Red Fish Blue Fish

best fish and chips (and more) in town.

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My Great Grandfather Frank Harper With Theodore Roosevelt

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Human Reaction Times

Working on an interface to a slideshow for a client that features a pager bar that fades in when the user mouses over the sideshow and then fades out when they mouse out. This is a nice effect since the pager takes up no room when it is not needed.

However I found an unintended consequence of the fade in and out was that if the user briefly mouses over the slideshow, the pager flashes in and then out again. I found this to be rather distracting so I decided to put a slight delay on the fade in.

The next question was “How long should the delay be?” Too short and it wouldn’t be effective. To long, and the effect would frustrate users waiting for the pager to appear.

So I decided to set it to the average visual response time as stated in this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time

The delay is set to 200 Milliseconds, which I think feels quite natural. Try it out for yourself, just go to this site and click through to one of the featured listings to see an example slideshow:

http://hollyandjohn.ca/

For those interested in the code used it’s jQuery with Malsup’s Cycle plugin.

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Slow Motion Lighting Strike

wow…

Science Blogs via: Gizmodo

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WordPress, the GPL, and Themes

I found this interesting being primarily WordPress developer. Seems that creating Themes and distributing them is a copyright violation but building a custom theme for a client is not a copyright violation so long as they do not distribute the code. Interesting.

http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/why-wordpress-themes-are-derivative-of-wordpress/

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Sticky CSS Footer

This is some slick code to stick you footer to the bottom of the browser viewport when the main content of your page is shorter than the viewport. But it allows the footer to be pushed down out of sight when the main content is longer than the browser viewport.

http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/

Like all the sticky footers this one is a little tricky to implement but it seems to have the best browser support with a minimum of extra code.

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CSS Float Layout Clearing

If you have any idea what the title means, then you may find these links interesting.

I’m using the overflow: hidden; method in my latest project. I haven’t had time yet to test it yet in other browsers but it seems to be working great in my mockups (fingers crossed there are going to be no bugs).

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Not knowing what we don’t know…

Fascinating read about the concept of unknown unknowns. Or how dumb people are not capable of even conceiving how dumb they are. This article begins with tale of one such ill fated fellow.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/

On a side note, this article reminded me of something that I read (or I think I read, I no longer have a copy of it) in the Tao of Pooh. The author stated the taoist concept of God was no concept of God at all. The rational being that if God was so powerful to create the entire universe then we as mere humans would never ever be able to properly conceive what God is. So it would be a futile mental exercise to even try.

The Bhagavad-Gita also touches on this concept when when Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal his true form. Krishna replies:

But you cannot see me

with your own eye;

I will give you a divine eye to see

the majesty of my discipline.

It’s interesting to know that we have wondered about where our limits of knowledge lay. If you read the article, you may also wonder if we really know what that limits of knowledge even are.

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Daniel Pink on Motivation

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10 Free Stylized Fonts

Planning on using the cube font for the design of my site.

http://www.thedesignbuzz.net/10-awesome-free-fonts-by-fontfabric/

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