Links to try during a Gmail outage

Lifehacker had some links to try during a Gmail outage:

Plain HTML: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html
Safe Mode: http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0
Old version: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1
Bypass browser checking: http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser
Mobile version: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=mobile
iPhone version: http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/
iGoogle gadget: http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax

CodeRush Xpress

This is a free tool for VS 2008 that's been pretty useful.

CodeRush Xpress for C# and Visual Basic inside Visual Studio 2008 - Mark Miller:

CodeRush Xpress is a powerful developer productivity tool from Dev Express. The product is free, licensed by Microsoft on behalf of all developers working in Visual Studio 2008 in all paid-for product skus (e.g., Standard, Professional, Team System). Note however that CodeRush Xpress will not load in the Express Editions of Visual Studio.

CodeRush Xpress includes features that support common developer tasks

Quick-Kill Multiple Programs with Batch Files

Quick-Kill Multiple Programs with Batch Files - Batch scripts - Lifehacker

The basic trick is to open the Windows Task Manager, find the executable names (like firefox.exe) of the apps you want to kill, then open a simple text editor and add a line for each app, like so:

taskkill /im program.exe

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Here's a bit of programming humor that made me laugh.

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages: "Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer."

Run IE8/IE7/IE6, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera from the web

Haven't tried this yet but it might be useful.

Run IE8/IE7/IE6, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera from the web: "The Xenocode Browser Sandbox allows all popular Windows browsers to be run simultaneously, directly from the web. Web designers, system administrators, and other users can now evaluate Internet Explorer 8, 7, and 6, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome directly from the web in a risk-free manner."

Update: I tried their IE6 sandbox and it worked great.

Chickenfoot

Chickenfoot: "Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser's sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks."

Useless Windows XP services

Here's a list of XP services that are normally useless to home users. I had most of them off already but there were some on the list that I didn't realize were useless.

Devoted Geek » Blog Archive The ultimate guide to tweaking useless Windows XP services

Free E-Book On SQL 2008

Microsoft Press - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Free E-Book Offer: "Learn about major new features in SQL Server 2008 including security, administration, and performance."

MSDN Low Bandwidth Bookmarklet

There's a low bandwidth feature on the MSDN site that can be activated by adding (loband) to the file name right before the .aspx (like this system.object(loband).aspx) or by using Jon Galloway's MSDN Low Bandwidth Bookmarklet.

Printing Long DIVs

I encountered a problem recently where printing a page with Internet Explorer caused a page break before the main content, chopped the content off after the 2nd page of the printout and then printed a blank page. So the users would get 3 pages, a page with the header, a page with the top part of the content and a blank page.

The issue turned out to be caused by a DIV that was being styled as overflow:auto that contained a long table. The table had recently increased in size so it now spanned two pages.

To fix it, all I needed to do was set the DIV's overflow style to visible in the page's print stylesheet.

overflow: visible !important;

Superdense Computers

Cool article by Hans Moravec from 1986 on building computers and other technology from neutronium, magnetic monopoles and Higgsinium. It's slightly out of date since the theory that allowed for Higgsinium has changed but it's still interesting.

Superdense Computers

DebuggerStepThroughAttribute

The DebuggerStepThroughAttribute sounds like it could be useful.

Pedram Rezaei's Ramblings : .NET debugging made easier: "As far as the CLR is concerned, there is no semantic attached to this attribute. However Visual Studio does not step through methods or classes that are decorated with this attribute"

You can use it to skip over stuff you don't need to step through while debugging but you can still set breakpoints in the code if you uncheck "Enable Just My Code (Managed only)" under Tools | Options | Debugging | General.

Accelerator keys you should avoid for Asp.Net 2.0 controls

The list of accelerator keys that are already used by the browser.

Accelerator keys you should avoid for Asp.Net 2.0 controls:
"ALT + F
ALT + E
ALT + V
ALT + I
ALT + O
ALT + T
ALT + A
ALT + W
ALT + H"

SwapMouseButtons

This is a pretty cool tool.

SwapMouseButtons - Freeware: "An easy way to share a computer between left-handed and right-handed persons"

I'm ambidextrous so it lets me easily swap the mouse to whichever hand is most convenient.

LINQ: Building an IQueryable Provider

The Wayward WebLog : LINQ: Building an IQueryable Provider - Part X: "find a nice shady tree, relax and meditate on why your world is so confused and full of meaningless tasks that it has kept you from pursuing the perfection of writing IQueryable providers"

.NET Developers’ Reference Cards

This guy has compiled a list of developer's reference cards / cheat sheets for .NET developers.

