In the new Tron movie we get one short glimpse of the desktop Flynn was working on:

I thought it would be fun to theme my site that way, using pure CSS3. (And you do need that 3: there are lots of rounded corners and glow effects.) I didn't follow the desktop exactly; I tried to use colors and visual concepts seen throughout the movie.

If you have a modern browser, you can see the live demo page. If you don't, here's what it would look like (click to go to the live demo):

I like the keyboard best: it's pure CSS styling, no images needed.

The Tron movies aren't great movies, but I liked them both because they try to show computers as complex, exciting, dynamic systems. Computers usually show up in moves as something a kid can hack in 10 minutes to change their grades: here they're at least trying. They even use a couple of real UNIX commands in the new one. But what Tron's really about is explained by Flynn's bedtime story:

I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see.

It's an attempt to visualize some truely abstract stuff, to make it more accessible. Think about what UNIX looks like for a minute. Files, processes, users, groups, devices, sockets, ports, signals, environment variables, locks, parents and children, daemons and zombies... and then inside each process you find objects, functions, threads, buffers, streams, arrays, sets, trees, maps, graphs... and on top of that virtual machines running interpreted scripts, garbage collectors, applications, GUIs all organized into classes, libraries, packages... the sheer number of hetrogenous concepts and the complexity of their graph of interrelationships is staggering. Now, if I tried to visualize all this, it wouldn't look much like Tron at all. But then again I'm usually not able to get much beyond drawning some boxes and circles with arrows between them, which can only approximately represent one little piece of all this. But in my head I can see it all, see the large applications I've worked on strung out like points and lines an abstract space, see all the explicit and implicit relationships between objects on various layers of abstraction... and better yet, manipulate that diagram in my imagination, try out new arrangements at the speed of thought... It's a trip.

Obviously Tron can't come close to that, but at least it's hinting to a broad audience that something is going on in there, so this is my little homage to it.