Within the last 20 minutes, I have received two different phone calls with recordings saying I’ve won an all-inclusive vacation, and I just had to push a number on the keypad to accept it. Is it just a matter of time before an automatic filter can be applied to incoming calls? People shouldn’t be able to make unsolicited calls and email; it’s just wrong.
A while ago (a year?!), I made this cute little bug graphic for Nemiver, a C/C++ debugger for GNOME.
Nemiver has since changed icons. More recently, Shirley pointed out to me that my bug had been used on a Mac site! 😮 (Of all things!) Heh. I only posted the graphic on the Nemiver mailing list, so I was really curious how the author of the post on the Mac site, Tanya Palta, managed to find my graphic. I’m guessing it was a Google Images search for “dead bug”. 🙂 I’m actually rather flattered that my graphic was picked for this post, but it’s worth mentioning that the license wasn’t followed – which is par for the course with the Internet. The image and it’s source was (and remains) released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License (It’s a mouthful, but it’s pretty simple).
The bug originally started with this:
I remember Jesse commenting that it looked like a barbeque. Hah… so it did! 🙂 I went through lots of different iterations:
And ended up with the graphic at the top of this post. I also tried simplifying it and making the eyes bigger to support lower resolutions, but I didn’t really put any effort into fitting it within the Tango guidelines.
Anyway, that’s this bug’s life story.
All images and SVG source available in zip file (dead_bug.zip – 330KB) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Images created in Inkscape, an excellent opensource vector art program.
That’s the name of the new channel available on Wii. I gotta say, it’s much better than the other channels we’ve been getting. After you download the channel (from the Shop channel), go in and look at all the “Popular” Mii’s. It’s pretty amazing what some people can do with the limited Mii palette. Moles are mouths. Sunglasses are cheeks. Eyes are eyebrows. Eyebrows are horns. Characters that you wouldn’t think were possible have been done. There’s also a contest aspect to this channel. The first contest is to create Mario without his cap. After seeing what others could do, I spent quite a bit of time getting my Mario submission just right. Oh god, I spent a long time (over an hour, I think) making a Mario Mii…. help me. The channel might not be revolutionary, but it’s kinda fun. 🙂
And, of course, the contest seems to be a way Nintendo is promoting their latest game: Super Mario Galaxy ships today. It is being dubbed the spiritual successor of Super Mario 64 (which you should have either on N64 or Virtual Console) and is pretty much unanimously the best Wii game. Get it. Now.
Steven runs out the door.
I’ve removed a lot of the noise from the theme. This includes all of the gradients and many of those nasty, sharp lines. Put Categories and Time at the top of each post, with Tags and Comments at the bottom. Made both smaller. Put everything on search results page. Added links to Technorati and del.icio.us from Tags and Categories pages. Changed the gradient images for header and footer (reminds me of rust).
Screenshots of some of the changes:
Original and loud:
Removed gradients:
Added solids:
Changed colours:
Some more touch-ups:
What you should be seeing now:
Comments / suggestions?
I finally updated the theme on my blog. Please take a look and try various things (in different browsers, if possible) and report any bugs in the comments section. Suggestions welcome, as well. Demands can go elsewhere… (you know who you are!) 🙂
This theme isn’t 100% done, but it’s functional and I wanted to get it up. The only thing I really miss is the turtle. But he could come back. Or something else….
If I was just writing a theme for Gecko-based browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Epiphany, etc) I would have been done ages ago. And if I do more wordpress theme stuff in the future, I vow to follow the KISS principle at all times. Would have saved me much time! Rather than try and figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it, just do something simpler! Maybe my next theme will be plain text. 😛 Probably not, though… I’m a sucker for tinkering.
Update: I forgot to mention, my goal with the theme on IE was simply getting it to display reasonably well (no giant bugs, and can be viewed). It will, in fact, look and feel better on Firefox. (I have been using ies4linux to test it for IE 6 on on my computer.) 🙂