.NET Developers’ Reference Card Roundup | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

Making PowerShell Start Faster

Windows PowerShell : Update-Gac.ps1: "people run this script long after their install and things get a TON faster"

Visual Studio 2008 Keybinding Posters

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog : Where are the Visual Studio 2008 Keybinding Posters?

He's got links to the Visual Studio 2008 keybinding posters and to the C# keybindings as a spreadsheet.

Sunblock

I'd been wondering why my sunblock didn't seem to work as well as it used to. This site did product comparisons on sunscreens and most of them don't work well.

Cosmetic Safety Database - Sunscreens: "Does your sunscreen work? An investigation of nearly 1,000 brand-name sunscreen products finds that 4 out of 5 contain chemicals that may pose health hazards or don't adequately protect skin from the sun's damaging rays. Some of the worst offenders are leading brands..."

Auto-Formatting Removes Tabs

Turns out there's a way to get Visual Studio 2008 to preserve your spacing if you've lined up your declaration statements.

Karen's Space : Auto-Formatting Removes Tabs: "A new option was added to Tools | Options | Text Editor | C# | Formatting | Spacing | Set other spacing options.
The option is a check-box and says: “Ignore spaces in declaration statements”."

Regular Expressions

Jeff Atwood's got a post on regular expressions that included some info on the IgnorePatternWhitespace option which I'd been unaware of till now. That looks like it could be useful.

The comments on his post led to the Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet and to Roy Osherove's Regulazy and Regulator tools. I've used the Regulator in the past but haven't tried Regulazy yet. May want to look into it the next time I'm building a regular expression.

Sysinternals

BetaNews | Russinovich's Windows toolkit goes live, quite literally: "Admins now have immediate access to any of Sysinternals utilities from any Windows computer, without having to install anything first."

live.sysinternals.com

Golden Tortoise Beetle

Found an interesting looking beetle in my house last night that looked like a drop of gold. When I handled it to get a better look and move it outside, it's color changed a bit to more greenish and transparent so I could see a lady bug like pattern under it's shell. I did a bit of web searching today and it turns out it was a Golden Tortoise Beetle.

The golden tortoise beetle, Charidotella sexpunctata bicolor (Fabricius), is brilliant brassy or greenish-gold in life. When disturbed, the color becomes orange with black spots.

Golden Tortoise Beetle from Bug Guide

Golden Beetle from Lady Bug Lady

Golden Tortoise Beetle from Bug of the Month

Golden Tortoise Beetle images from Google

Cool Text: Logo and Graphics Generator

Cool Text: "is a free graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need an impressive logo without a lot of design work"

HighlightCurrentLineInEditor

Here's a Visual Studio DXCore plugin that might be useful.

Rory's Ramblings: New Plugin HighlightCurrentLineInEditor: "a new plugin called 'HighlightCurrentLineInEditor' which unsurprisingly highlights the current active line in the editor in a nice shade of blue"

Coding Productivity Macro

Kirill Osenkov : Coding productivity: macros, shortcuts and snippets

This macro by Kirill Osenkov inserts a pair of curly braces and places the cursor inside them. It's useful when mapped to Shift+Enter.

Sub InsertCurlies()
    DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.NewLine()
    DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text = "{"
    DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.NewLine()
    DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text = "}"
    DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.LineUp()
    DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.NewLine()
End Sub

Robocopy GUI

Robocopy GUI: "allows users to customize their Robocopy scripts using a simple and very familiar-looking graphical interface"

What is the list of KeyCodes for JavaScript KeyDown KeyPress and KeyUp events?

The ASP.NET FAQ site has a list of the JavaScript keycodes.

Add Using Statement in Visual Studio 2008

Add Using Statement in Visual Studio 2008: "In Visual Studio 2008, if you've just added a class for which you haven't yet added the corresponding using statement to bring the namespace into scope, you can hit control-dot"

Graphics Programming Black Book

Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book can be downloaded from BYTE.com.

Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash : "Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book is a compilation of Michael's writings on assembly language and graphics programming (including from his "Graphics Programming" column in Dr. Dobb's Journal). Much of the focus of this book is on profiling and code testing, as well as performance optimization. It also explores much of the technology behind the Doom and Quake 3-D games, and 3-D graphics problems such as texture mapping, hidden surface removal, and the like."

Checking User Logins on a Remote Server

Needed to check the logged in users on a server recently and couldn't remember the QWINSTA (Query WINdows STAtion) command or find my previous post about it so I figured I'd do another post on the issue and include the words I searched for when I didn't find it.

