Thanks to everyone who came out to the NovaRUG presentation of my HTML/CSS/Rails Views talk. Here’s my slides from the event:

Beautiful Markup (10.7MB PDF)

Thanks to Gregg Pollack a video of my RailsConf 2010 Talk, Curing DIV-itis with Semantic HTML, CSS and Presenters is now online at the EnvyLabs site. I’ll be expanding and giving this talk again on June 29th at NovaRUG.

Thanks to everyone who came to the talk at the conference and for those of you who watch it online!

The kind people at NovaRUG have invited me to deliver my RailsConf talk on June 29th at NearInfinity in Reston, Virginia. I’ll be updating and greatly expanding the coverage of the talk, since we have a lot more time. I’ll get a decent presenter example worked up for you all as well.

If there are any things you’d like to see in the talk that I didn’t cover before or tools you think I should cover, feel free to email me or leave a comment here.

My RailsConf talk Curing DIV-itis with Semantic HTML, CSS and Presenters went off great, with a standing room only attendance and some great questions. I apologize for not having a decent presenter example in the slide deck. I was concerned about hitting my time limit with the slide count (but ended up coming in around 30 minutes instead).

You can get the slides from either the link above or here (9.7MB PDF)

I spent Memorial Day weekend down outside of Charlottesville as the guinea pig for Jack Landers and Paul Fritz’s new class on rebuilding an old Mauser into a modern deer rifle. Starting off with a K-98, we basically stripped it down to the receiver, got rid of the cosmoline and junk and rebuilt it with a new stock, bent bolt, scope, and trigger. After testing it at the range, we realized the throat erosion meant we were going to have to rebarrel it the following weekend. We just finished that and Paul Fritz emailed us an awesome range report about how his rifle performed.

I’ll be taking mine down to Lafayette Gun Club or the NRA range in the near future to sight it in and see how she shoots. I’m hoping for something similar to Paul’s results.

It’s been a while since I did one of these but my RSS feed reader has been overflowing with reads so I’m going to start doing these as I have links to share again.

iPad Gets Kitchen Cabinet Install | I expect to see a lot more of these kind of things with various touch screen interfaces. The benefits of a computer in the kitchen are numerous, from looking up a recipe to playing music to video chatting while working. It’s a matter of time until digital connectivity is laced throughout life.

We Are Out of Money | No matter how many “green shoots” people keep talking about, a simple fact remains: Government from the local to the federal level is living outside of its means and eventually, there’s one outcome: bankruptcy.

Students Get In Trouble for Wearing American Flags on Cinco de Mayo | Another sign of political correctness run amok, four students were almost suspended over wearing the American Flag on Cinco de Mayo because it was deemed offensive to the Mexican-American holiday. Luckily the school board in the area disagreed with the Principal’s take on it and the boys were not suspended. I think they should have gone back wearing Gadsen Flags.

Tax Bills at Their Lowest Since 1950s | For those complaining that taxes are through the roof, the numbers say otherwise. People in 2009 actually paid about 9.2% of incomes, as opposed to the historical average of 12.

Chicago Mayor Daley Wants Gun Case Heard by World Court | Obviously not content to simply strip Chicago residents of their Second Amendment Rights, Daley wants to take the case the Supreme Court declined to the World Court in the Hague. Citing numbers that have been proven incorrect (e.g. 85% of Mexican guns come from the US, etc.) it’s just another attempt at pushing a ludicrous agenda of control. Mayor Daley, put a sock in it.

I wrote a mockery of the Declaration of Independence for those Georgetowners who want to secede from Washington, DC. You can read it over at WeLoveDC

After the laughing debacle of the snowfecta and seeing people literally burn furniture to stay warm, I decided to take some of the Boy Scout basics I’ve learned over the years and put them into an article for WeLoveDC on basic preparedness. Read an learn.

I wrote an article for WeLoveDC about things that you can do for gardening in the winter time. Lots of things to get going even with all this snow on the ground!

I did two remixes for the band The D.R.A.M.A. Kings for their new EP. One is a house/techno remix for the song “Caught Up” and the other is a pop/rock remix for the song “Turn It Around”. You can hear the latter on their Facebook Fan page called “Turn It Around (Borealis remix)”.

Chad Fowler asked me to put together a quick site for the RubyConf 5k that will occur during Ruby Conf in San Francisco in November. If you’re there, please think about running, as it benefits Leukaemia and Lymphoma research. Need to get up to 5k from walking up the stairs making you winded? Look at Chad’s link that he sent me: Couch to 5k

National Review Author Says Woman’s Sufferage Bad for America | Almost hard to believe, but this is your right wing in action. Women voting is “bad for conservatism” and therefore “bad for society”.

Newspaper Redesign: The Story of a Beautiful Failure | iA was invited to submit a redesign of the Swiss paper, Tages-Anzeiger. This is a story of how they lost, and the designs they came up with. Beautiful stuff. It’s interesting to see a usability firm approach the newspaper format that has been effectively unchanged for almost a hundred years.

Overcriminalization: The Federal Gov’t Goes Too Far | a 66-year-old “diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinsons” was targeted by the Fish & Wildlife service, his house raided by a SWAT team, and forced to serve 2 years in a Federal prison all for missing some paperwork on importing… Orchids. Your tax dollars at work.

