Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.
This is where I tell you what I really think. This website doesn’t support comments by design, that is what your blog is for!
In a recent project, I wanted to apply a CSS transition to the hover state of a table row and some menu items. The problem was that my hover state used a gradient background and I wanted the gradient to fade in and out. Background colors can be faded in, but background images can only be moved around. My solution was to fade in a background color and animate the position of the background image.
Many of my friends have said 2010 was a bad year for them. I can surly empathize. I’ve had my share of rough years; not 2010, though! I was fortunate to have had a very enjoyable one. Here are some highlights and maybe a little perspective.
In the spirit of International Blasphemy Rights Day 2010, I wish to direct your attention to a video of Muslims attacking Lars Vilks during his talk at Uppsala University in Sweden.
I’m beefing up the “Tweet this” option in an event calendar CMS I’m working on for a friend, and I needed a quick way to determine the next Auto_increment value of my events table to provide a link to the event on the website. The query for this is totally easy:
SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'events';This query returns all kinds of useful information about the given table, including the current Auto_increment value. Learn more about how I applied my newly learned trick inside!
Happy Flag Day, USA.
In an opinion piece for the Daily Democrat, Pastor Andy Flowers for the Calvary Baptist Church argues that evolution by natural selection requires just as much faith in the unknown as his job as a Pastor. In it he sites some common creationist arguments against evolution that have been thoroughly addressed and dismantled over the past few centuries.
This is pretty status quo for a Baptist Minister. Normally I wouldn’t pay much thought to an article like this in a local newspaper’s Faith column, but Mr. Flowers is grossly misinformed about one of the most basic tenants of biology, and he is teaching this misinformation in my community. I feel I need to at least put the truth out there for people to see it.
Evolution through natural selection is a fact. There are proven, testable examples of it all around us. An endless supply of peer reviewed research supports it (as does the fossil record). Here I will address his main arguments, and offer some alternative reading to the Creation Answers Book that Pastor Flowers is offering for free.
I have been pining for a definitive, stock solution for managing my calendars on my iPhone since I got my first iPhone. I have a combination of MobileMe and Google calendars that I use. I didn’t like the idea of having an unused calendar app on my phone, so rather than look for a third party app to manage calendaring, chose to suffer with having read-only calendars on my iPhone.
No more! My boss found the mystery solution and passed it on to me, and I, in turn, am passing it on to you.
I got sick again. Just in time for a double bill show.
I’m learning Dear Old Dixie for the new Pleasant Valley Boys album we’re cutting. Our schtick is authentic traditional bluegrass, so the recordings we’re pulling our arrangements from aren’t exactly the highest of fidelity. Capo by SuperMegaUltraGroovie has come in quite handy.
My buddy Scott turned me onto Die Antwoord a few days ago. I wound up with an advance of their forthcoming album, “$0$” and can’t stop listening to it. I haven’t been this completely blown away by an album in quite a long time. Maybe a decade.
I have taken pride in my paperless workflow for over six years. When I say paperless, I also mean CD/DVD less as well. I simply don’t print and don’t burn. That is until last night. My wife bought a fricken laser printer (the kind with a fricken laser) on a whim at BestBuy.
I’m not really one to think more than a week or so into the past or future — I’m mostly a today guy — but since we are at the turn of another decade, I thought I would take a second to reflect. You know what, a lot can happen in 10 years.
My dad got another opinion piece printed in the Daily Democrat. I wish they would hire him permanently. He’s good and always gets me thinking.
I took the plunge. Check out my 1961 King Moretone!
I’ve been saving up for a new bass for nearly three years now. During that time the economy tanked and I noticed a marked increase in prices from the luthiers I had been keeping my eye on. My budget has now caught up to modern times and an instrument just popped up on my radar that has given my that tingly feeling.
Another cool band photo from the the early 80s. This band played a big roll in my coming-of-age soundtrack.
I recently stumbled upon this classic photo of GBH. I was a huge fan of their music in my punk days. Actually, I still am, although I haven’t purchased an album since 1987 or so.
For all you TextMate web developer people, I’ve rounded up some of my more useful CSS snippets, with a few handy snippets for proper quotes and apostrophes thrown in for good measure.
Last week, Google announced Wave, their new big idea in internet communication at their annual I/O developer’s conference. This project is absolutely impressive and has the potential to really improve the way we communicate and collaborate on the web, it’s just hard to tell, because the of the very long and very boring video Google is using to promote it.
Boy have I had a fun day with Internet Explorer 8! Faruk AteÅŸ has too. He posted a comprehensive piece about IE 8’s X-UA-Compatible header mechanic. I got down to the paragraph on the blacklist and quickly paused my reading to figure out the necessary IE conditional comment syntax to hide style sheets from all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Come inside. I will share.
I’ve been going through a bunch of websites that I maintain in the newly released IE 8, and I stumbled uppon a inconsistently documented bug with the line item element. This is a brief summary of my findings.
Dustin Pedroia, second basemen for the Boston Red Sox, and one-time Woodland resident was quoted in Boston Magazine with a few negative remarks about my home town. I don’t follow sports myself, but I’m told he is sort of a big deal in the baseball world, and people in town look up to him with pride ... well, that is until now.
Ella brought this flyer in to me saying it was jammed in the screen door. Upon first glance, I thought it was a flyer for a death metal show at the Stag or something. Then I realized it was just the church down the street threatening us with torture and mutilation.