I just installed sIFR 2.0 on this blog… and I must say I’m impressed. I’ve tested it on IE, Firefox and Safari, and it works perfectly. It degrades gracefully, too. I tested it on IE 5 for the Mac, and my old title appeared. The only drawback is that it has to wait for the whole page to load before it replaces your text with the sIFR includes.
It was a snap to install, but a little tricky to tweak. I was trying to adjust the line heights on my titles, but it caused the titles to scale in odd ways depending on the length of the text field. From their site: Read more...
I’ve been wanting to be able to create slideshows in Quicktime format on Slideroll for a long time. It isn’t easy because it would involve creating Quicktime files dynamically with a server-side script. I was looking around for a human-readable format that Quicktime understands when I encountered SMIL.
SMIL stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, and it is a format for describing time-based audiovisual presentations. The specification is up to version 2.1, but has very very limited support. Realplayer has SMIL 2.0 support, and Quicktime has had SMIL 1.0 support since version 4.1, released in early 2000. Strangely, Quicktime has never offered any further upgrades to its SMIL support. Read more...
Listening to Packard Goose right now, I realize I could not function without the music of Frank Zappa. Somehow it makes work and life easier. When I listen to Zappa, those little annoyances… Comment Spam… IE patches… Remote Debugger never working… Trying to understand the Quicktime spec… they don’t seem to matter quite so much. I just wish I could figure out the meter in Keep it Greasey. Maybe it’s because Zappa was so good at what he did, that he made it look effortless. Someday I hope I’m that good at something. Mooo-aaahhhh….
I’m still seeing blogs out there posting misinformation about the Microsoft IE Eolas Patent Suit Patch. All of the misinformation is regarding exactly how the patch will affect ActiveX controls embedded on a page. People are saying that the content “will not run until the user clicks on it”. This is simply not true. Code WILL execute, and your apps will run. The only difference is that the user must click once within the bounding box of the embedded content in order to interact with it. Read more...
