Horrell.ca

For some odd reason if you want to watch the following video from Microsoft at the Channel 9 site about the IE 9’s support for standards and interoperability, you are prompted to install Silverlight.

I just thought I'd post this to show them how it's done. The quality of the Ogg file isn't the greatest so apologies for anyone using Firefox 3.5 or Chrome. Update: I removed the Ogg version of the video to cut back on bandwidth usage.

You may have heard about Kanye West storming the VMA stage during Taylor Swift’s speech. To mark that event I bring you the Kanye Bomb, an easy way to add an interrupting Kayne to your site.

Download the file below, follow the README and enjoy!

A new phenomenon has hit the web: Squirrel Photobombing. I first discovered this on Cute Overload and Intelligent Travel. It’s taking over!

To join in the fun, I’ve created Squirrel Pop, an easy way to add the Banff squirrel sitebomb (yes, I just made that up) to your site.

Download the file below, follow the README and enjoy!

There’s an interesting article over at Surfin’ Safari about FOUC or Flash of Unstyled Content. Anyone accessing my site using Safari will already know what this is if not what it’s called.

Basically, it’s a glitch that happens when a website is rendered in a user agent (a web browser) where, for a bief moment, the user (that’s, like, you) sees an unstyled version of the page before it fully loads. This happens a lot in Safari if the page in question has Google Ads — like the main page of my site. So if you see it while browsing my site: it’s not you, it’s not me, it’s Safari.

And this isn’t a unique issue with Safari. Internet Explorer has (or had, I don’t know if they fixed it in version 6) the same problem under different circumstance as well as explained here.

Of course, I could always remove the ads but after 4 years I’ve “earned” just over $50.00! That’s American dollars! Yeah, you see thing thing is, Google only sends you a cheque for every $100.00 so I haven’t actually seen that money yet. Bah!

Could someone in the Rails developer community please create a webmail application that periodically saves what I’m writing?

I have this habit of spending a painstakingly long time writing emails and by the time I’m ready to send it, my session times out and I pretty much lose all of my eloquent and thoughtful prose. I know, I know, I should be frequently saving it as draft, but my brain doesn’t work that way and imagine I’m not alone in this. And hey, I’ve used a few webmail accounts in my day and it’s clearly an area that needs improvement.

Look, I figure with the whole Ajax and XMLHttpRequest business, this should really be a done deal.

What I’m after is the simplicity and usefulness of Basecamp, with an autosave feature that backs up what I’m writing every 2-3 minutes.

I mean come on, that shouldn’t be so hard, should it?