Well . . . as much as I have enjoyed WordPress, I felt like I am not doing a good enough job updating! I am not a blogger, and WordPress makes me feel like I have to produce good, long content on a fairly regular basis.

I have decided to move off of this domain, go to something more unique. In the process I have dropped WordPress and built my own solution in the Python Framework Django. So check it out at : http://zach.holmquist.me – I will be moving the content from here to there and will begin redirecting everything!

Let the good times roll!

I have mentioned it on my Twitter Stream – I am a Disney Geek. Without shame I spent a few hours watching some POV’s of different rides in preparation for our Disney World trip in August. While in the midst of awful cam footage, I came across a little gem on YouTube that shows incredible video of Disneyland being built. It is stunning and an absolute thrill to watch! So if you are even the slightest bit a Disney Fan, do yourself a favor and watch : “Building Walt’s Dream“.

Note : This is in 5 Parts on YouTube, below is just Part One.

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Click to Enlarge

UPDATE

As requested in the comments, the 2nd Inaugural Speech of George W. Bush:

Click to Enlarge

I know! Everyone hates Javascript. Except for this weird breed of us that get high off client side interaction of things. Sadly, when JS was in its infancy most of us were developing in IE6 and error messages for bugs were cryptic and useless . . . and at the time JS was being used for adding falling snow on a site, or a countdown to the year 2000.

These days there have been many advances in JavaScript, the biggest – in my opinion – is the most ignored of them all : console.debug()

From the old days of JS programming, we would do something like:

var x = 5;
var y = 5;
var z = x+y;
alert(z);

This would pop up an alert box with the number 10 in it.

The problem with using alert()’s is when you try to do a loop and the loop never ends because of a coding error and alert boxes are going off everywhere. At which point you have to shutdown your browser and start all over and *hope* that things would fair better a second time.

There is a cure my friend: console.debug()

To use console.debug() you must be in FireFox with Firebug installed. If you don’t know what Firebug is yet, you have been doing it all wrong for far too long! Write your code as normal, but swap the alert() for a console.debug() :

var x = 5;
var y = 5;
var z = x+y;
alert(z)
console.debug(z)

Refresh your page, launch Firebug and there inside is “5″! Amazing isn’t it?! It gets better though! Firebug gives you Object Inspection, which is incredibly useful when working with others libraries or trying to figure out how to access elements in a JSON object:

Firebug In Action ( click for bigger image )

So there you have it, if you are not using console.debug() – start . . . now! If you are stuck in your alert() ways – I have a solution – override your alert():

window.alert = function(e) {
console.debug(e);
}

Just remember console.debug() does NOT work in IE, nor does it work in Safari, so make sure to comment/remove them before you test in those browsers. If you want to use the Debug Console in Safari ( it is tucked under Develop > Show Error Console ) ( Turn Develop Menu on in Preferences ) you must use :

window.console.log( e );

Also for some reason, you sometimes have to enable Firebug’s console with:

My mother is an interior designer and she loves color. 

Being this way she taught me that every color conveys an emotion, and even more than that, color carries with it energy that is subtly picked up by the viewer. As a Developer, the correlation of emotion and color has always fascinated me, so I decided to finally try and put both my interest in color and my interest in words together.

The idea is simple, parse out “emotion” from text and then from there translate those emotions into color. Simple right?! I am not going to go into getting the emotion from text, at least not in this post – this post will focus on how I derived a formula to figure out the translation of emotion to color.

First I defined some base emotions to find a pattern, these emotions are: pleased, subdued, unhappy, aggressive, excited, relaxed :

Using my fancy color picker in Photoshop, I found the Red Green and Blue ( RGB ) for each of those emotions. While doing this I quickly noticed a pattern in these colors, either they were a strong representation of a base color – 255 – or low representation – 0 – and if they were kind of neutral – 51 . Thus, using the table above – I came up with the RGB values below:

• pleased : [0,255,255], // no R. strong G. strong B.
• subdued : [51,0,255], // med R. no G. strong B.
• unhappy : [255,0,255], // strong R. no G. strong B.
• agressive : [255,0,0], //strong R. no G. no B.
• excited : [255,255,51], // strong R. strong G. no B.
• relaxed : [51,255,51], // med R. strong G. med b

Once I had this list, I broke it down into a table of all the emotions and their intensity of either Red, Green, or Blue. A Strong Red emotion contained: Aggressive, Excited, and Unhappy. All terms that are rather extreme – so I correlated Extreme emotions with a Strong ( 255 ) Red. I did this with each Red, Green and Blue until I was able to map out key feelings of a color.

All this research left me with a general idea of how this would work in code. Each emotion would be represented in RGB – and each of colors would hold one of three values : 0, 51, and 255. From there I would be able to decide and create a table of emotion and color values . . .

A couple of examples – the word “happy” . . . Red which is aggressive we could say is 255, Green which is a relaxed and neutral color would also be 255, and Blue which is a high emotion color would be 0. Our color :

Lets try “die” -easy enough – if you are dead, you are nothing – no color : R: 0, G: 0, B: 0 Our result:

So now I have a large database of emotion and color, it took a bit of time, but I think I am satisfied with the results. When I parse in text, I pull out all the common words: “a”, “the”, “an”  etc. and from there I match up words from the text with words I have in the database – I average out each color value – and I tend to have a good representation of the general emotion of the text.

A quick example : “ I will be so happy when you die” – our emotions are happy and die. Red : ( 255 + 0 ) / 2 = 127, Green: ( 255 + 0 ) / 2 = 127, and Blue: ( 0 + 0 ) / 2 = 0 . . . so we have the RGB values of 127, 127, 0 – our result:

I think a nice gut puke color sums up that statement quite well. 

On a final note – the colors are bias to how I feel about each emotion, but on general I think most people agree with what I have chosen. Since I am using this in a sorta secret at the moment project, I cannot go into much more detail . . . in future posts I will make sure to cover the code I use to do this.

I am a Full-Time Web Developer in Salt Lake City, Utah. I do a lot of the front end coding, which means I am always knee deep in Javascript and CSS “Black Magic”. I am not much of a designer – but I think I am getting better as time rolls on . . . you can be the judge of that ! I intend this blog to hold snippets of all the random random I come across as I journey around the Internet.