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links for 2010-09-27

  • In my grouchier moments (one of which I am having right now), I am considering a public relations campaign to make fun of people who can't do simple math and shame them into either acquiring some fundamental skills or staying quiet and not bothering the rest of us with their ignorance. I've devoted a significant part of my career to education: working with K-12 teachers, teaching at a university, developing programs for the public.  I'm beginning to wonder whether we are not all just wasting our time and we would do much better to focus on developing an elite cadre of high-powered science literate researchers who will discover wondrous things and save us all from ourselves.  Of course, that won't work because the people who know the science will be prevented from fulfilling this task by the science-ignorant who comprise the public, as well as the executive and legislative branches of the government.
  • When it comes to logo design a lot of designers find it difficult to combine a lot of ideas in a small icon, if the logo have a symbol, or to make a unique typeface that tells you all you need to know about the business it represents. And the truth is that logo design is not easy. Here at ProDesignMedia I try to make designers’ life easier. This time I want to help the logo designers. A tip can save you a lot of time and efforts. It’s easier to hear a tip from someone than to say the tip. To say a tip you must make mistakes; you must try what is good and what is not. The model is the same in logo design. In this article you will find 15 tips which will help you to design logos the right way.
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    links for 2010-09-23

  • I saw that Andy Clarke had added a fluid width YouTube video to a particular page on one of his sites. His code relies upon a wrapping div and then images and video within this wrapper are set to the width of the wrapper:
  • The new cinematic trailer for the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie has appeared on YouTube. This is the highly anticipated first part of the epic finale that brings closure to the adventures of the little (O.K., perhaps not so little any more) wizard. Check out the new trailer above. If you missed the first trailer for the movie, you can find it here.
  • DVD and games rental company Blockbuster has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US. The Dallas, Texas-based company said it had made the decision as part of attempts to cut its debts and restructure the business. Agreements with its creditors will allow it to cut its debts from nearly $1bn to about $100m, Blockbuster said. Blockbuster's non-US operations are not included in the bankruptcy, as they are legally separate entities. That includes its 4,000-strong network of stores in the UK, Canada, Denmark, Italy and Mexico. Blockbuster's 3,000 stores in the US will remain open for the time being, the company's statement said. It has also secured a new $125m loan it says will allow it to keep working during the restructuring process.
  • Every three days, more Americans die from sudden cardiac arrest than the number who died in the 9-11 attacks. You can lessen this recurring loss by learning Continuous Chest Compression CPR, a hands-only CPR method that doubles a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest. It’s easy and does not require mouth-to-mouth contact, making it more likely bystanders will try to help, and it was developed at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. "This video is worth sharing," said Gordon A. Ewy, MD, director of the UA Sarver Heart Center and one of the research pioneers who developed this method.
  • A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we heard about a crowdsourced, shot-for-shot remake of Star Wars. Okay, it was actually about a year or so ago, we read about it online, and if you’re going to be an uptight fanboy about it, it’s a remake of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Nevertheless, it’s finally here, and we have not been disappointed. Which in and of itself is saying a lot. Unless you’ve spent the past thousand or so years being slowly digested by a sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon, you’ve probably lamented what’s happened to the Star Wars franchise. Sure, we were able to forgive the Ewoks.
  • Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. We’ve created an interactive map of Government Requests that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. Our interactive Traffic graphs provide information about traffic to Google services around the world. Each graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country/region and service. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's
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    links for 2010-09-16

