Simian Design

These are my delicious links for December 8th through December 9th:

• Water Drops – wicked cool.
• Mobius Sliced Linked Bagel – In which you prove to the world that you are indeed a dork and a nerd, and understand math and space better than most.
• Bugs. Big Giant Bugs. – Thomas Shahan takes excellent macro photos of bugs. Check out his stream.

These are my delicious links for June 24th through June 26th:

• Touched by an Angel – The story of how the Farah Fawcett poster came to be.

  "…t may be the most famous pinup poster of all time. Farrah Fawcett's smile is a row of impossibly white teeth so perfectly aligned they look machine-made, her hair a windblown blond tangle that swallows her slender hand.
  Then there is her nipple: a salacious nub straining against the nylon of her red one-piece. Its appearance marked the advent of "nippling." Whenever a model applies ice to her breast before a photo shoot, she's paying homage to Farrah….."

• The Bug, the Worm and the Death Star – As professionals, we prefer logo, logotype, mark, symbol, wordmark, icon, visual identity or signature. With this many choices it is no wonder others have settled on the irreverent bug. Incidentally, a long-time friend in Mumbai told me of some of the general names for logo in India include pintu (pint sized), chintu (tiny), dabboo (fat) and kaka (small one). (But depending on the specific region, language and even community in India, kaka also can mean poo-poo, as elsewhere. I guess context is everything, when calling a logo kaka in India.)

  But whether we designed it, manage it, or just live with it, having a name for the logo appears to fulfill some human need. Some companies provide a formal name, such as The Monogram (GE). Here are a few logos and their officially sanctioned names:

• How many colors? Wrong. – Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen.
• Fun with a spray-gun, a field and perspective. – Nice project, doing POV Perspective on a field, the photos are quite nice.
• Volcano from Space; or how I would kill a man to stay in the ISS for a bit. – A chance recording by astronauts on the International Space Station has captured the moment a volcano explosively erupted, sending massive shockwaves through the atmosphere.
• 10 Ways to Instantly Increase Your jQuery Performance – Nettuts+ –

These are my delicious links for June 18th through June 19th:

• Beck's Record Club. Beck covers an entire album in a day… – Beck ropes in various musician friends to record an entire album in a day. For the purposes of scrappy immediacy, nobody will rehearse or arrange anything beforehand.

  After that day of furious recording, Beck will slowly let the record out into the world via his website (as well as the websites of the other musicians involved), uploading a new song once a week. He'll kick this party off with The Velvet Underground and Nico.

• YUI 3 – The YUI JavaScript Library is going to version 3 (beta) hopefully this week. In an effort to make the library as flexible as possible, YUI 3 introduces an all new plugin architecture that allows you to add your own functionality to nodes and widgets.
• All the Small Icons You'll Ever Need – A large collection of small icons that should fit most of your design needs.

These are my delicious links for April 28th through April 30th:

• Ferris Bueller is the "Fight Club" theory – This just blew my mind. I never thought of the movie in this way, but it makes it SO much more depressing.
• Traffic – Rush hour in Los Angeles is synonymous with gridlock, but the sheer enormity of the situation can be tough to grasp. Fortunately, there is the architecture photographer Benny Chan, whose Traffic! series depicts the scale of overcrowded lanes of rush hour traffic from high overhead.
• How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – #12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

  #56: My Legion of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

  #85: I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 stones of power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be more alone the lines of "Push the button."

• This girl REALLY wants to be a horse. Or a pony. Or something weird. But the legs are kinda cool. – Kim Graham has made these Digigrade leg extensions. They are made of steel and add 14 inches of height to the wearer. But these are not ordinary stilts; they give a person the uncanny and graceful appearance of an animal. It is really cool! The movement of the legs is genuinely graceful and naturalistic. It is a great deal of fun being so much taller.
• FullCalendar – Full-sized Calendar jQuery Plugin – FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar like the one below. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format (an extension is provided for Google Calendar). It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event).

These are my delicious links for April 20th through April 22nd:

• 10 of the world's most unusual places to spend the night – Tired of boring old hotels? With limited vacation time, there's no reason your lodging shouldn't be as fun as the rest of your travel experience!

  From converted train cars to converted prisons, here are 10 of the world's most out-of-the-ordinary places to stay.

  I'd most like to try the monastery I think.

