Feel Creative

While on the Portfolio.com site (see previous post), this caught my eye (see above). The sculpter is Nathan Sawaya, a former lawyer who decided he’d had enough of the courts and figured he’d play with LEGO for the rest of his life (oh the joy!).

I think the appeal of the pixelated look comes from growing up playing 8-bit video games on NES and Sega Master System. Makes me think of this Canon ad that an old colleague of mine worked on:

Check it out the LEGO Sculpture slideshow at http://www.portfolio.com/slideshows/2008/08/Lego-Artist.

I Stumbled Upon this beautiful slideshow of images from the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. It further strengthens Video Games as the emerging medium for art.

If anyone has seen WALL-E and sat through the closing credits they’ll notice that the background theatrics use the progression of visual art methods through history to tell the epilogue. From lines cave paintings to medieval mosaics to the renaissance era paintings, all the way to, you guessed it, video games. For those who haven’t seen WALL-E please do so immediately! You won’t be disappointed.

Check out a review for WALL-E at WALL-E a modern masterpeice, and for anyone who wants to see the closing credits again:

Anyway enough with my rambling thoughts, check out the slide show at http://www.portfolio.com/slideshows/2008/07/Videogames-as-Art

This plugin is pretty impressive (needs some performance tweaking) and surprisingly easy to use, see for yourself at http://www.gruppo4.com/~tobia/cross-slide.shtml.

“WTF is WFF”? It’s basically a PHP form generator. You plug in the beautiful standards compliant cross browser happy HTML and it gives you back ready to rock PHP that either stores the data in a database or sends it off in an email. How sweet is that? Ahem not that I’d ever use it
Check it out at Web Form Factory

I found this nifty little loading gif generator and thought it would be mighty useful to spread the word. Check it out at http://www.ajaxload.info.

I was sent this article from my good mate Craig Stanford last year and found it really really useful:

“The “tech lead” role can be treacherous at times. While the name implies “leadership“, most of the times it doesn’t come with implied authority like a manager role for example. It often happens that this role is in a no-man’s-land where it brings a lot of responsibility but not enough formal authority. In order to successfully help a project from this position one has to navigate through narrow and convoluted straits.
The role is not clearly defined in most companies and it is placed in a continuum starting at the senior programmer level and extending to architecture and management positions…..”

Follow the link for the full article: 36 Steps for success as a Technical Lead

Time to learn a new CMS, Umbraco is nearing version 4 and seems to be a very mature offering. Plus it’s written in widely supported and client friendly C#!

More thoughts on this in the near future. Follow the link to find out more about Umbraco.

This is a great little tool that allows you to map locations on a webpage on an overlayed DIV. It’s really useful because not all webpages have intergrated maps.

As an added bonus it requires absolutely no installation. You simply drag a link into your bookmarks toolbar. The link is a little special though, its actually a massive concatenated javascript snippet.

Here’s a quick example, click on the following link Mapanui bookmarklet. (It’s a little slow at the moment). The javascript code in the Mapanui link will pick up the following addresses on this page.

For example. here are some of my favourite Japanese restaurants:

Wasn’t that cool? Now for the catch, as you can see above there is some location information. Now if you are a webmaster then the location information on your pages will need to incorporate microformats (additional semantic information), and while it may sound a little daunting, microformats are just additional bits of XHTML with meaningful class designations. In the first entry above, it is the following XHTML code:

<div class="vcard">
    <div class="org">Samurai Japanese Cafe</div>
    <div class="adr">
        <div class="street-address">493A Darling St, Balmain, NSW 2041, Australia</div>
    </div>
</div>

Can’t be bothered writing your own “vcard” microformat for your websites’ contact us page? Well there just happens to be a generator on hand at http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator

If the web page you are on does not make use of microformats, Mapanui will simply allow you to search for the location within the floating div. Very handy indeed.

Get more info on Mapanui at http://www.mapanui.com

You can learn more about Microformats at http://microformats.org

One of the more impressive preso’s at Webjam last night was a brand new product called uTag. uTag works on the premise that traffic is a valuable commodity (that is indeed true), and we as users move and direct it on a daily basis, yet we don’t see any of the profits.

uTag changes that by allowing users to benefit from their daily activity of sending links around to their friends and colleagues by paying real money into their paypal accounts for the traffic and click throughs their links generate.

Here’s the process put simply:

- Sign up, submit your paypal id

- Register a URL

- Receive a uTag url

- Send that url to your friend or post it on your site

- Receive a portion of the traffic that it generates

It’s kinda like tinyurl.com with a twist (that twist coming in the form of a little advertising panel at the bottom of the page). Quite an impressive idea, I’ll definately be using it. Check it out at http://ut.ag

Attended Webjam 08 last night and it rocked! There was much beer consumption and many impressive prezo’s. To find out more check it out at http://webjam.com.au

The crowd was a little rowdy (for developers) so the bar tabs provided by the sponsors really did kick start it. It’s great to see such passion for development in the sydney community, there was much cheering and wooping which I did not expect at all, very pleasantly surprised there. See all the action on Flickr.

I’ll use the next few posts to showcase some of the ones that impressed me greatly.