I’ve now been dancing swing for a little over two years. The people I’ve met through it have been overwhelmingly some of the nicest, most generous-spirited people anywhere… and also, a lot of the guys are pretty geeky.

Why?

The least charitable answer is “the geeks are there because there are women there,” but that’s not the whole story. Certainly lots of guys get into dancing because they followed (or were dragged by) a woman into it, but those who stay seem to do so for reasons apart from that. Indeed, the scenes I’ve participated in (Toronto, New York, Sydney) seem almost completely free of the creepy behaviour you would expect given that assertion. And that is despite being totally welcoming to guys and gals who might not be as accepted in other circles.

So what is it about the niceness of the swing community? What makes it so appealing to geeky guys? I think it’s the nature of the dance itself that attracts them, and once there, their presence and personality is reflected in the culture that develops around the dance. Read on…

For anyone who’s curious how Gmail’s chat widget notifies your browser that a new message has arrived, be curious no longer: here’s a simplified page that demonstrates the method used.

This demo itself is of interest to technical folks, because it demonstrates a way for programmers to work around another frustrating limitation that arises from the architecture of the web—that when an interaction over http takes place between a client (browser) and a server (website), the client must always be the one initiating the connection. Read on…

This is a pretty pedestrian way to break a month’s silence, but the 0.2 version of WP-Cats is out. I’ve rewritten the JavaScript so that I’m no longer completely ashamed of it; the closures are a lot cleaner now, and it makes extensive use of jQuery for DOM manipulation and bits of animation.

There’s also a cool new feature where if you add a category to a particular post, you can double-click the plus-button on another post to add the same category to that one. This could be handy if you’ve created a new category and want to quickly go through and tag a bunch of posts with it.

In this release, I made a really serious effort to remove dependencies on Wordpress code, especially on the WP admin panel markup. Using jQuery offers greater flexibility regarding what can be conveniently used as JavaScript hooks, and this time around the main hooks are all inserted by a filter, hopefully making the overall system much more tolerant of future upgrades. Oh, and it all works on Safari now.

A couple years ago I became interested in ambigrams, particularly the work of John Langdon. At the time, I got a hold of his Wordplay book, and began experimenting with some of my own designs.

I recently had a breakthough in figuring out how to create a surprisingly readable ambigram for my mechatronics engineering class. There was a general approval, and we ended up having the design embroidered on about 80 quality Campus Crew hoodies.

As someone with an amateur’s interest in typography and letterforms, I’ve found the doodling of these invertible designs to be an incredibly practical way to teach oneself the fundamental definitions of letters. Read on…

No functionality changes, but I spent an hour on the Clipper yesterday figuring out how to make WP-Cats work with WP 2.2.2.

Admittedly, WP-Cats is a more sophisticated plugin than some in the degree to which it interacts with core code, but my first experience contributing to a major open-source project has been a little mixed. My attempt to interact with the team received no response, and I can tell by checking out the trunk that the next point release of WP is going to—again—break the basic interface upon which WP-Cats relies.

Despite this, I think the plugin provides useful and worthwhile functionality in an elegant little package, and I’ve had dozens of thank-you emails about it over the past year; that’s motivation enough to carry on. So enjoy!

My Dad has Facebook. All my friends have Facebook. I have Facebook. I can count on one hand the people my age I know, that do not have Facebook. The people I met last term in New York and San Francisco all had Facebook.

Anyone who talks about “social networks” today as if they mean anything other than Facebook is being coy, or is deluded.

Classmates and Friendster haven’t been important in years; in the wake of its buyout, MySpace is rapidly losing relevance outside of musical artists using it for promotion.

Facebook is the model of a modern, successful, social website. It hits a very pleasant sweet spot between elegance, user-friendliness, and attention to issues of privacy. But there is one major problem: If Facebook Inc screws up, the elegance and user-friendliness can all go away (some of the new Apps are definitely pushing it), and your privacy might go away, too. Facebook is a closed system; it’s a single point of failure on all three counts. Read on…

The history and bookmarks features of web browsers have traditionally been separate. Which is strange, since they’re conceptually similar. Each is a title and a link. One represents a place you’ve already been, and the other represents a place you intend to visit in the future.

For me, they’re also similar in that I don’t really use either of them. At all. Between Google searches and location bar type-ahead, I’m always able to retrace my steps to something I remember seeing. To manually maintain a bookmarks list would be like manually maintaining a contact list in my email—why do it by hand, when Gmail can simply remember everyone I’ve ever corresponded with, and then guess who I mean as I start typing their name in the to-field?

Mozilla have recognized that power users ignore the two features, and have also seen their fundamental similarity. Firefox 3 will introduce a unified feature called Places, which attempts to bring a more sensible and usable interface to the browser.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for a number of months, however, and I don’t think Places goes far enough. I’d like to propose not only a unification of history with bookmarks, but a complete integration of that unified feature with browser tabs. Read on…

As time goes to infinity, so also does the entropy of any particular system. This fundamental truth will have long term consequences on Earth’s climate, but around midterm time, it was having immediate consequences on the state of my bedroom.

I browsed through the IKEA website, seeking information on shelving systems that I could use to quell the tide of chaos. I knew the basic size and configuration that I wanted, but I had trouble finding what I was looking for. There were a number of uninspiring wall-mount systems, and a bunch more free-standing units that were basically what I wanted, but visually boring and overpriced. When I asked about delivery, I was told that a $150 shelf would cost $180 to bring to my door.

Three hundred dollars was out of the question, so I investigated what could be done on my own. Read on…

I’ve written before about the power of JavaScript as a visualization tool. Then, I’d been talking about it in conjunction with straight-up HTML and SVG. Now I’ve got a neat new demo to share that takes advantage of Canvas.

You’re going to need Firefox or Safari to view this, but check it out.

The genesis of this idea comes from Louis K’. Thomas’ logarithmic clock, which showed up on reddit recently.

I had wanted to experiment with some more interesting visuals than what Thomas had in his original. I’ve always been fascinated with polar functions and spiral geometry, and this seemed like a fantastic opportunity to explore this area. Thinking of a traditional clock face, I mused about the feasibility of bending the log clock into some kind of round display that was less obviously just a mathematical plot.

Hopefully I’ll have more time at some point to write about the process of creating this, but for now, enjoy!

When I was in California a few weeks ago, Delta had oversold my return flight, so I ended up with a generous coupon to be redeemed for future Delta travel. Thus, in the process of checking out flights, I paid special attention to the offerings from Delta. Why not get my return trip to Toronto as a freebie, if I could?

Well, it turned out that the best Delta could do was around $250, so I’m saving my coupon for the future. But as I browsed the options Delta proposed to me, one in particular stood out as kind of bizarre. Surreal, you might even say. I guess these kinds of things happen when you have a computer proposing itineraries:

Read on…