Warp 20 Chart
Voting is nearly over in the top 20 Warp tracks of the last 20 years, head over to www.warp20.net to have your say. Below is the current top 10.
!Kaboogie Mash of the Week
A track I have done has been chosen as this week’s ‘mash of the week’ - head over to Homo Ludo’s blog or Kaboogie.net to check it out.
In honour of Obama
They did it. They actually did it. Hold your heads up high America, this is a proud day for you, you’ve finally painted the Whitehouse Black.
Poor Poor PNG
As web file formats go the PNG really has a hard time of it. On the surface it looks like the best options for many many types of web imagery - it’s small and it supports full transparency. Delve a little deeper and things dont look so rosy.
There has been much written about the problems with transparency and IE6, and thanks to a vast number of fixes, and the release of IE7 that issue has almost been sorted. Instead I’m going to talk about another problem that PNG users face, which I had not run into until recently.
A client recently emailed me to let me know that there was ‘grey boxes’ appearing around some of the images. Thinking this was our old friend IE6 PNG transparency (non)support, I happily told them to refresh their cache and look again (this was a test on the server, and not 100% completed at the time). But Alas, the boxes remained in Internet Explorer PC, and most worryingly, on Safari on the Mac too, but appeared fine on Firefox on PC. It soon dawned on me that the images in question were PNGs, but not ones that I had applied any transparency to.
This was a different problem. After much confusion, and a bit of screen-shotting I realised that the different browsers were displaying actual different colours. According to this it’s because of gamma correction, and how different browsers correct the colours differently
The easy solution is to use a GIF in it’s place (this is what I opted for), but it is a pity to be forced away from the usually smaller PNG file. Apparantly there are other ways to fix it and continue using PNGs, or alternatively you could use a PNG background image, but obviously this isnt always ideal
It’s All Clear to Me Now.
As a Firefox user (and a web designer) it really bugged me when IE7 came out with its crystal clear type rendering, partly because I held a grudge against Internet Explorer for making my job so difficult, but mainly bacause it made firefox look like out-dated technology, showing up straggly un-aliased text on my laptop screen.
It wasnt until I reinstalled my Operating System, and was going through (the excellent) Tweak Guide for Windows XP, was it that I came across Microsoft Cleartype and ta-daa, once turned on for my laptops LCD screen (aparrantly its only LCDs that need it) made Firefox render text beautifully. Phew, I can rest easy now…
Shitmat In Last Minute Gig SHOCKER!
Just a quick note to let yiz know that shitmat will be playing in the Legal Eagle this weekend as part of a REDRUM fund raiser.
The Weekend We Had Our Faces Banged
So I’m a bit late in posting anything about the incredibly sweaty, but great Bang Face Weekender. In short it was great, it was nice to be at a festival, but also to have a bed to lie in and a bath to bathe in, thus un-banging my face a little bit.
Highlights for me were Shitmat (I’ve seen him previously, but never really enjoyed a set by him as much as I did this time), DJ Scotch Egg - mental as usual, even at 6am! Mala’s set was great too, and µ-ziq was fantastic - little moments of genius, also the weather deserves a mention, especially because we were right beside the seaside.
Lowlights: Venetian Snares was atrocious, I think he was quite drunk when he played or something, he started off his set with some obscure tracks, but after losing the (somewhat young) crowd a bit, starting banging out the classics which picked the crowd up a bit, but then he started (trying) to mix, but was appallingly off beat every time he did. When he started playing one of my favourite Vsnares tracks - the Doormouse Megamix I recall turning to my friend in the crowd and saying ‘if he fucks this one up theres no hope for him’ and mere seconds later he did. Bah. Aaron Spectre was a bit of a let down too, it seemed odd that everyone was using decks, especially for mr Spectre, as he usually has his mp3 collection plus MIDI controllers at the ready. He was still pretty good, but not a patch on the other times I’ve seen him. MAJOR LOWLIGHT: Missing Bogdan! AAAAGGHH! Us stupid fucks standing downstairs waiting for him to come on while he was playing upsatirs. D’oh! Major downer.
Anyways here’s the rest of the weekend in video form:
Mayday!
to celebrate the official start of summer, here’s a video:
Now go find a christian to burn 
As an added bonus, laugh at the crap acting, bad dialogue, and violence against women of the 2006 remake of the Wicker Man starring Nicholas “I’m all Shuck Up” Cage:
Validation Y’all!
An cautionary/instructional rap to rival the likes of White Lines, or maybe even the Wendy’s training rap
Does this mean CSS/XHTML is now street? Or does it mean that Hip Hop is finally dead? A pivotal moment in music history no doubt…
New Bjork Video
Check out Bjork’s new video for ‘Wanderlust’ by Encyclopedia Pictura. Best Bjork video in a long time Imho!
Apparently There will be a 3D version out to buy at some point in the near future