Fossil Skeleton Predates Lucy | 1.2 million years older than Africa’s famous “Lucy” fossil, this shows that humans split off from other apes long before previously thought.

Hadron Collider Could Prove Hyperdrive | Reviving a 1924 hypothesis by a German physicist, Franklin Felber is looking to see if the concept of a hyperdrive could be proven on a near atomic level when the Hadron Collider starts back up in the near future.

Many of you know I helped run Nancies.org (which is no more) for 10 years and when I saw this video I was cracking up. Maybe it’s because I already had another band’s back catalog (that band being U2), ensuring that I didn’t suffer this same fate.

I wrote a post about the new Ward 8 Library design for WeLoveDC. The thing is a cross between a McDonalds Playplace and a sophmore architecture school project gone horribly wrong. You can see how much I love most modern architects (Predock, Calatrava and FLW being notable examples)

The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association has released 120 hues from the Mt. Vernon estate of George Washington that were realized during the last decade of interiors renovations on the property. So for those of you who like to keep period in your colonials (as opposed to the monstrosities of custom home builders in Northern Virginia), you now can have it like George would.

Dignified.

Sorry for my absence of late, but I’ve been busy. We’ve been pushing on developing our new product at InfoEther and I’m going to be moving out west of Dulles Airport to a place (pictured above) next to Oatlands Plantation.

We (myself and some friends) have been working on a 1200 sq ft garden and we’re going to be firing up the grill and enjoying the summer. I’ll be out that way in July.

The new MacRuby website is alive and kicking with a new look and feel (courtesy of me) and a nice Webby-based backend (courtesy of Rich Kilmer).

Webby is a Ruby framework that allows the user to work with model files to build a static site. We have a lot of helper methods and ERB that ends up dumped out as HTML when we run the deploy command. It’s similar to WordPress in that way, and it is a phenomenal tool for building static sites that feel dynamic. While it does support things such as HAML and SASS, we relied on good old Textile to get the job done.

The site is run without a database. It uses structs and helper methods to generate everything. For example, if Rich wanted to add someone to the “Project Team” list, he would simply update the Ruby array of people objects and the helpers loop through and make it all nice and styled. There was more info presented on this page initially, being the name, URL, focus and company affiliation, but it was simplified down for some of the presenters. The Special Thanks are handled in the same way.

We’ve been very happy to see some of the recent press about MacRuby as well. If you haven’t seen it, please check out:

Upcoming MacRuby Implementation to be Substantially Faster (at ArsTechnica)

Phil Rossi has posted a bunch of the Eden podcast at both the CrescentStation site as well as at PodioBooks. I did the soundtrack work for this and while I didn’t get to make as many pieces as I had originally intended due to schedule, it’s still a lot of exciting noisemaking with a good friend of mine. Check it out and while you’re at it, listen to his first podcast novel, “Crescent” as well.

I’ll be presenting at the DC Pecha Kucha night next Wednesday at the Corcoran in downtown DC near the White House. I’ll be presenting on the short film Meticulous made called “The Sandbox” in a 20 minute, 20 seconds per slide showdown. Hope to see you there!

Having grown up with pica sheets and crop slides with wax pencils, I come from a world of print design effectively dead with the advent of QuarkXPress, Pagemaker and InDesign. I still remember learning the rule types in high school yearbook design sessions and in some cases, I’ve recently implemented what’s known as a Harvard Rule line in a design.

What is a Harvard Rule? The old yearbook publisher I worked with defines it nicely:

A standard rule line is any printed line that is less than two picas wide. These rule lines can also add variety to your page. Common rule line weights are one, two, three, six, nine and twelve points. Rule lines are intended to unite design elements, not separate them. A Harvard rule line is two parallel lines, with one line wider than the other. Standard widths are one, three, six, nine and 12 points. When used as a border, the thin line is usually inside.

First off let’s get these terms right. A pica is 12 points. There are 72 points in a printed inch. (Sorry Windows users, someone back in the day thought 96px to an inch was better than 72. Apple is 72px/inch.) There are, therefore, 6 picas in an inch.

I didn’t want to use an image to do this, and wanted to accomplish it with html and css. Luckily, there’s an HTML element called “HR” that is a horizontal rule. These, in their basic implementation, are plain and simple ugly:

but some CSS can make it pretty:

That’s not nice to use. So with some HTML and CSS hackery, we can get something that looks a lot nicer. In your HTML, you first want to call the rule:

  <hr size="0" noshade />

Since it’s XHTML we’re using here, this is a self-closing element. The CSS for this isn’t too complex. We need to define the base colors to hide the original element. We then need to apply borders to finish the magic. You can alter the margins to space it out from other elements.

  hr {
    /* Faking a Harvard Rule */
    color: #fff;
    background-color: #fff;
    height: 2px; /* this is teh white space between the lines */
    border: 0; /* this removes left and right borders */
    border-top: 4px solid #aaa;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #aaa;
    }
  

With that in place, we can give these unique styles and flip the lines as needed.

You can also accomplish a double rule this way:

These are all being used in the forthcoming MacRuby redesign.

Enjoy!