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It was a very lucky night for me last night at the Carcass reunion tour at the House of Blues.

The night started out with Finnish guys Rotten Sound which put on a solid performance. Next Aborted picked up and man those fellas really sounded good live, one heck of a pit frenzy. Chatted with some old school and new school fans in and around the show during the breaks. Saw Shane from Napalm hanging out at a T-shirt booth with a sign behind him saying “Don’t Ask Stupid Questions” which was pretty hilarious.

After Aborted 1349 went on which I had never seen live before. They use face makeup and are pretty fast for a black metal band. Suffocation presented a nice change in the pace of the pit and I have to say that was the only band that I actually understood what the singer was saying when talking to the audience between songs. They really grinded up the crowd when the played Infecting the Crypts.

Then finally the moment of truth, after a 30 minute setup period. CAR CASS CAR CASS chants started. There was a very creative intro with a formal sounding lady’s voice with a British accent reading a very morbid script. Really cool stuff, I wish I had that script or hear it again. Then for the first time in more than 15 years Carcass came out and they played one heck of show. Last time I had seen them was with Death (RIP) and Pestilence back on 10/05/1990 at the legendary Country Club (used in the Boogie Nights movie) in Reseda, which is no more. I can’t say enough about how truly good Carcass was last night. Truly a legendary band with a classy performance. Bill Steer, Michael Amott, Jeffery Walker, and Daniel Erlandsson (deep resume) subbing in for Ken Owen who is out due to a brain hemorrhage. My prayers and best wishes go out to Ken. They played lots of their classics like “Incarnated Solvent Abuse” and “Exhume To Consume” and amazingly done. I would say the sounded even better than they did last time I saw them live.

So the lucky part was at the end when Daniel came out and threw out his drum sticks and one landed almost perfectly vertically and between my two feet. This was with about 50 other people trying to get it with their hands up in the air. I was so happy!! Here’s a photo of it, I will cherish it for ever.

Long live the English Death Grind core Kings Carcass. I’m predicting this tour will somehow influence them to create a new album once they get back home. They are playing tonight at the Grand Ballroom in San Francisco. Don’t miss it! It might be the last. Here are a few shots I took last night with my phone.

More old school death metal is on the way, Obituary are set to play HOB next Wednesday 9/24/08. I will try to make it there.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of trying to read those reCaptcha messages when going through TicketMaster sales screens. But hey at least they are helping a non-profit build an internet library which is great right?

As if it is not bad enough that they have a pretty annoying and unusable multi-step, multi-page ticket sales process, recently they are starting to give out some borderline non-sense captcha validation images. How many people would just say “forget it” and leave? Well not many, since TM is an undocumented Monopoly for ticket sales in my opinion. Pretty bad user experience overall. I would love if they at least put the reCaptcha page on the same page as the ticket search form to cut down page loads. Better yet, make the whole process an ajax based system so you never have to leave the order page. It sucks to go through a blinding reCaptcha page and then get the dreaded “You’re Screwed” all sold out page. Just tell me right upfront: “Hey Don’t bother, no seats are available mr!” and don’t waste my time. I mean I have to pay an inflated ticket price + order processing fees + convenience fees + delivery fees. Can we at least get a convenient to use website?

I went ahead and did a 2 minute reshuffling of the order form for TicketMaster and this is what I came up with. Just put all forms on one page and got rid of the clutter. Progress bar and search results would appear on the same page.

I noticed also that there are now TicketMaster hosted auctions and scalping services on site. Wonder how far they have to push the envelope before regulators are forced to step in.

Finally got a look at the Bill Gates / Jerry Seinfeld ads for Microsoft. Pretty unconventional stuff and sometimes funny. There is no mention of Apple in the ad at all, which is what I was naturally expecting to see. This ad made me realize how much I miss Seinfeld. It been pretty cool to have other ads with Morty, Newman and Elaine. Take a look for yourself. I can go for a Churro right about now!

Here is an alternate pwned ending version, pretty weird.

