Free land

I'm a bit surprised that people can actually get free land in a developed country, in this millenium.

Orphion - iPad musical instrument

Pretty interesting. There appears to be some amount of thought given to the geometry of the layouts as it relates to musical theory. And it's a new platform that I'm sure will gather a community around it.

Light vim intro

For newbies.

ZenCash

This is neat. It's like a collection agency, but for freelancers/small biz owners.

CSS selectors level 4 draft

For future reference.

Lisp in ruby

Lisp in ruby. Short and sweet.

What the bagel man saw

Interesting story, but the conclusion might suffer from survival bias - is the number of dropped customers statistically significant?

Random notes on WebGL

Notes on WebGL.

SML vs OCaml

I was learning SML over the holidays. Neat language.

Here's a syntax comparison between it and OCaml.

Fixing IE PNG opacity

So you've got a sweet jQuery-based animation working in Firefox and Chrome and all that, and you check in IE, and, in horror, you find that the opacity animations on PNG background images are showing this ugly black halo. What to do?

Easiest fix:

//say this is your initial style
.thing {
background:url(images/translucent.png) no-repeat;
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
opacity:0.5;
}

//add this to the stylesheet
.thing {
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(
src=/path/to/images/translucent.png) alpha(opacity=50);
background:none\9;
}

(I wrapped the one line to fit in the blog, but the filter declaration should be all in one line)

Just make sure you use an absolute image path on the filter, not a relative one. Tweak the opacity to your liking.

When animating, jQuery is smart enough to not clobber the AlphaImageLoader filter when it changes the opacity one.