February 2008

February 29, 2008


February 27, 2008

Catfishes and speed fixes

Here’s a handy Catfish plugin for Jquery. The author’s site seems to have disappeared, so I can’t comment there, but the one big thing to fix in this is to include a “speed fix”, which smoothes the jerkiness in the IE6 expression-based workaround.

Sitepoint’s original Catfish implementation was great, but big and slow pages tend to react badly with their IE6 workaround. Another approach is to use expressions to emulate position: fixed.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type="text/css">

body { background: url(hack) fixed; } /* 'speed fix', fixes the jerkiness of IE6 */
#catfish {
    position: absolute;
    top: expression(
        offset = parseInt(catfish.offsetHeight),
        document.documentElement.scrollTop + document.documentElement.clientHeight - offset + 'px'
    );
}

</style>
<![endif]-->

Ilya

February 25, 2008


February 23, 2008

Kiitos ei pelimiehille

Kipein adressi ikinä.

Ilya

Älä pilaa tätä vitsiä

Hikipediassa on sivu, jossa naureskellaan adressien tehottomuudelle. Huvittava lisä on tietysti se, että ainakin yksi väitteistä ei pidä paikaansa*, ja että kohdan muokkaa-linkin takaa löytyy kommentti “älä lisää tähän” mitään.

Ilya

February 22, 2008

True stories

Stumbling upon some books on Amazon is like getting lost within some strange alternate universe. Witness the art of Ben Mezrich: Rigged (The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai), Ugly Americans (The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions), Breaking Las Vegas, Busting Vegas (The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees), Bringing Down the House (The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions).

Ilya

February 20, 2008

Brain trickery

Helsingin Sanomat ran a story on the brain and how it processes stimuli. The story, published on February 12th, is behind a paywall, but I thought I’d post some of the links mentioned.

At first listen, this clip doesn’t make sense. But then listen to this, and return to the first clip. Sine-wave speech becomes decipherable after the brain knows what it is listening to.

Dropping syllables from recorded speech makes it nearly unintelligable (listen). But filling the gaps with static restored their comprehensibility (listen). Makio Kashino’s paper.

McGurk Effect — how your eyes throw off the ear. A great demonstration that visual cues are an integral part of speech recognition.

Looking isn’t necessarily seeing. For an infamous example, watch this video and “count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black.” Then proceed to step two.

Another example of attention in seeing is shown in the flicker paradigm: “A large fraction of traffic accidents are of the type ‘driver looked but failed to see’. Here, drivers collide with pedestrians in plain view, with cars directly in front of them (the classic ‘rear-ender’), and even run into trains. (That’s right — run into trains, not the other way around.) In such cases, information from the world is entering the driver’s eyes. But at some point along the way this information is lost, causing the driver to lose connection with reality. They are looking but they are not seeing.”

Ilya

February 19, 2008


February 16, 2008


February 13, 2008


February 10, 2008


February 8, 2008


February 7, 2008


February 6, 2008


February 1, 2008

  • flot. A chart plotting library for jQuery.