That’s right, she said yes! ;-)
Remember this? Well, I’ve managed to get rid of one computer and tidy up the rest of them so that it now looks like this:
A huge improvement, if you ask me. Now I can actually see the person sitting in the chair on the opposite side of the table.
Two of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time are Alien and Blade Runner, both the result of the genius that is Ridley Scott. I could hardly contain my excitement when I read over on io9.com that Ridley is getting back in the sci-fi saddle. This time, he’s going to tackle the film adaptation of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Leonardo DiCaprio, who owns the rights to the movie, will likely be involved in some fashion.
Plans to make the movie have been around for a long time, but “the technology was not there to make it look convincing”. If there’s anyone suitable for making things look convincing, it’s Ridley Scott. Alien is almost 30 years old now and it still freaks me out.
For those of you interested in the works of Ridley Scott, I recommend the Alien Quadrilogy box set as well as the Blade Runner collectors edition. Both contain lots of extra material and behind the scenes footage from when the movies were made. I particularly enjoyed “The Beast Within: The Making of Alien”.
At work, I’m currently in the process of migrating a relatively large (~30,000 lines of code) ASP.NET 1.1 project over to 2.0. While doing this, I have picked up a few cool things in ASP.NET 2.0. One of these is the Page.MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack property. Instead of trying to describe what it does, I’ll copy and paste from MSDN:
When Web pages are posted back to the server, the user is returned to the top of the page. On long Web pages, this means that the user has to scroll the page back to the last position on the page.
When the MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack() property is set to true, the user is instead returned to the last position on the page.
Now, I’m sure the behind-the-scenes implementation is this isn’t as pretty or as elegant as something you could cook up yourself, but dammit, it just works. In my case, the app I’m working on is for an intranet where we have full control over the browsers being used and accessibility isn’t a big issue. The app itself has lots of really large forms with tables, drop-down lists and submits. The ability to have users submitted back to the exact spot on the page where they submitted the form is a godsend.
I’ve been relying on reCAPTCHA using the official WordPress plugin to protect against spam on the blog for some time. All the while, I’ve just assumed whatever markup it spat out would be XHTML 1.0 Strict. Then yesterday, while tinkering with something unrelated, I decided to run the blog through the validator and noticed the reCAPTCHA stuff was far from valid XHTML. I thought this was odd so I searched for a discussion on the subject, but I didn’t find much. I did run across a discussion on the reCAPTCHA mailing list though. In it, I found this little bit:
The reCAPTCHA team is not going to be developing XHTML fixes.
And that’s from someone at recaptcha.net. Why not just release a quick fix and get it over with? Is it just me or is this really odd behavior? Why wouldn’t they make it valid out of the box? The fact that you have to hack the scripts in order to use it with XHTML is a huge turn-off for a lot of people.
As a result of this, I’ve decided to remove reCAPTCHA from the blog in protest. Come on Recaptcha! Get with the program.
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