New anti-AIDS ad. So NSFW it's like not even funny...

I'm not sure what to make of this ad. It's very NSFW, for one thing. Compared to the absolutely delightful French 2007 Campaign with its gorgeous animation and well-chosen music, or the hot Swiss 2006 Campaign which featured incredibly buff hockey players and Olympic fencers doing it in the nude, this current ad is more than a nightmare.

Oh, and let us not forget the Bug Posters from 2004, or the French 2008 Explore campaign.

Making an OS dock-like object with jQuery

I spent a solid two hours figuring out how to do this, so I decided to share with the world. Those of you with small monitors (or other strange habits) might have operating system dock (the thing at the bottom or top of the screen that you use to start programs, check the clock, and see what's running away with your CPU and network) set to "autohide," so it comes and goes as you mouse over it.

If you've ever wanted to simulate that in your HTML, I've figured out how to do it with jQuery. I've even provided a bare-bones skeleton of a dock, along with a working example. Feel free to embellish it at your leisure.

Saturday, What A Day, Every Day's The Fourth of July...

Aside from programming my brains out for the bootstrap employer, I have cooked a breakfast (french toast), lunch (egg salad), and dinner (hand-forged hamburgers), mopped the dining room and kitchen floors, and treated the wounds Kouryou-chan's acquired in an accident on the outdoor slide. I have been her doorman for most of the day, because every time she comes in she gets distracted by something-- a book, an origami project, a video game-- and I have to remind her that the neighborhood kids are desperate for her attention. She is the bright spark in their day.

The programming was pretty good. The proposed interface has a lot of RIA (and man, am I pissed off that ninety percent of so-called RIA sites are really just flash sites), and now I have the user able to search through the database, drag-and-drop found items into his/her own collection, paginate through the collection with a lovely graphical scrolly thing (using the Viewport Slider I wrote a few weeks back), and drag and drop the found items to give to other users. The user's collection is kept in a viewport dock, which was my big research item of the day. The dock doesn't update correctly-- new items don't show up until you refresh, but that's just a single redraw event, and I've isolated that down to a single method from which multiple forms can draw (Ajax and straight HTML), and the dock's collection is pre-populated on the server side with a Django context processor so I don't have to remember to populate it for every page-- it's automagically populated for those pages that need it.

The most annoying bit was that the dock wasn't sized right for the redesign, and the background was static! They didn't hire me for my gimp fu, but I still dragged out the Wacom pad and liquified that puppy. (Man, that sounds grosser than I intended.) What do you mean, we're not worrying about screens smaller than 1024x768?

I ate badly though; skipped lunch and munched my way through a big bag of pistachio nuts instead. That and coffee; it's like a grown-up version of soda pop and doritos.

Still, breakfast was great. So was dinner.

Omaha's at PAX. She calls me now and then to either (a) tell me what a great time she's having, or (b) just how exhausted she is running around getting interviews from everyone.

Yak Shaving

You know, it's incredible: I spent five hours this afternoon learning more and doing more with Django and jQuery than I did in some entire weeks at Isilon.

And yet, I just spent the last 90 minutes Yak Shaving to try and get lrf2html working. What a waste of my time.