Faith in their product - great advertising idea

In a recent marketing campaign in Vancouver, 3M sought a strong image for their security glass.

They modified a bus shelter, fitting it with their security glass and filled it with REAL BANKNOTES!!!

Many have tried to gain access with golf clubs and baseball bats but obviously the glass remains intact!

This is what you call having faith in your own product .... great advertising!

Codeigniter ahoy!

This week I have mostly been loving Codeigniter (not literally, that'd be hideous). Never has the MVC approach made as much practical sense before, and CI has the good sense to let you quite happily just use a VC approach where MVC would be overkill.

No framework is ever going to exactly fit the things you want to do in the way that you want to do them, but what I love about CI is that is doesn't try to do too much, but it's extendable if you want more. The initial setup comes with more or less everything you need for most purposes I would have thought.

CI also has great documentation and community, small overhead/footprint and is a doddle to setup (just copy the dir structure and set a couple of config settings). Plus it works with PHP4, which is a huge bonus to me as my shared hosting STILL have no date for migration to 5.

Is PHP's ROR? Time will tell, but it's like a breath of fresh air to this web monkey.

Note to self...

Cross-browser test EVERYTHING, ALWAYS!

:(

Typeface the facts

Typography is something not a lot of Web Developers gave much of a hoot about a few years ago. How things have changed, and these days a web monkey worth his salt needs to know his points from his serifs and kern with the best of them.

Heres my collection of typography resources...

A Guide to Web Typography
The wonderful webtypography.net is a superb guide to creating beautiful text. A wealth of information drawing on principles from The Elements of Typographic Style - the design industry standard by Robert Bringhurst. This site covers ground from the basics to the advanced levels of web typography. An essential for the serious web designer.

Typographica
The greatest Typography blog out there. Plenty that won't be directly applicable to your day to day work - but hugely inspiring creatively, fascinating and wonderfully written by people with a clear passion. Well worth keeping an eye on.

80 Beautiful Typefaces - compiled by Smashing Magazine
80 of the lovliest typfaces ever made. Pretty much all of the typefaces you'll ever need.

Thinking with type
A whistle stop tour around the finer points of working with type. Really nicely designed site, I got a lot from this one.

The Adobe Type Primer
In depth look at the issues surrounding text and typefaces from the daddies of documents. In PDF form, naturally.

Former Spam King admits "I'm going to hell"

A retired spammer, simply known as Ed has revealed at a security conference in London, how he used to make up to $15,000 a week by targetting the vulnerable members of society with specific spam emails.

Using lists of reformed gambling addicts and those dependant on prescription drugs he sent out thousands of emails to try and lure people to gambling and pharmacutical sites. Using networks of average consumers drone machines rented of hackers, Ed spent up to 10 hours a day sending spam and working out ways to evade spam filters.

After making nearly half a million dollars in a year, Ed decided to pack it in to write a book. In his words "It's hard to go into a bar and explain your job to a woman by saying "I advertise penis enlargement pills online, It doesn't go down very well.".

Full story at Yahoo! news

Jesus Action Figure on a Wal-Mart shelf near you soon!. one2believe for sure.

That's right folks, as of next month Wal-Mart will be selling the one2believe talking Jesus action figure. Your very own little plastic Messiah will deliver quotes and stories Action Man style - presumably along the lines of "Does this wine taste funny to you?" and "My hands hurt."

Harry Potter Leak - the Deathly Hallows available on bittorrent!

Well, the biggest book security operation of all time has fallen flat on it's arse - the new Harry Potter book is available in it's entirity across the bittorrent network. The torrent has appeared on the controversial torrent site The Pirate Bay.

I've had a look and it seems to be there as a series of photographs in pdf form - weighing in at 73MB. I'm sure there'll be some red faces at the publishers, Bloomsbury, and one would think an investigation to find those mystery fingers. Could it be the work of you know who?


Of course, I do in no way condone copyright theft, but should you be curious just go to The Pirate Bay and search for harry potter. I expect there will be one or two seeders!

Smart ass exam answers

The Hype Machine

This is a great aggregator of tunes posted on the best of the nets music blogs...

The most inept Crystal Maze performance ever.

What a plum.