Shallow Thoughts : : 17

Open Source Scientific Image Processing

Anthony Liekens has a wonderful page on open-source Cassini-Huygens image analysis.

A group of people from a space IRC channel took the raw images from the descent of the Huygens probe onto Titan's surface, and applied image processing: they stitched panoramas, created animations, created stereograms, added sharpening and color. The results are very impressive!

I hope NASA takes notice of this. There's a lot of interest, energy and talent in the community, which could be very helpful in analysis of astronomical data. Astronomy has a long history of amateur involvement in scientific research, perhaps more so than any other science; extending that to space-based research seems only a small step.

Tags: science, astronomy
[ 19:30 Jan 17, 2005    More science/astro | permalink to this entry | ]

Mozilla tip: highlight links that would open a new window

Investigating some of the disappointing recent regressions in Mozilla (in particular in handling links that would open new windows, bug 278429), I stumbled upon this useful little tidbit from manko, in the old bug 78037:

You can use CSS to make your browser give different highlighting for links that would open in a different window.

Put something like this in your [moz_profile_dir]/chrome/userContent.css:

a[target="_blank"] {
  -moz-outline: 1px dashed invert !important;
  /* links to open in new window */
}

a:hover[target="_blank"] {
  cursor: crosshair; text-decoration: blink;
  color: red; background-color: yellow
  !important
}

a[href^="http://"] {
  -moz-outline: 1px dashed #FFCC00 !important;
  /* links outside from current site */
}

a[href^="http://"][target="_blank"] {
  -moz-outline: 1px dashed #FF0000 !important;
  /* combination */
}

I questioned the use of outlines rather than colors, but then realized why manko uses outlines instead: it's better to preserve the existing colors used by each page, so that link colors go along with the page's background color.

I tried adding a text-decoration: blink; to the a:hover style, but it didn't work. I don't know whether mozilla ignores blink, or if it's being overridden by the line I already had in userContent.css,

blink { text-decoration: none ! important; }

though I doubt that, since that should apply to the blink tag, not blink styles on other tags. In any case, the crosshair cursor should make new-window links sufficiently obvious, and I expect the blinking (even only on hover) would have gotten on my nerves before long.

Incidentally, for any web designers reading this (and who isn't, these days?), links that try to open new browser windows are a longstanding item on usability guru Jakob Neilsen's Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design, and he has a good explanation why. I'm clearly not the only one who hates them.

For a few other mozilla hacks, see my current userChrome.css and userContent.css.

Tags: tech, web, mozilla, firefox
[ 14:03 Jan 17, 2005    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]