madovation!

Pixel-fitting by Dustin Curtis

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:46:09 -0700

Pixel-fitting by Dustin Curtis:

a good design-related read.

spotted in oakland: a man skateboarding and talking on phone...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 20:05:28 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

spotted in oakland: a man skateboarding and talking on phone while pushing a baby in a stroller

That time I flew a Cessna

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 22:40:00 -0700

This past Saturday I got to fly a Cessna! For my last birthday, Keria got me a flight lesson that included a one hour tour of the Bay. Best birthday present ever—I love this kind of stuff. Lucky for her, too; she got to hitch a ride in the back seat.

Keria and I both assumed that I’d be allowed to take control for twenty minutes or so at some point. BOY were we wrong. The instructor Tim casually mentioned that he’d pull the plane up a little bit and I would then take the reigns to taxi and take off. I was completely taken aback, and after processing it, I was thrilled.

First was the preflight checklist and plane inspection—during which I misnamed 40% of the plane’s exterior parts. I hopped into the pilot’s seat and took in the beauty that is the glass cockpit (i.e. the instruments looked like this instead of this). Tim discussed the basics of what’s going to happen during the flight and reminded me he’d walk me through everything again in real-time.

By far, the hardest aspect of operating the Cessna 172 was during taxi. The controls aren’t intuitive at all and I didn’t really get used to them. There’s no ground-based drivetrain on planes, so the prop (in this case) is used as the sole source of propulsion during taxi. So imagine driving a car with with an accelerator stuck on, and moving left or right involved seesawing your feet between two foot pedals. Tapping on the top parts of those pedals would apply the breaks, which you have to keep some amount of pressure on at all times anyway to control your taxi speed. I must have looked drunk to the control tower, as I was wobbling the center line for the entire taxi.

I was told that the plane tends to yaw right before takeoff, so I would need to compensate with the rudder to keep the plane in the center of the runway. It was yet another thing to remember. The time between taxi and full thrust was non-existant—all of the sudden we were hurling down the runway when Tim said to me “…annnnd rotate.” I had forgotten what that meant. “Pull back on the stick”—oh yeah, that… Whoops.

We were up and away! Keria briefly freaked out in the back seat (as I would have been if she were at the controls). But up front I was surprisingly calm after a nice rush of adrenaline. We took off from a small airport, KSQL, which is about 10 miles south of KSFO. We climbed to 1,500 feet and held a bit because of incoming SFO traffic. It was awesome hearing San Francisco Center ATC give a Delta 747 and a United 747 instructions before us. So big league! Once clear, I stopped circling and headed north to the Mission and then to downtown SF.

So far I’d had the controls the whole time (except for the throttle). We remained pretty low to get some good views in. We did a couple of loops around downtown SF then flew parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge. Then I turned East and got a nice view of Angel Island before heading to Berkley. After making a right turn at the new Cal stadium, ATC gave us clearance to do a couple of laps around Lake Merritt. We buzzed by Keria’s apartment, but she was feeling a little bit nauseous at that point (sorry for the herky-jerky flying).

Tim instructed me to stay East of the 880 and head towards the Coliseum. We were approaching OAK airspace and suddenly an freakish automated voice came on the headset—”WARNING: TRAFFIC.” On the secondary flight display (for navigation), I could see a blip getting closer to us with a +6 next to it, meaning another aircraft was approaching and was 600 feet above us. Straight ahead I see a Southwest 737 on final approach. It wasn’t very close, but it sure seemed like it and I had no idea what to do. Tim throttled up a bit and we headed West at about 120kts. The flight controls definitely got stiffer (because of the higher speed), and I was told to relax my death grip on the stick. My arm was actually sore the next day because of that tight squeeze I had pretty much the whole flight. After I completed the initial descent, Tim took control and brought it in.

And that was it! What a freaking cool experience. I had no idea how incredible that flight would be leading up to it. I was surprised at how much I was allowed to do, considering I’ve never taken a formal ground lesson or been in a real sim.

Take a look at some of the video footage Keria got:

Meteor

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:47:08 -0700

Meteor:

This framework looks amazingly awesome.

