Nevan's Page

Nominate New York Art

nevan — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:15:58 +0000

I’m putting New York Art up for nomination in the Best App Ever awards. I’ve put it in one of the smaller app categories, “Best Feel Like A Local App”. It’s a fantastic app for finding all sorts of art shows around New York, from the big famous museums to the tiny galleries in up and coming areas. You can search in categories and view the results on a map.

If you’d like to vote for the app, click here:
http://bestappever.com/c/lcap/322195848/nom

Voting closes on the 31st of December.

You can see details about the app over here:
http://nevan.net/newyorkart/

And here’s the iTunes link:
http://tinyurl.com/nyart

Mobile Orchard is one of the judges, and they’re offering to nominate their favourite app from readers. See here for details.

TinyUrl code

nevan — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 02:46:24 +0000

The tinyurl.com page has an example of urls you can use. One of them is tinyurl.com/3 which redirects to a unicycle page. I’d always assumed that they encode the url, in the same way as a zip file is an encoded version of the real file, but I guess they just have a database which keeps track of the codes. So somewhere in that database, there’s a place that says id=3 link=”unicyclepage.com/blah.html”.

It used to be that they were sequential, so if you type in tinyurl.com/4 then tinyurl.com/5 you can see those pages in the order they were input to the system. It’s always a security risk to do this, since you’ll get people who like to make scripts to go through all the pages. And you get people who can predict what the next one will be and mess with it like this.

Yesterday, I needed a way to refer to pages in a database, but didn’t want to use the primary key id (which auto increments) to do it. So I made a script to generate tinyurl style random patterns.

// make a tinyurl.com style id for pages. this one only generates 4 (or more) character // alphanumerics. there are about 1.6 million, should ben enough for most people. // it's not fussy about making pottymouth urls, like sex1 or feck, but the chances // are pretty slim... Oops, I ran it 5 times and got sexx! What're the odds? // examples: v7or vfbt im0x b7tu 59jx 3a4k a7kw mvg9 supe 1rx9 4ww6 tgpn ezb7 z6h1// let's see some examples for ($i=0; $i<14; $i++) { echo make_tiny(13); echo " "; }function make_tiny ($how_long = 4) { // make an array with the alphabet $alphabetnum = array('a','b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z', 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0); $return = ""; for ($i=0; $i<$how_long; $i++) { $char = rand (0, 35); $return .= $alphabetnum[$char]; } // could include some checking here, to see that you really have a unique id // for example, look in a database and compare the ids that are there // there's a chance that this will get recursive on your ass (if all ids are taken) // it needs extra checks to avoid an infinite loop if ($return == "v7or") { $return = make_tiny(); } return $return; }

Making paragraph indent just like in the paperbacks

nevan — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:09:50 +0000

Pick up any paperback and look at the paragraph indentation. You’ll generally see that indentation isn’t used on the first paragraph after a heading, but is on the subsequent paragraphs. If there’s a big bold heading, it’s pretty obvious that a new section is beginning, but for the paragraphs after that, the indent acts as a visual clue, letting you easily see the organization. Here’s how to do that technique in CSS.

The trick we’ll use is the p+p rule. The plus sign in CSS means “immediately following”, so p+p means a p tag which comes straight after a p tag. This means that we can set paragraphs which don’t have a heading before them to indent. Paragraphs which follow a heading won’t be affected by this rule, but the next paragraph will be (since the tag before it is a p).

Here’s an example of the HTML code to use:
<h2>The secret history of animals</h2> <p>This paragraph is coming straight after an h2 tag, so the p+p won't apply to it. The p+p rule only applies to a paragraph tag coming straight after a paragraph tag</p> <p>This paragraph will be affected though, and so will another paragraph coming straight after it. It gives the paragraphs a very "designed" feeling, looking sleek and professional.</p> <p>Here's the last paragraph, just to prove a point. If we put another heading, then a paragraph after it, that paragraph will pick up the same traits too.</p>

Here’s the basic CSS to use:

p+p { text-indent: 1em;}

you can also explicitely state that the ordinary p should have a zero indent:

p { text-indent: 0; }

but it’s not really necessary.

Heres how it looks (with a little more formatting added:

And here’s the full code:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <title>p_plus_p</title> <style> * { font-family: Georgia; color: #333;} div.box { width: 400px; } p { line-height: 1.3em; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; color: #000;} p+p { text-indent: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <div class="box"> <h2>The secret history of animals</h2> <p>This paragraph is coming straight after an h2 tag, so the p+p won't apply to it. The p+p rule only applies to a paragraph tag coming straight after a paragraph tag</p> <p>This paragraph will be affected though, and so will another paragraph coming straight after it. It gives the paragraphs a very "designed" feeling, looking sleek and professional.</p> <p>Here's the last paragraph, just to prove a point. If we put another heading, then a paragraph after it, that paragraph will pick up the same traits too.</p> </div> </body> </html>

Remember the symbol for class and id in CSS

nevan — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 04:29:32 +0000

I always mix up class and id in CSS. “Is class a dot or a hash?” “Is id a period or a pound?” So early on, I came up with a quick brain trick to help me remember which is which.

