Picment.com

Among other life transitioning events in my life, I recently started my new job as web manager for the Department of Computer Science (aka Daimi) at the University of Aarhus. This gives me the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in the business, and involves an every day work environment with incredibly fascinating research and innovation projects.

And before you go click that Daimi link; it''s an old website and it has served them well for six years, but a part of my new job is a complete well needed redesign.

This website has failed fairly hard as my attempt to blog — mainly because I never got in the habit of regular updates, but also because I was too lazy busy to write decent blogging software. Facing that — and the fact that several excellent blogging software solutions already exist — I''ve decided to move my sincere blogging attempts to my directory at my new work place:

www.daimi.au.dk/~sma/blog/

I''m in the process of moving the content from this website — and when that is done, this domain will point directly to my shiny new blog.

It seems like all my journal entries start with something in the line of "It´s been a while since my last update … " - and to add consistence; this entry will be no exception.

So ehrm ... It´s been a while since my last update. Alot have happened in the last few months. To make a long story short: I quit my last job, and started a few months ago at a young architecture firm, aart. Besides developing a brand new graphic identity and strategy for aart, I´m also developing their (our!) new website and photographing lots of architecture. And I couldn´t be more satisfied, challenged and stimulated with/by a job! So to guys at aart; thanks for letting me join your talented team; you´ve built a fantastic work place.

And Hermans (above) first birthday is coming up. Hooray! I can´t believe that a whole year already passed. But then again; when I look at him, and all the things he´s learned, and the speed of his development, he should be 50 years old! It´s not much; that´s why they call them "baby steps", but it´s incredible how worked up you get by seeing him learning to crawl, eat with his own spoon, wave and clap his hands and … well — you see where I´m getting at; he´s quite a talented guy!

I finally bought a decent camera when Herman came into our lives, and I'm currently putting an image gallery together. Obviously the star in said image gallery will be this little 7 months old fella on your left, but I've also picked up on an old hobby of mine - night photography / long exposures.

But until I finish the image gallery, and to show everybody that we are all doing fine, I just wanted to show you some of the latest photos I took of him.

Cute, eh?

Herman Svart Madsen

~ Born 11th of June 2005 ~

After an undramatic labour that took only 6 hours, my beloved Christine gave birth to our son Herman Svart Madsen at 11.03 AM on the 11th of June.
Words cannot express the love and warmth I feel for this little fellow. Those little reflex smiles, the way he stretches, the look on his face when he discovers a new sound - it's pure magic. He makes me want to improve, do better - be a father worth looking up to. And he makes me feel truly happy.

The following are truly side notes compared to the above; but I should also mention that I started working at an international trade portal that just recently launched its version 2. I'm wearing quite a few hats at this job, being responsible for web front-end development and design. It's a really exciting job, and it's going to be very interesting working here while things start to progress.

And last but not least; my band Mellophone have finally finished recording our new EP. It contains five songs, and obviously we think that this is the best we've ever made. Visit www.mellophone.dk and check it out (it will be up for sale medio August.)

Remember my band Mellophone? We're riding on a wave of success at the moment. We won the national round of the Emergenza Festival, so now we're heading off to Germany in the mid August to play the international final at Taubertal Open Air.

We also played at the danish show case festival for nordic music, SPOT 10, where we received excellent reviews for our concert.

It's been a bit quiet around the article writing, but while playing alot of music, and starting working at MedieSpinder, I've gotten some work done. Three latest works include Cubion, Forgetting Feet and PS12.

I've put up a new article on how to customize input fields in HTML forms. Although the technique demonstrated isn't truly cross platform friendly, I'm certain that some of you will find it informative nonetheless.
View the final result here – and the whole article on how to get there: ”Fun with forms – customized input elements“.

As for the publishing of part II of custom corners on A List Apart, it should be there in a few days. Look out for Issue 172 on the 27th. I'm not really sure why it took so long, but it appears that my article got lost in the cracks around the ever returning stress and confusion that is christmas :)
Anyways – It's right around the corner!

It'd be really nice to get some feedback on these articles, by the way, so if you learned something, or you think I need to get my s*** straight, feel free to leave a comment!

Update:
Part II of custom corners and borders is now available at A list Apart

I'm going to be playing lots more live concerts this year. To start with, both my "serious" bands, Mellophone and Dooley, are signed up for the international band competetion Emergenza, and Mellophone is further more signed up for the danish band competition Livecontest. Lots can be said about these band competitions, especially that music is kind of pointless competing about, but nevertheless it is a great opportunity for new bands to introduce ourselves to a wider audience — and perhaps even win something. Here are some dates, if you'd be interested in seeing yours truly live on drums:

Mellophone

Friday 29. january – Livecontest – Musik-caféen
Friday 12. march – Emergenza – Musik-caféen

Dooley

Saturday 13. march – Emergenza – Musik-caféen

I hope to see you there – you really should :)
I''ve added a new section to this website by the way – portfolio » miscellaneous. It displays a few examples of graphic design and interface design. Go check it out, and let me know what you think :)

Update:
Mellophone won the round in the Livecontest.dk contest played on the 29th, so we head on to the semi-finals — wish us luck! :)

Part II of Customized borders and corners has just been handed over the editors at A List Apart, and should hopefully be published soon.

In the meantime, here's a nice little ASP function I wrote with help from David S. I use this in my comment system. When someone writes a comment and gives his websites URL, it checks whether the website in question has a favicon.ico or not - and if it has, the favicon is displayed next to the users name.

<% 	
Function HttpExists(uri)
Dim srvXmlHttp
Set srvXmlHttp = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP")
srvXmlHttp.setTimeouts 500, 500, 500, 500
srvXmlHttp.open "HEAD", uri, false
on error resume next

srvXmlHttp.send
If Err.Number = 0 Then
	If srvXmlHttp.Status=200 Then
	HttpExists=True
	else
	HttpExists=False
	end if
	else
	HttpExists=False
end if
End Function
'  ********************
' Now feed the function with an URL, like:
' domain = cmd("url")
domain = "http://www.picment.com"

 ' Make sure there is a trailing slash
If Right(domain, 1) <> "/" Then
domain = domain & "/"
End If

url2chk = domain & "favicon.ico"

If HttpExists(url2chk) then
Response.Write " "
' else 
' Response.Write url2chk & " could not be found"
end if
%>

You should probably cache this information in a database, if you have alot of URL´s to check, since it will slow your page processing down considerably. I´m very open to suggestions on how to improve this.

Try it out! Leave a comment. Oh — and a merry christmas to you all :)

Update:
This little function now has it's own article, Favicon pinger with classic ASP/VBScript

Well almost. You´ll probably run into empty sections and "Lorem ipsum" text here and there, but trust me - I´m working on it! Older regular visitors will probably remember that I took down the old version about eight months ago, which was supposed to inspire me to do a new site - fast. Okay - so that didn´t happen.

As some might know, I just had an article published on A List Apart, and anticipating 15 minuttes of internet fame, I finally managed to put something together.

"So what´s this website about?", you ask. I´ll tell you. It´s about me, and stuff that interests me. And these days that means web development, CSS, XHTML, accesible websites, usability - Yes - it´s the song everyone is singing.
On a regular basis, I´ll be posting articles, that go into depths of some more advanced/specific CSS layout techniques and tasks, but I´ll also be writing more general articles about browsers, their state and development. More to come! If anyone has an article request on a specific CSS task - feel free to contact me.

But this website will/does also contain information and writings about my other interests and doings - such as playing music. Music is a big part of my life, so for those not interested - tough luck!:)

Yes Sir; this website will definetly be Picment.com — personal website of Søren Madsen