For no reason whatsoever, I was looking at QR code generation and had delved into some interesting paths, such as a recent contribution to CPAN that generates QR codes in spaces and asterisks. Not much use, perhaps, until you use those characters to feed some graphics processor and then you really can work some magic. The error-correction built into the codes permits quite a lot of intentional errors without destroying data, and one can arrange the intentional errors to form interesting pictures within the codes. ISO 18004 has all the details (if you have the money to buy the spec).
If you are interested in lower level implementation details, check out the libqrencode library (in C). This recently added Micro [click title to read more…]
I find myself trying to do something simple: making an image 100% opaque when in a div that is set to 80% so that the background shows through (a little) on the div but doesn’t interfere with the image.
I’d demonstrate here, only it turns out to be impossible. Not with the latest CSS, and not with any current browser. What might help is a jQuery plugin called Transify (easy to find). It’s not 100% compatible with my case, but close enough to be worth a bit of exploration.
Since proper opacity controls for backgrounds wont appear until some future incarnation of CSS3, for now we have to resort to hacks involving semi-transparent PNGs, Z-axis hackery, floating layers, etc. Actually, [click title to read more…]
I was disappointed to discover from the public minutes a few days ago, that the W3C BPWG had to give up the quest to establish standards for Content Transformation Proxies. It would seem that they just didn’t get enough implementations to conclude that the specification was ready for prime-time, and it’s now going to be consigned to Note status. After all the work that they put into this effort, this really is an ignominious end. I’m sure the casual observer will be debating the possible causes for this, including perhaps:
The providers of CT solutions can’t/won’t comply.
The CT providers have moved on to other things and don’t care about the CTG.
CT proxies are becoming less relevant as [click title to read more…]
If history teaches us anything, it’s this: we’ve seen it all before, we’ll see it all again. I’ve been pondering the “app vs Web” tug o’ war for quite some time, and since my early days with computers (some 30 years ago, as I write this) there have been constant cycles of centralisation and decentralisation.
Short history lesson
It started long before I got involved. This is one case where we know whether it was chicken or egg. In the absence of anything like a working network, computing solutions were centralised. As late as the 1970s, computers were designed for just one task each (a single app on a single computer). You might look at this as “on-device applications”. Computers [click title to read more…]