Visual Lizard

Blog for January 2012

Daily Links

Must Read of the Day: Lockdown by Cory Doctorow

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.

Grab your lunch and settle down for a read. This is important stuff to understand, especially if you work on, with or near computers. Being in Canada, our current federal government likes to march in lock-step with whatever big brother to the South of us does with regards to intellectual property and copyright laws. If the Stop Online Piracy Act passes as a law in the US, mark my words, it will be coming Canada.

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

What's That Big Green Lizard on Princess Street?

big green lizard on princess street

If you travel on Princess Street, in Winnipeg, you might have seen a giant six foot green lizard as you head into downtown and wondered "what is that big green lizard?" It is none other than the logo of Visual Lizard. We are one of Winnipeg's longest running web and application programming companies. Our new home on Princess Street is a fabulous 2400 square foot condo that we just finished off at the end of 2011 with the help our friends at Syverson|Monteyene.

Visual Lizard logo in six foot aluminum and vinyl

Our friends over at SRS Signs did an awesome job in translating our little lizard into a six foot tall aluminum and vinyl sign. They also did the front door signs and our hours of operation on the front of the building.

So next time you are wandering down Princess street, if the lights are on, drop in and say 'hi'. We're always happy to meet new people, discuss ideas, projects, concepts, web sites, programming, and general tech-nerd stuff.

See you soon!

Daily Links

The Schticky - best infomercial ever!

Vince from Shamwow fame comes back with a new product that is way overpriced yet he will sell millions.

Daily Links

Search, Plus Your World

Wikipedia Link of the Day - Microbrust

Now you know.

8 Responsive jQuery Slider Plugins

Henry Jones rounds up some jQuery slider plugins that will adapt to the size of their container. Handy, considering the uptick in responsive web designs lately.

OpenType on the Web

Microsoft has a nice little demo site of some Firefox and IE specific tags for advanced typography with CSS. I'm going to have to find out the status of Webkit support for OpenType and see what the future holds.

Veerle Has Updated Her Inspiration Stream

Her layouts alone are inspiration enough for me.

Scrollorama

A jQuery plugin by John Polacek for doing cool scrolly stuff.

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Hooray, Pizza Day

Today for lunch, we made pizza. Everything turned out mostly OK.

 

Dough Recipe

  • 6 cups flour
  • 3 cups lukewarm water
  • 3 teaspoons sugar
  • pinch of salt
  • 1 tablespoon yeast

Mix together sugar, water, and salt (which I forgot) and sprinkle yeast on top and let it bloom. Dump or sift the flour into the largest bowl you have access to (or straight onto your counter if you don't mind making a mess) and make a hole in the center of the flour. Slowly add the water/yeast mixture into this well, mixing thoroughly. When the dough starts to come together, knead by hand until it's smooth.

Cover the dough with a little olive oil, to keep it from sticking to everything, and leave it to rise in a warm place for 15 minutes to half an hour. You should pre-heat your oven to 500 F, so I used the counter next to the oven.

(For those of you who don't get Jonathan Coulton references ... my kneading theme music.)

Pizza Fixin's

Wil helpfully provided bell peppers and onions. I wanted a Margherita pizza, so I had fresh basil and slices of mozzerella.

Sauce

  • small (213ml) can of general-purpose tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 tablespoon dried oregano
  • 1 tablespoon dried basil
  • salt and pepper

MIx it all together, bring to a boil, turn down the heat and let it simmer for 5 minutes or so. Then take it off the heat and let it cool down a bit before putting it on your pizza.

 

Prior to adding spices.

Prep Work

We had enough dough for 5 small pizzas. It probably could have been 6. Or two medium sized. Or one really large.

Cooking

Bake at 500 F for 15 to 20 minutes. Or, as we discovered, for 40 minutes if you've put too many pans in the oven at once preventing hot air from getting to the top of the oven where it can properly brown your pizza. Switching the pans to different levels sped things up ... but the crusts ended up a bit tougher than I'd like.

Not the best pizza I've made, but they still turned out pretty delicious. It took far too long to make this a regular thing, but cooking at work can be pretty fun. 

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Spontaneous Office Pizzas

For lunch, Dwayne had brought ingredients to make a small homemade pizza in our office kitchen. Since he is a generous cook and some of the rest of us had other fixings available, we all chipped in and it became a spontaneous office lunch!

We decided to share this unplanned kitchen cooperation over Twitter. Then decided to share it here on our blog through Twitter's embeddable tweet functionality, a new feature that allows web-savvy folk to include tweets and all associated functionality right into their content…

Twitter's embeddable tweets make for an interesting new way to bring social media onto websites. They provide multiple ways to support it, specifically an oEmbed endpoint, and some clean HTML for web visitors without javascript enabled. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that any extra content in the tweet (like the above images) is HTML code that is injected by Twitter's JS, so it might be picked up by social sharing sites when sharing your content (such as Facebook when looking for thumbnails).

As for the pizzas, they come out delicious… so much so that we didn't pause to take a picture of the final results. Right out of the oven, onto plates, and into our bellies. Mmm. If you are interested, you can read Dwayne's follow-up post for his pizza recipe! :)

Daily Links

The Restart Page

Experience the reboot experience of ye olde operating systems.

