I've just pushed a major new version of my Photoshop calendar-template-building script, which creates the components of a calendar as a many-layered PhotoShop document, that can then be changed and tweaked, have photos added, etc.

The version history shows lots of new things since the previous version:

Can now create calendars in 58 languages. Added ability to display week numbers. Added ability to change annotation font name/size/color/opacity. Added ability to force linebreaks in annotation text. Added import/include/<context> support to annotation file. Annotation filename specifications with "YYYY" auto-convert to the calendar's target year. Can now include the year in an annotation's [...]
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A book written by a friend of mine at Yahoo!, for which I did a technical review last summer, was published earlier this month. High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders is just crammed full of real-world, practical information on how to present a web site so that it loads faster for the user.

The main thrust of the book are 15 rules for better server↔browser performance. Although I've been doing web-related engineering since 1994, many of the rules were new to me.

Some of the rules are completely common-sense, such as to include an expires field in the response [...]

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When programming scripts for Photoshop, you sometimes need to know Photoshop's internal name for a font. That name almost always differs from the name presented in the drop-down list of fonts. For example, the internal name for the Arial font is "ArialMT."

A simple way to find out the internal name of a font is to create a text layer using the font, then invoking this Show Font Name.jsx script from within Photoshop. When executed, an alert will pop up showing the internal name of the font.

If you don't know how to install a Photoshop jsx file, mimic the [...]
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The kids' tea bottles await their owners, at the preschool Sports Day this past weekend (more about which is presented here).

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On the little trip where I photographed the elderly couple harvesting rice, I was returning to the mountainous area with a lot of terraced riced paddies that I'd visited the week prior with Nils (where the kids had played). I'd returned to try to get some shots from higher up on the mountain, where I envisioned I'd be able look down at a wide expanse of rice paddies splayed out before me.

It turned out that the terrain wasn't that steep, so all but the few closest terraces seemed to blend into one. There were dozens of levels between the [...]

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