Managing Terminal Services Session Remotely: "Windows 2000+ (includes Windows XP and 2003) have two command-line tools called qwinsta and rwinsta that can query and reset a remote session."

The Query Session command is the replacement for qwinsta on Windows Server 2008.

Fractal Desktops

Fractal Desktops: "Mandelbrot set images for the desktop."

Celebration from their Best of 2004 collection is one of my favorites.

Free File Difference and Merge Tools

DiffMerge from SourceGear
WinMerge which is Open Source

Iris - Free Syntax Highlighter

Iris - Free Syntax Highlighter: "Iris is an open source syntax highlighter built in C#. It has a rich web interface that lets you highlight nearly 500 syntaxes"

Visual * 2008 Express Edition

Here's a couple of links to remind me to download this stuff. :)

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

Visual C# 2008 Express Edition

40 Bloggers Over 40

I figured I'd post a link to this article on bloggers over 40 as I will be joining their ranks in a matter of days.

JavaScript Libraries

Some of the JavaScript libraries I've been using lately:

• Prototype (and here's more info on using Prototype)
• Control.Modal which uses Prototype to create modal windows.
• Ext has some pretty interesting user interface elements. It uses Prototype and Striptaculous. (Ext demos and documentation)

MailTo Links

This site has some useful info on the mailto syntax. They've also got a page for encoding email addresses to help stop spam.

XSL Textarea Collapse Problem

Heuristic Blog has an solution to collapsing textarea controls.

XSL Textarea Collapse Problem : "a hack that seemed to do the trick: inserting a <xsl:value-of select="@unknown"> tag pointing to an unknown attribute."

Make the Logo Bigger

MaketheLogoBigger.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)

VS.NET Macro To Group and Sort Your Using Statements

David Findley's Blog : VS.NET Macro To Group and Sort Your Using Statements: "This macro will take the current selection, parse it for using statements, group and sort them..."

Shutdown Command

This article on restarting a remote computer lists the command line arguments for the shutdown command.

SQL Server Code,Tips and Tricks, Performance Tuning: How To Restart A Remote Computer

I've had to use shutdown -a in the past to abort system shutdowns.

Wikiseek

Wikiseek: "A better way to search Wikipedia"

Wikiseek is a Google-like search for Wikipedia and it's external links that also allows you to choose from related categories. It looks pretty cool so far.

AJAX Patterns

AJAX Patterns: Design Patterns for AJAX Usability

There's also a wiki at ajaxpatterns.org.

PureText

"PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically."

Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks

Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks

Fun With Pie Charts

Here's a few links with some funny pie charts:

Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac-Man

Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Ms. Pac-Man

Notoriety as Renaissance Artists vs Ninja Turtles

We Have Pie Charts

What American Accent Do You Have?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
North Central
The West
Boston
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Good Agile, Bad Agile

Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile

This was the source of a few good laughs as I'm stuck doing Bad Agile and was rubbing my stiff neck when I read his quote about Scrums causing neck damage.

Some cool links

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

Here's a webpage with an area 17 billion times the surface area of the Earth.

Here's an explanation of why .99... = 1
And Wikipedia has some proofs and a page on recurring decimals.

Disable the “Restart Now” Message from Windows Update

How to Disable that Blasted “Restart Now” Message from Windows Update:"Press Windows-R, type “net stop wuauserv” in the box and press Enter."

Ajax Debugging

XmlHttpRequest Debugging for IE: a bookmarklet for Ajax debugging.

Toggling The C# Navigation Bar

Born to Code has a macro for toggling the C# navigation bar on and off. Turning it off speeds up the C# source code editor.

Visual Studio Spell Checker

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT)'s WebLog : Spell Checker for HTML and ASP.NET pages: "Spell checker works in Source view, it is able to extract text from markup elements and use Office 2003 spell checker to check the text. Spell checker is able to handle entities to some extent (they are considered whitespace for now). It is also able to spell check values of attributes that typically contain human readable text."

EclipsePalette

EclipsePalette: "EclipsePalette is a color palette and screen color capture program designed for not only web designers, but Visual Basic, C++, C#, and Java developers as well."

Browse the GAC

Browse the GAC

The following registry entry allows browsing the GAC with Explorer

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion]
"DisableCacheViewer"=dword:00000010

Set it back to 0 to go back to the orginal view.