Will Canada Join The Trans Pacific Partnership?

The biggest effect would be extending copyright by an additional twenty years, meaning nothing would enter public domain until 2033.

Facebook Kills RSS Feed Importing

Old news to some, but I just found the official documentation from Facebook on the fact that you can no longer import your blog posts to Facebook via RSS. They suggest posting manually to "better interact with your fans". Loosely translated this means we want to show you more ads while you hang around Facebook. Posted here so I don't forget the next time someone asks why their news feed isn't on Facebook anymore.

Startup Lessons From A Crime Boss

"Everything I need to know about startups, I learned from Kobayashi. While I can't get too deep into specifics (would you?), I can share a few the things he taught me."

Daily Links

Preview of 2012 Animated Features

Some fantastic animated movies coming out this year, including "The Secret World of Arriety", "The Pirates! Band of Misfits", "Brave", and more.

Windows 8 Storage Spaces

With Storage Spaces, physical disks are grouped together into pools, and pools are then carved up into spaces, which are formatted with a regular filesystem and are used day-to-day just like regular disks.

IE6 Usage Drops Below 1% In the United States

At this writing, Canada is still at 1.4%... come on, everyone, we can do better than that!

Van Halen to Play MTS Centre on May 17th, 2012

The first arena rock show I went to was Van Halen 1984. This would be fun to see.

CSS Profiling and Optimization notes

An interesting read about CSS performance and factors affecting it. Take some time to understand how using different CSS selectors may become more expensive.

Daily Links

Douchey Account Guy

Marketing speak, business speak, power speak, whatever you call it, we've all met at least one guy who talks like this...

iPhone on pure CSS3

Check out this awesome proof of concept project. Rendering of iPhone 4 and its icons was made in pure CSS3. No images, no base64, no SVG, no canvas, just 3395 lines of CSS code and 335 lines of Javascript code. Viewed best with the latest versions of Safari and Chrome in Mac OS X.

Microsoft Signature

Apparently, not being ladened with bloatware, adware, spyware, and general crap is a feature now?

CPR is no laughing matter, but this advert for learning it is!

Vinnie Jones (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch) promotes learning CPR in this advert for the British Heart Foundation.

Embeddable Tweets

Twitter provides a single line of code that allows tweets to be embedded directly into your HTML, along with associated images, conversations and videos. Retweeting, following, and all other standard-issue tools automatically handled. Handy!

Daily Links

Bookshelf Porn

Porn for book lovers. A photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos from around the world for people who *heart* bookshelves.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Probably the best english sentence in the world, via Simon Aughton.

Google Penalizes Self After Sponsored Post Gaffe

Google demotes the official Chrome home page after embarrassingly backing a campaign that generated numerous paid links and thin/garbage content about the browser... something they have been actively fighting against.

Do As We Say, Not As We Do.

According to findings by TorrentFreak and YouHaveDownloaded, several IP-addresses assigned to the Canadian House of Commons have been caught pirating copyrighted material. Oops.

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

The Advantage Of Cloud-Based Stores

Visual Lizard has been working on Apple machines since 2007-ish when we all upgraded from standard-issue Dell desktops to seventeen inch Macbook Pros. Every since then, Apple has released a number of Mac OS X versions, and each time I have upgraded my machine rather than formatting and starting clean. Though this has the advantage of not needing to reinstall apps and track down registration numbers, after half a dozen updates and the same number of years, my machine has inherited quite a bit of cruft.

Over this season's holidays, I decided to reformat and reinstall OS X Lion. The first time I have started fresh in years. I like to believe everything is booting up and shutting down faster because of it, but I have not bothered with any measurments so that may, admittedly, be just my rose-coloured perception. The most noticeable improvement was reinstalling my applications.

Services like the Mac App Store and Steam have made setting up a Mac incredibly easy compared to the old days. I did not have to track down CDs or registration numbers or manuals. I was able to log into a cloud-based store, find all my existing purchases waiting for me in a list, and reinstalled them with just a couple clicks. What used to be an arduous and long process has become a straight-forward series of over-the-internet restores... though it can still take a while depending on your internet connection and the filesizes involved.

Reading Daring Fireball, I saw a quote by game designer Will Wright that was amusingly relevant...

It’s kind of remarkable. I’ve set up a couple of PCs and a few TVs over the last couple of years. Buying a new television and setting it up is far more complicated now than buying a computer and setting it up.

My recommendation to my coworkers and my own plans for the future is to, when given the choice, make app purchases from reputable cloud-based stores from now own. There are some issues with doing so, notably the Mac App Store's lack of demo versions and Apple taking a major cut from a developers profits, but it will only take you one time setting up a machine from scratch to see the advantage.

Daily Links

New Transit Fares

For those going back to school or work today, remember Winnipeg Transit has raised their fares a nickel over the new years.

Distrust That Particular Flavor

Collected non-fiction essays and articles written by William Gibson, including journalism from small publishers, online sources, and magazines no longer in existence.

Truth Hurts

Some amusingly frank iPhone wallpapers designed by Nico Ordozgoiti.

Slavery Footprint

Not only a solid survey raising awareness, but also a kick-ass exception on JS, CSS, animation, design, etc!