grack.com

Looks like the Candian Federal Court has decided in favour of the anonymous John and Jane Does in the recent file swapper case.  The Judge has determined that the following criteria must be satistified for a disinterested bystander to be compelled to aid in discovery as a third party.  In the case of the recording industry versus KaZaa users, this means that the ISPs would be releasing the confidential customer data that would map a user’s IP to his home address.

Just bought the necessary wood for the cabinet today.  It was a pain to load up on the truck - the wind was ferocious!

Here’s a tip for anyone looking to build a MAME cabinet: get the big, straight cuts done when you buy the wood (if possible).  It cost me CDN$0.50 a cut - worth it to reduce the number of long cuts that I’ll have to make myself.

Total cost so far is CDN$120.

Just bought a circular saw today in preparation for building the MAME cabinet.  The guys at Rona/Revy are nice enough to explain the basics of cutting and the pieces I’ll need. 

My plan of attack so far is:

1. Cut all of the required pieces of wood (from the plans I’m using)
2. Draw out the control panel layout from my sketches
3. Purchase required control panel electronics
4. Assemble control panel and test with regular PC
5. Paint, add T-channel edging to all other wood pieces
6. Assemble the rest of the cabinet pieces
7. Attach control panel to cabinet
8. Figure out computer and TV bits to make it a real, working cabinet

I was playing around with getting NAnt to build all of our VS.NET projects today - it’s much more pleasant to build 90+ C# projects using an XML-based build script than with VS.NET’s native build system.  I highly recommend anyone with more than a few dozen projects to consider using it!

It’s a bit of a pain to get around some of the VS.NET locking issues, but once you’ve got it figured out, you’ll be thankful.

I’ve decided to tweak my default stylesheet a bit to use some fancy features available in Firefox (and any other highly compliant browser).  As usual, I’ve designed the effects for Firefox and just made the site work with IE. 

Here’s a rundown of the stuff I did:

1. Added position: fixed; to the header above and navigation bar on the right so that they stay on the screen.
2. Added real transparency to the logo.
3. Added a transparent gradient background to the header, underneath the logo.

These effects are all available in any browser besides IE.  I’ve used the conditional comments to set the body class depending on whether the browser is IE or not: