Telegraphics - Free ICO Format Plugin for Photoshop

After a little stumbling around looking for a way to create my favicon.ico (favicon.com has withdrawn the nice service they had there for a while), I came across Telegraphics and this file format plugin. It was reportedly tested for Photoshop 4, but I just dropped it into my Plug-Ins\File Formats folder for Photoshop 7 and it worked just great - just Save As: .ico

When I get back in the office I'll take a closer look at what it actually output in IconFactory, but so far so good in Firefox and windows IE 6.

Web design process (and the "Grey Box Methodology")

This is an interesting piece outlining one designer's process for coming up with web design comps. This addresses some common issues and starting in a vector format gives you some tools for accommodating different browser widths, content lengths, font/graphic proportions.

I agree wholly with his point that moving into the target medium too soon (html/css) is limiting - you can easily end up with colored boxes with varying borders and padding/margins (sound familiar?). But the interactive aspects of a page, and the different uses and contexts a given template might be used in (lots of content, no content) are still a problem. Yes, you can iterate over a load of cases - but who really has time to explore all the options, with every design variation? This needs to be made easier by the tool.

This is where working in the medium can be valuable. Once in html/css, its easier to test a comp by screwing with the browser (expand/contract, bump font sizes up/down, employ your various bookmarklets for grey scaling / graphics off / css off / override color/background colors etc, as well as pushing more/less content into the various content areas.

There's obviously a balance to be had, and a good process would start with sketching; defining layout and content/design element placement; some visual treatments; prototype in target medium; repeat. The key is that there be a full feedback loop through each step. The more cumbersome any one step is, the less likely it is to be employed with any frequency.

CGI Debugging

This snippet from a thread on PerlMonks:

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use diagnostics;
local $SIG{__WARN__} = \&Carp::cluck;

and this CGI Help Guide, also on PerlMonks...

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

ensure all fatals go to browser during debugging and set-up

comment this BEGIN block out on production code for security

BEGIN {
$|=1;
print “Content-type: text/html\n\n”;
use CGI::Carp(‘fatalsToBrowser’);
}

along with lots more good tips and tricks on that page.

Whitespace - the language

A programming (interpreted) language using only whitespace as its tokens: space, line-feed and tab.

Here's the perl interpreter a [collection of interpreters](https://github.com/hostilefork/whitespacers/) and an assembler for the squemish. No I've not tried it, but I love the idea.

Sun Chimes

I’ve been really getting into BEAM robotics.. most of the examples I’ve seen are mobile edge-finding / line-following / light-seeking critters. This is a whole nuther species - a solar activated chime - a very sweet idea.

Here’s one I made and sent over to my brother in Hawaii:

WinXP SP2 crack down

Whether it will do any good or not, this page outlines all the things the new service pack will object to when browsing with IE. Mostly current best-practices for pop windows have anticipated the measures MS now recommend. But some things like remote scripting might be impacted?