140 Resources on Online Tools, Generators, Checkers

Here's a list of tools for web developers:
140 Resources on Online Tools, Generators, Checkers - Listible

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Macro

Coding Horror: Keyboard shortcut summary macro - Queries the Visual Studio IDE for the actual keyboard bindings and produces a web page that lists your keyboard shortcuts.

Everything you always wanted to know about Task Manager but were afraid to ask

Coding Horror: Everything you always wanted to know about Task Manager but were afraid to ask

Visual Studio 2005: C# Code Snippets

The C# code snippets equivalent to the VB snippets that shipped with VS 2005 are finally out.
Visual Studio 2005: Visual Studio 2005 Code Snippets

New PC

I'm in the progress of migrating to my new Dell Precision 380 Pentium D with dual flat screen monitors at work so I figured I'd post some links to info I've found useful when switching machines.

Disable Windows Server 2003 Shutdown Event Tracker

Command Prompt Here

Internet Explorer 5 Web Developer Accessories for the view partial source feature.

WMF Vulnerability

Microsoft Security Advisory (912840): Vulnerability in Graphics Rendering Engine Could Allow Remote Code Execution.

Here's a patch for the WMF vulnerability that the SANS institute is recommending.

VMTN - Browser Appliance Virtual Machine

browse the Internet with Firefox in a virtual machine

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

A list of some useful free utilities including anti-virus software.

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

24 Ways to Impress Your Friends

The 24 ways site appears to be posting a cool web development article a day that you can use to impress your friends.

Day 1 was on the Prototype Ajax library.

intensivstation :: CSS Templates :: Templates

Here's some possibly useful CSS Templates
intensivstation :: CSS Templates :: Templates

Fun With C# and HP Laserjets

Don't know if I'd dare try this but we've got HP printers at work.
Fun With C# and HP Laserjets

10 Useful JavaScript Functions

Here's Dustin Diaz's list of the top 10 custom JavaScript functions of all time. They look like they could be useful.

Dactyl Fractal Zoom

A flash animation of Fractal Fingers.

PromptSQL: SQL Intellisense for MS Query Analyzer, VS.NET 2003, Management Studio and VS 2005

PromptSQL: SQL Intellisense for MS Query Analyzer, VS.NET 2003, Management Studio and VS 2005: "PromptSQL provides SQL Intellisense style word completion for various Microsoft SQL editors, and UltraEdit."

Fractal Food

Fractal Food: "Romanesco (as I'll refer to it henceforth) is a member of the species Brassica oleracea L., which includes cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collard greens, kohlrabi, and numerous other 'cultivars' (cultivated variations)."

Cool looking fractal relative of broccoli and cauliflower.

Update: Found some Romanesco links on Metafilter.

Inside Outlook Express

Inside Outlook Express: "Help, tips, FAQs and technical information to help you use, understand, and repair Microsoft Outlook Express for Windows"

Google Logo Maker

Logogle converts the text you enter into Google logo style.

Here's an example that crosses the Whole Wheat Bagel site with Google to produce Whole Wheat Baagle.

Context Free

Context Free: " Context Free, an environment for editing and rendering CFDG design grammars."

Design grammars are sets of non-deterministic rules that produce images.

Doskey

To my surprise Doskey still exists in XP

To create a batch program named Tmp.bat that contains recently used commands, type:

doskey /history > tmp.bat

Removing the Dotted Border From Active Links

I've got some pages that use link based CSS tabs and I've finally stumbled upon a method for preventing the dotted border from showing up on active links in IE.

hideFocus: "use the HIDEFOCUS attribute to prevent a focus rectangle from appearing "

Spring Flowers 2005

Here's some pictures of some of the flowers that bloomed in my yard this spring.


Spring Flowers 


Spring Flowers 


Spring Flowers 


Spring Flowers 

Amaryllis 2

This is the second flower stalk that my amaryllis plant grew this year. This one only produced three flowers and was leaning to the side so I propped it up on the railing between the living room and the kitchen.


Amaryllis stalk 2 

Revert to Saved

Revert to Saved: "Most other word processors and layout programs put a Revert to Saved command right on the File menu. This allows for a quick return to the last saved version of a file. This hack shows you how to add this feature in Word"

Amaryllis

Here's a picture of my amaryllis plant. I took this picture a few weeks ago of the first flower stalk of 2005. Currently stalk number two is about to flower. I'll probably post some pictures of that one after it opens since this experiment in photo blogging seems to have worked out well.


Amaryllis 

Greasemonkey

mozdev.org - greasemonkey: "Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ('user scripts') to any webpage to change it's behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage's style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a webpage's design or interaction."

