Parallax Error Beheads You

tl;dr: I made a silly 3D web page thing.

Yadda yadda:

For entirely nostalgic reasons, I’ve been buying a bunch of paperback books published by the largest Norwegian publishing house, Gyldendal, in the 60s and 70s. I guess these are the Norwegian equivalents of what Penguin was at the time: Cheap, but nice and with a nose for quality.

As a teenager (when the series had wound down), I’d use to walk around the library, looking at these artefacts and thinking “I should really read all of these”. I think one of the triggers for this weird desire is that they’re numbered, to it’s conceivable to read them all. Even in the correct order!

But the library didn’t have the oldest books in the series, so I never got started… But it’s a thought that has reoccurred to me over the years, and…

Look what happened:

I started buying them the other week. They’re still cheap: Inflation-adjusted they’re cheaper now than when they were published. Which is both nice and not-so-nice: It can be harder to find cheap books, because people don’t put them up for sale, as it’s not worth the bother. But I’ve bought 60% of them now (that’s 25% of them in the picture up there).

While doing this, I was also thinking about 3D. Perhaps because many of the covers are kinda pop-artey. And perhaps this nostalgia trip made me think about the demos I made as a teenager. And I’ve never done any 3D programming, ever, so I sat down and started typing some Clojurescript… and:

The stupid source code is here, and the live web site is here.

This is only the second Reagent thing I’ve written, and it’s… not a very Reagent-ey single page app. The main problem is that I have to do some low-level DOM fiddling, and I didn’t find a way to do that with Reagent’s “proper” way of doing things. For instance, when going from an animation to a transition, I have to stop the animation, query the 3D state of the object, copy that over to the object’s style as is, and then start the transition. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out how to do that in Reagent without glitches, so I just resorted to altering the DOM directly (adding styles and stuff on the fly).

Working with CSS 3D, as a total novice, was pretty fun. You can play around with the 3D stuff in Emacs and see the changes immediately in the browser. Getting to grips with how to do perspective, or not, also took a few tries. For instance, when the books glide out of the library, the other faces haven’t loaded yet, so it just glides out straight towards the viewer, hiding the other faces. And then only starting to turn once the images have loaded. So that bit has a way-off perspective, while it’s more fun to have a closer perspective when the books are spinning…

Lots of trial and error. There’s 98 commits.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The annoying thing about CSS 3D is, of course, that there’s a number of browsers out there. The site looks somewhat choppy in Firefox, very smooth in Chrome, and there are some glitches in Safari, which seem to stem from Safari not being able to determine (fast enough?) what objects are behind what other objects when there’s a lot of them, and the Z axis different of the objects is less than a couple of pixels.

Oh, and I got to use a new tool:

To measure the spines for scanning. Fun!

The confusing title of this post is from an album by Max Tundra:

The Fate of gmane.org

As previously discussed in this embarrassing saga, gmane.org was bought by Yomura Corporation, and they have now let the domain expire.

The domain went to the normal Namesilo auction process, and I was waiting for it to appear there so I could buy it back. I didn’t check often enough, and before I was able to put in a bid, somebody else had put in a max bid, and I was unable to buy it.

I’m assuming it’ll now be taken over by spammers or somebody else? We’ll see.

But here’s a call for action: Yomura, the previous owners, have 22 days to renew the domain, get it back, and hand it off to somebody else. Does anybody know anybody there they can prod? Mark? Eden? Sam? Whoever? It would be a shame if all the gmane.org links out there end up pointing to some scam or malware site.

[Update 12 hours later: I just got a message from NameSilo saying that the domain has, indeed, been renewed, so perhaps somebody did some poking? Or something? But I guess the domain is safe from malware squatters again.]

*sigh*

OK, here’s the longer story about the expiry process, because I knew nothing about what the process was like, and you may be as confused as I was.

So: A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the domain, set for expiry on Feb. 17th, had switched to a different set of name servers:

The gmane.org domain now pointed here:

A nice blank page with just the following JS:

Kinda invalid:

But I figured that it was just some holding page.

But they got a new certificate from DigiCert?

Uh-oh, I thought.

So the expiration date is now in 2021…

The IP address points to an IP range owned by SEDO. But… Who is SEDO, anyway? It turns out that it’s a domain name auction site. And I knew nothing about domain name auctions.

It turns out that most of the bigger registrars, upon domain expiry, put domains up for auction, usually for a month. In this period, the original registrant can still renew the domain and get it back, so it’s an auction during the grace period.

The rules vary between auction houses, but NameSilo will typically put older, attractive expired domains (and gmane.org is from 2002) up for auction with a max price of $1K. If somebody bids the max price, they’re ensured winning the action, so I thought I’d just sit still here, not calling attention to the situation and wait until it comes up for auction, and then bid $1K.

But I didn’t reload the page often enough, and somebody else bid $1K, so I’m locked out.

… and somebody bid $1K.

I’ve been looking at this page for days now, and these other five-letter .org domain names have been there with bids for, like, $1 all this time. And then gmane.org shows up, and somebody immediately bids $1K.

*sigh*

Well, I have no idea who that is, so for all I know, it’s somebody nice? If so, please get in touch: larsi@gnus.org.

OTB#67: Vivre sa vie

Vivre sa vie. Jean-Luc Godard. 1962. ⚅

Godard movies of this era are such a delight to watch. He’s having so much fun, being all mischievous and stuff. Like filming the actors from behind for the first five minutes, and fading the music in and out at seemingly random. He’s so punk.

Every single scene has a new thing going, like the bar scene where he shifts the camera, seemingly at random, and thereby focusing our attention not at the people talking, but working behind the bar (cleaning cutlery and stuff).

There’s not a single pixel of a single frame of this movie that I don’t adore.

It’s just a marvel. Every scene, every camera movement makes me go *gasp*.

I think the movie is basically Godard saying “yeah, fuck you” twenty-five times a second.

Oh, and the 2K restoration (by the wonderful BFI) is beautiful. And it has a bunch of Godard shorts as extras, and a long, interesting interview with Karenina.

Another cocktail to get rid of Benedictine: Cunningham.

It’s OK.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.