Of course, what you don’t know is why he did it. And nobody could know that unless/until _why himself decides to come back and tell us, for lack of a better word, why. Naturally, that hasn’t stopped folks from guessing out loud. At the moment, the prevailing “wisdom” in the various threads on Hacker News is that _why’s disappeared himself as a response to his identity being disclosed last month. If that’s the case, then I humbly encourage those responsible to fornicate themselves with something rusty. There were no death threats involved, so we’re not at the Kathy Sierra level of offense, but the end result for the web community is the same: somebody who obviously cared a lot about making the web a better place for everyone has decided it’s not worth the abuse.

It should be pretty obvious why I don’t feel particularly inclined to link back to any of the trolls out there who, even if they’re not directly responsible for _why’s decision, are directly responsible for the web being less of a great place to live and work. That said, I do want to point to John Resig’s “eulogy” for _why, mostly because I wish I could be as positive as he is about this whole thing.

The other day, I switched my shell from bash to zsh. Just like Rafe, I read the Fried CPU post about zsh, and was convinced to give it a whirl. It’s been in the back of my mind for a while now, since I’ve notice that a lot of people whom I respect (Ryan Bates, for one) are using it, but the concise list of really powerful features in the Fried CPU article was the tipping point. I’ll admit that, never having switched shells before, I thought it was going to be a heck of a lot more complicated than just typing chsh and replacing “/bin/bash” with “/bin/zsh” in the config file that pops up. Had I known it would be that easy, I would’ve tried it a lot sooner.

At first, I tried copying huge chunks out of the zshrc & other zsh config files that Joe Ferris maintains in a repo at Github, but eventually decided I’d get more out of this experiment if I took more bite-sized chunks out of other peoples configurations, and only added them to my own when I understood what they were doing.

That’s when things got out of hand.

When I was copying bits of my old bash configs over to my zshrc, I noticed how disorganized all of my dotfiles were–not just the shell ones, but my irbrc, and vim & emacs configs, etc., etc., etc. So I basically decided to scrap all of them and take the same approach to them as I was taking with my shell configs. So basically, I’m starting over with Unix, and slowly rebuilding what I’m hoping will be a super-organized and super-optimized environment for future work and play.

If you’re interested in seeing how things develop, you can follow along with my dotfiles repo on Github. But what I’m sure will be infinitely more interesting will be to start on your own adventure in Unix configuration. If you go down that road, here are some of the resources I’ve used in rebuilding my environment:

• Joe Ferris’s config_files repo: I mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again, due to its being awesome.
• dotfiles.org: User-conributed dotfiles for just about every *nix-based utility that uses a text-based configuration file.
• irb & script/console tips: Obviously these are only useful to Rubyists, but if you swing that way, theses are well worth checking out. Ever since I first saw the SQL generated by an ActiveRecord query show up in someone’s script/console, I’ve coveted that functionality. Dan Croak shows how it’s done.
• Dr. Nic also has some great irb tips
• Finally, I cribbed a git-aware prompt from this screencast. A very neat trick.

So yeah, it’s been really fun getting back to basics with my Unix configs. That said, I have had one small hiccup in this process. After going through all of this with my OSX terminal, I went to switch my shiny new Ubuntu JeOS VM’s shell over to zsh, but found that after doing so, my delete key wasn’t behaving like a backspace as it had been doing when I was using bash. Apparently this is a known issue when using zsh or screen over ssh. I still haven’t found a good workaround for this, and so am still using bash in Ubuntu.

All in all, switching from bash to zsh has been an extremely rewarding experience, and definitely one I’d recommend to anyone looking to change up their routine and learn something new and useful.

This month’s experiment, called “The Eyes of March” involves taking or making a picture of something every day. If you want to follow along, there’s a Flickr group for the project.

Of course, every experiment needs a hypothesis, so here’s mine: I’m guessing (and indeed hoping) that being on the lookout for things to take pictures of every day will make me more mindful of the visual impact of things that I look at all the time and don’t pay very much attention to. So if by the end of the month, I’ve been able to look at the things around me and notice something new and or important about even a few of them, then the experiment will have been a success. If anything like that happens, I’ll be sure to make a note of it here.

As you might expect, the border-radius property is used a lot like border. That is, you can specify one value for each corner (border-radius: 10px;), one value per corner (border-radius: 1px 2px 3px 4px;), or values for opposite corners (border-radius: 5px 10px). It actually gets more complicated, since in addition to describing corners with one radius (i.e. those with semi-circular curves), you can make elliptically rounded corners by naming two radii. For more detail on this, take a look at the draft spec. Lastly, you can use a property for each corner, border-top-left-radius: 2em;, etc. So, assuming there aren’t any major changes in the spec, expect this to be what gets implemented as part of CSS3, and what you’ll ultimately using in your code.

But what about now? Here? Today? It happens that two of the standards-aware, forward-thinking rendering engines have developed proprietary extensions to CSS that should stand in for border-radius until certain ambiguities in the spec can be resolved, and the property is implented according to the standard. So if you want to use border-radius in your code today, you’ll have to use both the Mozilla– and Webkit-specific CSS properties. Fortunately, both of the proprietary extensions work in the current major releases of their respective browsers.

If you’re making a box with four corners of the same radius, the syntax is the same in Mozilla and Webkit:

-moz-border-radius: 10px; /* 4 corners of radius = 4px*/
-webkit-border-radius: 10px; /* Same as Mozilla */

To specify different radii for each corner, things diverge somewhat.

