Monthly Archives: January 2006

sIFR: Improving Link Accessibility (and Colors, Too)

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sIFR and Anchors Can Be Friends! Marc over at the Crossroads blog (basically consisting of only the one post) provides an excellent article on issues affecting link accessibility and how to modify the standard sIFR Javascript and ActionScript to fix it. Great work.

Note, of course, that this pertains to accessibility for links in a sIFR context. One of the great boons of sIFR (aside from eliminating hours of boring Photoshopping) is that ascii text treated with it is 100% accessible.  Er, except the link thing, to some extent.

Note: Well, that’s what I get for going off half-cocked. Turns out the anchor hack fails miserably in Firefox 1.5 — the sIFR-ized text has a tendency to disappear entirely (sometimes) in that browser. I’ll investigate further to see if I can jimmy the whosis. But meanwhile, caveat emptor and (always) test thoroughly before going live, kids.

Marc’s contribution makes a fine companion to Marko Dugonjic’s excellent two-color sIFR hack, so’s you can have more than one color in a block of sIFR-ized text. For that you’ll need the first article and the second part, which includes some more standards-compliant optimizations.

Note: A couple drawbacks to the 2-color hack are worth mentioning. Foremost, the second color must be encoded into the Flash file itself (via one of the ActionScript files). Changing your site palette will thus mean re-encoding the sIFR. (I’ve not tried hacking the hack to see if it can be repurposed to, say, a CSS class, tho I’m not optimistic since it relies on dynamically swapping in an olde school FONT COLOR=”foo” tag.) Also, integrating the hack is kinda cumbersome in a couple ways. One, it was created for an earlier version of sIFR, and so the “find this and replace it with that” stuff in many cases no longer explicitly applies — which means putting on your reverse engineering hat. Two, part two of the article is revisions to the previous revisions — which means you gotta reverse engineer the changes twice.

Both of these hacks are officially sanctioned included in the sIFR documentation wikki, but is not officially sanctioned by the creators of sIFR.  (See comments, below.)  I’m also pleased to report that the wiki appears to have been fixed and will now talk to you even outside of bankers’ hours.  Hooray!  (Or boo…that means I don’t have any excuses when working late or on the weekend.)
(If you don’t know about sIFR, then get thee to the official sIFR site right quick.)

The Walls Have Ears? Okay. HEY, FUCK YOU!!!

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Cryptome has posted an 18-page excerpt from the brand-new book by James Risen, State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Risen is the NY Times reporter who broke the story about illegal domestic spying by the NSA that was (did I mention illegally?) “authorized” (um, though turns out maybe retroactively) by Prezdint Gee Duhbya. And yes, this is a big story.

Turns out that during the year the NY Times sat on the story, per agreement with worried Admin figures, he just did more leg work and wrote hisself and damned book. Take that, evildoers!

Cryptome, god love it, has also archived important but apparently wholly deleted documentary evidence and first-hand accounts of Uzbeki disappearance and torture chambers funded by Your Government And Mine (with some help from the Brits). The material originated from one Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan who quit, turned critic, and then went nuclear (so to speak) by releasing these and other documents that make it crystal clear everyone knew what they were doing while they did what they were doing. Huh…go figure. (There’s also a massive Google compile of Murray-related links.)

So…why was Clinton impeached exactly?? Oh yeah…lying about a blowjob. Right.

DeMille’s Silent Ten Commandments at The Paramount This Sunday

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Thanks to mine olde pal Mr. Whybark who had the foresight to make a reminder post to his own blog that reminded me that I told him over xmas that this Sunday (1/8) commences the latest of the superlative series of silent film screenings at Seattle’s own olde once-upon-a-time movie palace, The Paramount. I’d a been kicking myself if I’d forgotten, and I prolly woulda.

The theme this time is the silent works of Cecil B. DeMille, leading off with The Ten Commandments (1923). Take note! It’s all on Sunday afternoons this time ’round, at 4pm.

Mike also links to a fine review of the film by David Jeffers over at SIFFblog. Mr. Jeffers also offers an entertaining post about a 30 year feud between CB and the Gower Gulch boys — gen-yoo-ine cowpokes turned Hollywood stuntmen — that began during the shooting of the epic.

