Well, we had to make a website for my Digital Imaging class, and I thought what better than to redesign my website? I'm quite liking the new design, it feels kinda bubbly and friendly. But possibly the coolest thing about this design is that I've written it to work side-by-side with the old design.

You see, if you click that little "Swap Theme" button just under the menu to your left (or just click here if you're lazy), you will be instantly transformed back in time... to here! Ok so not back in time, but you get to see the old design applied to the current page instantly with some Javascript Wizardry. And with the help of some delicious cookies, your preference will be saved and served up whenever you visit the a page on this site. And if you change your mind, there's the exact same button in the old design now, guess what that does? ;)

Currently the blog archive pages are all in HTML, so they can't actually read cookies and will default to the new style. But I'll work on this in the future and it should be possible to fix it.

Nintendo merchandise catalog - from the 80's, so it just oozes class...

Hilarious. And the added captions are great too. Double whammy!

Well here it is finally, the Google Desktop Search.

You download and install the desktop client, and suddenly a "Desktop" tab is integrated into google's search. It doesn't index every file type yet, but the main ones are there and I think more will come. The main missing one is probably PDF, which is strange since google already indexes PDFs on the web. Also, it only indexes IE's history which sucks Firefox users like me, but hopefully they'll improve Mozilla support soon.

Also, it doesnt seem possible to make a Mozilla bookmark which goes directly to Desktop seach, as it uses some kind of cryptic "s" value in the URL, which is tied to the actual request string (changing either manually gives an error). My guess is that it's some kind of hash value for security reasons - I have no idea what reasons, but I am quite curious...

It took a lot of debugging, but my Javascript interface to read your Bloglines subscription is finally done. It's basically a light, visually pleasing and simple interface to read your unread items at Bloglines. You can roll your own, just host the necessary files (zip) on a server that supports PHP, and customise to taste.

"Whats this PHP business? I thought it was in Javascript!"
Well it is, but it required a tiny bit of server-trickery to get around cross-site access restrictions. The restrictions are unfortunate, but probably justified in many cases.

You should try out the live test version to see what it does. Just use your regular Bloglines details to login.

Currently IE support is broken, sorry sheep... Try Firefox, you'll love it :D

Alrighty, I've decided it's time for some good old-fashioned personal rambling:

• Saw "Shaun of the Dead". It was very funny, but also pretty damn weird.
• Practiced juggling the 5-ball Mills Mess some more. I'm getting closer ;)
• Started work on my own Bloglines interface (using the Bloglines APIs). It doesn't add much in terms of features, but it's a great learning experience. I'm doing it in Javascript, and the only thing I can't figure out how to do so far is traversing (or doing anything with) an [object XMLDocument]. If anyone has any ideas, please leave comments.
• Had a picnic in the park today for a friend's birthday. That was great :)

So yeah, not much uni work happening but I'm not too worried about all that... The main thing I need to do is to figure out what subjects I want to do next year. I already quit physics, I'm not enjoying maths too much, the entire Informations Systems department is a gigantic crock (sorry to any IS students out there, but it's true). On top of that the arty subjects I am interested in (like Multimedia) seem to consist entirely of stuff I taught myself years ago.

But enough of this future talk. Everybody get up and DANCE!
(note: I never actually dance, and refuse to start any time soon...)

Zoom Quilt: It's big and it requires shockwave, but it's also incredibly cool.

For some reason, little design quirks are setting me off for no apparent reason. I stumbled across Joe Blade tonight, and scrolled down the page a bit (as you do). As I approach the bottom, I notice this bit of text over in the bottom right corner, slightly cropped. I scroll all the way down, and it says "the bottom of the page". I scroll back up, and at the top there is reassuringly printed "top" (albeit upside-down). Made me laugh, but maybe I'm a little weird...

So I came across TiddlyWiki sometime last week or so and really wanted to use it for something cool. Sadly, I couldn't really think of any ideas for content, so I did the next best thing: I made it look cool ;)

All I did was play with the CSS until I had something that I think looks a bit more appealing than the original style. Of course this just my opinion, and I encourage everyone to make their own styles for this great little piece of Script-Fu.