What time we’ve had in the office over the past week or so has been spent listening to the excellent second album by The Go! Team, Proof of Youth.

It has a lot going for it on iTunes. Not only is it cheaper than the CD, at $9.99, not only does it save a bunch of plastic, but it’s “iTunes Plus” which means great quality and no copy protection, and it also includes three bonus tracks and a video!

I had quite a day working in Flash’s relatively new ActionScript 3 language yesterday. I have really been spoiled by programming languages like Ruby.

Here’s an example. I was trying to make something open a new web page in the browser. This is a pretty darned common, obvious thing to need to do in Flash. And until recently, it was appropriately simple: you just use the getURL command, and pass it a string exactly like you would in your web browser. Hard to improve on such simplicity and perfection, isn’t it?

Oh, but they have. Now you use the navigateToURL command… but you can’t just pass it the link… now you must first create a URLRequest object to pass it. And be careful – now it opens a separate browser window by default – before, the default was to just bring you to the new web page. You see what’s going on here? Much more complex, many more hurdles, and the defaults have changed.

Why?

Now, I’m sure lots of folks could argue that the “new way” is much more robust and has lots more features and scales better, but let me tell you, to me it represents everything I loathe about ActionScript these days. After writing in Ruby, which is about the most simple, concise, and elegant language around, ActionScript feels like having to bundle up in your warmest clothes when it’s only like 50 degrees outside. It’s just overkill.

And it ended up taking me most of the afternoon to figure out how to do some things that should have been far simpler. Frustrating!

Wow, what a week it’s been.

As web designers, we both help set up websites for clients and also offer them Ladybug, to keep their nice websites up to date. Those are two very important components that work hand in hand – their website, which holds the actual site and all of the images, and Ladybug, which holds the database and functionality to make updates to their sites.

Last weekend, our client noticed some issues with their site. And then it went down. It was down for a few days, in fact, during which time we received little knowledge of the problems. Even after the site was restored, we couldn’t get it to work with Ladybug because the FTP address and other vitals had changed. So after a support ticket, and some back-and-forth, we eventually got that straightened out and their site back up.

The trouble was, their backups were about a week behind. Since Ladybug doesn’t keep all of the source images for the website (we keep those on the client’s website, because they own the images), all of the updates we’d just done were broken. Not good. Once we figured this out it took a bit of work, but we got all those problems fixed.

And then the site that hosts Ladybug, at Joyent, went down, yesterday. Hard. For about 36 hours, in fact, leaving all of our clients quite put out. And when our host was finally brought up, there were a couple of problems there to be dealt with! Not too bad, but it does increase the heart rate a bit, if you know what I mean. We lost the last 12 hours of database updates, which was a big pain for Kandace – she’s re-doing a bunch of work now. But we’ll live.

So we’re leaving town and taking a couple days off. It’s been a long week. Let’s hope things go more smoothly while we’re gone!

(Note: I would still recommend Joyent for hosting. They handle downtime well. I would not recommend the other company, who lost a week of backups, among other issues. They will remain nameless.)

So, there were a bunch of whale names that everyone was voting for on the Greenpeace site. Mister Splashy Pants was the only interesting one, so tons of people from Reddit went over to vote.

Turns out, he won by a landslide, and so Greenpeace asked everyone to come back and save Mister Splashy Pants. Which I did, but unfortunately ended up with this error:

Oh Rails. There you go again.

I just couldn’t help myself!

Google just released the Google Chart API … a fancy way of saying that they’ve made it easy for any web application to generate up to 500,000 charts a day. For free. And it’s really easy to use.

Here’s a small example, generated on the fly.

Nice!

Darel Rex Finley recently published an excellent article explaining sub-pixel font rendering. It’s an interesting subject – when LCD displays first became popular, every major OS vendor rushed to add this feature. And it basically looks good for what it’s intended for – black and white text.

But this breaks down as displays get more sophisticated. Even though this feature is turned on by default on my Mac, many advanced graphics features bypass it. For example, in a web browser, if you add a text shadow with CSS, you don’t see sub-pixel font rendering. And it doesn’t work if your display is rotated, something that happens often with the iPhone.

In fact, the iPhone is interesting in that it doesn’t use this feature, largely because its display resolution is so good that it’s not really necessary, and also because you can rotate the display. That’s another place it breaks down – the feature takes advantage of the arrangement of the red, green, and blue colors that make up the display, and once you rotate your display, it would have to work in a completely different way.

So it was good while it lasted, but I think its days are definitely numbered, as displays get better and better. I’ve had mine turned off completely for a while now, because I no longer like the way it looks, and I think more people will agree in time!