The Electronic Entertainment Expo—E3 for short—is taking place right now and is producing the expected wave of hype, “in-game” movies and “screenshots”. Check out the E3 insider or the IGN site for all the latest effusive marketing/reporting. Games that want to sell these days have to look good; to that end, publishers use high-quality screenshots and ridiculously good-looking in-game movies to draw in their audience. Recent years have seen an escalation in these types of tricks, with Sony... [More]

Stephen Colbert

The Finished Product!This is the simplest possible tutorial for creating convincing OS X–style Aqua effects using only vector graphics. The Ultimate Aqua Button takes a designer step-by-step through Fireworks to create a simple oval button. Here are the advantages listed in the tutorial:

• It takes the fewest number of steps (for a technique that doesn’t leave out any design elements)
• It uses fewer objects to complete the design
• All the elements of the button remain fully editable
• The final button is made entirely... [More]

Boot Camp is the newest product recently released with the OS X 10.4.6 update. With it, Mac users can resize their hard drive, create a new partition and install Windows XP on it. It burns a CD with all the necessary drivers prior to Windows installation. Windows XP is not included.

In order for Boot Camp to do what it does, Apple adjusted its EFI-only firmware to be able to emulate an old-style BIOS so that Windows recognizes it. They also built an initial set of Windows drivers for their... [More]

At long last, ISE Eiffel has released their development environment and libraries as Open-Source software, as announced in their press release (ISE Eiffel). The project is hosted on a wiki at the ETH and includes downloads for the most recent builds and nightlies (for Linux and Windows). The ISE implementation is the only one that fully supports the ECMA-367 standard, released in June of 2005. The download includes all development tools and libraries.

This is the language that Java and C# should be chasing... [More]

Fighting Off the Strogg 'Bugs'The next installment in the Quake world is being designed not by id Software, but by Splash Damage[1]. It’s a multiplayer-only game set in massive outdoor environments using the Doom3 engine. Quake Wars: Enemy Territory Q&A (Shack News) is an interview with the lead developer. That’s right, you just read “massive outdoor environments” and “Doom3 engine” in the same sentence. How can this be?

Those familiar with game engines know that each has its strengths and weaknesses drawn from the type of game for which... [More]

Tom Brokaw Discusses Politics and Society at Hamilton covers a recent speech he gave at Hamilton College. One of the many topics he covered was the divisiveness of national politics in America:

“The ethos of national politics today is one of division between red and blue states in which the national parties seek to divide and conquer the nation by turning people’s views against each other. There is little tolerance for intermediate or unorthodox views, Brokaw said, citing examples of orthodoxy... [More]”

I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It! by George Clooney (Common Dreams) is a very short essay in which George Clooney officially outs himself, even though most would consider Three Kings, Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana to be eloquent enough statements of that. Still and all, there are some nice enough turns of phrase in it:

“…one of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we’re all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it’s not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.”

... [More]

Oil prices are at an all-time high. Summer’s coming up, so don’t expect a dip anytime soon. The US is threatening war with Iran, the war in Iraq is dragging on and the Saudis are scrabbling to maintain control over an ever-more-agitated populace. Prices are going nowhere but up. This makes the “car culture” deeply ingrained in American culture (and growing quickly in Europe as well) problematic. The notion that everyone has a car has led to decades of residential design depending on just that... [More]

Get Your War On (MNFTIU) is frequently funny, occasionally published comic that’s featured on earthli several times. Every once in a while, they pack a serious wallop into a short rant, as in the following comic:

The quote is repeated in text form below, ‘cause it just makes me laugh:

“Sorry—after three years in Iraq, I don’t get excited by the word “progress”. That’s some bullshit. Maybe I’d be excited by progress if we had only spent, like, two million dollars, or if we had a bunch of... [More]”

Serious Sam Suicide BomberThe commuter rag[1] on the Swiss train today ran a small article about Iran’s army of suicide bombers, which was recently on display in a military parade. They marched by with their dynamite wrapped about their torsos and their detonators held high. 40,000 strong they are. These lethal forces are poised to deploy to 29 key points in Britain and the US if Iran’s nuclear facilities were to be bombed. Fully 1,300 bombers per attack point—they’d be kind of hard to miss, no? Anyone who’s played one... [More]

The Trouble With EM ‘n EN… (A List Apart) discusses how to create proper punctuation characters in online documents—specifically HTML. Of most interest are the rules of use for “em” and “en” dashes:

em dash

“…used to indicate a sudden break in thought, a parenthetical statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead of a colon or semicolon to link clauses.”

en dash

“used to indicate a range of just about anything with numbers … also used instead of the word “to” or a hyphen... [More]”

Final Box CoverFinal Box Back

History of the HTML Canvas

When Apple shipped Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” last year, it included the Dashboard and Widgets. Widgets are almost completely platform-independent, built with HTML, JavaScript and CSS and the Dashboard is a desktop-sized layer that could be called up instantly to show all installed Widgets. The “almost” above is deliberate since the release of the WebCore browser engine in Tiger included special hooks through which scripts could call system utilities (like executing local... [More]

