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Developers continue to do crazy things to show us what can be done with CSS3. The latest is a fully animated Twitter fail whale by Steve Dennis: The idea for this came to me this morning after being greeted first thing this morning by another Twitter outage. I'd been looking for something to stretch my CSS muscles on, and the Fail Whale seemed perfect. Also I think the animation only adds to his (or her?) charm. How was this made? The short answer is very painfully, by hand, using trial and error. Curves are done using various uneven border-radius properties, stranger angles (such as the strings) are masked using containers with overflow: hidden; set on them. I hope someone else gets a bit of enjoyment out of my wasted Sunday. It was a fun experiment that I don't plan on repeating any time soon. Take a look at the source to see the mass of code such as: PLAIN TEXTCSS:@-webkit-keyframes flutter1 {  0%   { -webkit-transform:rotate(0deg) }  50%  { -webkit-transform:rotate(-25deg) }  100% { -webkit-transform:rotate(0deg) }}.right .wing {  background: transparent !important;  z-index: 22 !important;  width: 15px;  height: 18px;  bottom: 4px;  left: 8px;  -webkit-animation: 'flutter1' 0.1s linear;  -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;} 

My friend/ex-coworker Sam the Wonder Boy used to send me late night AIM messages comprised of only three letters, "M.F.R." This would then send chills up my spine, and I'd curl up on the floor in fetal position and weep nonstop. OK, I'm exaggerating a quite bit, and Sam doesn't do that anymore. "M.F.R." stands for "Monthly Forecast Report." It was one of the many modules of a huge intranet web application we worked on years ago. As the name implies, it was a report. Before arriving to the actual report screen, the user could select some criteria such as date range, products, etc. Depending on the selection, the report can have up to sixty columns and thousands of rows. It was quite a challenge both on the backend and frontend. I initially created it using server side Excel API and dumped it to the frontend as an excel sheet. In version 2 I made it as an HTML table with the Excel export option. In version 3 I ditched HTML and went for Crystal Report, in version 3.5 it became Active Report. In version 4 we rewrote the whole application as a .NET client app, with the report section being Excel again. In version 5, well there wasn't a version 5. The whole project got outsourced to India and the team was disbanded. But that's a blog for another day.

It's an addictive little habit, that Twitter. But what if there were ways for you to still keep your ugly tweeting habit while staying productive at the same time? Since I can't fully support the total indulgence in the tool that has the tech-world (and beyond) glued to their favorite Twitter client, I thought I would share a few very useful ways to make the service much more productive while you're living inside of it.

once upon a time some really good web developers created sIFR. Their goal was to seamlessly convert HTML headlines into nice fonts. Well, these developers did a great job getting it to work nicely. Looking at their code, I decided I would create a "lite" version of sIFR using a more object-oriented approach. sIFR Lite is a bit easier to read, and more intuitive to use. The only drawbacks are that it is currently unproven on a large scale in the real world. This library is of course open-source, so I welcome you to submit any improvements, suggestions, or bug reports using my contact form.

I needed to use the tall Delicious save button, but I found that it wasn't tall at all.. it was short & fat :) So, I had to shrink it a little by hiding some parts