Brand new Ad

Yet another browser? Well here we go again. Let’s take a look at Chrome and see what it has to offer. The download page is located here. The installer for Windows XP is only 474KB! You can watch the press conference video about Google Chrome or read the Google Chrome Book in the meantime.

What we knew so far about Chrome

First Impressions

Installation was a breeze and imported FireFox settings. No status bar, You only see the status bar when you hover over a hyperlink. The Task Manager (Shift + Escape) updates in real time and shows memory, CPU and network usage for each tab, each plugin, and the main Chrome process separately. There is also a link to Stats for Nerds with lots more gritty info. The Flash plugin is extremely CPU usage intensive and causes sluggishness when scrolling. I just loaded a popular flash website and noticed my machine came down to a near halt. It seems to happen more with Flash files that contain infinite loops, using as much as 70% of the CPU.
The built in JavaScript console looks like a combination of FireBug and Web Inspector. There is a built in JavaScript Debugger (Alt + `) Passes the Acid 2 test. Chrome gets a score of 78 on the Acid 3 test, which is higher than FireFox 3 at 57, Safari at 72, and Opera at 45.
Omnibar - this is the URL/location bar in Chrome that has some fuzzy logic built in to suggest “smart” autocompletes. This is the current order of the drop down in the auto complete list. There seems to be no way of changing this ordering as of now. Would be nice to be able to customize them.
 

 

Search Google for FOOBAR FOOBAR/ (I’m not sure how useful this one is really) Link to the FOOBAR Wikipedia page Link to I’m Feeling Lucky URL for term FOOBAR. This item gives you the ability to search within the URL. For example if you type in Amazon in the Omnibar and select the amazon.com option using the down arrows, you will see “Press Tab to Search Amazon”. See below instruction on implementing this search functionality for your website. Search Google for FOOBAR ANOTHER TERM Search Google for FOOBAR ANOTHER TERM A page in your history pertaining to FOOBAR Link to history search for pages about FOOBAR

Cool Developer related stuff in Chrome

Google Chrome User Agent String:

Chrome has a menu option called “Create application shortcuts…” that uses Google Gears to create a shortcut to your webapp. Users can choose to place the shortcut to your webapp on their Desktop, on the Start menu and even the Quick launch bar in Windows. This is a pretty powerful feature. When a user clicks this icon, Chrome opens up without the Omnibar, and your website will appear in an “Application” format. You can customize how Chrome creates these shortcuts using meta tags. These tags are named: application-name, description, application-url, and shortcut icons in both 32×32 or 48×48 formats. The favicon is used if not specified. For example you can use the following HTML code in the head of your document. Note that with the Mozilla added support which is used in Chrome, you can use any supported graphic format as your favicon, and not just the old school favicon.ico file.

<head>
  <meta name="application-name" content="Gmail"/>
  <meta name="description" content="Google's approach to email"/>
  <meta name="application-url" content="http://www.gmail.com"/>
  <link rel="icon" href=gmail_32x32.png sizes="32x32"/>
  <link rel="icon" href=gmail_48x48.png sizes="48x48"/>
</head>

To open a new tab from your webapp in a separate process using JavaScript you can do this in Chrome.

var w = window.open();
w.opener = null;
w.document.location = "http://differentsite.com/index.html";

Chrome lets users search your website from its ominbar. To enable and include your website’s search in Chrome you have to create an OpenSearch description document (OSDD).
For example you can create something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
   <ShortName>Web Search</ShortName>
   <Description>Use Example.com to search the Web.</Description>
   <Tags>example web</Tags>
   <Contact>admin@example.com</Contact>
   <Url type="application/atom+xml"
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}&amp;format=atom"/>
   <Url type="application/rss+xml"
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}&amp;format=rss"/>
   <Url type="text/html" 
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}"/>
   <LongName>Example.com Web Search</LongName>
   <Image height="64" width="64" type="image/png">http://example.com/websearch.png</Image>
   <Image height="16" width="16" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">http://example.com/websearch.ico</Image>
   <Query role="example" searchTerms="cat" />
   <Developer>Example.com Development Team</Developer>
   <Attribution>
     Search data Copyright 2005, Example.com, Inc., All Rights Reserved
   </Attribution>
   <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
   <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
   <Language>en-us</Language>
   <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
   <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
 </OpenSearchDescription>

Fore more tips read the Google Chrome FAQ for web developers page.

ps. Don’t use the Google gears Chrome download page which gives a JavaScript error!

