Here is a javascript UI widget that I made to resemble OS X text fields that accept tags, email addresses, etc..

It uses the CSS3 border-radius property, meaning support is not ubiquitous. Safari seems to render the best. It could probably be restyled to use pill-shaped background images. I'll leave that as a challenge for the user.

Download the Javascript, CSS and demo.

Try it out!

Tags: (comma separated)

This is a screenshot from Adium, an AIM & Jabber client for OSX. As you can see, it logs the time that any of your contacts sign in or out. This particular contact is using the GTalk network. The problem is that GTalk is often (as in the case above) used within the context of the Gmail client, not a third party app like Adium. The log effectively tells me every time that they check their email.

The question, is whether or not this constitutes a privacy concern. No nefarious uses jump out at me, but there must be cleverer people than me who could exploit this information. One potentially useful application (for the paranoid) is to add your own GTalk account as a contact, which would show you if anyone else has been logging into your email.

For those people who do view this as a problem, the solution is to turn off chat in the Gmail web client. The option appears in the page footer (as of this post).

I've been fooling around with generating random patterns—this one in flash. I'd like to see a wall covered with an argyle pattern of these morphing diamonds.

ruby-openid comes with a sample Rails server and a consumer. However, the server has a few bugs out of the box. First, the server uses @params and @session, rather than the `params` and `session` methods respectively. This can be fixed with a simple search and replace. I was also getting the following errors:

At this point I just decided to generate a new rails app, and copy over the relevant files from the server app included in the download. That eliminated those errors.

Finally, when I created an account on the server, and attempted to verify said account with the consumer, I was getting this error in the flash message:

As Zach Holt discovered this is the product of mongrel returning an incorrect status in the header. ulfurinn goes on to discover that the problem stems from the use of the depreciated `render_text` method in ServerController#render_response. The solution is to replace

with

And you should be in business.

Maureen and I took a boat to the Farallon Islands today, which lie about 26 miles outside of the golden gate. They sit on the edge of the continental shelf, causing nutrient rich "upswellings" that provide food for migratory animals. This contributes to a very robust ecosystem that includes hundreds of thousands of nesting birds. We saw about 6 humpback whales on the 10 hour trip, one of which breached multiple times. The Marine Mammal Center also released 4 sea lions back into the wild once we got there.

This was a funny little bird that ran and flew at the same time. Maybe a common murre? He just caught a snack.

Photo set on Flickr