Scaling images to ratio with CSS

 Software, Software Development  No Responses »
Jun 052012
 
Fluttershy is best pony!

Fluttershy is best pony!

Here is a neat little trick one can use to scale images in CSS to ratio. The trick works with the max-width and max-height CSS attributes.

Take the image to the right of here, with the dimensions 288 × 338. It has conveniently been thumbnailed by WordPress, but you can see that the thumbnail does not show the full picture. The thumbnail itself is set to 150 × 150 and to preserve any quirkiness with ratios, WordPress does not use scaling. Instead, WordPress generates a hard thumbnail of 150 × 150 which clips a part of the picture. With some proper CSS it is possible however, to use proper scaling. The advantage of this, is that the scaling can be generic and thus you can put any picture you want in it. It also requires no hard thumbnails to be made, so you dont have to worry about image editing, polluting your hosting space with thumbnails and managing said thumbnails. The disadvantage is, however, that the scaling uses the full image in all it’s bandwidth-absorbing glory. It also become messy when trying to fit images that are taken with a different orientation. (vertical versus horizontal) Continue reading »

Arduino Serial Stream Communication

 Hardware  No Responses »
Mar 262012
 
Arduino Serial Stream Communcation Project

Well, today I managed to get things going with my Arduino. As a modern-era software developer my usual modus operandi involves object in one form or another. It can be quite graceful (C++) to extravagant (C# and Java) to harsh (Python) and even downright perverse (PHP5). Still, it’s a nice and clean way to work when it’s not implemented as an afterthought. (That means you, PHP5) Thankfully, the Arduino integrated language has some proper OO in it and today I decided to take it for a spin. Behold!

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Mass Effect 3 – 50 euros of disappointment

 Gaming, Ramblings  No Responses »
Mar 192012
 

A few days ago I finished Mass Effect 3. It was lauded as one of the more epic RPGs of all time; it’s predecessors setting a trend for a classy yet harsh science-fiction story. Over the course of the past two games, one had the ability to import their Space Jesus (aka, Commander Sheppard) from game to game to game. In the end, I started Mass Effect three with a quirky default character called John Sheppard who had a history of being snarky yet saintly. So far, so good; the idea worked just fine in Mass Effect 2; your choices in the first game had significant repercussions in the second game. So, with hope for another glorious installment of storytelling and gaming, I began my game of Mass Effect 3… Continue reading »

I think I have neglected this long enough

 Ramblings  No Responses »
Mar 182012
 
When in doubt, post boobies!

Quite a few things have happened in the past few months, though I have put down most of it on my other site. And sadly, for anything besides that, not much really interesting has happened. Then again, a certain level of interesting-ness is not really a criteria for in- or exclusion on this site. Suffice to say, Mass Effect 3 was disappointing, jMeter is a horrible atrocity and anyone involved in making that abomination should be banned from ever using a computer, Western Digital earned some sleazy brownie points for making a sleek streaming HD content player, I have become a brony, HTC sucks at the bluetooth and it’s easier to find a proper enclosure for a borderline polar bear with a minigun than for an Arduino..

Okay, maybe I should update more often. I will consider it a sort of backlog for me to catch up on!

My own little starfield

 Software Development  No Responses »
Nov 142011
 

Here is an old but still decent example of Javscript that I made quite a while ago. Mind you, this was before I got introduced to jQuery, so we are talking about late 2010. It’s nothing that special but still something I really thought was interesting to work on. Please note however, that this requires some HTML5 wizardry to work; so you need a decent and somewhat modern browser. This boils down to nearly any browser not made by Microsoft.
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Can someone explain this?

 Gaming  No Responses »
Nov 092011
 

A long time ago I was completely addicted to a game called The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It featured solid gameplay that included fighting, magic, setbacks, betrayal and victory. Hell, it even included Patrick Stewart, who managed to get shafted in the first hour. That was a bummer, because the very voice of Patrick Stewart is like making love for your ears. So with that little bit of backstory behind us, it’s safe to say that for the longest time I’ve been looking forward to TES: Skyrim. Unfortunately this took quite a long while and patience is not a virtue which I possess. Then again, I also have the attention span of a goldfish on Speed, so before I knew it I was watching at the definitive release date of Skyrim. Precioussss… Continue reading »

Starting work on WordPress

 Ramblings  No Responses »
Nov 072011
 

… and about time, too!

I’ve been delaying this for a while now, but I reckon it’s finally time to get started with my own website again. Granted, it’s just a relatively simple WordPress install so calling it ‘my site’ would be overkill. A better description would be ‘my result of pressing a few buttons and lazily leeching of the work of others’. Some may call it lazy, I will call it efficient and a good-business-practice. Regardless of all that, we now have a starting point for my own online collection of nonsense. Yay!