_GU_SetupOneClick is not defined
onload(load )

The arguments object in JavaScript is a local variable in any function that provides some nice features we can use in our code. Here is the list of its properties and related properties of the Function object.

arguments itself returns an object that looks like an array (but not really an array) of the arguments passed to the function.

Prior to JavaScript 1.4 the Function object also had a similar arguments property, which is now deprecated.

However the Function object comes with a few other useful properties that we can still use to get argument related data.

function callTaker(a,b,c,d,e){
  // arguments properties
  console.log(arguments);
  console.log(arguments.length);
  console.log(arguments.callee);
  console.log(arguments[1]);
  // Function properties
 console.log(callTaker.length);
  console.log(callTaker.caller);
  console.log(arguments.callee.caller);
  console.log(arguments.callee.caller.caller);
  console.log(callTaker.name);
  console.log(callTaker.constructor);
}
 
function callMaker(){
  callTaker("foo","bar",this,document);
}
 
function init(){
  callMaker();
}

For demonstration purposes, you can run the init function above and view the logs in FireBug.

arguments object and its properties

arguments returns ["foo", "bar", Window, Document]

arguments.length returns 4

arguments.callee returns callTaker(a, b, c, d, e)

arguments[1] returns bar

Function object and its argument related properties

callTaker.length returns 5

callTaker.caller is the same as arguments.callee.caller and returns callMaker()

callTaker.name returns callTaker

callTaker.constructor returns Function()

Basic Usage Sample

var dataArray = ["One", "Two", "Three", "Four"];
 
var lister = function createList(list) {
 if(arguments.length == 3){
  var result = "<" + arguments[1] + ">";
  for (var i = 0; i < arguments[2].length; i++){
   result += "<li>" + arguments[2][i] + "</li>";
  }
  result += "</" + arguments[1] + "l>";
  document.getElementById(arguments[0]).innerHTML = result;
 }
}
 
function makeList(){
 lister("list_HTML","ul",dataArray);
}

Run the sample

References:
JavaScript Stack Trace
Function
arguments

Looks like the long awaited web 2.0izing of the del.icio.us website is finally here. Very sleek and sexy is my first impression.

Take a look at some of the older user interfaces to get a sense for how del.icio.us has evolved until now. Aside from the new look there are new features as well. The delicious dev team has supposedly completely rewritten the code base, to allow for a more scalable and spry tool.

New features:

Navigation: New simple CSS tabs with onclick drop down menus make is simple to find your tasty bookmarks. The navigation structures seems to borrow from Flickr. Search also comes with a simple drop down option list to find stuff in your bookmarks, network or everyone.

Bookmarks: You have Title view, regular view and Full View options here. View your popular bookmarks to filter the good stuff and filter down more by choosing fresh only.

Sidebar: is updated to show a relative set of tags related to your left content pane.

Action Box: This light blue box in the sidebar shows the common tasks for the given page.

Search URL: This is a reverse search for bookmarks and pulls in the ones with the given URL along with tags used for that URL by each user, broken down in chronological order. You can also view the notes added by each user to the given URL.

Settings: The settings page is laid out with all the actions listed on one page, similar to a sitemap.

Forums: There is a support forum that looks more like a categorized list of links than a forum. I like the non-cluttered design. Reminds me of Drupal.

As in the past their API is still available for developer consumption.

