ericmiraglia.com

When you listen to an audiobook on an iPod, the default scanning speed is, of course, “1x,” which means that the audio plays at normal speed. But there is also a “2x” button that allows you to play the audio back twice as fast as it was recorded — without changing the pitch. It takes a little while to get used to the increased pace, and there are some unnatural tonal artifacts that sound strange, but when you’re listening to an educational book or anything you want to get through quickly it’s incredibly efficient. After a few minutes, the artificiality falls away and your ear and brain make the adjustment on the fly.

But then you find yourself throughout the day stuck in normal-speed conversations, and sometimes you start looking at people’s foreheads and wishing you could find that little 2x button.

Reading Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt, I have discovered more superfluous evidence that I am a colossal pansy. She writes about Teddy Roosevelt giving a speech during the presidential campaign:

Roosevelt, still famously energetic at fifty-four, greeted his admirers with characteristic vigor, pumping his left arm in the air like a windmill. His right arm, however, hung motionless at his side. The last time Roosevelt had given a speech—just two weeks earlier, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—he had been shot in the chest by a thirty-six-year-old New York bartender named John Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant who feared that Roosevelt’s run for a third term was an effort to establish a monarchy in the United States. Incredibly, Roosevelt’s heavy army overcoat and the folded fifty-page manuscript and steel spectacle-case he carried in his right breast pocket had saved his life, but the bullet had plunged some five inches deep, lodging near his rib cage. That night, whether out of an earnest desire to deliver his message or merely an egotist’s love of drama, Roosevelt had insisted on delivering his speech to a terrified and transfixed audience. His coat unbuttoned to reveal a bloodstained shirt, and his speech held high so that all could see the two sinister-looking holes made by the assailant’s bullet, Roosevelt had shouted, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”

“Sorry, Nancy, I forgot to duck” may be glib, but Teddy didn’t bother to stop the speech he was giving. Doctors left the bullet inside him; ‘in later years, when asked about the bullet inside him, Roosevelt would say, “I do not mind it anymore than if it were in my waistcoat pocket.”‘[wikipedia]

Urgent-care receptionist: “You don’t look so great.”

Me: “Unfortunately, this is just how I look.”

Doctor: “You don’t look so great.”

Me: “I get that a lot. Is there a pill for that?”

Doctor: “That would be above my pay grade. So, you have Yellow Fever and H1N1 symptoms after being vaccinated last week, your teeth are chattering although it’s 75° in here, there’s a burning sensation when you urinate, and your urine smells like sulfur?”

Me: “Mild burning.”

Doctor: “This couldn’t wait until Monday?”

Some notes from a recent presentation on HTML5, CSS3, and other current proposals that are starting to see real world browser implementations — serves as a starter linkography for reading up on recent developments.

[download slides/12MB PDF]

The Specification

• HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML (current editor’s draft on the W3C website)
• Differences between HTML 4 and HTML5 (W3C document)
• 2004 announcement of the WHAT Working Group’s formation

HTML

• W3C HTML5 markup summary, includes new/updated flags for markup elements
• New semantic HTML tags
  • Headers and Header Groups
  • Footer
  • Section, Article and Aside
• New input types
• Audio and Video
  • Opt-in page for YouTube HTML5 Video Player
  • Sample Yahoo! media page (view in iPhoneOS)
  • Interactive video demo (view in FF)
• 2D drawing APIs:
  • Canvas
    • CanvasDemos.com: playground of canvas-based explorations.
    • Liquid Particles Demo
    • Tweetflare Demo
    • Flot plotting library: Based on jQuery; there is a YUI 2 Flot implementation by Philip Tellis.
  • SVG
    • Raphael: JavaScript library to harness SVG — rapid uptake in popularity and use.
    • sfgweb: SVG library that provides a Flash fallback for IE.
    • SVG-Wow.org: Compelling demos of SVG animation and interactivity.
• 3D drawing API: WebGL, a low-level 3D drawing language based on OpenGL, leveraging Canvas and JavaScript.
• ARIA (video demo of how ARIA helps improve the screen reader experience)

CSS

• CSS Current Work (W3C)
• Interactive rounded corners demo
• Drop shadows
  • Box-shadow and text-shadow interactive demo
• Other new CSS levers:
  • Wichary and Delgado’s deck has a nice exploration of additional CSS features that are nearing the cusp — CSS Gradients, text- and box-specific opacity, HSL controls, new background image control, and more.
• Multi-column layouts:
  • Interactive multicolumn example
  • PPK’s multi-column CSS tests
  • W3C multi-column CSS candidate recommendation
• Transitions:
  • CSS Transition — Fading large and small images
  • [For comparison] JS Transition — Fading large and small images
  • CSS transitions interactive demo — reacting to hover
• Transformations:
  • 2D Transformation functions: Position, scale, rotation, skew (Examples: Simple image table with pure CSS)
  • 3D Transformation functions: Position, scale, rotation, perspective (Examples: Simple Flip, 3D Cube, Rings, Photo Rings)
  • W3C CSS 2D Transforms Working Draft
  • W3C CSS 3D Transforms Working Draft