Miscellaneous Symbols

Miscellaneous Symbols - Test for Unicode support in Web browsers: The Miscellaneous Symbols page from Alan Wood's Unicode Resources - Test for Unicode support in Web browsers.

Regular Expressions Site

This site on regular expressions looks like it could be useful and has a fairly cool site design.
Regular-Expressions.info - Regex Tutorial, Examples and Reference - Regexp Patterns

JavaScript Shell

JavaScript Shell: "A command-line interface for JavaScript and DOM."

20 Questions to a Better Personality

Here's an interesting personality test I found via Whole Wheat Blogger

My results were:

Wackiness: 10/100
Rationality: 72/100
Constructiveness: 40/100
Leadership: 34/100

You are a SRDF--Sober Rational Destructive Follower. This makes you a Fountain of Knowledge.

You are cool, analytical, intelligent and completely unfunny. Sometimes you slice through conversation with a cutting observation that causes silence and sidelong glances. You make a strong and lasting impression on everyone you meet, the quality of which depends more on their personality than yours.

You may feel persecuted, as you can become a target for fun. Still, you are focused enough on your work and secure enough in your abilities not to worry overly.

You are productive and invaluable to those you work for. You are loyal, steadfast, and conscientious. Your grooming is impeccable. You are in good shape.

You are kind of a tool, but you get things done. You are probably a week away from snapping.

Addendum, 2004/07/19: this fits me 99%, there is a slight inaccuracy however. We are not necessarily completely unfunny. If we have a sense of humor (I do) it surfaces on the occasion with well-timed, completely dry, very sarcastic, wit. - Chase

Of the 84172 people who have taken this quiz since tracking began (8/17/2004), 7.5 % are this type.

A List Apart

A List Apart : "A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards."

Huygens Pictures of Titan

Here's some links to pictures of Saturn's moon Titan from the Huygens probe:

ESA - Cassini-Huygens

NASA - Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn

Update: The Onion has a list of Huygens discoveries.

More Character Entity Info

The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)

A Simple Character Entity Chart : evolt.org, Code

A Simple Character Entity Chart : evolt.org, Code: "Character entity references in HTML 4"

The IFRAME+SSL Problem

One of the common causes of the "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items" message is the IFRAME+SSL problem.

If you're using SSL and have an IFRAME without an SRC attribute, the frame will start out displaying a nonsecure blank page which causes the warning. To get rid of the message you need to supply your IFRAME tags with SRC attributes that display secure content from your site.

If you don't know ahead of time what page the frame should display, just make a file that contains an empty html page and use that.

<iframe src="empty.htm"/>

Google Suggest Dissected

Here'a an interesting analysis of the Google Suggest javascript code - Google Suggest Dissected...

Curbside Limb Pick Up

Here's a link to the curbside tree limb pickup info for Overland Park.
Curbside Limb Pick Up

NPQ

New Perspectives Quarterly - "Cutting-edge debate on current affairs"

Picasa: Free Photo Software From Google

Picasa: Automated Digital Photo Organizers, Picture Software, Instant Photo Albums, Sharing, Printing

Hiding the Image Toolbar in IE

Hiding the Image Toolbar in IE:

You can make your page not display the image toolbar on an image-by-image basis by adding GALLERYIMG="no" to the <IMG> tag, as shown in the following code example:

<IMG SRC="mypicture.jpg" HEIGHT="100px" WIDTH="100px" GALLERYIMG="no">

Or you can disable the display of the image toolbar for an entire Web page by setting the HTTP-EQUIV and CONTENT attributes of the META element. Set HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" and CONTENT="no". Just put the following code in the HEAD section of your page, and IE doesn't display the image toolbar for any image in the page.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" CONTENT="no">

XPath Visualizer

The XPath Visualizer Version 1.4: "This is a full blown Visual XPath Interpreter for the evaluation of any XPath expression and visual presentation of the resulting nodeset or scalar value."

AKA XPath Visualiser

The writings of Charles Darwin on the web

The writings of Charles Darwin on the web: "The most complete collection of Darwin's work ever published- with original page numbers, illustrations etc."

Sysinternals Freeware

Sysinternals Freeware: "The Sysinternals web site provides you with advanced utilities, technical information, and source code related to Windows NT/2000/XP/2K3 and Windows 9x, Windows Me internals"

MONSTER ATTACK!!!

MONSTER ATTACK!!!

And here's the monster attack page and a monster attack bookmarklet.

Update: Unfortunately his site's been suspended. To bad as it was a pretty cool effect.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

This was pretty cool looking.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System: "S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well."