  • Your searchable source for FREEBIES
    (tags: free)
  • The other day my fellow co-worker, Cameron, and I were discussing what the best way to style the hr tag? I usually try to use a div if I just need a line for presentation. But what if I need to style an hr that is used on an existing site. It is certainly easier to apply a simple style to the hr tag in the style sheet to make the change. However, each browser, as you can guess has a different way to render them. At first I thought it was Mozilla and the rest of its crew that was rendering the styles incorrectly. However, surprise surprise, it turned out to be IE that did it incorrectly in the end. Here are my solutions and examples on how to get the hr tag to render the same in the popular browsers. By default the hr tag is center-aligned. To align it left follow the example.
  • What I learned at work:  During an interview about green design for our Climate Desk podcast, Dwell magazine editor Aaron Britt dropped a word on me I hadn’t heard before: Retronym.  It means, “a word or phrase for something that now has to be specified because it is no longer identifiable in its original state.”  For example, the retronym “acoustic guitar” exists only because there are now electric guitars. Other retronyms include digital clock, sit-down restaurant, black-and-white photo. You get the idea.  Britt believes green design is a retronym because once upon a time homes were built with the environment in mind as opposed to how they are built now.  The invention of the word has been attributed to former NPR president and Robert Kennedy press aid,  Frank Mankiewicz, circa 1980.  Thinking of retronyms is a good time killer and I believe a great Scrabble word if you get lucky.
  • Eric Schmidt has confirmed that we could be getting “Google Me” sometime this Fall. This Google Me service will introduce what Google calls “a social layer” into online search, video and Google Maps. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters quote Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying the company will integrate social networking elements to its services. What’s interesting to me is that this doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a stand-alone product — it appears the plan is to weave some social goodness into Google’s existing product base. Squeezing social stuff into their already successful products is probably Google’s best shot at getting widespread adoption — as I imagine it would be extremely difficult to get 500 million users to see the value in a competing service, and then decide to switch. I am looking forward to see what Google’s got up it’s sleeve — and I’m hoping it’s going to knock my socks off. What do you think “Google Me” will look like?
  • There are many ways to play Super Mario Bros. 3.  This… is not one of them.  With Mario's 25th birthday just passed, it's nice to see some retro funniness coming out of the internet woodwork.  This new video from YouTube's Master0fHyrule shows exactly how not to get to the secret area in the clouds of level 1-3:
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    links for 2010-09-09

  • Websites are being used more and more effectively everyday to promote Products, Services, Ideas and countless. A well-designed website is very important for the growth of a business and often to create a clear image of a brand. Here are the 10 Awesome, inspiring and creative website design. There are many other awesome designs which we will be covering later.
  • There are many people who claims WordPress Blogs better than Blogger Blog. The main reason behind this is it’s flexibility and our capability to edit the core source of the WordPress blog, which is not available for Blogger Blogs. There are several posts in internet who gives all those non-sense reasons to choose WordPress over Blogger, with some reasons like low quality themes, less flexible, no good plugins and author’s love over the money that he’ve invested in hosting for his blog makes him to post good articles. These kinds of reviews are usually done by WordPress Fans. A blog in simple terms is a web log with some text, images, videos and audios. Where Pyra Lab’s Blogger is the first blog system in the world internet history. Later Google purchased it just 11 years ago. Later other blogging platforms started to rise up copying the features of Blogger.
  • Let’s get real for a second here. As far as web languages go, CSS is arguably the simplest. I mean, really, what could be easier than a simple list of properties affecting an element? And the syntax is almost like written English. Want to change the font size? There’s a font-size CSS property. How about the color? There’s the color property. But despite its deceptively easy exterior, CSS is one complicated system, especially when you’re doing it in a professional, high-scale, high-performance level. The sheer number of ways to select an element is amazing; not to mention the number of properties you can apply to that selected element set and then how presentation changes when you’re talking about supporting multiple browsers and layout engines.
  • Top Ten Free Online Tools For Web Developers In this collection I would like to show you very handy and useful online applications for developers and web masters. If you are a developer you will love these freely available online applications. Using them you can improve the quality and accuracy of your development work. You might also like to view : Top 16 Free Online Tools for Designers or Top 20 Free Business Web Applications I hope you’ll like them all!
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    links for 2010-09-03

  • Take one part love story, two parts SNES references, six parts awesomeness, let it stew in the fridge for a few days, remember it, freak out and race back, and you'll find Scott Pilgrim waiting there. So why did the movie lose millions of dollars?
  • As you probably guessed, my name is Jason M Ray. I'm a 26 year old guy from St. Louis, Mo. I spend my days as a software engineer for a flight simulator company. I earned my Bachelor's Degree in computer science in 2005. I wrote my first lines of code well over a decade ago, learning BASIC on a RadioShack TRS-80. Since then, I've written code in TI-BASIC, Z80 assembly, C, Perl, Java, C++, JavaScript, Prolog, PHP, and C#, among others. I've been a web developer for many years, having written my first website around 1998. I'm an amateur musician. I've been learning to play guitar since around 2006. I also consider myself an amateur graphic designer and cook (which means I sort of know what I'm doing, though things don't always turn out well). In general, I try to learn more things than I have time for. And I want to take up rock climbing. Seriously.. who wants to go with me?
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    links for 2010-09-02