Even if you have a passing interest or morbid curiosity about silent films, you can hardly do better than to experience any given selection of the series The Paramount has been hosting a couple times a year for 5 years or so now. The Paramount was originally built to be a movie palace during the mid-’20s, the hayday (heyday?) of movie palaces, and man is it a gorgeous theater. The original Mighty Wurlitzer (or at least a lovingly restored version of it) is still in place and maintained by the Puget Sound Theatre Organ Society, occupying enormous bays on either side of the stage.

The films are accompanied by Dennis James on the aforementioned organ. Dennis is a living (and thankfully fairly young) living treasure of world cinema, having done more than probably any other person to preserve the art of silent film organ accompaniment. He’s also very good at it (the playing and the preservation both). Better still, he’s friendly, personably, and kind of a goofball — no stodgy silent film blowhard he, nossir. Mike and I have an especial warm spot for Dennis because he got his start back in the ’70s in Bloomington, IN, where Mike hails from and where I spent a fair amount of my spent youth. (It’s just spent, is all.) In those days, no one was doing the proper organ accompaniment deal, so to be able to attend Halloween screenings of The Phantom of the Opera with live organ was a treat we Hoosiers scarcely deserved but were most grateful for (especially judging by the mobs of people who would attend).

So yeah, seriously: see silent epics in a genuine, fully restored movie palace complete with live accompaniment on a GIANT Wurlitzer organ…? What the hell are you waiting for?!

Other films in this series include Carmen (1915) and The Cheat (1915), plus on Feb. 6 what’s being billed as a “bonus” film, The Scar of Shame (1926), the first film by the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia and a famous example of what were called “race films” back in the day. (That means real black people actually made the thing. Gosh!)

Coming up in August: adventure films! Get out yer swash and buckle it, G.

Rational Ajax Dev: “Hijax”

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Jeremy Keith has a fine post at his DOMScripting Blog in which he makes a fine argument for (gasp!) retaining some basic sanity while drinking all that yummy Ajax kool-aid going around. He even coins yet another buzz word: Hijax.

It really is all very obvious to anyone who remembers the (shudder) browser wars of the late ’90s. Basically:

  • Plan for Ajax from the start.
  • Implement Ajax at the end.

More specifically, Mr. Keith says:

  1. First, build an old-fashioned website that uses hyperlinks and forms to pass information to the server. The server returns whole new pages with each request.
  2. Now, use JavaScript to intercept those links and form submissions and pass the information via XMLHttpRequest instead. You can then select which parts of the page need to be updated instead of updating the whole page.

I know…pretty radical, huh?

Great ’60s Flicks at the NW Film Forum

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There’s some really great ’60s films now and soon playing at the NW Film Forum.

Running now through Jan. 5 (this Thursday, so chop chop) are Barbarella (a new 35mm print…though be warned that “new” is often a relative term to certain distributers) and Danger: Diabolik (also in 35, though not a new print). They are running concurrently, but it is not a double-feature (’tis pity).

Both are great examples of ’60s art direction run gloriously riot, and what is especially pleasing to me about the pairing is the fact that are also at opposite ends of the budget spectrum. Barbarella was a high-dollar luau, while Diabolik was made on the cheap by Italian genre master Mario Bava. If you gotta pick between the two, I’d recommend Diabolik since you never ever get to see the thing in 35mm.

Up next this Friday (Jan. 6) is I Am Cuba, an absolute masterpiece that should not be missed. It’s also a brand new 35mm print, with new subtitles and (oh no?) a “new soundtrack.” (God only knows what that’s supposed to mean. According the NY Film forum’s site [no relation], the new soundtrack eliminates “that pesky overdub which once gave an unwelcome instant Russian translation of the Spanish dialogue.”) Regardless, yes it’s genuine USSR Inspected Propaganda, but it also includes some of the most astonishing cinematography of the period (East or West) and is entertaining in its own right. I’ve only ever seen this on DVD, and I cannot wait to see this in 35mm.

Welcome To My Blog ™ and all that jazz

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Whoopee, welcome to my new blog. Bear with me whilst I get situated, fart around with the themes, and all that.

This site being the proverbial cobler’s child, who knows how much activity this thing will actually see. But hey, ya never know!

Right…back to configuring this thing…