Apparently Secrets In Websites (Part II) got a mention on Technorama CCT#202 around the 00:23:20 mark. First I heard about it (I think it’s from back in January).
I do plan on a Part III, but not sure when that’s going to happen. It’s a ton of work to put one of those out.
Big Buck Bunny, the new open movie made using Blender is out. It’s rather good, and impressive when you realize it’s made with open source products, meaning the only barrier to making one yourself (assuming you’ve got a rendering farm, or the patience to let your workstation churn out the pixels) is your skills. You can download it from the website (h.264 available) or watch on YouTube. I’d recommend the download so you can appreciate the HD quality. Some more screenshots can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
The first open movie was Elephants Dream back in 2007. Elephants dream used proprietary audio software. As far as I can tell, Big Buck Bunny didn’t.
Between the two I think I like Elephants Dream more. It was a little darker, but struck me as a little more entertaining. That’s my personal opinion though. It will be interesting to see what the next one is.
From Urban Dictionary via Fake Steve:
Vistaster n. a giant cluster-fuck; a colossal mistake; a turning point, inflection point, or event that, in retrospect, turns out to have led to the doom and demise of a once-powerful company, person or organization.
DERIVATIVES:
vistastrous. adj.
visastrously. adv.
“Have you seen Speed Racer? It’s a total vistaster.”
I think it’s about time to start using this term, so that hopefully it goes mainstream and becomes a new word.
On a related note, Festivus still isn’t in Websters Dictionary. It’s not in Thunderbird’s spell check either. That’s another word I’m lobbying for.
As usual, my list of April Fools that I saw today:
To raise awareness for Earth Hour, Google took the bold step of making the page black. I can’t remember the last time they made a change this bold. They did the same thing for the Google Israel site the other day (who participated a day early to prevent conflicts with the Sabbath). According to Google:
Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.
Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.
Ran across this quote today which I just had to blog from WordPress.com’s Matt Mullenweg since I found it funny:
“We decided to show ads only on certain pages, only to the people who were sort of random drive-by visitors…if you use Firefox, you’ll never see an ad, no matter what, mostly because I like Firefox.”
Also kinda interesting from a business perspective. There’s been some suggestion over time that Firefox users are prone to ignore ads. Partially because of extensions that block ads (though products to block ads on the OS level, and in IE exist too BTW), but partially because they are said to be more technical.
I wonder if a practice like this actually provides a higher click through rate. Because they only show ads in certain places, it’s not about total impressions (they control that by picking where to show ads, and when). They control how many impressions they run in a given period. By targeting those more inclined to click on ads, theoretically your ratio should be higher.
I’ve heard of quite a few different ways to target ads over the years, but this is a new one.
Someone actually tried the now infamous cheeseburger in a can. After reading it, and seeing the pictures of it prepared I can now form a solid conclusion. It must be a complete waste of calories. How the hell can a cheeseburger have a bitter aftertaste? There are so many things in this world that I would eat before that. I’ve tasted dog treats for money before. I’d eat them for free before eating a cheeseburger out of a can.
That post however is quite funny to read.
While on the the topic of strange foods… Has anyone ever noticed how much dog food is bacon flavored? Why can’t they do that for people food? I’d love bacon flavored cereal, etc. Bacon flavored vitamins would also be nice.
This post is a follow up to the first Secrets In Websites. For those who don’t remember the first time, I point out odd, interesting, funny things in other websites’ code. Yes it takes some time to put a post like this together, that’s why it’s just about a year since the last time. Enough with the intro, read on for the code.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in the John Hancock Memorial Marker? I guess in MDCCCXCV (1895) the childish humor just wasn’t there. Or people found it funny but nobody said anything until they erected the marker (pun intended). Reminds me of that Family Guy episode where they parodied John Hancock as having changed his name from “John Footpenis”.
Interesting, example of something done 100+ years ago that would possibly be offensive by todays standards because of his name and the phallic shape. Just shows how society’s perception of things as simple as shapes change. As does it’s sense of humor. On a more serious side, it’s interesting that this was done during the lifespan of Sigmund Freud who had some interesting views on this type of stuff.
I see these every once in a while. Advertisers occasionally think it’s clever to make their ad mimic the OS interface in hopes that novice users get confused and click on it. I’m sure this is (sadly) pretty successful despite being rather deceptive. It becomes comical when these ads show up on a Mac since it looks so out of place as shown in this image.
You can’t really expect a Mac user to fall for this. It looks pretty strange. The best part is how for Operating System, it says “unknown”.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Around The Web category.
Robert Accettura is a web developer by day, a Mozilla contributor, self-proclaimed Mac Addict, and Open Source advocate on the side. more »