  • These icons were created by me, and are free to use under a Creative Commons License. I've got icons for Digg, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube.
  • Imag ine a user who is really excited about your prod uct or ser vice. They’re ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill ing out their infor ma tion. The way you align your labels with your form fields can affect how easy it is for users to fill out the form. Do you want to give users a quick, easy and pain less expe ri­ence or do you want to give them a has sle? If you want to make their expe ri ence quick, easy and pain less, con sider using top aligned labels for your form fields.
  • Here is a list of courses and innovative resources to help CS students, faculty, and instructors. These are examples of the training Google engineers use to learn new skills.
  • Cached Commons is a collection of user-contributed javascript libraries that have been cached, optimized, and hosted on Github’s fast CDN. If a library is missing from this collection, post a request on Github and we’ll add it immediately. The readme has all the details.
  • I’ve mentioned on and off that I don’t watch TV, and several readers have curiously asked me why I do that and how I manage life without TV. So I thought it’s about time I write an article on it. I haven’t been watching TV for a long time, since about 2006. By TV, I mean watching shows direct from TV networks or channel surfing. I still catch my favorite shows off DVD or online, though the frequency is decreasing. The last new shows I caught were Prison Break and Dollhouse (as I’m a fan of Joss Whedon’s work), both of which have ended their runs.
  • <!–44d0aafe02544ac598a432ba204bb5dc–> Verifying your feed establishes that you are the owner of this content and allows Digg to auto-submit your stories as they are published. To verify your feed: Paste the RSS (not HTML!) feed URL into the Auto-Submit box and click "Add Feed" Take the verification key shown and add it to a new post in the RSS feed, (you can delete it later) then click "Verify Now" Note that RSS auto-submit does not submit content already residing in your feed, so once it is verified please add a new entry to test things out. Please allow some time for the new entry to get pulled in. If you care about the thumbnails that are used for your submitted stories, please see the FAQ.
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    links for 2010-08-26

  • Photography as both a profession and a hobby is an incredibly expansive topic that covers a remarkably vast range of subjects from science and art. No matter where you lie on the professional spectrum, there is simply always more to learn. We spent countless hours scouring the web for the best content we could find and share with you, and today we’ll help you expand your knowledge with 100 photography related tutorials!
  • These whitepapers are designed to educate all users of ad servers, from startups to seasoned professionals
  • St. Louis based online marketing and Internet junkie with in affinity for shiny objects, cold beer, dance music, and good books. This blog is about online marketing and generally just things I like. – Click Because You Like It
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    links for 2010-08-24

  • This guest contribution is from a programmer colleague of mine at Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences. Thanks for this enlightenment. According to Wikipedia there are an estimated 10.5 million American men who are red green color blind. I am one of them. I discovered this many years ago and rarely think about it as to me it is normal. However, I have discovered that those around me are endlessly fascinated with it—especially designers. So, to you I provide this public service message on color blindness. First a little bit of myth busting. Red and green do not appear gray to me, perhaps less bright then you are used to but not gray. Second, color blindness does not give me superpowers. I cannot magically see through red and green objects and describe what is behind them. (It would be nice at times though (-: .) Examples Now for the really fun part. This is a series of images created with Vischeck that appear the same to me. Really they do, at most one is a very tiny shade lig
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    links for 2010-08-17

  • Most of the web pages you encounter is presented to you via HTML, the world wide web’s markup language. In this article, I will share with you 20 best practices that will lead to clean and correct markup.
  • * Beautifully Designed We make beautiful WordPress themes that are ready to go right out of the box. * CSS Styling Take full control of your theme styling with our framework without having to learn any coding. * Widgets Themes come stocked with a number of custom widgets that help you to display dynamic content more efficiently
  • I caught this news on Blastr this morning (via techland) and hesitated to report it, partially because I don't want it to be true and partially because I was waiting for comment from Lucasfilm. That second bit never panned out, so I'm going ahead with the unfortunate update on the "Star Wars" live-action TV series. George Lucas spoke out on the series at special 30th anniversary screenings of "Empire Strikes Back" in May. And while he's still gung-ho to get the series done, it seems that cost is going to prevent it from happening anytime soon. Said Lucas, "The live action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don't know how to do 'em. Because, they literally are Star Wars, only we're going to have to try to do them … a tenth the cost. And, it's a huge challenge … lot bigger than what we thought it was gonna be." So excuse me while I go weep in a corner.
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    links for 2010-07-27

  • Color is a major part of any brand's identity. Here we're taking a look at some of the most recognizable color identities in the world, as well as some groups and forums on COLOURlovers that could be valuable for anyone who is working to give their brand a little more color.
  • A comprehensive WordPress installation, albeit simple to produce, often requires multiple steps — many of which can easily be omitted accidentally. How many times have you forgotten to customize your permalink structure? How about adding in a sitemap plugin? What about changing your timezone? If you’ve installed WordPress more than once, chances are you’ve missed something. Take the following steps and you’ll never miss anything again.
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