Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

Your Vote Matters

We, as Americans are edging closer to the cutoff date for registering as a voter in many states - Texans only have a few days left! If you haven’t registered yet, go to the site Your Vote Matters right now. Voting is a right and responsibility that everyone should take part in, especially in an election cycle as important as this one.

Register to vote right now.

Posted in Law & Government

Standards-Compliant New Windows

Standards-Compliant New Windows - “a method for opening links in a new window that doesn’t fail XHTML validation tests”

Posted in JavaScript, Quick Links, XHTML

Dilbert Ultimate House

Dilbert Ultimate House

Posted in Architecture & Furniture, Quick Links

Poker Plugins

Three plugins for WordPress that convert simple shorthand into a visual representation of the cards or hand being discussed:

• Card Converter
• CardSuits
• Pokerhand

I haven’t installed any of them yet, but I really like the idea!

Posted in Poker, WordPress & Tagged: Poker, WordPress

ColorZilla Extension

Yet another reason to love Firefox: ColorZilla. The extension adds an eyedropper tool, that will tell you the color of any pixel in the browser, plus a color picker, like the one found in Photoshop. Both of these tools can prove immensely useful to Web developers and designers, as it can save the step of opening a different program when you need to find out the values of a specific color.

Update: I noticed an odd problem when I installed version 0.5.1; the extension broke the ability to use the tab key to move from one form field to the next within a Web page. Upon reverting to version 0.5.0, all was well.

Posted in Design & UI

The Hold’em House

The Hold’em House, has put together a series of free Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments in the Austin area at local pubs. Sounds like a fun time. Hopefully I’ll find some time to head on down to one in the near future.

Posted in Poker

Intellectual Property PAC

IPac gives me hope that our rights as both innovators and consumers might survive the current onslaught of intellectual and copyright legislation.

IPac is a political action committee (or PAC) that is dedicated to creating balanced intellectual property policy. We support U.S. Congressional candidates who will be advocates for the public interest in debates over copyright and patent law, technology regulation, and other IP-related issues. IPac focuses on getting better, smarter, tech-savvy legislators into office while coordinating with other groups who engage in litigation, activism, and regulatory work.

Posted in Law & Government & Tagged: intellectual property, ipac, politics

Notational Velocity

Notational Velocity - An interesting OS X note taking app. As stated on 43 Folders, “All Notational Velocity does is record little notes, but it does that in a way that is completely elegant, intuitive, and incrementally searchable. It does this by an uncanny dual use of a single text field for both searching and creation of your notes. If you’re just typing in the field, it acts as a full-text, incremental, live search on all of your notes and their contents. If you hit RETURN at any point, you generate a new note with its title set to whatever you just typed.”

Posted in OS X, Quick Links

Ingredients Dictionary

Cooking For Engineers has provided yet another great resource, theingredients dictionary, which includes pictures of each ingredient, making it easier to spot the item you need in a grocery store.

Posted in Food & Drink

The New Fifty

Photo from CNN/Money

The redesigned $50 will enter circulation today. Some of the changes include:

• Multiple colors (which stand out more than on the redesigned $20)
• Larger portrait of President Grant
• New fonts for the number 50
• Color shifting ink (tilt the bill to see the appearance change)

Posted in General & Tagged: Design, money