Today is Google’s ninth birthday – as witnessed by the cute pi&ntilda;ata in their home page logo*. So that means it’s been nine years since that clean, simple page with just a logo, a search box and a button appeared and changed the way the web worked. Again.
I won’t rehash Google’s history, Wikipedia does the usual splendid job on that, suffice it to say they are still a great example, along with many others such as youTube & Facebook, that nothing is written in stone in this Internets business. That idea you just had may seem a little crazy/obvious/impossible to you right now, but in nine years time me and many others could be blogging about how your idea changed the world. Of course it won’t be ‘blogging’ then but memelizing…. coff. Excelsior!
* And no. Nothing happens if you ‘hit’ the pi&ntilda;ata unfortunately..
Thanks to researchers who recently presented at SIGGRAPH, we may soon have intelligent image resizing in Photoshop to help fit photos into any size and scale area. The technology looks at an image and tries to work out where the important parts are – so that when you re-size the image, it knows which parts can be reduce or expanded with minimal impact to what the image is trying to convey. Very clever indeed. The movie below gives some great examples of this.
And why might this soon be in Photoshop? Well Adobe has hired one of the co-creators to join their team so expect cool stuff like this in the future. Perhaps they’ll even release some kind of image server that lets you define important image areas and then vend right-sized thumbnails or reduced images on the fly without having to go through the manual slog of intelligently cropping it yourself. That would be pretty cool. [From Wired]
A random CSS thing: there are many reasons why rollover image replacement fails to work in IE, when it works fine in Firefox et al, however I just found a new one; if you forget to put the HREF into the anchor link (<a&rt;) then both Firefox & IE render the link correctly – but Firefox will activate the :hover state and IE won’t. Simply putting the HREF back in again makes it work.
In this case you could argue that Firefox is at fault, as a link without a destination isn’t a link. Either way it was a waste of time finding it.
I’ve just been banging my head against an issue with my Rails Action Mailer (action_mailer) not sending emails. I know the application used to work, but thought the upgrade to the latest Rails had scuppered it. Every time I’d try and send an email the server console churns and then simply says: 302 Found.
So I turned on the full debugging in my config file (config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true) and this meant I got a time out error shown. Pinging my mail server gave a rapid response, so that was obviously not the problem.
Luckily my host provides an alternate SMTP port number for just such an eventuality, but otherwise it means you have to set up your local development SMTP to match your local ISP information.
O’Reilly have just released a new book on harnessing the collective intelligence of the Web 2.0 masses. Founder Tim O’Reilly is very excited about this book, and though you might think he’s biased he’s not one to shout about every single book they release as that would probably fill every day of his life. If anyone has read it let me know if it’s as good as it sounds.
