So, you’ve got all these great Javascript effects on your website. Hidden information magically appears after clicking a link, and all is good. But what if someone that doesn’t have Javascript comes to your site? If your information is being initially hidden by CSS, you’re doing it all wrong.

Instead, the best way is to have everything visible by default in your CSS file and use Javascript to “unhide” it. To illustrate this concept, I’m going to go through a quick example utilizing the excellent jQuery.

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As you may or may not have heard, Sony and Stanford University released a Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3. This is awesome in itself, but what’s more is amazing is the effect it’s had on the computing power of F@H. If you look at the current numbers, the PS3 has almost tripled the computing performance (in teraflops) of every other operating system.

This absurd amount of processing power is primarily due to the fact that the PS3 is designed to produce beautiful graphics, which seems to have the same sort of needs as folding proteins. Video cards, in general, seem to have a tremendous ability to process these sorts of numbers, because if you look at the numbers, although there are only about 700 GPUs (other than PS3) crunching numbers for F@H, they are doing the same amount of work of around 25,000 Linux boxes.

Hopefully this move by Sony will encourage Nintendo and Microsoft to implement similar clients on the Wii and Xbox. By allowing these machines to fold proteins in their spare time, it may very well lead to significant advances in research of diseases such as cancer. Pretty amazing that playing video games may very well lead to a cure for cancer.

A little while back, I wrote about Netflix “Watch Now”, the movie streaming service from Netflix. Today, I was finally able to test it out, as my account had it activated (how, I’m not quite sure—the tab just appeared). Overall, I was fairly impressed: my thoughts on the good and bad follow:

The Good

• Generous viewing time – For every $1 you spend on Netflix each month, you get 1 hour of online viewing. This means that I get 15 hours per month that I can watch movies online—not bad! There’s even a potential for bonus time.
• Good video quality – For streaming video, the quality was quite good. I had no problems with skipping, although the soundtrack was a little off during portions of the movie (Word Wars is what I watched)
• Quick and easy installation – To get the player running, it took at most five minutes—I fired up Internet Explorer (which unfortunately is the only supported browser at the moment) and Netflix installed everything for me. The only little blip was that Windows Media Player had to be upgraded, but that was as simple as pressing “Upgrade”.
• Easy to use player – The video player was dead easy to operate—play, pause, fast forward—all of the basic controls you need.

The Bad

• Limited selection – At the moment, only 13 of the 156 movies in my queue were available to be viewed online and, with the exception of Word Wars, they were all fairly old. I’m sure this will improve with time, but at the moment, it’s a little disappointing.
• No advanced features – I was unable to find any way to display subtitles, and there certainly weren’t any special features—just the movie.
• No auto-resume – Unless I’m mistaken, there is no way to resume a movie where you left off. For instance, I watched a few minutes of the movie and then exited. It would have been nice if it restarted right where I left off, but instead, it went back to beginning. Annoying, but not terrible.
• Only supported on Windows in Internet Explorer – This is a real downer, but hopefully they’re working on other systems/browsers. I really don’t like opening up IE any more than I have to.

The Ugly

• Watch Now crashed my browser twice, and I had to reboot my system. – When I started the movie, I exited out once or twice, to see what would happen. The second time, I had to force quit IE, and open it back up again. The movie still wouldn’t play, so I had to do a reboot. After that, everything went fine, but it didn’t leave the best first impression.

I’m really interested to see how this service plays out—it could either be a huge flop or a big success. I think that, as long as newer movies are released this way, it will take off. Otherwise, I don’t see it gaining widespread use.

Uggh—so I made a pretty significant typo in the instructions for Better Stats Insertion 0.1. Essentially, I made it so it would not work if you followed the directions. I said to insert the following tag:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'bsi_include' ) ) { bsi_include(); } ?>

And, basically, bsi_include() is a non-existant function. It should be the following:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'bsi_insert' ) ) { bsi_insert(); } ?>

I apologize for any confusion this may have caused, but if you download the latest version (0.2 at the time of this writing), it will fix the instructions.

Alright, so maybe you’re getting a little sick of this, but I wrote another WordPress plugin. This time, it’s for inserting your stat tracking code. I noticed that just putting the code straight into my footer resulted in 404 and preview pages being tracked, so I quickly whipped together a plugin to solve the problem, and here it is. Check out the plugin page for more info.

In the process of redesigning this site (which will hopefully be up sometime soon), I realized I had no good way to exclude certain categories from being displayed on the front page, feeds, or in archives. So, naturally, I threw together my own plugin to do the duty. Ultimate Category Excluder allows you to quickly and easily exclude categories from your main page, archives, or feeds. For more information, check out the plugin page. This is a beta plugin, so be sure to check back for any new updates.

Just a quick note—I just added a sidebar item on the right that shows the movies I currently have at home from Netflix. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have my ratings, but I’ll see if I can tweak the plugin to get that working (I’m using Albert Banks’ WP Netflix Plugin)

Hardcover Economics book with MyEconLab subscription: $171.43
Online/eText Economics book with MyEconLab subscription: $80.00
(Apparent) cost of materials for physical Economics book: $91.43

You can guess which option I chose. And yeah, I don’t get it either.

I noticed, through using Wordpress a bit, that it does not correctly replace double dashes (––) with the correct em-dash (—). I quickly put together a plugin that you can use to do just that, along with single dashes. Go to the plugin page for more information.

UPDATE: After a helpful email from theddy, Nice Dashes is now 0.2–check the plugin page for more information.

According to ZDNet, as well as many other sources, Netflix is beginning to offer a movie streaming service for its users. While right now the service is only offered to a limited number of customers, it will eventually be available to everyone who uses Netflix. Each user, depending on what plan they have, will get a certain number of hours to watch movies streamed through their browser.

So, is this going to work? The internet already has several movie download services, such as Movielink and CinemaNow, but, as far as I know, they are largely unsuccessful. Netflix, however, has a chance to become successful. Why?

• Large customer base – Netflix already has a large and loyal customer base. Because customers are are getting the service for free along with the typical rental plan, the service will most likely be used, unlike if you were to go with an existing service.
• Generous viewing time – with the 3 at a time plan, users will be able to watch 18 hours of movies online. While this isn’t unlimited, it means you’ll be able to watch roughly 8-9 movies online every month, which definitely adds a lot more value to Netflix.
• Already included in the plan—no extra cost – Many users probably don’t want to try out sites such as Movielink because they have to pay more for a service, such as Netflix, that they already have. Therefore, the users of Netflix will be much more likely to try out the service, for the sole reason that they don’t have to pay extra for it.
• Easy to use – Judging by Hacking Netflix’s demo of “Watch Now”, users will find it very easy to view the movies. You don’t have to download anything other than a simple plugin, which looks easy enough to install.
• A large selection of movies – Right now, Netflix is offering around 1000 titles to be viewed online. As they begin to roll out the service, I’m guessing more and more movie studios will agree to have their content available this way, which means a higher percentage of Netflix’s extensive catalog will be available online.

All-in-all, this seems like a great move on Netflix’s part, and it will be a good way to retain customers. They needed some way to keep up with Blockbuster’s Total Access program, and this looks like it could (potentially) be it. I’m looking forward to this being enabled on my account, and I’ll let you know how it goes once I use it.