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We work on the Internet and are constantly consuming information. There's a lot of it out there. We'd forget it if we didn't write it down someplace…

Visual Lizard's blog covers everything from web standards to the muppets, from php to comic books to music, just about anything we find interesting

Harry No More

In an interview with the Guardian, J.K.Rowling alludes to the ultimate price being paid in the battle against pure evil. Read the full article at the Guardian and cross your fingers that your favorite character makes it out of book seven and into the sunset.

I must admit, I'm more of a Harry Potter movie fan, but my wife is a huge fan of the books. Sorry honey, looks like book seven is it.

Deadly Bacteria or Alternative Energy source

I remember high school chemistry experiments where we used charged cathodes and anodes to break down water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. We would then light the hydrogen and think how cool it was that in burning the hydrogen we ended up with water vapour as the by-product. I find it interesting that those experiments are now being re-thought and made more efficient in an attempt to, for all intents and purposes, save our planet.

Well I found this interesting little article about an experiment in England at the University of Birmingham which had found an alternative version of the electolosis experiment. Instead of applying a current to separate hydrogen and oxygen in water, scientists fed waste chocolate and nougat to E.coli bacteria. No you don’t have to clean your glasses you read correctly. E.coli, a deadly bacteria associated with severe abdominal distress which left untreated leads to death.

Apparently this deadly little bug produces hydrogen as a by-product of it’s digestive process. The experiment entailed feeding the highly sugared waste from a Cadbury Schweppes candy production plant to the E.coli bacteria, and harnessing the hydrogen produced by the E.coli into a hydrogen fuel cell which was then used to power a small electric fan. For those of you who remember some of their high school chemistry, the glucose (sugar) molecule has the following structure.

C6H12O6

Breaking down this molecule isn’t all that polluting now is it? And that’s 12 Hydrogen atoms per molecule. This could be a pretty efficient way of producing hydrogen for fuel cells. More technology ideas like this and we should be able to drop our oil dependence soon. Wouldn’t that be a relief?

Get The Net

Whether you are personally for or against aquaculture, we should all be able to agree that the earth, with its booming population, will need to do something in a an effort to feed itself. Given that the earths population is already over 6.5 billion and climbing steadily, food, the environment we live in and energy are our number one problems. Aquaculture offers great hope in the solving the planets growing food demands, but is it viable?

Traditionally fish farming has meant penning fish in either a pond, cage system or something similar and raising them until ready for market. The drawbacks have always been that fish in captivity are subject to disease, pollute the water around them and consume bait fish that would normally go to wild fish. All of this leaves areas around fish farms scared, sometimes barren and polluted.

Over the years fish farmers have introduced various technologies, breeding processes and strategies to keep their fish crops healthy and viable. Recently such concepts as the robotic aquaculture, where fish are raised in giant floating computerized pens that actually travel around the ocean, are bringing new light to how we might actually farm the oceans in a healthy, environmentally responsible ways.

Since the Bush administration took office, they have been watching the fish farming industry closely and are in the process of working on a fish farming bill that would see aquaculture production in the coastal regions of the US ramp up significantly in the coming years.

Here are some articles on fish farming and aquaculture from both sides of the argument:

CSS Remix By Night

Fred By Night, the live action Vampire: The Masquerade chronicle web site Reddz and I launched last week has been featured on CSS Remix. I only noticed by the sudden spike in traffic logs, as we receive a collection of click-overs.

According to thier about page, CSS Remix is...

CSS Remix celebrates the dynamic innovation and creativity of designers who are on the forefront of css-based design. We honor those designers who aren’t afraid to think outside the box and who are reinventing our ideas of what great web design can be.

I’ve submitted a couple sites to CSS Remix and Fred by Night is the first that has ever been accepted. It means I am improving, and am recognized by at few of my peers.

Thanks to those who rated the site, good or otherwise. :)

Update, June 22: Fred By Night is now also being featured on CSS Mania, another CSS gallery site.

Update, June 24: Fred By Night is now also being featured on Light On Dark, a gallery site that focuses on sites that use light text on dark backgrounds.

Opera 9 Released

Opera has release the latest version of it's under-appreciated browser. Firefox is getting a pile of press and all the good praises in moving web browsing technology forward, and kickstarting Internet Explorer 7 development, but Opera has been doing the same and for longer.

