Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Leopard Up-To-Date

Oct 27, '07 · 16 Comments Tags: apple, leopard, macbook pro, os x, up-to-date.

If you bought an Apple product — say a MacBook Pro — during October, before the launch of Leopard, you’re entitled to the $10-upgrade to Leopard (nick-named ‘up-to-date’), you could be fooled into thinking that with the $2000 purchase receipt in hand, you could walk into an Apple Store, say in New York, pay them the $10 and walk away with Leopard. Right?

It certainly sounds fair to me. The stores are official Apple stores, there should be nothing stopping them from extending the offer to walk-in customers. And you might’ve put down two grand just a couple of days prior to the launch of Leopard, so really, they owe you…

That however, is not the case. For what I can only deem to be entirely artificial reasons, the up-to-date program is an online offer only! And that’s despite the fact that the $10 upgrade package is exactly the same as the retail package.

I’m guessing the reasoning lies in the $120 difference between the upgrade and the retail price. That is, there are people, like me, who are so eager to get Leopard, that they might actually pay full price for a product they otherwise are entitled to for a measly $10.

I don’t want to think that about Apple, but I’m just really really disappointed right now, that I didn’t get to take Leopard home with me.

Update: Received my ‘upgrade’ DVD of Leopard today. Yup. ‘Upgrade’. So I can’t reinstall the machine with Leopard without going through Tiger. That’s cheap Apple. Cheap. And it wasn’t boxed either, in that cool psychedelic scifi Leopard box. Oh, and it’s a double layer DVD too.

Guess what I’m torrentin’ right now…

New York, New York

Oct 25, '07 · Closed

Send more money. Plz.

NY07 Departure

Oct 21, '07 · Closed

Gone Daddy Gone :)

All comments will remain closed until my triumphant return.

NY07 Final Preparations

Oct 20, '07 · 2 Comments

New York is by far the most distant destination Rikke and I have travelled to on our own, so it is of course not without some trepidation that we make the final preparations. It’s hard enough to figure out what books will have the honor of becoming bound to our New York memories; but even worse is, what about clothes?

Copenhagen is cold these days. Really cold. But it seems the big apple is still cruising along at rather comfortable temperatures:

I sure hope that’s the case, otherwise the first thing we’re going to be doing is buying some new overcoats.

Let me also take this opportunity to thank all of you who took the time to recommend restaurants and sights in and around New York; my map is teeming with stuff we’re going to check out, and I’ll be sure to review as much of it as possible when I get back.

Underworld’s Oblivion with Bells

Oct 17, '07 · 4 Comments

I’m absolutely in love, in particular with track #2, Beautiful Burnout, from Underworld’s new album, Oblivion with Bells. But the whole album is great.

Humanized Messages for jQuery

Oct 15, '07 · 33 Comments

Debuting in K2’s Sidebar Manager earlier this evening, Humanized Messages (demo) is a jQuery extension written by me, based on Aza Raskin’s article on transparent non-modal messages.

Transparent messages are the brainchild of Jef Raskin. Itâ€™s simply a large and translucent message thatâ€™s displayed over the contents of your screen. They fade away when the user takes any action (like typing or moving the mouse). In practice, the message is both noticeable yet unobtrusive. And because the message is transparent, you can see whatâ€™s beneath it. Itâ€™s just humane

I’ve tested it in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 (thanks to Joen, without whom I would be a wreck of IE loathing), and as near as I can tell, it works across the board.

Please report any issues (or feature requests), discuss it and, not least, enjoy.

NY07 Google Maps

Oct 13, '07 · 12 Comments

If I was in the fortunate position of having an iPhone or any similarly Google Maps capable device, I would swoon over the applicability of Google Maps when traveling in the US.

Sure, we have similar Danish services, and Google Maps itself even covers us fairly well. But compared to New York, and similar major US cities, backwater countries like Denmark are severely underrepresented in the more interesting features. Fair enough, I’m not expecting the streetview feature to hit Copenhagen any time soon, ~~but man, would I like the route finder!~~ Update: So the route finder works exactly the same in Denmark, contrary to my belief. Ehm. Yeah.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you should do so. Try grabbing the blue line anywhere and dragging it somewhere else.

Makes me want to get a drivers license and go on a roadtrip in the US, just so I can use Google Maps.

Styling Admin Interfaces

Oct 12, '07 · 5 Comments

In styling for the K2 Sidebar Manager page, I’m constantly having to work against the native WordPress stylings to achieve what I want. Whether this is because of styled form elements — a major pain in the ass — or simply an unexpected line-height, it inevitably causes some frustration when I’m trying to make things just right.

