• Dan Cederholm is an expert in the field of standards-based web design.
• Tantek Çelik is best known as a principle editor of several CSS specifications, former chief technologist for Technorati and for his time spent at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer for Mac.  More recently he’s known for his advocacy of microformats.  Tantek has a pretty good wiki.
• Wendy Chisholm is an expert in universal design and content accessibility.
• Aaron Gustafson is a web standards evangelist, a member of the Web Standards Project, A List Apart and Web Design in a Nutshell.
• Jeremy Keith is a master of the DOM, scripting and AJAX.
• Ethan Marcotte is a senior designer at Happy Cog, and passionate about web standards and gorgeous design.
• Eric Meyer is a CSS guru.
• Nicole Sullivan is a performance engineer at Yahoo!  Check out of CV.
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s A List Apart tutorial site is his biggest claim to fame.

This should be a great resource as the HTML 5 spec emerges.

Six months ago I donated $40 to the manufacturing of an album.  Along with 410 other contributors of the Kickstarter community, we managed to raise $8,648 towards the recording of Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, considered to be the greatest jazz album of all time and currently celebrating its 50th anniversary.

For those not in the know, 8-bit music is music generated using older computer and video game consoles of the 8-bit generation: Commodore 64, NES, Sega Master System, Atari-ST, Nintendo Gameboy, etc.  Sometimes original hardware is used, sometimes emulated hardware, and other times just the chip that was needed to make sound is used.

Eight bit music started off as a form of nostalgia, either downloading old tracks or listening to radio stations such as Slay Radio which gave old gamers the opportunity to enjoy to the video game music of their youth.  With time remixes of these songs became popular in the dance, techno and electronic music communities.  Most 8-bit fans fall in love with the idiosyncratic nature of the music, and now you can easily find covers of contemporary songs, such as Weezer – The 8 Bit Album.

“So Chris, what are you listening to these days?”
“Crowdsourced jazz tribute albums recorded on Nintendo, Sega and Commodore 64.”

What’s interesting about this particular project is that it was commissioned by Andy Baio, bringing together the talent of several 8-bit musicians, each one working on a separate track over a four month period in order to produce the tribute album.  Andy was looking to raise $2,000 in order to give a small stipend to each artist and produce physical copies of the disc, and cover the necessary royalties (yes, this is completely legit).  Amazingly, interest in the project was so strong the necessary funds were raised in the first day, and before the deadline had been exceeded by 430%.

So how does Kind of Bloop sound?  Well you can listen to it yourself, but my own take is that most of the tracks come off really well.  I think a lot of love and consideration has gone into the composition of each one, especially All Blues by Shnabubula, which respects the tradition while containing some amazing improvisational free-form sections that any jazz musician can appreciate, even Miles himself.

“Those songs to me don’t exist, you know? “So What” or Kind of Blue, I’m not going to play that shit, those things are there. They were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It’s over; it’s on the record.” – Miles Davis

Things started rough on the Saturday, with our boat cutting off another boat at full speed and nearly tipping, but we moved up steadily through the ranks and by the end of Saturday were the 6th fastest of 25 teams.  After the semi-finals Sunday morning we were third fastest of the 15 teams in our division and in the finals we came in first place.  Medals and champagne were distributed, and we celebrated afterward at the St. James Gate.

I have to admit that although I’m not a very competitive guy when it comes to sports, our steady success, and the cohesion that made our team run like a well oiled machine made the whole weekend a very appealing experience.  I can’t wait to try again next year.

Here’s a simple example:

      @font-face {
        font-family: "Robson Celtic";
        src: url("http://site/fonts/rob-celt")
      }
      H1 { font-family: "Robson Celtic", serif }

This is very exciting news.  No longer will typographically savvy developers need to rely on clever sIFR hacks.  Oh, and not to make Internet Explorer an afterthought, but IE has supported @font-face since version 4, except with a proprietary .EOT filetype, a compressed form of OpenType, while Firefox and Webkit are supporting the more common and non-proprietary TrueType and OpenType formats.

So I wrote a little perl script that renames all RAZR pictures to YYMMDDhhmm.jpg so that they can be easily sorted in chronological order by any file browser.  You’d think a big international company like Motorola would be able to respect the ISO 8601 standard by now.

rails -d mysql appname

SQLite3 and the necessary driver gems come preinstalled on OS X Leopard, but if you don’t have the Ruby bindings installed it’s as simple as:

sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

You can always change which db your Rails app is using by changing your config/database.yml.

Lets say you want to forward mail from your Lotus Notes account but want to strip attachments, you’ll definitely want to try the following script. It’s perfect for sending your mail to your sexy new iPhone without racking up ridiculous bandwidth charges.

This works in Notes 8, but has not been tested in earlier versions. Also be sure to replace YOUREMAIL@MAIL.COM with an external email address. Credit should go to Simon Lacasse who did the nitty gritty work, I’m just making sure others can benefit from it.

Sub Initialize

Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim collection As NotesDocumentCollection
Dim memo As NotesDocument
Dim doc As NotesDocument
Dim j As Integer
Set db = session.CurrentDatabase

Set collection = db.UnprocessedDocuments

For j = 1 To collection.Count
Set memo = collection.GetNthDocument( j )
''If Not( memo.SentByAgent ) Then

Set doc = New NotesDocument( db )
Call doc.CopyAllItems( memo, True )
Dim rtitem As NotesRichTextItem

Set rtitem = memo.GetFirstItem("Body")

doc.Form = "Memo"
doc.Subject = "From :" + memo.From(0) + ":" + memo.Subject( 0 )
doc.Body = memo.Body
doc.Principal = memo.from(0)
''doc.InetFrom = memo.SMTPOriginator
doc.ReplyTo = memo.from(0)

Call doc.Send( True, "YOUREMAIL@MAIL.COM" )
'Call doc.Send( False, "Put another EMail address here" )
''        End If
Call session.UpdateProcessedDoc( memo )
Next

End Sub

Leopard (OS X 10.5) has its fair share of goodies, including a new and improved terminal client with *gasp* tabbed windows. I thought this feature would be great news, since as I wouldn’t need to install the venerable iTerm in much of the same way that Spaces has supplanted VirtueDesktops. After a week though I’ve gone back to iTerm, as it became painfully obvious that the Window Groups features of the Leopard terminal couldn’t hold a candle to the bookmarking features in iTerm. The Window Groups in terminal fail to retain any useful information such as which host you are connected to, and you’re manually forced to ssh back to where you were before, this is something that the bookmarks in iTerm solve easily. So close Apple, yet so far…