Meteor is a set of new technologies for building top-quality webapps in a fraction of the time, whether you’re an expert developer or just getting started.

simurai: We're in an icon-sharpness limbo

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 13:12:06 -0700

simurai: We're in an icon-sharpness limbo:

simurai:

With the rise of Retina displays people are looking for resolution independent alternatives to PNG icons. Some fell in love with font-icons, some are shouting “SVG”. But I’m sorry, if you’re looking for a silver bullet, I’m afraid it doesn’t exist. Let’s take a closer look at our options:

Icon…

st patty’s day

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:24:16 -0700

st patty’s day

that’s a bottle of hand sanitizer attached to his belt via...

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:31:00 -0800

that’s a bottle of hand sanitizer attached to his belt via a carabiner

"also last night at like 4am i googled insomnia and learned about fatal familial insomnia which is an..."

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:50:55 -0800

“also last night at like 4am i googled insomnia and learned about fatal familial insomnia which is an autosomal dominant disease that is caused by a mutation to a protein and basically you just don’t sleep for so long that you hallucinate and then you get dementia and then you get SUCH BAD dementia that you die. and you don’t even sleep when you’re put in a coma”

- Keria on her new WebMD find

Vday running stuff..thanks K! (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:31:16 -0800

Vday running stuff..thanks K! (Taken with instagram)

My dear god. (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:21:59 -0800

My dear god. (Taken with instagram)

Booooo Inertia Scrolling

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:09:00 -0800

In an effort to make the scrolling experiences consistent with iPhones and iPads, Apple added inertia scrolling throughout OS X’s interface elements. You know, the rubber-banding feedback to indicate you’re at the edge of a page or list. While I welcome this in most places, I loathe this feature in the browser. Taking a cue form Safari in Lion, and in the spirit of unifying the behavior of WebKit browsers, Google soon adopted this in the latest versions of Chrome for OS X.

Most designers like myself have enjoyed having complete control of the web page canvas but now must deal with annoyances that come with inertia scrolling. When approaching a webpage boundary, that overused gray linen pattern pokes its head out—and in a lot of cases, disrupts the aesthetic of our interfaces. Most notably, fixed positioned page elements can get out of whack for a brief period. Things are a little bit disorienting for a bit for fixed backgrounds, too.

And in some strange cases, when elements are out of the viewport they become incorrectly rendered when the rubber-banding snaps back. The bug doesn’t occur 100% of the time, which is sort of odd. An example of this can be found in the CSS3 inner box shadow on tapviva’s top nav items:

Before scrolling to bottom edge of page (correct rendering):

After scrolling (wild behavior):

I expect that in the near future, we’re able to disable inertia scrolling via a meta tag property. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Edit: there’s a hack that involves disabling the CSS overflow of the body, and requires that you wrap everything in a div that has a y-overflow of auto.

CSS Variables Module Level 1 Spec

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:20:46 -0800

CSS Variables Module Level 1 Spec:

Move over, Sass.

AT&T Heavily Throttling Unlimited Plans after 2GB Data Use

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:42:35 -0800

AT&T Heavily Throttling Unlimited Plans after 2GB Data Use:

This is absolutely unbelievable—it’s a complete breach of contract for anyone grandfathered into the unlimited plan. Throttling after just 2GB??

8 Most Popular jQuery Plugins of January 2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:17:02 -0800

Unopened box found in my old room in Baltimore :( (Taken with...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:53:21 -0800

Unopened box found in my old room in Baltimore :( (Taken with instagram)

Nice work, mom. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:59:49 -0800

Nice work, mom. (Taken with instagram)

Very useful, Google Maps!

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:09:14 -0800

Very useful, Google Maps!

How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:42:31 -0800

How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere:

With the recent Facebook app refresh, and the release of Google’s new iOS Gmail App, it’s very reaffirming to hear developers are going in the direction of HTML-powered apps verses remaining truly native. Luckily this is the path we decided to take when coding out tapviva in early 2011. As a two-person development team, it was the most logical choice in terms of quickly iterating across several platforms simultaneously.

Never noticed the shortcut prefs in iOS5

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:52:18 -0800

Never noticed the shortcut prefs in iOS5

Photo

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:52:50 -0800