For id, the symbol is a # (hash or pound depending on your dialect). For this, I think of an id number, as in “My id is #43368″.

For class I think of the word period, and how in school we used to have a break period in the middle of the day for lunch. I imagine all these little dots sitting at their desks, and the bell going off.. end of class.

Bosozoku riding the highways of Japan

nevan — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 05:14:25 +0000

My and my friends were going to the beach in Chiba a few weeks ago. Riding along the highway, there was this huge noise as we passed a bunch of bosozoku (Japanese biker gang members) on their tricked out bikes. The bikes have old Japanese flags, big chopper style seats with backs and the silencer removed, so they make a huge clatter as they go.

I took out my camera and shot a few pics of them, and they were all waving back. Then I took a video of one of them doing tricks. Wheelies along the highway, dangerous but fun to look at.

What’s the centre of Dublin, London, Tokyo, according to google?

nevan — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:02:17 +0000

I’ve been learning how to code things with google maps today, and came across the google maps api blog. A new feature lets you get mapping results with a preference to a certain country. They encourage you to play with the new service by typing in a country code and city name, which produces a map with a push-pin at the centre of that place. The pin is centred on some strange places though..

Typing in jp (Japan) and Tokyo gives the centre in Ginza, in the NTT building (National telephone company). Typing ie (Ireland) and Dublin puts the pin at what looks like an ordinary residential house in Sussex Road, near Leeson Street. London gives a traffic island just near Parliament square, close to the Westminster tube station.

To try it, just zoom in with the + sign and click the map button.
http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2007/06/v282-set-countryviewport-restrictions.html

Google Analytics

nevan — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:28:36 +0000

I added google analytics to this site. It’s not because I want to see how many visitors are coming (I know, it’s not many) but because I’d like to see any searches that are leading here. The dreamhost web control panel isn’t all that exciting, and I don’t want to work too hard at getting stats.

Google analytics made it real easy to install, and I used a plugin from http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/ to add a wordpress plugin, which just inserts the javascript at the top of every page. Now I get to see all the funky searches that people are using on the web, a little peep into peoples minds.

MacOS MySQL terminal tip

nevan — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:10:00 +0000

Here’s something that saves me time when I’m starting a new database and still testing PHP scripts which input to the database. I want to clear the database of all information, but don’t want to have to recreate the database structure. I just want a bare bones database with no content, so I can see exactly what information is going in and what information is getting messed up along the way.

I’m working in terminal. I write a series of commands to delete the contents of the tables I want cleared. Instead of pressing return each time, I separate them with a semicolon. Here’s an example:

delete from authors;delete from reports;delete from paper_authors; delete from journals;

This deletes all information from the four tables: authors, reports, paper_authors and journals.

Now I highlight the line, right up to the last semicolon, and drag it to the desktop to make a clipping. Next time I want to clear my db, I drag the clipping from the desktop onto the terminal window and press enter. Automagic.

You can do this with any command you want too, from ftp open commands to long folder names. Drag any folder onto the terminal window and the path shows up, saving lots of stubby fingers.

And for an extra bit of magic, look what happens when you drag a folder on a BBEdit or Textedit window. Useful for folders of mp3s.

Safari 3 makes my gmail slow

nevan — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 03:17:20 +0000

I downloaded the new safari beta 3 to see what it is like. I love the speed that it renders web pages, it’s definitely faster than firefox on mac. There’s still a lot missing though. The first thing I looked for was google chat in gmail, which has never been available for me in safari. It still isn’t there though, so I’ll have to keep using iChat for my gChat. The next thing I noticed was that gmail has started sputtering, taking forever to load the inbox, giving errors when trying to send mail, generally giving strange errors which I’ve never seen before.

The windows version was nice too, for speed at least. I don’t know what that funky big bar on top is like. Now it looks like an upside down imac. Big forehead browser.

Identifont identified the typeface in nymphomation

nevan — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:07:42 +0000

One of the sites which really make the internet great is Identifont. If you’re looking to find out what a particular typeface is, you can go there, answer a series of questions about the shapes of the letters, and it will give you your font. It gives a nice link to a place where you can buy it too, presumably where it’s making money from.
I was reading a little of Jeff Noon’s “nymphomation“, and thought that the font might be Futura. I went to the site, answered 22 questions such as..

“what shape is the tail on the capital Q?”
“is the dot on the i round or square?”

and found out that the typeface they use in my copy is “Avenir”, not Futura. Here’s the link to it.
Avenir