/* Mozilla: */
-moz-border-radius: 1px 2px 3px 4px;
/* Webkit:
    (The four declarations below amount to the
    same thing as the single rule above) */
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 1px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 2px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 4px;

And that’s the guts of it. So to make a tabbed navigation list, you would use a declaration along the lines of the following (and see the below code in action.):

li {
  border: 1px solid #587402;
  border-bottom: none;
  border-radius: 0 10px 0 10px;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px 10px 0 0;
  -webkit-border-top-left-radius: 10px;
  -webkit-border-top-right-radius: 10px;
  list-style-type: none;
  float: left;
  padding: .5em 1em 0 1em;
}

There you have it. But there are just a couple of other things I want to point out. If the container you’re rounding the corners of has only text content and a background in it, the background will clip to the rounded corners. And indeed, according to the spec, any the contents of a block-level element on which a border-radius is set should clip do the same as long as you set overflow: hidden on those contents. However, the implementations just aren’t there yet. Instead, with anything over and above plain HTML text (for instance, an img or iframe) inside such a container, the square corners will peek outside of the rounded container. (Example)

One solution would be to make the border thick enough that the corners of the inner element can’t poke through the outer border (like so). Though inelegant, this will work just fine if you don’t need everything to round nicely. And this method should suffice for whatever kind of content you’re trying to stuff into your nicely rounded box.

However, if it’s an image you’re putting in the box and you need the inner corners to be rounded as well as the outer corners, then the only answer (for now) is to set the image as a background. Still, if the language of the spec is any indication, it won’t always be this way.

For the poor soul who is trying to squeeze iframe content into a rounded corner box, you’re essentially out of luck at the moment. You can certainly use the thick border method I described above, but short of that, you’ll have to look to the bleeding edge. That is to say, you’ll need something which isn’t yet in any production-quality browser, but that is currently in the Webkit nightlies. I speak of the arcane methods of -webkit-mask-image. This property can take a png or an svg as its url, and pretty much anything you apply it to will play nice and clip to the shape of the image. See for yourself. Still, this last bit is obviously not anything anybody will be using in production code for some time to come.

After reading all of this, if nothing else, I do hope that you’ve come away with a better idea of some of the great things that the CSS working group has in store for you, the developer. But even moreso, hopefully there’s something in all of this mess that you’ll be able to put to use today.

Graphically, it looks considerably better than Criminal Origins. This is to be expected, since the latter was a launch title for the 360, and the developers clearly didn’t know much about how to utilize the resources available to them. As such, the fact that the character models and animation have drastically improved is as expected as it is welcome.

I wish I could say that the gameplay has improved as much as the overall look of the game. Not so, I’m afraid. At least through the first part of the game, everything feels much easier. Let me expand on that. The first thing I noticed when going through the combat tutorial at the start of the game was that I didn’t really need to block to keep from getting clobbered. In the first game, encounters usually began with you having to block a 2x4 being swung at you by a lunging hobo. Then you’d have to watch your opponent and precisely time your blocks and parries until you had sent the bastard to wino hell. Each fight was intense, savage, and thrilling. This time around, however, if you notice a bad guy before he spots you, you could potentially just run up to him and punch him until he dies. Not fun. But hey, who needs intense combat, when you’ve got… minigames? Uh, no. Thanks to God of War and Resident Evil 4, game devs think that tacking a small rhythm minigame onto a fight is sufficient to take monotonous button mashing into something innovative. It’s not.

Unfortunately, the worst consequence of taking the grit out of the combat, is that the game has lost its white-knuckle edge. Playing through the first one was exhausting. Each shadow potentially hid one or more bloodthirsty crazies who could kill you pretty quickly if you weren’t ready for a fight, and the resulting tension was genuinely draining. For this outing, if you’re not worried that you’re a couple of whacks away from game over, the best you can hope for is a jump scare when the weird ash-monster explodes from the ceiling. It’s just not the visceral experience that I loved the first time around.

What I do like is the storytelling. I like that our hero has essentially become one of the lost souls he mercilessly battered in the first installment. I really like that from his (and the player’s) perspective, there isn’t any real indication that he hasn’t succumb to whatever it is that has caused half of his city’s population to turn into brutal psychopaths. Most of all, though, I really like the turn towards horror that this game takes right from the outset. The city is covered in oozing tar, skeletal ash-men lurk in the shadows, and the weird lip-ring dudes are giving you attitude in the most ominous way. Good stuff all. I just wish the gameplay was able to match the tone of the writing.

Overall, I have a lot of serious issues with Condemned 2 that I really hope will resolve themselves as I get a little further along. However, given how fantastic the first game was, I feel justified in being at least somewhat optimistic that they will.

And speaking of violent video games, Stephen King has come out against the proposed Massachusetts law that would lump violent games in with pornography as being “harmful to minors.” Indeed, he even namechecks RE4. This further supports my long-held suspicion that Stephen King is completely awesome.

matt@thinkpad:~$ sudo gem install hpricot
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing hpricot:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install hpricot
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1
Gem files will remain installed in
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6 for inspection.
Results logged to
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6/ext/hpricot_scan/gem_make.out

Now what? The main problem here is that Hpricot and Mongrel both contain some C code that needs to be compiled. In order to fix this, you’ll need to install the Ruby & C development libraries for Ubuntu. To do that, just fire up Terminal and enter:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev linux-libc-dev libc6-dev

You should now be able to install Hpricot, Mongrel, or any other gem that requires you to build some C. It’s that easy!