Appstore app for WordPress is out … whooptie doo

The concept of collapsing margins is very simple but to fully understanding its behaviors in CSS can be tough at first. When 2 or more vertical margins hit each other, they are combined (collapsed) to form just one margin. The largest of the margins is the one rendered in the flow. The formula in theory then, for the bottom or top margin of the adjoining boxes will be:

margin-top | margin-bottom: max( marginbox 1 … marginbox n)

When it comes to the real world there are 3 major categories of margin collapsing. So let’s figure out how these 3 types of collapsing work and how to tame them.

1) Adjoining boxes of sibling elements:

The bottom margin of an in-flow block-level element is always adjoining to the top margin of its next in-flow block-level sibling, unless that sibling has clearance.

 <div>
  <div>content</div>
  <div>content</div>
 </div>

While margin collapsing is great for written text such as paragraphs and headings etc., it can get somewhat tricky if you’re trying to get pixel perfect spacing between your boxes, so there might come a time when you want to disable margin collapsing. Take a look at these examples that suggest ways of uncollapsing your margins.

So it seems the only way to break out of collapsing that works in both IE and FF is our second example by using floats and clear combined. You might have noticed the above 4 boxes themselves also have 20px margins which have collapsed to form 20px margins within our 3 adjoining sections in the middle.

2) Adjoining boxes of ancestor elements:

The top or bottom margins of contained elements will always collapse together to form one margin. If the element’s margins are collapsed with its parent’s top margin, the top border edge of the box is defined to be the same as the parent’s. Below is the sample HTML and diagram and explanation of how to avoid this.

 <div>
  <div>content</div>
 </div>

Remember that collapsing only happens if the margins actually touch one another. In this case the inner box’s margin ends where the outer box’s margin starts, therefore they are touching. One easy way to avoid this type of margin collapsing is to add either vertical borders or vertical padding to the parent box. Take a look at these examples:

3) Self collapsing boxes:

Empty block level elements result in a special case of margin collapsing. Their top and bottom margins actually touch each other and they basically self destruct based on the rules of margin collapsing. According to the W3C: An element’s own margins are adjoining if the ‘min-height’ property is zero, and it has neither top or bottom borders nor top or bottom padding, and it has a ‘height’ of either 0 or ‘auto’, and it does not contain a line box, and all of its in-flow children’s margins (if any) are adjoining.

 <div>
  <div>content</div>
  <div></div>
  <div>content</div>
 </div>

Another obvious way to break out of collapsing is changing the display to absolute. Finally, note that the margins of the root element box in any document never collapse. There are a few rules for negative margins when it comes to collapsing. I will try to write another post on this later.

I’ve created a demo page here with the above examples.

References and Acknowledgments

W3C Box Model Collapsing Margins,
Andy Budd No margin for error,
Research Kitchen CSS Autoheight and Margin Collapsing,
Complex Spiral Uncollapsing-margins,
La Chatte Noire tests: block formatting context, display:inline-block and margin collapsing

It seems there is no way to set the frequency of when FireFox3 checks for new files on the server. If you are a web developer and are testing your code, you really want the browser to check for changes “every time” you refresh the page. You can always force the clean refresh by holding down the Command key (aka Apple key) on Macs or Shift on Windows.

There is a less painful way to do this in the advanced settings of FF3. Just open up about:config and look for browser.cache.check_doc_frequency. The value can be:
0 once per session
1 everytime
2 never
3 when out of date (default)

I recommend changing this value to 1 if you are developing and testing code.

You will then see lots of 304 not modified messages, and get 200s for your changed files.

Looking for royalty free photos to use in your next web or print design? Here is a list of websites where you can buy (or for that matter sell) royalty free stock photos for your web development needs. The stock photo companies are now starting to offer subscription models as well that offer quantity discounts. There are even pay per view and ad supported models emerging for stock photos.

The Big Shots ($$$$$)

Semi-Pro ($$$)

Shop Smart with Microstock ($)

You get what you don’t pay for (Free)

Photo Search Engines

Pay Per View and Ad Supported

Need a little more inspiration? Try the moodstream website from Getty Images or get insider details from the StockPhotoTalk blog. Enjoy!