And so, for the third time this year, I’ve completely re-themed this site. Taking a very different tack from the last theme, I’ve tried to keep this one as simple as possible, with just a few subtle touches here and there to add interest. The palette is more subdued, which hopefully means that reading the text is a more pleasant experience. I’ve also done away with the multi-column body text in favour of a fixed-width design.
At the same time, though, I have endeavoured to use some of the new features available in modern web browsers — gradients, shadows, transitions, generated content, and so on. I’m fairly happy with the result — I think it’s a clean, unobtrusive theme that’s not too in your face. Feedback and criticism welcome! 
Continuing my HTML5 and canvas experiments, I’ve put together a generative music system. Essentially, a series of particles move across a field, occasionally triggering sounds — the sound triggered depends on their location in the field.
There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that. Under the hood, I’ve got a series of HTML5 Audio objects that are used to provide polyphonic audio using a simple round-robin algorithm (I encoded the audio in OGG, so you’ll need to use an OGG-friendly browser, like Firefox). The particles are much simpler than those in my previous canvas dalliance, in that they don’t swarm, and their motion is more linear.
I’ve been meaning to start playing with the HTML5 <canvas> element for a while now, and yesterday I took the opportunity. I translated a Processing sketch I made a while ago into JavaScript (with a few minor enhancements).
Essentially, 1 to 3 swarms of particles move around the canvas, reproducing when the conditions are just right, and dying of old age. Quite simple, but the patterns produced can be really quite pretty.
One interesting thing that I discovered whilst doing this is that you can’t pass around a canvas’ context at the instantiation of a MooTools class — it complains about wrapped natives. That’s why, if you like in the source JavaScript, you’ll see me pass the actual context around to various functions. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has a workaround for this, because this is, well, a bit clunky.
I’ve been bumping up against an interesting bug in Internet Explorer recently, and, having just found the solution, thought I’d share it with you.
The problem is that in Internet Explorer (tested 7 & 8), when your document is in quirks mode, uploading a file sometimes just sends through the file name, without the actual body of the request. Put the document into standards mode, and it all works. It should be noted that this is when you’re dynamically setting up the elements used with JavaScript.
The cause? In quirks mode, the enctype attribute isn’t supported. So whilst setting “encType” on the form element to the correct “multipart/form-data” will indeed set this attribute, it won’t actually cause the upload to include the file. Instead, you need to set the encoding attribute to this value, too. It certainly doesn’t help that the MSDN article on the <input type=”file”> element tells you to set “enctype”, but makes no mention of “encoding”.
I couldn’t find any reference to this problem on the intertubes (although maybe I just didn’t look hard enough), so hopefully this will help someone.
