Firelight

Illumination from the residents of Firefall, LLC

The latest way to solve PNG transparency in IE 6 and 5.5

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I was reading Daring Fireball as I do each day and noticed a blurb on Drew McLellan’s post about Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 on 24 ways.

I’ve been using PNG Fix by Bob Osola, for all of my foreground PNG files, and manually adding the IE image filters through conditionally included CSS for the background images. However SuperSlight does both, obviating this need.

My gratitude to those who keep reinventing wheels and making things better for the rest of us.

The One Hand Bandit

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Our good friend Ryan O’Neil needed a site that allowed him to easily connect with his fans. A blog alone would’ve done the trick. However, a standalone blog based on pre-built templates just doesn’t offer a level of personalization and uniqueness that an artist deserves.

The solutions to these problems are not difficult or complex. The solution is to blend together the ease of use of a blogging platform with the extensibility of Strict HTML and CSS.

As is the case in most of our projects, the objectives are clear: cleanliness in design, simplicity in maintenance, value through simplicity, a stable foundation, and an adherence to standards through semantic markup.

All Ryan has to do is focus on the message. We take care of the rest.

U.S. States CSV / SQL

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I needed a mySQL table containing the common names of the U.S. States and their two letter abbreviations. I quickly Googled and couldn’t find anything. Maybe I didn’t search long enough. All I found was a Wikipedia article that listed them.

I grabbed the contents, formatted them with BBEdit to a CSV and imported them into mySQL. Just so no one else has to do that, here you go: state.csv, state.sql

Hope this helps someone.

HadarMetalDesign.com

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Working with our friends at Mogollon we just wrapped up Hadar Metal Design. Mogollon provided the clean industrial design and we did the rest in [valid] HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS.

We made use of JavaScript to perform in-page scrolling, where Flash might have otherwise been used. This keeps the content accessible to all users, and even better, to search engines, err I mean Google. We also tried to keep the markup as semantic as possible to give the site the best chance of being properly indexed with context. It’s probably not as pure as it could have been, we ended up using tables for the scrolling portions so we didn’t have to rely on endless browser hacks. Actually the CSS is relatively hack free.

Expendable Storage

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From: [deleted]
Subject: another hard drive to [deleted]server
Date: July 25, 2007 3:52:01 PM EDT
To: scott[deleted]

Hi Scott,
We need to expend the available space of [deleted] server.

Can you purchase an additional drive and install it?

(more info)

WTF

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Frequently we are the recipient of e-mails that are so poorly constructed they are nothing less then offensive. Dan remarked recently that it must have taken more effort to write it incorrectly then to just use real words and write in full sentences. Not only do we suffer the barrage of willful negligence, but sometimes we encounter remarks so bazar that we can only hope it was a joke. Deep down we know that it’s not really a joke, and people treat e-mail like time-delayed IM.

With that said, I’d like to introduce a new series of posts that will highlight some of these shining examples. Each of them will be tagged with wtf and sufficiently conceal the identity of the offending party.

Here we go:

From: [deleted]
Subject: Re: Embedded Font Temporary Location
Date: July 17, 2007 10:35:48 AM EDT
To: scott[deleted]

That’s on the computer?

Oh Wow

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Dan, has an alter ego, 100dbs, which is not news to us, but this video from one of his fans is. Dan said he doesn’t know this person at all.

My fear of web-cams is at an all time high.