Mr. Speaker

Nothing like a major milestone to throw you into a whirl of nostalgic self-reflection. Today I’m 30. 30 years old. There’s no doubt about it - I’ve done the maths and it adds up. I’ve tried recounting everyday since my first memory (a huge green praying-mantis in the back yard) but there are certainly a lot of holes in there.

One thing I’ve noticed to be a recurring theme in the mesmerizing drama that is/was my life is the presence of computers. If my existence were portrayed as an art flick, you’d turn to your friend 3/4 of the way through and say “What’s with all the computers?”

In case one or more of you out there wish to produce such a film, I’ll supply some background information - so you get the details right.
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I was doing a bit of light reading today, flicking through an ASUS notebook warranty booklet (The booklet is way better than the movie). I found a section entitled TFT LCD Defect Policy that should clear up any confusion people might be having on what constitutes a problem with your notebook monitor. It states that you may claim warranty service when your screen has:

…at least 3 bright dots or 6 dark dots or 8 bright and/or dark dots in total; or 2 adjacent bright dots OR 2 adjacent dark dots; or 3 bright and/or dark dots within an area 15mm in diameter.

Yes, that one “or” was in capitals.

The booklet also had a hilarious compendium of collective nouns for pixels. Well, no that’s not true. But if it did I’d have to say my favourite one would be “a sprite of pixels”. What’s yours?

Tags: pixels

Hexadecimal sure comes in handy sometimes. Like, say, um, if you wanted to know why there was some of the alphabet on your scientific calculator for example. There’s been a few times I’ve needed the following functions to convert decimal bytes to hex in javascript: converting decimal RGB values to those #FF00FF looking ones, or far more commonly, creating XBM images by hand. You do create your XBM images by hand don’t you?

First up, here’s a javascript object I use to convert bytes (0-255) between the two numbering systems. I can’t remember where I got the guts of the dec2hex function. But I do like it:
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A while back I tried to “reverse-engineer” the Line Rider shared object - the file that stores your Line Rider Tracks. The idea was to add a much required “erase” function. I mostly figured it out - but owing to my extremely short attention span it quickly entered my immense “1/2 finished projects” repository.

In an effort to get some more posts happening around here I’ve decided to unleash a few of these 1/2 finished projects. The Line Rider File Format is the first such post. I chose this one because there is supposed to be a new version of Line Rider due out very soon - once this happens this information will be totally useless, instead of just mostly useless.
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Necessity is the mother of dodgy macros, they say. Here’s one I made to fix the stupid most recently- to last recently-used document tab order of Visual Studio. But before the code, here is my harrowing tale….

I remember doing user interface design courses in my undergrad study, and thinking “I don’t need to pay attention to this - by the time I’m out in the real world UI standards will be firmly in place.”

I remember this today as I try to tab to an open document in Visual Studio.
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A couple of years ago I had a client who insisted that they should be able to copy some cells from Excel and paste the data into their web-based inventory system. I ended up creating a faux-grid of textboxes, with a “paste-box” where they could paste the data, which would be parsed and entered into the grid. It really felt like a horrible hack - the pasted data wasn’t always in the “correct” format, and my parsing code was pretty dodgy.

But now that microformats are poised to take over the web, it’s not looking like such a stupid idea after all! Ray Ozzie outlined his “Live Clipboard” idea a few months ago and created a pretty cool system that allows you to copy and paste microformats between web pages and applications.
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