• Firediff – In Case of Stairs – Firediff is a Firebug extension that tracks changes to a pages DOM and CSS.
• This is what 1000FPS looks like. – Here is the first SprintCam v3 showreel, made for NAB 2009 exhibition.
  Mostly 1000FPS shots, made during a recent rugby competition in the Stade de France, Paris

These are my delicious links for March 19th:

• Incredible quadruple transit on Saturn! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine – OK, duh, that’s Saturn. But you can see four moons crossing its face at the same time! Such an event is pretty rare, and very cool. The moons are (from left to right) Enceladus, Dione, Titan, and Mimas. You can also see the shadows of Enceladus and Dione on the planet’s cloudtops, too.
• Browswer Ball – Browser Ball attempts, with only moderate success, to allow the configuration of a seemingly endless array of continuous spaces using multiple overlapping browser windows. Within this multivariate space, users are invited to toss a beach ball both hither and yon. It's quite fun.

These are my delicious links for February 8th through February 9th:

• Blog: Thom Glick – Thom Glick is a great artist. Thom Glick came from space. Seriously. He escaped from a horrible mucky planet, where all forms of art were forbidden and everyone had to eat puppies. It was a sad place.
• jQuery plugin: Tablesorter 2.0 – tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell.
• Sorted Column Highlighting Widget for jQuery TableSorter Plugin – Since Bill Beckman switched to using client side sorting for my tables via the tablesorter.js plugin created by Christian Bach, the one thing he have missed from the server side method he was using before is the highlighting of the sorted columns. He created a nice widget for this.
• Basically, just some architecture porn. (or why building new types of buildings is a good thing) – Herzog & de Mueron won the architecture profession's highest honor, the Pritzker, in 2001; last summer their iconic "Bird's Nest" stadium was beamed into a billion homes during the Beijing Olympics. But unlike other starchitects they haven't been recycling old ideas (Frank Gehry, that's you). They just keep getting better. Witness a new museum/library/community center they just unveiled in Tenerife, Spain.
• Spaceship Yamato. – Vincent Cheung makes the Spaceship Yamato. This is fantastic. I remember this fondly from watching as a kid, and I recently just started rewatching via Netflix. Nice timing. (via Neatorama)

These are my delicious links for January 27th through January 28th:

• CSS Font Stacks – A compiled a list of font stacks that will both open up more font possibilities for web designers, and hopefully offer more appropriate substitutes. Defintely not the Dreamweaver defaults you see all over the place. This is a good list.
• [ws] Color Scheme Designer – This is great, easily find out your mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic and accented analogic color schemes.
• Fluid 960 Grid System | 16-column Grid – A good demo page showing a fluid 16 column grid, in conjuction with mooTools.
• The Milky Way Over Mauna Kea – Stunning photo. I remember as a kid being able to see the Milky Way back at my grandfathers house back in the woods. I wish the light pollution today wasn't so bad, and that this was a more common sight.

These are my delicious links for January 13th through January 14th:

• Movie Poster Remakes. – Olly has decided to create a series of movie posters reinterperated in a kinda minimalistic post modern German-ism style. Six posters (The Dark Knight, Die Hard, Deer Hunter, Rain Man, The Great Dictator, and American History X) are listed here. The Deer Hunter and Die Hard are probably the best in my opinion.
• Fancy Aquarium setups. – Not so much fancy in terms of glass shape, but fancy in terms of what's inside. Brilliant lighting and growth make for stunning underwater landscapes.
• Select Cuts Off Options In IE (Fix) – If you set a static width on the <select> element, any <option> elements that are wider get cut of in IE 7 and below. There is no good CSS solution for this that I can come up with or find. It has been tackled with JavaScript a number of ways.
• iPhone Wallpaper. – Extraverage has a nice collection of iPhone wallpapers. Worth checking out.
• Facebox 1.2 – Facebox is a jQuery-based, Facebook-style lightbox which can display images, divs, or entire remote pages. It's simple to use and easy on the eyes. You'll need a loading image, close label, four corners, and solid border images in addition to the javascript and css files

Dan Wellman has written an excellent article, The Definitive Guide to Creating a Practical jQuery Plugin. He takes you step-by-step through the entire process.

In this article we’re going to be building our very own jQuery plugin step-by-step from scratch; jQuery makes this task exceptionally easy for us, giving us a simple method of packaging up our scripts and exposing their functionality, and encouraging the use of scalable and reusable object-oriented techniques.

Writing a jQuery plugin makes sense if you have code you reuse a great deal. You can drop code into your site and have it work right away with little or no tweaking of the code.

He takes you through the Adding Configurable Properties, building Constructor Methods, and adding to the plugin’s API.

It’s a very well written tutorial, easy to follow, easy to help you along.