of that process was upgrading to Nanoc 3, a Ruby-based CMS that generates flat HTML. It’s a pretty simple concept—one that you wouldn’t think is all that helpful—but it really speeds up development.
The interesting part, though,...
The Angry Crowd Strikes Again
While I was checking out this slick email marketing site Mail Chimp, I noticed something rather peculiar—the crowd behind the chimp looked uncannily similar to something I’d produced a few years back. I thought for sure they had somehow dug into my discarded pile of Flipswap comps and gleaned a piece of my work. But, alas, it turns out even though there is a likeness, no wrongs have...
MuseoWatch 2009
Whenever I recognize a font that I’ve used before, I immediately develop an irrevocable hatred for it. The latest recipient of this maddening dislike is exljbris Font Foundry’s Museo, an organically-seriffed typeface that I used in the last revision of the Flipswap site. A specimen:
See, here’s how I used it:
The problem came when I saw these two sites last week. These two...
WordPress Title Trickery
Here is a bit of the code we’re using on a new site redesign. We needed a custom, more descriptive title on certain pages.
It grabs a title from a custom field if you set one, or just gets the page title if you don’t. Also, since WP doesn’t display the page’s title if you’re on the homepage, we’ll grab custom text from the site’s description (which we...
Ok people, this is what happens when you don’t have HIG (human interface guidelines) for your platform. These Android Developer Challenge entries represent a core sample of the best applications Android has to offer.
Based on the icons alone, it is clear what kind of junkiness you can expect in app they represent. This kind of stuff is endemic in the open source community.
Do any of...
November 2009
1 post
Python: List Comprehension, Closures & Lambda
The best part of learning is being able to share your knowledge is a way that’s autodidactic & condescending. So, here’s a little (possibly obvious) nugget I came up with for using list comprehension, closures & lambda.
My problem: How do I take a list of n-dimensional coordinates, and make a list of just one of the coordinates?
You could do it like this with list...
July 2009
8 posts
1 tag
More on Push
I just came across this little iPhone app that displays Growl notifications on your phone that originate from your computer’s Growl-compliant app. It’s called Prowl, and it’s exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my little piece on iPhone Push notification two weeks ago.
Had Apple chosen to allow 3rd party background apps in favor of its notification service, this kind of...
3 tags
Poor Man's Guide: Deployment with Git (and GitHub)
Git is one of those things that when you learn it, you start looking for reasons to use it. I would describe it as frictionless version control. Although the king of nerdy, abrasive verbosity, Linus Torvalds explains it as really just a filesystem—it’s the way that you use it, through its minimal, command-line interface that makes Git so efficient.
The technical stuff I’m not...
4 tags
Poor Man's Guide: Twitter Integration
I was just researching quick ways to integrate a one of my latest Flipswap projects with Twitter when I ran across this obvious, yet non-obvious thing. You can construct a URL that pre-populates the update field with any text you like. It works like this (click it for full affect/effect):
http://twitter.com/home?status=Yeatblog+rocks+my+face+off.
The craziest thing about this...
Autocross Wrap-up
Autocrossed today with Maggie in tow. We had a lot of fun and met some cool people. I’m left with some disappointment though—seems like this time I didn’t get a chance to learn something. Ninety-six cars ran today which only gave time for four 50s runs through the course. That’s one or two laps to “learn” the course and a few to try to get competitive time. The...
These Jeans Died for Our Freedom
Checkout even more radical family photos. Happy 4th of July internet.
3 tags
Tale of the Tape
Regarding my upcoming autocross event at GVSU in a newly sponsored BMW, I thought it would be interesting to compare technical stats from my first autocross at WMAA.
Event Then: WMAA Autocross, May 17th, 2009 Now: GVSU Autocross, July 5th, 2009
Vehicle Then: 1985 BMW 318i (E30) Now: 2002 BMW 330ci (E46)
Classification Then: HS (H Stock) Now: DSP (D Street Prepared)
Vehicle Horspower &...
4 tags
Flipswap is Sponsoring #20
Lately I’ve been going to Gingerman Raceway for the weekly Test and Tune event and I’ve raced in an autocross event with an older BMW. Although track driving and autocross are completely different styles, they have one thing in common: go as fast as possible.
The problem with my older BMW was that it was slow and didn’t have the greatest handling (though for its time, it was...
June 2009
7 posts
1 tag
“You should add a stroked box around a [design] element that can’t stand on...”
– One of my clients told me this in 2002—he had gleaned this knowledge nugget from a design professor at UIC. I think it’s a load of bullshit.
2 tags
ClickToFlash is a Must Have →
ClickToFlash is a WebKit plug-in that prevents automatic loading of Adobe Flash content. If you want to see the content, you can opt-in by clicking on it or adding an entire site to the whitelist.
I’m not really big on browser plugins, extensions, toolbars, or whatever. But, if you use Safari on the Mac, this plugin is an absolute must. Flash ads (or anything for that matter) are an ultra...
Going to a “Car-B-Que” today. In memorium of that, here is a picture of a car that is in my parking lot. It’s a VW with Polizei (‘Police’ in German) livery.
Two significances with this:
I don’t live in Germany.
It reminded me of this totally amazing cross-country trip by Team Polizei completed in 32 hours, 7 minutes.
2 tags
I like letters, do you like letters?
Last summer I took it upon myself to create a few typefaces—two of which I partly finished. To say that creating usable, durable, venerable type is hard, is probably too much of an understatement to even mutter. Also, to find a type that fits your style is probably even harder. This is likely the reason why many of the best designers only find a small selection of fonts that they feel...
1 tag
Thought it’d be a sweet idea to collaborate...
3 tags
Think About Push in a Different Way
I’ve been anticipating iPhone Push app functionality for a while now—and it’s finally here. The interesting part about this concept, as opposed to having apps run in the background, is that it is a more distributed system.
Take, for instance, a simple background process that functions to check for new messages (eg. email, IM, etc.). A standard way of implementing this is to...
3 tags
May 2009
2 posts
Yesterday, I arranged a song based on a poem by my...
How NOT to Make Money Developing Apps
In July of 2006, I created a small app to keep track of my website accounts, ftp credentials, and domain information. Not too long after that, I named it “Server Vault” and stuck it on my site. Two months later I received a notice from the law firm employed by this company to either change the name of my software/site or face repercussions. That’s the moment I knew I might get a little attention....