I normally avoid political posts, especially ones concerning the politics of another country. But I couldn’t resist this: Matt Damon, a man whom I hold in high regard, is worried about the “absurd” prospect of Sarah Palin becoming President of the United States. As Mr. Damon says, “I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. Because she’s gonna have the nuclear codes!”
Now where’s Jason Bourne when we need him?
I’ve made some (more) tweaks to the design of this website over the past few days. They’re mostly little things and, unless you visit the site often, you probably wouldn’t notice them unless I were to point them out. In fact, in comparing the design today with the template I relaunched with on the 28th June, 2008, it’s amazing to see just how much the design has changed — while still sharing a common overall aesthetic. But then this is how web-design should be isn’t it? A website evolves with small, subtle, incremental changes, yet retains its “brand” by remaining true to its original design.
While I was applying the revisions I started thinking about web-design. I considered the current state of the art, how far we’ve come (I started building websites right back in the beginning when IBrowse on the Commodore Amiga really was cutting edge), standards compliance and the W3C, etc.
The catalyst for these thoughts was my adoption of a simple little CSS3 property known as border-radius, which is used to produce the RoundRects that, depending on which browser you’re using, may or may not be visible to you when you visit this website. If you’re using a Gecko or WebKit based browser, then you’ll see this website exactly as I intended - complete with RoundRects. With other browsers you’ll only see an approximation of the design I intended.
Continue Reading…
Prompted by Jason Kottke’s recent post about his “Most-rewatched Movies” I list the ten movies that I have watched over and over again (in no particular order).
The Usual Suspects: A boat has been destroyed, criminals are dead, and the key to this mystery lies with the only survivor and his twisted, convoluted story beginning with five career crooks in a seemingly random police lineup.
Continue Reading…
I am becoming increasingly impressed and intrigued by the multimedia produced with the Processing framework. There are some stunning artworks and videos emerging and it’s all serving to make me ever more curious about the capabilities of the system.
A lot of the work produced reminds me of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST demo scene of the eighties and I find myself feeling terribly nostalgic.
But Processing isn’t just about art — the framework is also used for some very serious data visualisation too.
It’s all very impressive.
Further Reading:
The History of Visual Communication
Visualisations and Infographics
Information Aesthetics
A collection of links to pages/websites that I’ve found interesting enough that I might want to revisit them at some point. I’m publishing these here because my Safari bookmark library has become a huge, disorganised, unmanageable mess and even ninja warriors would fear to tread there.
Continue Reading…
I’m sorry to say that there may be a little downtime on the horizon. I’m transferring this domain from it’s current host to (mt) – where the site is physically hosted. It’s silly for me to be paying two suppliers in order to keep the Urban Mainframe online and there are some additional benefits in (mt) domain hosting that I’ll take advantage of including email services and DNS management.
It’ll take around 48 hours for the DNS changes to propagate fully so the dust should start to settle over the coming weekend.
See you on the flip-side…
I want to remodel my rather drab and cold computer workspace1 but I’m not quite sure what I want to do with the small amount of space my Macintosh lives in. And so I’ve spent a few hours browsing through workspace photos on Flickr for inspiration and, adopting ideas from a variety of home and office photographs, I think I’ll be able to create the perfect workspace for myself.
What follows is a gallery of those workspaces I found most appealing, with a concise commentary on what qualities appealed to me.
1. I love the simplicity and warmth of this workspace. The lighting here looks absolutely perfect for long hours in front of the computer. I think the desk lamps are gorgeous2 and the lack of visible cabling is very appealing.
People are willing to automate their current processes but not change them. They think they’re already doing it the right way. Big companies have to standardise their processes across all their different locations if they want to automate efficiently. That requires a lot of change, and a lot of resistance to that change is inevitable.
(Quotation from “Softwar, An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle” by Matthew Symonds, page 35)
It always amazes me how, when one is innocently browsing the Web, following a link can suddenly reveal an Internet gem that has previously been lost amongst billions of pages of white-noise. This happened to me yesterday - while idly clicking links on Designslices, I discovered the fabulous SpaceCollective - a website that then kept me thoroughly engrossed for hours.
“Space Collective.org is a cross-media information and entertainment channel for post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking terrestrials.”
Along with being beautifully designed and easy to navigate, SpaceCollective features some gorgeous imagery and, most importantly, interesting, informative and thought-provoking articles.
My favourite pages include:
So if you’ve got several hours (or days) to kill, head on over to SpaceCollective for some serious mental stimulation.
This is the personal website of Jonathan M. Hollin (aka DarkBlue), eccentric billionaire and consort of supermodels. [Contact Me]
I am a freelance web designer & computer programmer based in Leeds, England. I'm passionate about Apple Mac's, photography, technology & music. I'm also a super-hero in my spare time but I tend to keep quiet about that so as not to draw attention to myself.
