An Adium message style based on the chat design in Squad. Download this message style here.

A quick mock-up of my ideal twitter client. It's a windowless HUD that could stick to the desktop and/or float above other applications. You could scroll tweets using your scroll wheel or by dragging the scrollbar. When you hover on a tweet you can favorite, reply, or retweet. You can post a new tweet by clicking the chat icon at the bottom.

Quick tour of the bomb shelter in our 1961 limestone ranch in Bloomington, Indiana. It has concrete walls, floor, and ceiling for added protection against an atomic bomb.

Kind of funny, as you wouldn't be protected against contaminated air or radiation poisoning. It's still a cool room, and we are lucky to have it. The concrete also dampens my music while I work, so I can rock out without bothering the rest of the family.

Squad is a web-based collaboration editor I helped build as part of the SproutBox team. Squad is the conception of SproutBox co-founder Mike Trotzke, and is the fourth company to launch from SproutBox since we formed in January this year. ReadWriteWeb has a great writeup: Like Google Wave for Developers: Real-Time, Collaborative Code Editing.

I have to thank NPR Music for introducing me to Thao. When I first heard "Bag of Hammers" I knew I had to get the album. This past week I've listened to the album over and over, and still can't get enough.

This is the perfect album to enter into spring. It's full of energy — perfect for warm weather excitement. Lyrics like, "And as sharp as I sting, as sharp as I sing, It still soothes you, doesn't it? Like a lick of ice cream" are both abstract and delightful.

I've gone from collecting wind-up alarm clocks to globes. Gosh, these take up more room - I'm going to need some shelves to store them. The one pictured on the left is the moon. We are quite fond of the tiki picture too.

I love finding old books on flying saucers. These come from a time when the media and public took the topic more seriously. From left to right, these are from 1967, 1956, and 1966.

The one on the right starts off with this sensational message:

"WARNING! Near approaches of Unidentified Flying Objects can be harmful to human beings. Do not stand or attempt to touch a UFO that has landed.

In either case, the safe thing to do is get away from there quickly and let the military take over. There is a possibility of radiation danger, and there are known cases in which persons have been burned by rays emanating from UFOs. Details on these cases are included in this book. Don't take chances with UFOs."

The other two books are much more serious about the subject, I just had to share this funny intro by Frank Edwards.

Today I've updated the Movable Type templates to format comments. The updates reformatted the display of comments, the comment form, and the MT comment preview template to match my redesign. The comment display can be previewed here and here.

I've also installed the Movable Type Comment Challenge Plugin to combat comment spam.

It's becoming clear that the PNG image format is preferred for Web design. The JPG format might be a better choice for photographs, but PNG has many advantages over the prehistoric GIF. The PNG alpha-channel transparency seals the deal by giving designers Photoshop-quality transparency.

The only thing holding us back is a lack of support for transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6. While many Windows XP users have upgraded to IE7, it may be another year before we can fully drop support for IE6. There have been many different techniques to use the AlphaImageLoader filter to allow transparent PNGs in IE6, but one finally stands out in the developer community. It comes in two different forms, each applied differently, but both using almost identical code.

The IE PNG Fix v1.0 RC4 from Angus Turnbull is currently being using on the Apple Web site. You need the iepngfix.htc and blank.gif files, and apply the fix by adding behavior:url(iepngfix.htc); to your stylesheet. This can be done with one style for inline PNGs, and also added to individual styles if using transparent PNGs as background images.

The other form of this fix is SuperSleight by Drew McLellan. This one is published on the 24ways Web site and is well accepted by developers. It also promises to fix other issues with transparent PNGs in IE6 — issues besides just display. SuperSleight is applied by adding a conditional comment to target IE6 and load a javascript file that does all the work.

Even with these elegant hacks, IE6 still won't let you use background-repeat or background-position with transparent PNGs. For my personal Web site I rely on tiling a transparent PNG down the background, so in the end, I'm going to turn off PNGs for IE6 that are used in the background of this site.

This entry is aimed at anyone doing a project with the Avery 8293 1 1/2" round labels, and searching for an EPS template. Avery used to offer templates in this format, but apparently they now only offer templates in Microsoft Word format. I've packaged an Illustrator (AI) file together with an EPS.

Download Avery 8293 Template

During a previous project I lived through the horror of importing Illustrator CS2 documents into Flash 8. As you can see from the project, it contained a lot of gradients, and at the time, Flash would not accept gradients from Illustrator. Two years ago I was forced to redraw a shape in Flash if it contained a gradient. For a detailed illustration you might have hundreds of shapes, and redrawing them all is a nightmare.

Now that Adobe owns Flash, their compatibility in CS3 is greatly improved. This works as long as you use the AI import function from Flash (File>Import). Some of the older methods of transferring artwork to Flash, like exporting a SWF from Illustrator, still yields Flash 8 type results.

In a current project I am using the AI import function frequently and have found a few things that Flash doesn't like. I've looked around for a document from Adobe, or even a blog post, that outlines what techniques in Illustrator CS3 are not compatible with Flash. Adobe does tell us a few things that will work, but what I need is a list of common Illustrator techniques to avoid. I'd like to be able to give this information to the artist that I'm working with on the project. I've haven't seen any information posted about this, so I'll start a running list here. If anyone knows of any other lists, or have items to contribute, please post a comment.

• All Illustrator "Effects"
• Dashed Strokes (Though they show up as rounded shapes)
• Blends (Will create millions of little shapes, which hog memory)

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