I just installed it, and am trying it out. I liked the fact the Setup asked if I wanted to update my version of 8.5 or install 9 seperately. And jumping around the 'Net, I'm seeing pages load amazingly fast. Faster than I've ever seen them load! Woo!

I'll continue to play with the browser for a week. After that, I'll find out if I'll stick with it as my default, or switch back to Firefox. I do, however, encourage everyone to download it and give it a try. Since 8, the Opera browser is free (with no ads), so you don't have any excuse anymore :)

We Have Contact


Ok. So it happens from time to time. We get annoying spam from thousands of sources. With proper email filtering on your inbox, you can trim out most of the viagra / ciallis emails (are there really that many people online with erectile disfunction?) along with the pornography and cheap software spam. However, from time to time, a new creative spammer comes up with a completely novel way to beat the filters and get through. This request to give me $800,000 was just such a clever email. 

Let's review it shall we:

From : Mr Patrick Mankou. 516 Main Bazaar, Shahdara, New Delhi, India. Due to my tight schedules I could not contact you earlier before now. The business later became successful with the cooperation of a new partner from India. Presently I'm in New Delhi with the partner for some projects. Meanwhile,I did not forget your past efforts and attempts to assist me in that process despite that it failed us at that time. Now, I want you to contact my secretary,his name is Mr Ruben Moussa and his email address is: rubenbeninbjbj@yahoo.fr ask him to send you the total sum of ( $800,000.00) which I kept for your compensation for all the past efforts and attempts to assist me in that matter. I appreciated your efforts at that time very much. So feel free and get in touch with my secretary Mr Ruben Moussa and instruct him where to send the Draft to you. Please do let me know immediately you contact him to receive it, so that we can share the joy after all the sufferness at that time. In the moment,I am very busy here because of the projects which I and the new partner are having at hand. Finally, remember that I had forwarded instruction to my secretary on your behalf to receive that Draft, so feel free to get in touch with Mr Ruben Moussa and he will send the Draft to you without any delay. NOTE THE EMAIL AGAIN, rubenbeninbjbj@yahoo.fr Finally, take note of this CODE, when you contact him do present this SECRET CODE FOR security reasons : 555 don't fail. Best regards, Mr Patrick Mankou

My favorite part of this email is the well structured grammar. If I wasn't so jaded, I would have thought for sure that this was the same Patrick Mankou that I performed some outrageously low priced service for about 3 years ago when I was abroad. However, THAT Patrick Mankou spoke the Queen's english and wrote with the eloquence of a poet, so it was the composition and structure of this email that gave me pause.

At first I thought perhaps my good friend Patrick Mankou (from New Delhi - where I have never been, but would love to visit some day) had suffered some form of crippling brain injury. Or perhaps was writing to me while under the influence of the $800,000 service I had provided him awhile back. (Law enforcement officers readings this - this is satire, please don't break down my door. Thank you.)

Now, I have to give everyone a little word of warning, this is criminal spam. They goal of this email is to get you to contact them. They will then ask for your bank number in order to deposit this money you earned (according to the email) into your bank account. Well, surprise, there is no money coming to you. In fact, the money only flows one way in this transaction and that is out. IF you are silly enough to think that this is a legitimate email, and you are desperate enough to follow up on it, then hats off to your and so long life savings.

Going Live - The Last Mile

Over the years, we have built many projects. Some big and some small. The one common element between all of them is the end portion of each and every project. For years it has seemed like no matter the client, no matter the job, no matter the deadline, the last 20% of the project is the hardest part of the project to complete. This article is a look at our process for getting through that last 20% and moving the project into the end state, which results in a live project, a happy crew on both sides and the feeling of getting something done.

A little history

When we started, the web, as we know it, was a fledgling thought. People could put up information and other people could go read it.

Plug it in!

Apparently Toyota has been listening to some of the ideas being voiced about making their hybrid cars even better. Instead of using just the kinetic energy of the car and the charging ability of the gas engine, Toyota is considering adding the ability to plug in the car to recharge the battery that runs the electric motor. The only thing that is missing now is the high speed charging available in capacitors.

