Month: November 2004

An Introduction to Client-Side XSLT: It’s Not Just for Server Geeks Anymore

Client-Side XSLT

This is rather cool. I read through the article and went through step by step and played around a bit afterwards and made my XML look pretty. I may just have to start looking into this more. It has real application in trying to separate content and design, which as we all know, is the web design dilemma.

We know that XHTML is XML, but it’s not used by most Web designers on a day-to-day basis. Its importance and usefulness aren’t even fully understood by most developers. Unless you’re familiar with a server-side technology where the power of XML has been utilized, you might find XML’s purpose a little ambiguous.

Links of Interest:

Learn XML in 30 Minutes

Getting started with XSLT and Path

[tag]Tech News[/tag]
[tag]Internet Related[/tag]
[tag]WebDEV[/tag]

Half Life 2: First Impressions

Well, I followed through with my plan, I woke up at 2:50AM …got myself awake and then sat impatiently waiting for Half Life 2 to be released promptly at 3:00AM, and then I impatiently sat through the 10 minute long unlocking process. Then all hell broke loose.

Let me first state that I am running Half Life 2 on a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, it’s running off of a 160GB 8MB Cache Maxtor HD, running at 1280×1024 2x AA on a PCI NVIDIA 5200 FX 128MB video card and I was getting anywhere between 35-60 FPS (frames per second). Yes, and it looked absolutely beautiful. Doom 3 has got nothing on this game. Doom 3 looked good, but Half Life 2 is the complete package. It looks good, it sounds good, the game play is a perfect combination of fun while being difficult, and it’s scalable based on whatever system you’re running it on. This is what Doom 3 and Halo 2 should have been.

Now, I’ve been a pretty decent Halo 2 “fan-boy” since…well, since Halo 1 came out. I can’t help it, I love my Xbox, it does eveything that my computer can’t. As any of you who have read this blog in the past month have witnessed I have been following the progress of Halo 2 with the utter anticipation of a 4 year old boy on Christmas Eve. I bought Halo 2 the day after is came out. I beat it within 2 days of owning it. It’s good, but it’s not much of a step from Halo 1. That was the very sad realization I am starting to cope with. I don’t play on Xbox live, I will hopefully get to play some multiplayer Halo 2 soon which may just save this game from being an total flop.

That said, Half Life 2 is everything that I expected, and is shaping up to be more. There is such obvious attention to detail it’s almost frightening. From the very beginning you can tell this game is different because of it’s ability to swallow your senses. You feel tense as you’re running down the halls and across the roof top from the “police”…you duck and jump when you suddenly hear bullets whizzing by the left side (yes, you can hear directionally) of your head. I am happy to announce that the wait was worth it.

If you don’t own it already, go buy it, If you do own it, congrads…you probably won’t be doing anything else in the near future.

[tag]Tech News[/tag]
[tag]Software[/tag]
[tag]Thoughts[/tag]
[tag]Life[/tag]

Half-Life 2 Countdown

Getting everything ready for Half Life 2…lol, yes I am well aware that I am a nerd.  LOL

Checked for and deleted Spyware/Adware… Check

Antivirus Check Last night… Check

Cleaned up the registry… Check

Wiped Temp Files… Check

Defragging Hard Drive… Check

Time for some sleep and then it’s game time. cool smirk 

[tag]Chaos[/tag]
[tag]Thoughts[/tag]
[tag]Life[/tag]

YourTotalSite.com / Creativity vs. Standard Layouts

Creativity vs. Standard Layouts

This is the designers daily delimma. Do you create a visually pretty and shockingly creative website or do you go with the cookie cutter standard design that will be accessible to everyone. Having read a plethora of design, accessibility, and usability articles it’s very tough to think of a design that meets all of these very high standards while still being unique and attractive. Ah…and so the struggle continues. 

[tag]Tech News[/tag]
[tag]Internet Related[/tag]
[tag]WebDEV[/tag]

Are Web Safe Colors Dead?

Web Safe Colors are Dead?

The browser-safe palette was developed by programmers with no design sense, I assure you. That’s because a designer would have never picked these colors.

The only reason to use the browser-safe palette is if you have a concern that your Web design work will be viewed from a 256 color (8-bit) computer system.

I think it’s safe to say this second quote pretty much says it all. Are the dead? No. Should they be dead? Yes, for all intensive purposes they should be put out of their (and our) misery.

[tag]Tech News[/tag]
[tag]Internet Related[/tag]
[tag]WebDEV[/tag]

Another night, Another party

So last night we threw a Media Cloisters party here in our little home in celebration of (more or less) completing the new Cloisters web site. Soon enough this new site will be live and then we will have an entirely new set of exhilerating tasks to perform on it. Anyways, the party was quite fun. Krohn and I all but killed the bottle of tequilla he brought. It was nice to finally have another person who likes tequilla; no salt, no lime, straight up tequilla. Matt had a very interesting observation: it doesn’t burn until the 5th or 6th shot, it’s strange but true. Anyways, I have to cut this short for now.  More to come…

[tag]Chaos[/tag]
[tag]Thoughts[/tag]
[tag]Life[/tag]
[tag]VC[/tag]

MSN Search – Google has some Competition

MSN Search

This doesn’t officially launch until tomorrow, but I just happened to stumble across the URL so I thought I should get a jump on posting about it. Here goes my brief comparison between Google and MSN Search…

Visual Appearance of home search page:

  • MSN Search: Plenty of whitespace, simple, clean, and elegant design. The text links are a little bit difficult to recognize as links.
  • Google: Again, plenty of whitespace, clean appearance. Links are easy to distinguish. Large, rather ugly logo.
  • Winner: Although the difference are slight, I honestly find MSN Search to be easier on the eyes. I’ve never been a huge fan of the rather massive “Google” logo on their search page. Therefore MSN Search wins.

    • Other Features Available from the home search page:

  • MSN Search: MSN Home · My MSN · Hotmail · Messenger · News · Sports · Entertainment · Weather · More…
  • Google: Web · Images · Groups · News · Froogle · Language Tools · more »
  • Winner: Tied. Based solely purely on numbers it is a draw, but based entirely on services provided they are very different in the features they offer, but in my opinion just about equal.

    • A simple test search: “gmail AND pop”

    Note: Google annouced today they would begin allowing POP access to gmail accounts, this represents breaking news that has filtered through the internet today

  • MSN Search: Nunber of results: 56,800. Most of the results are about “Pop goes the Gmail” …not what we were looking for.
  • Google: Number of results: 450,000. The first search results is “Gmail Users Soon Able to Check E-Mail Via Outlook” …Bingo.
  • Winner: The winner is Google because it found the information we were looking for, though I admit the search wasn’t very specific. Also, MSN Search hasn’t had the time yet to build an index comparable in size to Google’s some-odd 8 Billion indexed sites. Watch for this to change very quickly though.

    • I will continue comparing these two as new categories come to mind. Either way, it looks like these two will become the best overall search engines available. I look forward to seeing where Google can innovate and I am equally excited to see how MSN Search competes with the established search standard.

    To quote some anonymous tech guru, “You know you’ve (referring to Google) made it big when your name becomes a verb.” This is in reference to the explosion of “googling” to find something on the internet. Who knows? Maybe we will be “MSNing” a year from now.  LOL 

    [tag]Tech News[/tag]
    [tag]Internet Related[/tag]