I just went to Costco for some essentials for my home office (see below) now that I’m working at home every day. I’m finally replacing a nasty, busted, hand me down office chair with a brand spanking new one. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s not broken. I’m actually sitting a the proper ergonomic height. It makes a huge difference.
Archive for March, 2008
New Office Chair
Monday, March 24th, 2008Newest Member of the Family
Monday, March 24th, 2008
Baby Poop
Monday, March 24th, 2008Spent a couple hours on Saturday with my good friends and their new baby boy. On the way out, Jill mentioned that she thought it was cute that they spent ten minutes talking about the poop. Not being a parent myself, I can only guess at why this is such a common topic among new parents. There are really only a few ways a new baby can interact with the world. They can’t walk or talk or even focus their eyes. All they can do is eat, sleep, and poop.
My parents, for example, don’t talk about my bowel movements. There are other ways that I can interact with them.
Aiden Elliott
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Age 5 days. Congratulations Kevin and Dana.Got my OLPC
Friday, March 14th, 2008
Finally.For the Longest Time
Thursday, March 13th, 2008A few years back, my buddy, David Unger, recorded a little cover of “For the Longest Time.” I hadn’t heard it in a while, but it just popped up in my playlist. It’s really fucking good.
Anyway, you should listen to it.
Making the Most of EDGE: SVG
Saturday, March 8th, 2008Note: I wrote this post almost a year ago, just as the iPhone was coming out. They’d told us in development talks that the iPhone would support most of the features of the desktop Safari, sans Flash. I never published because I discovered that the iPhone did have canvas features, but did not have SVG support. It’s been announced recently that the next version of the iPhone firmware will support SVG.
Most visual effects on web pages are today created in a graphic editor such as Photoshop and implemented on the page as rendered graphics. This is all well and good for users on speedy DSL connections, but the bandwidth eaten up by these graphics can really effect the load times of your content on our favorite new mobile device.
Luckily, the iPhone supports both canvas and SVG for handling your drawing in the browser. Using these formats will allow you to create much more visually appealing content at a fraction of the bandwidth. Both canvas and SVG are specified using plain text. Instead of supplying the artwork, you supply instructions for generating the artwork.
In the example that follows, I’ll compare using a transparent PNG to create a reflection effect with the same effect in SVG. The SVG version uses only a few lines of code to produce what is a near identical effect.
More on Local Facebook Development
Thursday, March 6th, 2008A few notes:
- This works just the same for OpenSocial development.
- I discovered I’m not the only person to have come up with this solution.
- Be sure to set your cookie domain if you need session to work.
Local Facebook Development
Monday, March 3rd, 2008One of the challenges of working on a Facebook or OpenSocial application is that two-way communications are required between the platform and the application server. This becomes a workflow hinderance because you have to constantly push your work out to a public server in order to test your changes. Here’s a simple solution.
- Shut down the web server on your public server.
- Configure your local machine to behave as if it were the public server.
- Create a reverse ssh tunnel from your local machine to the public web server on port 80.
That’s it. Requests for pages from the outside world will now be served transparently from your local machine. You can develop using your local filesystem and test without any unnecessary steps.
If you have multiple things running from a single web server, you can still do this. Instead of shutting down your pubic web server, create or modify your VirtualHost directive to use mod_proxy or mod_proxy_balancer to localhost:8080 or whatever custom port, then setup your reverse proxy from local port 80 to whatever custom port number your webserver wants.
iCal Window Menu
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
I can open two meaningless panels with keyboard shortcuts, but I can’t open the main iCal window or the Address Book. Why?