Client-side JavaScript

• Geolocation
  • Geolocation demo #1
  • Geolocation demo #2
• Client-side storage
  • Key-value storage scoped to the session or persistent (demo)
  • SQL storage on the client (demo; tutorial/intro)
• Application Cache
  • Alex Kessinger’s HTML5 iPhone application tutorial on Six Revisions
• Element Selection (querySelectorAll() and getElementsByClassName()): The important point here is that these apis are now implemented in native code and according to a commons spec, which means that the venerable JS library implementations of this functionality will become less important over time. Native implementations are much faster.
• Document Editing
• Drag and Drop (brief tutorial, example)
• Notifications – think Growl for web-apps — unbaked, Chromium only
  • W3C Web Notifications Editor’s Draft
  • Live Demos (CSSNinja; requires recent Chrome or Chromium)
• Web Workers
  • Prime number example without Web Workers
  • Prime number example using Web Workers
  • Motion detection in video (FF-only)
• ECMAScript 5 (ES5 Harmony)
  • ECMAScript 5 browser compatibility tables (by kangax)

Server-side JavaScript

• Ryan Dahl presents Node.js at JSConf.eu: This was a seminal moment in the history of the SSJS movement, and in the months since Node.js has built substantial momentum.
• Server-Side JavaScript: Back with a Vengeance: Michael Mahemoff’s exploration of SSJS in December 2009 for ReadWriteWeb.
• Node.js, YUI 3 & Dom Manipulation… Oh My!: Where this is headed — full access to DOM interfaces on the server, supported by libraries like YUI.
• Coming Soon — Node.js/DOM/YUI videos: On May 5 2010, Yahoo! hosted a special BayJax event with some of the leading developers in the SSJS world. The video from that event should be available within a few days on YUI Theater.

More Reading

• When Can I Use?: Browser-support tables with notes and demo links for a variety of HTML5, CSS3, and other techniques.
• HTML5 Readiness visualization: Paul Irish uses the data from When Can I Use? to create a nice visualization of how different “HTML5″ features are working their way into mainstream browsers.
• Dive into HTML 5: Mark Pilgrm of Google is writing his new HTML5 book online (incomplete but evolving, with excellent descriptions of how we got where we are).
• Feature Detection: Mark Pilgrim’s appendix provides detailed codesamples for doing feature detection with almost all key HTML5 features.
• HMTL5: Web Development to the Next Level: An interactive slide presentation by Marcin Wichary, written in HTML5. For best results, view in Chrome or Chromium and read the disclaimer.
• Brad Neuberg — Introduction to HTML5: YUI Theater video from October, 2009, with a special emphasis on SVG and Canvas.
• Jeremy Keith on HTML5 in conversation with Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman, episode 2 of The Big Web Show.
• Safari CSS Visual Effects Guide (Apple Developer Center)
• CSS Recipes for WebKit (Apple Developer Center)

Demo Apps

• EveryTimeZone.com: This application by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs uses CSS 3 transitions and transformations; it uses the Application Cache to allow the application to run offline and be bookmarked to the iPhoneOS desktop. It uses proprietary Apple-specific extensions to define icons for use on the iPhoneOS desktop.
• The Man from Hollywood: Tyler Gaw describes his demo as follows: “The Man From Hollywood is a kinetic type animation using only HTML, CSS and Javascript. All of the animation is done using Webkit CSS transition, transforms, as well as standard CSS properties. Javascript just acts as a helper to turn CSS classnames on and off at the appropriate times. All of the content you see on the demo is HTML and CSS, no images were used. The audio clip is scene from the movie Four Rooms.”
• Firefox Download Statistics: Vector map created in SVG; live sparklines and download points rendered in Canvas.
• Coverflow Pattern Implemented for iPhoneOS Safari: Charles Ying’s “CSS-VFX” library demo — iPhoneOS-only, best viewed in an iPhone in landscape orientation.
• Snowstack Flickr Mashup for iPhone OS: Charles Ying’s photostack demo — iPhoneOS-only.

From Holy City down to Lexington, up Black Road to Summit and then over to Hwy. 9. Down Hwy. 9 to 236 to loop through Big Basin and through to Boulder Creek. Quick jog up to Bear Creek Road to go over the hill back to Lexington, then back up Old Santa Cruz to Holy City. No problem.

The hills above PCH south of Point Lobos are covered with poppies, lupine, larkspur, and deep green grass after a good series of early spring rains.

Weekend lovefest with the Madone.

After ordering a variety of items (no more than 1 of each item) on the Apple Store recently, I got the following email from Apple:

To ensure that all customers are given equal opportunity to acquire this product we have limited the amount available per customer. Therefore, this order has been cancelled.

Upon calling Apple’s Customer Care line, I was told that my order had been summarily cancelled because Apple believed I was ordering one of the items to resell it rather than for personal use. They suggested trying to place the order again but to use a different shipping address. (What?)

I’m no MBA, but accusing your customers of fraud seems like an odd approach. Your products have to be a LOT better than the competition at that point…and maybe they are today, but will they maintain that gap?

When lifetime Macolytes start rooting against Apple, that can’t be a good sign.

Getting ready for the Santa Cruz half marathon tomorrow, but a little daunted by a weather forecast calling for 40something degrees, heavy rain, and big wind, it was nice to see this message on the the lower back extension of my cycling/jogging parka: Never a bad time to ride. Or: “Suck it up and get out there, you big pansey.”

Weather aside, the route looks amazing — all along the water for a few miles, then out on a paved path to the dirt roads on the sea cliffs at Wilder, then back into the wind to Cowells and to the finish on the sand.

Mady is sitting on the couch talking to Emily.

“Hang on,” Mady says, “I need to check the Bruce news for the latest on the divorce trial.”

“Bruce is getting divorced?” Emily asks.

“No, it’s some other couple, but they say the reason they’re getting divorced is because Bruce was moving in on the wife.”

“Oh, that’s not good,” Emily says.

“And it makes me sad if it’s true,” Mady says, “to think that he cheats.”

She pauses a moment, pulling on her lip.

“And then I thought about it more, and I thought: Hey, Bruce cheats…?”