Age: old enough to know better but still young enough to try it.
Hometown: Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada
Where do you now live?: Vancouver B.C. Canada
Where would you most like to live?: Paris, France
Who was your first "hero" in life?: This one is tricky. I'm finding myself debating the merits of the "hero" in North American culture, how the idea of a hero has become perverted and maligned, we no longer have a sense of the original intent or meaning of the word. Not unlike many initially positive and unbinding social constructs it seems to have become a method solely by which to propagate product; to create desire for that product unbeknownst to the consumer. More recently the product has been removed from tangibility, it now resides as ephemera, particularly useful when populations need to be convinced of or swayed towards certain ideologies. I am thinking specifically of the onslaught of comic book superhero movies that have been accosting every man woman and child in the last 6 or 7 years. The all rely on the same formula, the use of an underdog, a freak accident or occurrence beyond their control, the never ending countdown, the false humility..ect..ect. I suppose what concerns me the most is that these scenarios are played out with such frequent repetition and magnitude that the effect they must be having on the children and youth of today is incalculable. Anyway.....never really had any heroes, if I had to name one it would be Eric Blair. His work got me through some really hard times as a teen, and still amazes me with its almost prophetic accuracy.
What is your favorite thing to do on your day off from work?: I don't take days off.
What is your favorite color?: i know its not a colour..black.
Who (or what) do you love?: Kaia, animals, children who aren't afraid ( harder to come by these days...;{....) old folks who aren't angry, the forest, riding my bike really fast, making a good piece of art (rare), Europe, film cameras, making music, singing, playing piano, dreaming ( if they are good dreams) old blues, boy sopranos, being inspired, anything antique that is mechanical, hand tools.....ummm...lots of stuff..hahhaha!

Wooster: Who and/or what are some of your influences?:

The Renaissance, David Hockney, Caravaggio, Attila Richard Lukacs, Rick Owens, Chuck Close, Arvo Part, Eric Satie, David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, James Dean, Bernini, B/W film photography, Carl Jung, Carlos Castaneda, George Orwell, Shakespeare, Jimi Hendrix, William Blake.... there are so many. too many.

Wooster: What other artists do you most admire?

Currently ..Elbow Toe and Conor Harrington...sooo far ahead of the curve. These ones you might have to Google, but its worth it...Office Supplies Incorporated, Graeme Berglund, Jeff Petry, Todd Duym, Meghan Patterson, Ronan Boyle, Tom Anselmi.

Wooster: What other talent would most like to have?

I guess I'm pretty lucky in that department, I have pretty much all the ones I want. I do regret not taking ballet lessons when I was a kid, I think it's absolutely beautiful. I'd like to be able to dance like Baryshnikov. That would be really cool.

Wooster: What do you fear the most?

The power of my mind.

Wooster: What is your greatest ambition?

To be written into art history and be an inspiration for the generations to come.

You can see more work by The Dark here and here.

Filed under: Displays

Gigantic LED display board goes live at Walgreens in Times Square originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Polymorphisms in NQO1, a gene coding for the phase II enzyme involved in the detoxification of quinone carcinogens, have been associated with childhood leukemia in some studies, although the observed direction and magnitude of effects have been inconsistent. Therefore, the authors systematically reviewed all published reports describing the effect of NQO1 in de novo childhood leukemia and conducted a meta-analysis of 7 case-control studies that examined the association between NQO1*2 and childhood leukemia. Although a family-based study previously demonstrated overtransmission of this allele among childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia cases, the meta-analysis showed that the presence of a NQO1*2 variant allele, which reduces the activity of the enzyme NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase 1 (NQO1), had no significant effect on childhood leukemia. However, there was an increased risk associated with having at least 1 copy of the NQO1*2 allele in a subset of cases with MLL translocations (summary odds ratio = 1.39, 95% confidence interval: 0.98, 1.97). Heterogeneity between studies may be due to differences in population exposures to NQO1 substrates and small sample sizes, as well as potential population stratification in non-family-based studies. Therefore, further research is warranted on the role of NQO1 polymorphisms in the etiology of childhood leukemia, especially among MLL-positive leukemias.

Let's say you have a view of support tickets that are awaiting processing. The older the ticket gets the more important it is that somebody does something about it.

How do we convey this to the user though? Well, there's various methods, but yesterday I came up with a new way, which I think you'll like. Imagine each row of the view is a varying shade of red, based on the document's age. The older the document the redder the row.

You can see an example of this in the screen-grab to the right and in this DEXT demo page. On the demo page you'll need to scroll down to see it in effect.

In terms of CSS this works by virtue of the fact you specify a colour as three numeric values representing the mix of red, green and blue. You might be used to seeing something like this:

<tr style="background-color:#ff0000;"><td>I should be bathed in red</td></tr>

But did you know you can also do it like this (in all browsers!):

<tr style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0);"><td>I should be bathed in red too</td></tr>

An RGB value of 255,0,0 is red, whereas 255,255,255 is white. You can specify any shade of pink by passing 255 for the Red value and any number for Green and Blue, as long as they're both the same. See this table as an example:

The smaller the number you specify for Green and Blue the redder the colour. Can you see where this is going?

What we need to do in our view is have each row calculate a number between 0 and 255. Brand new documents need to come out of the formula with a value of 255, whereas really old documents need to compute to 0.

The view itself needs to be treated as HTML and one of the columns would have a formula like this:

As you can see (hopefully) the G and B values of the row colour are worked out as a "percentage" value of 255, based on how many days have passed since it was created.

The number you multiply 255 by should be somewhere between 0 and 1. If it's 0 then you get red. if it's 1 then you get white. So it might seem the opposite way round to what you'd expect.

Note that I've introduced a "factor" in to the formula above. What I found was that you need to spread the shading of your rows out over the range of dates you expect to encounter. The factor needs to be about the same order of magnitude as the top end date expected. The best way to work this out is to play with it in your real world scenario.

By now you might have noticed the view uses today's date in a column formula. Although the way I've done doesn't invoke the problems with indexing that using @Today does you might be wondering how it gets updated, as the date appears hard-coded.

Remember I've talked before about how you can use scheduled agents to update view selection formula. Well, you can do the same thing with column formulas too! Imagine this code running every night at shortly past midnight:

It's as easy as that. There's little wonder I'm so fond of Notes.

Used in the right place this technique can add much usefulness to the user and help them immediately recognise documents in need of attention. How you use it is down to you (it doesn't have to be a support ticket system!). It doesn't have to be shades of red either. You can use shades of any colour, as long as one of the RGB values always stays the same. Brilliant.

Next blog entry will discuss the use of this technique with LotusScript.