Eolas is at it again

This week — a year and a half after settling with Microsoft — Eolas has gone on the attack again, filing suit against “Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Argosy Publishing (publisher of The Visible Body), Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, GoDaddy, J. C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, ‘transactional’ adult entertainment provider New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Rent-a-Center, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube.”

Changes to pipwerks.com, part 2

In case you hadn’t heard, pipwerks.com was hacked last week. The entire database was erased. Bastages. Luckily, I had a recent backup. While going through the pains of a new WordPress install (with new plugins, extra security, and imported posts/comments), I decided “why not throw a new layout in the mix, too?” I mean, if I’m going to make changes, I may as well do them all in one shot, eh?

Gotchas in Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is at Release Candidate 1, which means it will be released very shortly. IE8 is a brand-new browser and will represent a considerable shift from IE7/IE6; it will follow standards more closely and will offer much improved CSS 2.1 support. However, because of some of these changes, it is also widely understood that IE8 might ‘break’ websites that have relied on IE-specific hacks targeted at previous versions if Internet Explorer.

Lazy loading excanvas.js

I started by developing an HTML example page that used the canvas element and had the excanvas.js file hard-coded. Everything worked as planned. I then took out the hard-coded excanvas.js file and replaced it with a JavaScript-based lazy loader. Guess what? It didn’t work. A simple modification to the excanvas.js file fixed the problem.

Custom modal windows using canvas and MooTools

I’ve built a simple modal window class named Modal using MooTools. This class combines a dynamic canvas drawing API (my Rectangle class) with dynamic DOM element generation to create on-demand modal windows using no external images. My goal was to make this about as easy to use as a normal JavaScript alert, prompt or confirm window.

Hawaiian diacriticals

This brings me to one of my pet peeves and the purpose of this post: misuse of the backtick (`) character. Many of the afore-mentioned well-intentioned folks mistakenly use a backtick to represent an ‘okina, and it drives me absolutely bonkers.