[Technology] Permanent flux and brokenness

So Google Hangouts for Android now supports SMS and IM.  That's great.  Except for when my friend Kevin is messaging me and then half of his messages appear in one app (texts) and the other half another (IMs) indiscriminately and inconsistently.  Trying to chat with him from G+ Hangouts results in me missing random messages, since G+ Hangouts doesn't catch texts.



So, obviously, the next feature we need is letting GMail/G+ manage your texts too.  That would actually be nice, if I could send a text to any friend from my web browser.  My SwiftKey virtual keyboard on my phone is pretty great, but it's still painful have long conversations through compared to a full keyboard.



It's amusing how quickly I stop considering the privacy impact of letting all my communications be hosted remotely together in the same location.



Anyway, it's sad how people have been solving the problem of digital messaging for over thirty years and it's no better now than it was before, or it's worse.

[General] Helping others and learning stuffs

Today I made a website for a group on campus, Guelph Queer Equality.  It's not published yet, but here's a screenshot:

As you can see, it's fabulous.  I volunteered to do this because I support their work on campus and it benefits good friends of mine.  They didn't have a website before, but wanted one, so I thought my skills could be useful to them.



I'm not brilliant at visual design, but they didn't have any website before, and what I can provide for free is (hopefully) preferable to nothing.



I enjoyed doing this because it did not take too long and was a break from my regular work (thesis, TAing, GRAing, etc).  Here are some fun things I got to play with

• HTML Canvas.  I've poked at it a couple times before, but never really  made it far.  It felt like one of those weird things I might never quite understand.  Basically it gives you a space on your page to draw on.  You have a context that you can use to draw shapes, letters, images, etc.  In this screen shot, the name "Guelph Queer Quality" is drawn on the canvas, and the rainbow and the whitespace are drawn too.




• I followed this tutorial to do the rainbow:
  http://krazydad.com/tutorials/rainbow/showexample.php?ex=rainbow_arch_grad
  The resulting code was refactored quite a bit, though.




• Web fonts.  The header and the URLs are done in Snippet:
  http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Snippet


• PHP.  The elements of the site that are consistent across pages are in template PHP files that get included into the primarily-content-based named pages (Updates, Events, FAQ, etc).  Also, the blog posts are actually just a feed from a Blogger blog, whose atom feed is getting parsed.


• JavaScript and CSS.  This was used to position content in the right place, and required many calculations.

I also briefly was using neat stuff like CSS transforms but that was too much for the group. :D