I think so. I am absolutely fed up with all the password nonsense we have to put up with (multiple lists etc.) just to use different websites. Also and importantly it’s an OPEN STANDARD which hopefully means sites will be quick to adopt. I signed up for an account a while back and was shocked when I recently visited at how many new companies were on board…including 37 Signals. Take a look.….also their blog.

…ist a book by Gary Snyder (about: DE/EN) which I loved to read when I was much younger, just before I had cut my hair. Unfortunatly it has nothing to do with the rest of this post but it made a nicer heading.
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I never got around to use delicious or any other social bookmarking tools rather than the occasional peek around. I do like the idea behind it and I also like people who spend their time trying to make things more usable. Ian Clarke (about: DE/EN) seems to be someone like that. He just launched Thoof and not only has it the double-O in its name, it is also - lOOking gOOd!
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Speaking about what the web is about (sort of..), here are some links I quite like:
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The Stranglers: Strange Little Girl
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Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver Official Premiere
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Deutsche Hörbücher für Kinder
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Hr s fnt whch lmnts ll vwls. stll rdbl. r myb nt?

Recently I have found a small bug in the asset packager from Scott Becker. The asset packager can compress your stylesheets, strip comments, remove empty lines etc. It does this by using regex string operations.
The asset packager is a great tool. Thank’s to Scott! Maybe you can change the regex pattern in line 176 to allow the tool to remove inline comments.

howto remove comments from your css (regex)

Let’s assume, you have a css like this:

H2{ font: bold 1.1em "Arial Narrow"; word-spacing: 0.2em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #516F37}
H3{ font-size: 1.15em}


Now you are commenting out like this:

H2{ font: bold 1.1em "Arial Narrow"; /* word-spacing: 0.2em;*/ text-transform: uppercase; color: #516F37}
H3{ font-size: 1.15em}


When you do it with regex, you might come up with the following pattern:
\/\*.**\*\/
Let’s have a look at the regex in detail:
“\/\*” - matches “/*”
“.*” matches any character, no matter how often
“\*\/” matches “*/”, which is the end of our comment.

Looks good, but it does not lead to the desired result. The “.*” also matches the two characters from the end of the comment! The regex will finally stop at the end of the line and leave the string like this:

H2{ font: bold 1.1em "Arial Narrow";
H3{ font-size: 1.15em}


That is no valid CSS code anymore, since the first line is broken and not ending with a “}”.

The solution

You need to change the regex pattern in order to do the following:
1. search for a “/*” in the string
2. skip anything but the end of the comment
3. search for a “*/”, which is the end of the pattern

In order to search for anything but the end of a comment, we define the following pattern:
[^\*\/]*
What does it do?
The [] defines a set. Well, we do not need a set here, but we need a feature of the []: reverse matching. The “^” at the beginning is not the matching symbol for the beginning of a line. Within the [] it tells the set to perform a negative match. In this case: everything, but the end of our comment. And that’s exactly the magic we need.

Running this regex on our css:

H2{ font: bold 1.1em "Arial Narrow"; /* word-spacing: 0.2em;*/ text-transform: uppercase; color: #516F37}
H3{ font-size: 1.15em}


regex pattern:
\/\*[^\*\/]*\*\/

Result:

H2{ font: bold 1.1em "Arial Narrow"; text-transform: uppercase; color: #516F37}
H3{ font-size: 1.15em}


It works!

patch for the asset packager

Scott left me a comment in our blog, telling me, where to look in the code.
file:
vendor/plugins/asset_packager/lib/synthesis/asset_package.rb, line 176

patch:

# orig line: source.gsub!(/\/\*(.*?)\*\/ /, "") # remove comments - caution, might want to remove this if using css hacks
source.gsub!(/\/\*[^\*\/]*\*\//, "") # remove commens within a line, but keep the rest of the line intact


ajaxiator / screech / helmut ebritsch is proud to present his record release together with harry seldom. We play live on the 7.7.2007 at the mädcheninternat / deep club.

Some friends are supporting us : tigerskin (pokerflat/organic domain) and dirk diggler(axiom).
I hope to see you there because it will be a great party. Also the location is partially outdoor.

Listen to the track here : harry seldom myspace profile

More infos in my blog : screech - music creation source

Releaseinfo :

Harry Seldom - don`t look back will be released on the 26.june 2007 on organic domain records (label of Tigerskin/Dub Taylor). The track is produced by Screech and Harry Seldom. Distributor is neuton. There are some remixes available from Tigerskin and Benno Blome. Phonique has put us on his may charts at place 5 and we are on the playlist from ellen alien,dj t. and mandy.

This t-shirt comes with a special marker that enables you to customize your t-shirt claim. If you feel bored or even think this text is maybe a little to rude you wrote while you were drunk, just through it in the washing machine and start all over.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/9505

Choice:
We (web users) have more buying choices than ever. Largely due to the fact more and more shops are coming online presenting every imaginable product from all corners of the globe. I can find almost any kind of product online now, even the most niche or bizarre items. Shopping is fast becoming a Long Tail experience and consumers want to say something unique about themselves when they buy things. The fact that the web does not have a fixed shelf space and can ’store’ as many products as can be put onto a web site means that we have the ability to find and buy the products we actually desire rather than a proxy or ‘it will do’ solution.
Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the things we do here at tsoosay is to work with patterns.

(in more than one meaning of the word)

This video by the canadian pop band SLOAN (wikipedia, band website) is using a vast amount of them, so I thought to share it here. It’s worth listening, too.

The more technically orientated reader might find the notes at FEED interesting.

(via, via)

We are using the asset packager in order to reduce the amount of requests to the server. The other bebefit is, that you can compress one bigger file (packager combines all css files into one big one) better, that e.g. 5 smaller ones. It is a great plugin, but recently we had some trouble with it.

Well, when testing some changes in production mode, the site lookes crappy. In development mode, everything looked fine. After doing some debugging, we found out, that a comment in a css file was the problem.

css line: “… … …;z-index:20000;/*paranoid value!*/}”

After calling “rake asset:packager:build_all”, the combined file looked like this:

“… … …;z-index:20000;”

The “}” was missing, which means, that the packager just searches for a starting comment and kills the rest of the line witout checking the end of the commend.
Just keep that in mind, when you write your css.

Not a new story but noteworthy - mobile phones that become flowers. I think it’s a wonderful idea and a sustainable ‘best practice’.

bgmaker enables you to produce your individual pattern. therefore you get a pad where you can create your own little pixel pattern which will be tiled by your browser to a cool scalable and fast loading background graphic.

http://bgmaker.ventdaval.com/

tsoosaylabs background pattern

mario background pattern