And sure as hell doesn’t feel right when others’ property is burnt down (few months ago), by people who want to prove the meaninglessness of property and wealth in the word we live in. Banks, shopping malls and any form of corporation I understand, yes, but not people’s shops. The insurance companies’ money pool won’t be drained fast enough.

After taking up so many gigabytes of hard disk space with ‘useless’ city traffic videos, i decided to mount it on my motorcycle‘s fuel tank and go for a nice downhill mountain ride. Here’s the fruit of my labour, enjoy

Given that you’re not using a public computer and you trust your surroundings, pets and relatives, here’s a solution. No need to close Firefox, it’ll take the changes the next time you run it.

1) In the Directory_Where_you_installed_Firefox/components, find and open nsLoginManager.js in a text editor.

2) Search for “_isAutoCompleteDisabled” — without the quotes. You will find a block similar to the following code:

_isAutocompleteDisabled :  function (element) {
if (element && element.hasAttribute(“autocomplete”) &&
element.getAttribute(“autocomplete”).toLowerCase() == “off”)
return true;

return false;
},

You must add two forward slashes to comment out the second, third and fourth line, such as this:

_isAutocompleteDisabled :  function (element) {
// if (element && element.hasAttribute(“autocomplete”) &&
// element.getAttribute(“autocomplete”).toLowerCase() == “off”)
// return true;

return false;
},

Save the file, close your editor, restart your Firefox and you’re done!

Teldrassil film concept art

Left-click on the video to visit Youtube for more details!

Just landed on Piraeus seaport .

Still needs work on the building outlines, tarmac, vehicle shadow.

I mean, sure Jakob, your site is usable — not totally usable, if you take a moment and ponder the wall-of-links and the boring colour scheme. Which brings me to the fact that it’s uglier than hell on a bad morning! My eyes feel sore every time i visit your site.

And what is it with this latest article about showing passwords in plaintext and not ****sterisks any more?  Firstly, when in a public computer you don’t know when someone’s eye is fixed on your screen. That’s the first rule for stealing a password-upon-entry. Duh!  But the problem isn’t the asterisk – the user needs to think of a password they can type relatively quickly and unerringly on their keyboard. But if they clearly see it on the screen, then a potential password thief can look at your keyboard OR your screen. And if you’re not an idiot, the twentieth time you type in your password, you’ll type it in faster and with less errors than the first time. Misspelled password entering “costing you business” is a joke. Except if in your line of work, you need to log in to the same thing every ten minutes.

Anyway, back to the point. My argument is this; you gotta have a beautiful site, as well as a practical one – which should be navigable and well-presented).  If the unlikely situation that the Web was controlled by Mr. Nielsen, we’d have a few billion pages with white backgrounds, black text, blue links (and of course purple visited links, no other colours exist) — and no graphical elements except the ones that have a *shudder* ultimate purpose. Given this extremely limited set of features, if you can squeeze a nibble off of your time to think how to lay stuff down — it’s hard to go completely wrong. Unless you have an unusually large amount of information you need to structure, where it can get complex.

But i digress.

People recognise patterns. If you’re presented with a magenta background page with dark green text and light green underlined links – believe me, most of the visitors will recognise where the links are. Provided you keep a consistent pattern in designing all your links on the page to be light green.  You can also play around and have a different underline colour, to make the text itself more readable and the underlining more subtle (via the border-bottom CSS property).

Thankfully, the rest of the world supports Flash, Java, 24-bit transparent PNGs (Internet Explorer was a slowpoke in this technological advancement, but oh well). Guess what, there’s a reason. Put some FUN into designing your damn page. We don’t have 14.4kbps modems any more, we have brilliant tools to create, and an easier than ever way to publish your creations to the rest of the world.  You can also put some embellishment, a little spice-me-up-don’t-let-me-die-of-boredom element… because you can. Because you want to stand out from the crowd. If you don’t, still that’s really fine. But it’s your option. It’s not *bad design*.

Of course, you’d better take it easy with going overboard, since it’s typical to see an overuse of Flash applets or huge images on a website. But so, fucking, what!  The human race has a cultural (thus aesthetic) diversity, so must their web sites. You can’t take individuality away from everyone and make them succumb to any laws, because  you’ve …”done research” on howeverymany web users. I’m aware that you must use a different design on an informative site, a personal webpage or a social network as you have different limitations. But my point is, if visitors are interested in what you have to say – they’ll bear with your yellow text on dark red background. I know i have, on countless other pages – that aren’t devoid of any personal touch whatsoever.

Don’t stay in science lab too much – go for a walk, then back to design something.

Ok, fuck-all wasn’t exactly correct. It’s very hard to do absolutely NOTHING. Most correct rephrasing would be “doing nothing of real value to oneself; nothing that will improve you as a person or give you experience in any field of knowledge.

Come to think of it, it’s one of those periods in life where you can freely accomodate your hobbies ..that don’t require moving around. That kind of cuts it down to computers for me. Which in turn means: Graphics, World of Warcraft (and other Lesser Games) and Web.

Recapping those past two weeks, i can say i’ve done a bit of everything in this limited set of hobbies.  Photoshopped friends, relatives, my motorcycle, myself, and photomixed various stuff i’ve taken photographs of in the past.

Then, there’s Warcraft. I was waiting for that darn Midsummer period for at least nine months, so i could get the honorary “Flame Warden” title in my newly grown paladin, Luxaeterna of Silvermoon-EU. All would be well, if it wasn’t for the low-spec laptop i’ve been sleeping with for the past fortnight. I actually completed this achievement playing from start to finish with 8 frames per second. For the laypeople out there, that is something that hurts your eyesight and makes you want to say “Aaaargh!” every now and then, if you’ve been into Warcraft for a while.  On second thought, laypeople might have stopped reading this paragraph, so…erm, anyway.

I’ve also managed to create this blog. Ah, spare time. Well… it’s a tough call, people. If you need some free time from your daily job/slavery routine, go buy a cheapo motorcycle and find a friendly bloke that will happily crash onto you – but preferably causing a non-lethal non-paralysing wound. Ta-da, a period of FREE TIME is instantly created! Complete with being taken care of by your family, and visited by friends who bring icecream.

Just make sure it’s NOT SUMMERTIME. And also, make sure you got a latest-tech laptop, so you can play the coolest games in the meantime. Lastly, if you’re in Greece… don’t expect the gov to pay you a reasonable amount of money, for the period you’re incapable of working.

I’ve always thought of blogging as a tad silly – I guess that time will tell if i’ll be able to sustain the silliness required to actually post something in this blog. Oh wait, dang! i’m already posting!

For starters, i’ve changed the theme a bit, added a lively bit of orange and outlined a few fluid forms as well as some curvy backdrop designs.

You see, I have plenty of time due to a recent motorcycle accident I recently had. So i’ll be staying in my double bed for approximately 2 weeks more – then if my pelvic fracture has healed itself enough (go go stem cells!), i’ll be able to move onto my high-spec PC room, and at least be able to play World of Warcraft to kill time for the rest of my medical leave.