The valuable lesson here, and this goes for any other up-and-coming platforms as well: Keep your elements in containers and style specifically for those containers.

So, instead of simply styling p, div {line-height: 140%}, divide your pages into header, content and footer, or whichever configuration suits you the best. Then make sure you only style specifically for your containers, like so: .content p, .content div {line-height: 140%}.

That way, when people need to create something like the Sidebar Manager UI, they simply create a new container with the class of ‘SBM’, at the same level as the other containers, and they don’t have to worry about that 140% line-height.

Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins

Oct 10, '07 · 18 Comments

Watch, as the man sent back from the future to save Sarah Connor, is crying like a little girl, because of the title for the new Terminator film.

Continue reading ‘Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins’

WAMP?

Oct 10, '07 · 25 Comments

Yeah, I was going to buy lazyweb.com, but that’s taken, so… Anyway, I’m looking for a package similar to MAMP, except for Windows (which would make it WAMP). Wikipedia has a comparison chart, but it’s a bit much.

What I really want to know; which bundle are you using, and should I use it?

NY07 Cinemas

Oct 10, '07 · Closed

Where do I go if I want to reserve tickets for, say, Nightmare Before Christmas 3D, for our New York trip? Are there any cinemas that are particularly interesting?

In Rainbows

Oct 10, '07 · 9 Comments

So I pre-ordered the new Radiohead album, which is sold with the rather cool ‘pay what you want’ deal. And while it’s nice that the tracks are old-school MP3’s, I would’ve liked some serious metadata and perhaps an album cover?

Update: Well, what do you know?

NY07 Location Scouting

Oct 8, '07 · 10 Comments

Alright campers, it’s time for another round of ‘tell the dane what to do’. As you know there’s now less than two weeks before Rikke and I embark on our NY07 tour, and gosh if you aren’t going to drop some knowledge on us. Prompt.

We’re looking for pretty much anything that could be of interest to first-time tourists like us. Shopping, museums, zoo’s. The works.

I’m maintaining a Google Map with placemarks for potential locations. So if you’ve got the time, look up the recommended location and drop a link to it in the comments. That way it’s easy for me to add it to my map, and the digital circle is complete.

One From the Heart. 50’s Science Fiction.

Oct 8, '07 · 7 Comments

1950’s science fiction has an wonderful intangible effect on me. At the mere though of giant ants or mysterious long lost galactic civilizations, my inner blue-eyed child manifests itself, as sure as the end of the world is neigh.

Continue reading ‘One From the Heart. 50’s Science Fiction.’

The Digital Manicurist

Oct 7, '07 · 10 Comments

It’s been a relaxed weekend, mostly Halo free and steeped rather in the internal workings of K2. The codebase of which is in a pretty good place currently. So much so, that I can usually spend whatever time I find for development on tweaking and polishing the smallest parts of the interaction ‘experience’, if you will.

Continue reading ‘The Digital Manicurist’

Multi Safari

Oct 7, '07 · 4 Comments

I’ve been polishing on K2’s interface layer this weekend and found myself having broken our rolling archives on Safari 2. Everything was working fine on Firefox and Safari 3, but somewhere in my — rather sloppy — code, Safari 2 was choking.

Luckily, thanks in part to Google Reader’s newish search function, faint memory echoes and a certain unstoppable robot ninja, I dug up Multi Safari, which has stand-alone versions of Safari going right back to 1.0.

Now everything works again.

Thanks internet.

Go See Blade Runner

Oct 7, '07 · 7 Comments

If you live in one of the few places that is currently screening Blade Runner, like Los Angeles or New York, you owe it to me to go and see it on the big screen. I’ve been hearing wonderous things from Oliver about the cut and the quality of the digital master. So please, since I can’t go, you should. And yeah, I checked, and from what I can see, the showing in New York has stopped by the 21st, when we land there… Dammit.

Update: Check out the running times

Got Owned By Teh Halo Physaxx

Oct 3, '07 · 12 Comments

Thought I was done with Halo 3? Well kiss my shiny metal ass! Cuz this here be the dopest shiet! You dig? (via Mazy and here)

Some Halo 3 Pointers

Oct 1, '07 · 13 Comments

Yeah, you’d think I’d be over this whole Halo thing by now, but trust me, not a lot of other interesting things are around to grab my attention these days, so…

Continue reading ‘Some Halo 3 Pointers’