Entries from May 2008

The differences between Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on 35mm and 70mm film are stark enough, to say nothing of viewing the movie on a small screen format. I've seen 2001 well in excess of 100 times (it is, without peer, the greatest motion picture ever made), in formats as disparate as 70mm, laser disk, VHS, broadcast TV, DVD and even the awful, scratched, discolored 35mm print, complete with ... Read full entry

Though still in pre-release IETester sounds like a promising application that tests websites in a number of versions of Internet Explorer from IE 5.5 through to beta 1 of IE8. I've been playing around with it, and my god, disassociated looks terrible in IE 5.5 and 6, but I already knew that. While there's still work to do this is certainly looking promising. The "holy grail" of website testing per chance?

A study of the four best known current browsers finds Safari and Firefox (especially pending release version three) to be the best when tested against a variety of benchmarks. Web 2.0 applications and sites place the focus firmly on browser performance. Anyone who still believes that the speed of your DSL connection is the only potential bottleneck is gravely mistaken. Key parts of Ajax applications run locally, which ... Read full entry

It seems some people take to the cookie jar to sidetrack unpleasant thoughts of death. I thought when I took to the cookie jar it made for an excuse to defer a mundane task of some sort. To better understand the link between thoughts of mortality and the urge to consume, Naomi Mandel at Arizona State University, Tempe, and Dirk Smeesters at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, asked 746 ... Read full entry

Group art show Grid 01 opens at the The National Grid, in Brookvale, Sydney, next Thursday, June 5 at 6.45pm, and features the work of local and international artists Andrea Innocent, Alex Cherry, Chelsea Greene Lewyta, Lang Leav, Elise Vaughan, and Ant Keogh.

Darth Vadar and Princess Leia feature as fonts in a representation of Leia's capture by Imperial troops at the beginning of Star Wars, A New Hope. I started out trying to literally depict that scene from Star Wars using letterforms, intending to use bold letters for Vader and light letters for Princess Leia. I loved the idea of the @ sign filling in for Leia’s hair bun. But after a ... Read full entry

Author and futurist Arthur C Clarke is credited with predicting the emergence of a number of technologies, including a tablet-like device called a "Newspad", which could serve the latest news stories from electronic versions of newspapers. So far more has been said about comparing the Newspad to PDAs or Tablet PCs, but the Newpad also worked in a very similar way to ... Read full entry

Designing a good website has become too easy since the demise of the Geocities homepages of the late 1990's. Accordingly Alec Rios has prepared a great primer on designing really bad websites. From the time a visitor enters your site to the time they exit, there are plenty of effective techniques to annoy them. So in this article, I will identify 28 points to remember during a website development ... Read full entry

A Firefox plugin, Add-Art, could just be the counter balance to advertising, targeted or otherwise, that art lovers especially are looking for. Addart will work with the Adblockplus. While Adblockplus replaces each advert with a less annoying blank space, Addart will connect to an online database of artworks and dump them in the space. The picture database will be updated every two weeks and include the work ... Read full entry

British Telecom, or BT, will soon begin tracking its customer's web surfing habits to better enable the ISP to serve targeted advertising, presumably in the same fashion as Facebook. Improving targeting is the perennial obsession of the advertising sector, in line with the often-quoted saw: "I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half". The internet, where it is possible to ... Read full entry