scruffian

February 8th, 2011

Flash and CSS3

Today I stumbled across an interesting feature of flash and CSS3 that I thought might be interesting to someone.

If you have ever done much work embedding flash onto a website you will have come across the wmode parameter. If you set wmode=”transparent” then the swf file you include will behave properly and obey your stacking (z-index) commands.

Today I discovered that this parameter also allows you to apply CSS3 border-radius to a container of a flash movie – if your swf takes the same amount of space as its container, then if you apply a border radius to the container if will also crop the swf.

I couldn’t find that documented anywhere, so I hope it helps someone.

November 20th, 2010

Fun with CSS3

Last friday I went to the full frontal javascript conference, which was really good. One of the speakers was Seb Lee Delisle who showed us some nice animation effects with particles using canvas.

This got me thinking – I thought that same thing could be achieved in CSS, without any javascript, so I gave it ago. This was the best I could do:

http://scruffian.com/css3fun/ [will only work on the latest version of Safari on Snow Leopard].

It’s pretty similar – a few differences, but close enough. The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t use any images or javascript – it’s just pure CSS!

It’s quite amazing what you can achieve with CSS, of course at the moment this is only in bleeding edge browsers, but hopefully this stuff will be standardised. I also made a couple of other interesting variations:

bubbles | planets

November 20th, 2010

Peep Show series 7 on 4oD now!

This isn’t meant to be aired until next week, but for some reason it’s on 4oD now!

So excited…

May 21st, 2010

Search features in Spotify

Today I discoved some nice things about Spotify. You can search for music by date – just search for “year:1920-1930” for example and you get some nice 20’s Jazz. You can also search by label, for example search for “label:jazz“. Nice!

Now they need to make it so I can add my own labels! Enjoy…

May 19th, 2010

Fly Bikes – Uno (Soundtrack)

The beginning of Fly Bikes Uno BMX film is probably my favourite (non trails!) BMX video of all time, mainly because of the music. For the longest time I have been unable to find out what the music is. I emailed Fly to find out but they didn’t know what it was – only that it was from Sergios’s ipod. I used Shazam which told me that it was “The Decant Session” by Yann Tiersen, but that is only 47 seconds long – not long enough.

Then today I found the rest of the piece. It’s part of the “Goodbye Lenin” soundtrack, by Yann Tiersen but Fly reordered the tracks and I really like their order, so I made a spotify playlist of video:

Fly Bikes – Uno

May 14th, 2010

Why Facebook, why?

About a week ago Facebook introduced a global “Like” button that you can put on any website. It sparked some controversy as some people don’t like the idea that Facebook is spreading like a cancer all over the internet as if they are the platform the web is built on.

I started looking into implementing this, and today I realised that the API for “open” graph specifies the meta tag with an attribute “property” this is not valid XHTML. Why couldn’t they just use the name attribute like everyone else? Why Facebook, why?

April 22nd, 2010

Recruiting band members

If this doesn’t want to make you be in a band then I don’t know what will:

Maybe this:

February 22nd, 2010

Testing in old versions of Internet Explorer

When you are laying out websites, testing in different versions of IE is really important, but also really hard, as when you install an new version it writes over the top of the old one, so you can’t have two side by side. For a long time Multiple IEs was a good way round this problem. Of course it’s no replacement for a real test machine (or virtual machine) but it’s a useful tool for developers to do some quick checks. However javascript support is notoriously bad, and it is gradually going out of date, so we have started using spoon which is a great replacement.

But now the new firewall settings have blocked us from using this. Back to square one. Then I remembered a tool that I have used in the past that did something like multiple IEs but was much better. It took me ages to find it again, so I am blogging so that I don’t forget and maybe someone else will find this too. The tool is called IE Collection and it does a great job.

July 28th, 2009

Vote for me

A few weeks ago I entered a busking competition. I did this song which in hindsight was probably a mistake as it’s so quiet and no-one knows it, but never mind.I should have done some cheesy beatles cover but never mind. Please give me a sympthy vote!

I worked out a system for what songs would work well to busk:

If I like it
If Alan Partridge likes it

That’ll be lots of Kate Bush then!

Don’t forget to vote:

http://www.london.gov.uk/rhythmoflondon/showcase-events/busking/busker.jsp?ref=ajtR5ViwcjY

July 14th, 2009

Making a Kitchen Garden/Brick BBQ

I had some work tops left over from our old place, so I decided to make a kitchen in the garden. Here is a brief summary, but there are lots more pictures on Flickr.

Brick BBQ/Garden Kitchen

Planning it out took quite a bit of time. I had to work with the space I had and the worktop was already cut to a size, so getting the plan right was important.

Brick BBQ/Garden Kitchen

Once I knew where everything was going I laid the blocks in post-crete and got them all level with a spirit level.

Brick BBQ/Garden Kitchen

Once that was done then it should have been pretty easy to build it up to height. I had never worked with mortar before so I learnt a lot and got a lot better as I tried more things.

Brick BBQ/Garden Kitchen

Ok so there was a bit of a complication. The breeze blocks didn’t stick to each other.

Brick BBQ/Garden Kitchen

Years of building jumps made me realise that the problem was that both surfaces were too smooth so the mortar didn’t bind to them. I made the surfaces textured and they stuck a lot better.

Brick BBQ/Garden Kitchen