The last 3D image had too much parallax so this time I tried two images with only about 8"-12" of separation. I still used the lame cellphone camera and did a bunch of positioning in GIMP to adjust for the errors in my images.

If you have a pair of those red/cyan 3-D glasses (perhaps from this year’s Supper Bowl), could you take a look at this image and tell me if it works correctly. You will get a 768×1024 image if you click on the thumbnail here.

I created this anaglyph using GIMP and a script called of all things”script-fu-make-anaglyph”. If you are interested in the manual steps involved, there is an easy to follow tutorial (one for GIMP and another for Photoshop).

My two source images were just “junk" shots I took with my cell phone. If this works, and I get my own red/cyan 3D glasses, I’ll go back and process some of my good quality pictures as well as try a few new ones here on the shore.

If this has peaked your interest, you can find many anaglyph images with a Google search.

What do geeks do when it rains out … same thing they do every day, tinker on the computer. I’ve been trying to decide if I will get television (the signal not the appliance) when I finally move into the farmhouse. There are some things I miss, like a couple cooking shows, some DIY stuff, and shows like Scientific America, NOVA … and there there is the pleasant mind rotting guilty pleasure  Doctor Who, CSI, or Grey’s Anatomy. I can get enough of what I am looking for on-line, from renting past seasons of shows, and the download of the nightly news. I also look for decent movie rentals. So, the Network Media Tank (NMT) or Popcorn Hour (PCH) or what ever you care to call it, gets a few hours exercise each week. I also am finding I want a “one-click” to the weather and the current news headlines.

So today  being the fourth day of rain, I decided to write some HTML, generate some icons, and whip up some PHP. the results are a “not too attractive” home page for my media play along with a headlines and stories feeder hooked up to the Associated Press.

I did manage some decent “hover” effects for the icons. I also had to contend with the very limited style sheet capabilities of the PCH (aka non-existent). Add to that the 12 foot seating distance away from my measly 20” monitor and everything had to be BIG.

The weather page is provided by Brett Charney. I don’t have much control over the look-n-feel. I just give it the nearest airport. The news is handled in two steps – there is a PHP application to display the “Top News” feed from the Associated Press. Then there is a second page to display the story.

As I wrote previously, the nightly news is downloaded the I added a link direct from the media player home page to the latest download.

The weather, AP News, WBUR Radio (streaming), and the NBC Nightly News (podcast) all have icons at the bottom of the home screen along with “search”. I also hooked each up to a button on the remote so they are all “one-click” away.

When I first saw “how Benjamin Button got his face”, a TED talk by Ed Ulbrich of Digital Domain, I did not think, ”wow, that’s cool!” Instead, I thought, how long before some evil entity killed off a world leader and replaced them with a digital representation ? I guess there is more cynicism in the world than wonderment …. bummer.

If you interested in digital computer generation or are a card carrying member of the conspiracy theorem, this video is for you …

My Thinkpad T61p widescreen has a very high resolution – 1920×1200 – but the physical screen is only 13 inches wide. This equates to approximately 18 characters per inch when using a word processor and when reading many web pages. Even with setting the operating system for things like “use large fonts” etc, most pages display tiny fonts. I will admit some of this is my eyes but it is most predominant on this high DPI display. The majority of the trouble was when reading web pages so I started increasing the font size in Firefox, first just hitting “CTRL-+” and then latter, installing the NoSquint plug-in. What I noticed was that some sites were making bad assumptions about the display font size. This manifested itself in text running into other text or text overlapping graphics. The problems begin when a web designer assumes both horizontal and vertical  screen real estate. When text can wrap and expand, pages work pretty well. Even when layout needs to be better managed, it’s possible to leave some “breathing room”. Obviously, accommodating for a wide range of scaling is not reasonable, it’s not out of reason to allow for 20% or even 50% increase. Here are some examples …

The most common errors occur in the banner of a page. The three examples above – IRS.com, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com were all viewed at 120% 0f normal. The IRS website loses an entire line of links. Without moving the cursor under the button bar, a user would never even notice there is an entire row of links. Over at CNN, there is left aligned text together with right aligned text and anything in between gets crushed. MSNBC has a search box in the banner and it grows left into the corporate logo while the “sign in” to MSN space falls off the right.

Amazon.com does a pretty good job at handling display changes. The image on the left is at 120% and the one on the right is 150%. The “Shop Departments” menu on the homepage was not as forgiving. The text can expand beyond the underlying graphic.

Probably one of the more interesting is the pop-up on Microsoft.com. The “Click to Install” text is not part of the button and thus can wrap onto a new line and below the button’s graphics.

In most of these cases, the issue is the web design separates text from graphics but expects them to stay in lock-step. In early web design, the solution was easy – the text was part of the graphic. This practice fell out of favor as accessibility became a priority. Screen readers can read the text of a webpage but can not read graphics. There are a number of ways to address screen readers – “alt text”, “tags”, alternate pages, and separating the text from the graphics.

It’s easy to make a graphical and visually appealing web site. It’s more difficult to make it accessible. Screen reader support has been the big priority. Color support has been another priority. I think text size should get more attention.

The advent of mobile devices, higher resolution screens, the UMPC fad, and web TV, dictates we revisit the construction of web pages. Perhaps HTML has reached the extent of its applicability. It may be time for some structured XML to focus on web sites with multiple possible renderings.