Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Leopard: I have a feeling this will be a very significant OSX release. I’m looking forward to it in October.
Games: I admin, I’ve secretly been wanting to play C&C 3. Not that it’s much of an issue with Bootcamp and the new 3D acceleration in Parallels and VMware, but it’s still nice to see a [...]

You’ve all seen CAPTCHAs before, where a form requires additional input from the user to protect itself from automated spam. Here’s a new project from Carnegie Mellon, made by Ben Maurer:
You might notice that reCAPTCHA has two words. Why? reCAPTCHA is more than a CAPTCHA, it also helps to digitize old books. One of the [...]

Reuben Yau tells us how to make Google Analytics report the full URL for dynamic referrers. In other words, the referrer will show up as /forums/showthread.php?t=1234 instead of /forums/showthread.php (which is more or less useless). This is a good trick if you use Google Analytics; lack of dynamic URL reporting was a major reason why [...]

I haven’t used Internet Explorer for years, but as a part time web designer I’m glad IE7 is finally out (and soon to be included in Windows Update). When I write HTML or CSS I try to keep everything neat, simple and standards compliant, but there always seems to be something that didn’t work quite [...]

For a lot of programmers, no matter what language or technology you’re working with the hardest part of developing an application isn’t just writing code, but making the end result look nice as well. Those of us who prefer an IDE to Photoshop are pretty much reliant on what we can find on the internet, [...]

I purchased Mint a week or two ago, and I have to say that for $30 it’s a steal. I’ve used a few other statistical packages over the years, and the only things they seem to be good at are the tools I don’t need. I know there are people out there who care, maybe [...]

And so after a solid week of coding and futzing around in Photoshop, I finally put the new Downtown Software House design up. I still might end up changing one or two things, but it works, and what’s important is that it looks much, much better than the old website. Good visual design is more [...]

Continuing my first post on the subject, here are a few more useful web design resources:

PHP5 Exception Handling
SimpleXML
Classes and Objects (PHP5)

PHP5 has been around for a while, but since I was never able to get it working on my old host I’m just now beginning to use it. These articles cover some of the big [...]

Short answer: you can’t. In my experience it’s easier to just use 8bit PNGs when you absolutely need transparency (a nav menu for instance, where the background color changes depending on the context), and fake alpha transparency by layering the image over the background in photoshop. Of course, this can have plenty of problems by [...]

I’ve been very busy the past week working on a complete redesign of the Downtown Software House website. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and since I recently switched to a new hosting provider (as well as noticed some ugly bugs with IE I didn’t know about before!) I decided it [...]