Blogger has trouble with images

Hmm, it looks like Blogger is having occasional trouble with the images I'm posting. I'll fix them all up soon.
Update: I've moved the blog to my danielbaird.com server, so now I can put images where I want them. So now it's all good.

Name popularity since 1880

I found a great interactive (java) charty, mappy thing that shows the popularity of given names. It's hard to explain.. go there a give it a go. Don't miss the bit where you can type the first few letters of a name to see just those that match.
http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

Rounded corners better than Nifty Corners

The well known Nifty Corners can be used to apply rounded corners to page elements. Nifty and similar tools add a bunch of elements of varying heights to simulate a rounded corner. I've realised that there's a cool way to do corners in HTML documents that uses lots fewer inserted elements than Nifty Corners.

The trick is, that when borders meet, browsers draw a nice diagonal chamfer. Like in this picture.. see how the browser's rendering of the borders makes a nice neat diagonal line where the borders meet.

Nothing special yet, right? Next, we'll see what happens when there's differently sized borders, and no content.

Ok, this is the same div with zero width and height, wide bottom and right borders, and narrow top and left borders. The 'content' of the div woulld normally be the bit between the four borders, but because the content is zero sized, the borders are triangles that meet in the centre; of off-centre, in this case. Hmm, interesting. Next we'll try less colours..

Now the top and left borders are coloured white, like the background. The bottom and right borders are blue.. and you can see the effect I've been going for here: a two-line approximation of a curve. Shiny.

This example is quite large, but at 10 pixels across instead of 40, it's quite a nice looking corner. Position this one div over the boring square corner of a blue box, and you've got a nice curvy looking corner.

It gets even cooler.. if you put a second div inside the first, you can have four lines to approximate the curve. Like this:
I've coloured the inner div lighter than the outer so you can see where they happen.

Ok that's as much as I can write today -- I'll come back to this later and maybe whip up a function to apply this rounding to your corners.

Boy meets Python

This great set of posts are from a dad whose six year old wanted to make a computer game. Not exactly sure why I liked reading them so much.. maybe I'm hoping I'll have to handle a situation like that in a couple of years (my eldest is 4).

I want this megacheap laptop for schoolkids

MIT have this great design for a laptop.. small, rugged, super-portable. The keyboard and screen rotate individually around the handle, and inside the handle is the power unit -- including a hand crank for manual recharging.

The total cost is supposed to be US$100. The idea is to mass manufacture (minimum order is 1 million) and sold to governments in poorer countries to provide to schoolchildren. Lauch date is 2006 or 2007.

Glorious pics and diagrams-of-use here, including the integrated carry strap / power cord and other great ideas.

This whole design is sweeet, and I want one in a way which I am sure is quite unhealthy. Hopefully there will be a retail release so I won't be reduced to mugging some poor Cambodian kid (told you it was unhealthy).