www.mode3.com/david
recently
- 2006.05.02 : A Day Without An Immigrant
- 2006.04.29 : Javascript Tips & Tricks
- 2005.11.01 : L.A. Update
- 2005.11.01 : Updates & Widgets
- 2005.10.20 : Flock Blog Test
about me
I'm David Gee, a freelance interaction designer and DHTML (that's "AJAX" for you Web 2.0 types out there) developer. I was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and currently reside in the Angeleno Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
listen to this
experience archive
- Turkey
- Photographs from 5 weeks in Turkey.
- India
- Photographs from a month in India, mostly in Rajasthan.
- Other Travel
- Photographs from around the world.
- North America
- The US of A, plus the Canucks. One day I'll go to Mexico.
- Burning Man
- Photos from the annual week-long festival at Black Rock City, Nevada.
- Moontribe
- Photographs from Southern California desert gatherings
- Miscellaneous
- Other gatherings & festivals
websites
This list only contains small, freelance projects, as most of my larger projects are bound by client confidentiality.
- Summa Tech
- A quick CSS/XHTML project for a Pittsburgh, PA based technology firm. The site was valid XHTML transitional and valid CSS when delivered.
- DJ Zak Brown
- A small blog & announcements site for mode3 resident Zak Brown.
flyer design
- Sidetrakkt Productions
- A series of flyers for parties in Pittsburgh, PA
- Infinite Frequency Productions
- A series of flyers for parties in Los Angeles, CA
- Miscellaneous
- Other odds & ends
Yesterday afternoon, I talk a walk downtown with Christian, in order to check out the Day Without an Immigrant protests against HR-4337, the proposed bill that will make it a felony offense to be inside the USA illegally, amongst other things.
You may have heard some news about it.
Later that afternoon, we met up with Kim, MAKSTER, and hexod.us at Macarthur Park and joined the march into Hollywood. About halfway down, we ran into fellow Flickr ninjas Orrin & 7-how-7.
I've uploaded a few photos to my flickr stream, and it seems most of the rest of the world has, too. Some popular pools you may be interested in are Immigration Nation & A Day Without Immigrants - Un dia sin inmigrantes. Alternatively, check out the interestingness going down at the adaywithoutimmigrants clusters.
Over the last week or so, I picked up two pretty useful web development tricks that might not be obvious and/or widely known.
While I occassionally use Internet Explorer's proprietary CSS "expression" value calculations for prototypes, I always thought it was limited to one statement -- you can't use a semicolon to seperate multiple statements like you would in regular Javascript. However, you can use the && concatenator to accomplish the same thing, as such:
.myDivClass {
width:expression( (var expressionOne) && (var expressionTwo) )
}
...which can come in handy when you need to do some browser-specific object detection before applying a value.
This via a comment by Marc Köhlbrugge on Cameron Moll's blog, obtained from Paul O'B's site.
The second tip regards the use of multiple CSS class names on a single element. I use these fairly often, but I've always kept the CSS code seperate for each class, as I didn't think there was a way to apply the cascade to the intersection of multiple class names. Turns out there is, and it's as simple as it should be. For an element with two CSS classes:
<element class="classOne classTwo">
The relevant CSS would be:
element.classOne.classTwo {
/* rules */
}
After spending the last 4 or so years trapped in the pestilential hells of Mordor living in Pittsburgh, PA, Kim & I recently relocated to Los Angeles, CA. We're now living in Angeleno Heights, purportedly Los Angeles' first suburb, and within spitting distance of Echo Park, Chinatown, and downtown.
We're hoping that the plans to resurrect the Angeleno Heights trolley line are a success, as it would likely end up running past our front door, but for now I'm happy with the regular visits from the neighborhood ice-cream truck.
It turns out Angeleno Heights is pretty well-known for its historically significant sprawling Victorian homes, which as we discovered last night, make it a great place for Halloween. Many of the older homes were elaborately decked out, the streets were full of families in costume, and on the whole it was a pretty festive atmosphere.
Other recent activities include exploring our new neighborhood, visiting the awesome not a cornfield project, the Burning Man decompression party and FAB Market in downtown, as well as attending Lucha va Voom with our friends hexod.us and MAKster.
November 1st has arrived, the unveiling date for the CSS Reboot, an event which I, of course, never got around to signing up for.
However, as you may notice, I have cleaned up things a bit around here over the last few days, removing some of the older content, slapping a fresh coat of paint on, and adding a couple of new widgets: thumbnails of my Flickr photostream, and Brandon Fuller's Now Playing iTunes plugin.
The underlying code on the site is still a bit of a mess, the result of minor tweaking here and there over the course of the years with no real plan or direction. Both the HTML and CSS still validate, but I'm hoping to clean things up a bit on that front too over the next couple of weeks.
Well, I finally received my Flock beta developer preview thingamajig, so I have set up my blog and I'm now using Flock to post to mode3. Isn't that just thrilling?
One thing that I'm finding particularly cool about this, is that it hooks right into my Flickr account, so I can drag and drop photos into blog posts, like this:
The options to edit the raw html are a bit primitive, and it would be nice if it generated the same code as Flickr's "Blog this" button, but I'm sure that will come with time.