Looking at the technology coming out over the last couple of years, I find it astounding that all car manufacturers are not trying to clamber on to the hybrid (potentially fully electric) band wagon. Can you imagine not having to use fuel at all and the ability to almost instantly recharge your car’s capacitor by plugging into the power grid? One hopes that the oil industry will realize that they are not in the oil industry, but in the energy industry and will make the turn and try to lead the way in this potentially planet saving endeavour. Until then, cross your fingers and give your consumer dollars to companies that are working for the future.

New Fred By Night Web Site Launches

Fred By Night web site

This is not a work related project, just something I and a fellow site developer worked on during our spare time. But I liked how it all came together, so I decided to post it here as well. But first, a little blurb about Fred By Night, directly from their about page...

Fred by Night is a Vampire: the Masquerade chronicle using the third edition Laws of the Night live action roleplaying (LARP) rules published by White Wolf. The game has run continuously since 1999 as a Member Chronicle of One World by Night (OWbN), a world-wide shared universe games.

With an average of twenty players per session, we pride ourselves on bringing the World of Darkness to (un)life every second Saturday night.

Now, into the nitty! Into the gritty! :)

I joined the Fred By Night game in December 2005. I hadn’t been playing a live action roleplaying game in years, and I wanted to meet new people, so I chatted to a friend and dropped by one night. For a couple months, I just played non-players, to get a feel for the game and the setting. I finally "rolled up" my own character during Keycon.

I wasn’t the only one. Turns out a couple people dropped by during Keycon and were interested in the game. They tried it out, they learned about the setting and the chronicle, and they wanted to regularly attend. The problem they discovered, as I did when I was first attending, was finding out when and where the games were happening was troublesome.

First of all, most of the game player base communicates through a mailing list. Of course, unless you already know someone on that mailing list, how would you discover it’s existance, never mind becoming part of it.

Second of all, the chronicle’s web site had fallen victim to a common malady: apathy. See, the trouble with game related sites is not that it has to be administrated, but that it requires up to date content to remain useful.

That content can only be provided by the game’s storytellers and player base. If the storytellers and player base do not provide content, the site does not get updated. If the site is not updated, the storytellers and player base lose interest in the site, and are less likely to provide updated content. The site administrators fight a losing battle against this cycle, and eventually give up. If no one else wants to bother with the site, why should they?

Usually, when a site falters like that, a site has three possible fates:

1. The site remains online, but stagnant, never receiving new content. This is, in my opinion, the worst option. New site visitors will get the impression that the game is not running anymore, as abandoned as the site seems to be.

2. The site is taken offline. This removes a site’s online presence, making it harder for new players to find the game and current players to keep updated, but better that than turning potential players away. At least this way, new players will continue to look!

3. Relaunch the site, kick start interest again. Get interest going again, get momentum again, put a fresh face on the site and get relevant content up!

The site is currently hosted and administrated by a fellow roleplayer and site developer named Reddz. He’s a fun guy to chat with, a fun guy to roleplay with, and enjoys maintaining the site. But when he found himself asking for new content from people and getting nothing back, he decided to stop wasting his time. I can’t really blame him.

After Keycon, I volunteered to assist Reddz in trying to get the site updated. I’m a web nerd, and I like designing and making web sites as a "free time" hobby, so it was no skin off my neck. As soon as someone else was interested in the site again, Reddz was full bore at it, ready to get going!

So we took down the old site, talked about what worked and what didn’t, and came out with a new game plan. We collaborated in what pages would remain, which would be combined, and which would be removed entirely. We ended up separating it out into two main sections: information about the game (rules, resources, contact info, etc) and information about the setting (the theme, the characters, etc).

I designed the site and coded the initial HTML and CSS pages. Reddz took over, hosting the site and incorporating the dynamic elements. We launched the site in mid-June, shortly before an upcoming game, in hopes we could build up some interest.

So far, things seem to be working. Players are volunteering new and updated information. Players and storytellers are requesting log in information so them can update their characters’ profiles. People are commenting on the site and the look.

Reddz and I plan to try and sustain that by occasionally adding new sections ourselves. Stuff like bringing a laptop with the site on it to the game, showing people the site and it’s (possibly missing or out of date) content. Stuff like bring a digital camera to a game and getting character shots and/or putting a gallery page together.

The idea is to occasionally prod the storytellers and player base and keep them jazzed about the site by keeping ourselves jazzed about the site :)

Down the road, I’ll write up another article to update you on the success of our endeavours.