With his approval ratings swirling down a deeper and darker hole every day, president Bush’s handlers have decided to address at least one perceived weakness in his persona: his lack of outside input. Meeting and talking to live audiences is “an innovation for a leader who until recently stuck to scripted meetings with screened audiences”. His handlers feel that, even in a non-election settings, he needs to “show he is not afraid of criticism.” It’s the first time in five years that he has stooped... [More]

Microsoft recently released another build of Windows Vista to members of their developers network. A flurry of screenshots ensued. The system appearance, if not its feature set, is starting to stabilize and shows signs of having had input from graphic designers for this go-round. Windows Vista Screenshots (Only4Gurus) provides the latest batch in what they show to be a long line of screenshots from the various Blackcomb/Longhorn/Vista incarnations from over the years.

Initial Impression

Control Panels Gadgets!

The basic... [More]

“When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.”

Following close on the heels of their delay announcement last week, Microsoft finally dropped all pretenses and cancelled the next version of Windows entirely in a press release early this morning.

Vista was plagued throughout its many-monikered existence by delays, feature withdrawals and a heavy amount of FUD[1]. Windows Vista slips…out of sight (The Register) has a full history of the troubled software:

“Harking back to the days of the XP beta “Whistler”, which was regarded as a code cleanup and facelift... [More]”

Bush is Laughing at YouIn a move that was stunning on many levels, Bush finally vetoed a bill that the Congress had sent on for his approval. After letting over five years of pork legislation ooze its way across his desk without being in any danger whatsoever, Bush finally unleashed the mighty power of his pen to hold back a piece of legislation that was roundly viewed as a senseless waste of taxpayer money and precious time for all parties involved.

I’ll give you three guesses what it was … and the first two... [More]

In the days of the telegraph, human operators sent telecommunications by hand using morse code. Each person had their own cadence and style of sending messages; the styles were so unique that another operator could unfailingly distinguish which person sent a message simply by hearing the message arrive. This style was called the operator’s fist.

A careful perusal of screenshots from different upcoming games shows similar “fists” emerging for the game engine driving them. Over the last several... [More]

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

This weekend I unearthed an old document from March 23, 2003, which was written in response to a letter I received from a friend earlier in the month. This friend had taken the time to write a long reproach to the attitude towards the Bush administration—and American hegemony in general—found on this web site. The quoted blocks are from the friend, but the document is not available online. Therefore, though the quotes remain somewhat out of context, most are long enough to indicate to what... [More]

Last week, president Bush’s approval rating slipped below 35%. One might take heart that Americans, after having elected[1] him not once, but twice, are finally coming around. One might also wonder what took so bloody long and further wonder what’s wrong with the other 35%. How can they be so foolish? Those “red staters”. Those “Republicans”. It’s not so simple. The fingers of propoganda grasp far and wide and reach deep into the unwary mind. Thanks to sufficient propaganda, a lot of people live... [More]

The article We Have Created the World’s First Truly Global Empire (Democracy Now!) is an interview with “Self-Described Economic Hit Man” John Perkins. He’s a former NSA employee who spent a couple of dozen years of his life playing loan shark to various countries around the world.

“We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it’s been... [More]”

This draft was buried, nearly complete in the earthli archives. It has been published now … well because it’s still relevant.

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Bush Views New Orleans from Air Force OneWhy doesn’t Bush come up with a better persona for the Katrina aftermath? Americans don’t really have high standards for veracity in reporting, a fact that he’s used often before. What’s... [More]

US citizens not interested in Freedom (Slashdot) started off a conversation on Slashdot recently that aired some common arguments for and against the libertarian political system.

Libertarians want a world with as little government regulation as possible, including drug and weapons use. The basic philosophy goes along the lines of “if it only affects your own self, you should be able to do it”. No more laws imposing a morality inherited from religion or from less enlightened systems. If you want to smoke... [More]

The article, Build It, Or Else (Weekly Standard) is about public funding of private gain in an arena other than the military. Sports teams have been playing the “stadium hopping, city-hopping” game for several decades now and its only getting worse. The most recent and egregious instance is Washington D.C. “issuing $535 million in bonds to build [a] stadium” for the Montreal Expos, which are moving in as soon as it is complete. The article lists a litany of other stadiums, from baseball and football stadiums to... [More]

The Perforce P4V client has a list of recent connections under the “Connection” menu. This is especially nice when you use more than one workspace or more than one server. However, if you select the wrong workspace, it stores that copy too and there doesn’t seem to be any way of editing the list from the UI. That means your recent connections list gets crowded with entries you don’t want—and which may fail with a long timeout when selected.

You can’t remove entries from this list through the... [More]

If you’re looking for good advice on JavaScript programming, take a look at javascript.faqts, which offers a massive list of questions and answers about JavaScript, including many samples and snippets organized by topic.

Yahoo goes Open Source

The Yahoo! User Interface Library offers all of Yahoo’s JavaScript controls, packaged and ready for download as Open Source. It includes GUI-level components for handling drag & drop, or building treeviews or calendars as well as low-level components... [More]