One Monday, San Jose Judge Leslie Nichols rejected the suit brought by Elaine Evans against the San Jose Redevelopment Agency (SJRA) in an attempt to stop it's Strong Neighborhoods Initiative (SNI) activities. I attended the first half of the arguments in Superior Court on Monday morning.  The heart of the case was whether Evans had properly sought to bring her concerns to the redevelopment board.  In the end the city prevailed on that point, but not before I heard a few interesting bits along the way, including:

• 5 members of the council wrote the other 5 members, before the public hearing, indicating that they were going to support the SNI plan.
• Evans was at the public hearing and heard her concerns being addressed to the council by others.
• The city's own report on the concerns raised by the public included the very issues Evans wanted addressed, namely that the blight designation process was being abused.
• The city paid an outside agency over $300,000 to "justify" designating the area blighted.

The real problem seems to be a requirement that "blight" be found before redevelopment dollars can arrive.  These dollars come with a terrible string attached: eminent domain.   Once an area has been designated blighted the city has the power to take the land.

I continue to twiddle the look of floppaganda. It looks best on mozilla due to the use of rounded borders (which is a mozilla-only css feature), and it looks best on mac due to use of  Marker Felt and American Typewriter fonts. I'm investigating adding writeback and trackback features... stay tuned.

The latest blocks more ad images and also fixes the false positive on netflix's rental page. Go here for the latest.

I just landed some changes to the cocoa test app project that allow it to build and run again.  You can find it in mozilla/embedding/tests/cocoaEmbed.  Directions for building a cocoa version of the mozilla, and the cocoaEmbed test app, can be found here.   I will write up my own additional directions shortly (the mozilla directions are slightly stale).

Remember the early screensavers that just drew random rects? Bring back those epileptic fits today, using nothing more than javascript, dom, and css! Note that this may only work in Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Netscape, Firebird, Camino...)    Go here for demonstration...