Category: Ryan’s Internet Technology, and Web Design Blog

svn add * –force

Venukb had published an article that details an interesting way to install Eclipse SDK plugins.

Ok, so you have some text in Photoshop (on the PC, not the Mac) and you want to create a bullet, but don’t want to create some rasterized circle.

1. Put your cursor where you want the bullet to render
2. Press and hold the ALT key
3. Type the following numbers on the number pad 0 1 4 9
4. Release the ALT key and the bullet will appear

I needed a couple of 1 TB SATA drives to put into external enclosures.

I have found that in many cases MicroCenter offers prices very close to that found on Amazon, and/or Buy.com. The thing that I really like about MicroCenter is that they actually have knowledgeable sales people. When seeing if the drives that I was looking for were in stock the sales associated told me that I wanted to stay away from any of the “Green” drives. In his experience, not only were they considerably slower (which in this case, didn’t make much of a difference to me) but that their reliability was very poor. The “Green” drives spin at variable speeds so that they will consume less energy. Evidently, the variable speed mechanism hasn’t been sorted out completely and results in catastrophic hardware failure.

I added a subdomain to a zone file and when I reloaded named I noticed the following error in messages:

Oct 29 09:31:06 master named[28254]: tabordesignbuild.com.db:59: beta_live.sampledomain.com: bad owner name (check-names)
Oct 29 09:31:06 master named[28254]: zone sampledomain.com/IN: loading from master file sampledomain.com.db failed: bad owner name (check-names)

We are running BIND 9 and after doing a little searching it turns out that with the default configuration for BIND 9 underscores are now verbotten.

Evidently, if you need to include an underscore “_” in your domain name you can turn off name-checking but that seems to be overwhelmingly not recommended by the wider sysadmin community.

An article that discusses the level of freedom (User Access Rights, Cooperation and Interoperability, Presence of Closed Source Software, and Freedom in Practic) between Maemo and Android.

Building advanced web applications and frameworks often involves getting incompatible pieces from various projects to work together cohesively inside a majority of browsers. The more advanced the functionality, the more of a problem this becomes especially when you’re trying to support older and very broken browsers such as MSIE 6.0.

At the present moment, I’m involved in building a substantial ecommerce project with a desktop style interface that includes popup dialogs, drag and drop lists, multiple tabbed interfaces among other patterns. The desktop guys with all of their mature toolkits just don’t know how easy they have it in comparison.

For this particular project, we’re using the jQuery UI toolkit which is excellent. However,sometimes there are conflicts with other projects, such as the Xinha WYSIWYG Htmleditor control we use. Xinha does not like to be placed inside hidden divs. (Google maps has a similar issue as do most more advanced components).

I’ve written up a short summary of a solution to get these disparate pieces working together:

Xinha WYSIWYG HTMLEditor in jQuery.UI tabs

Here is a great resource for free CSS templates and web site designs. Based on the licensing information on the site, it seems as though they are all either GPL/GNU or Creative Commons.

What follows are links to two different blog articles by Steve Reynolds about both Flash and Javascript packages. The coolest looking package, not just charts is the Raphael Javascript library.

• 7 Flash Charting Solutions
• 5 Javascript Chart Alternatives

We have a client that is in need of some dynamic Flash charts. After some googling I came accross the Open Flash Chart project. It seems to be an active project with a decent following. Moreover, there are a number of other commercial products out there that are using the LGPL licensed code.

It looks to be a fairly mature code base that provides an enormous amount of customization without editing any ActionScript code or recompiling any .swf files. Right now, I’m just struggling with the lack of documentation and it’s just taking a while to figure out the syntax of the php front-end that is provided; through which you can generate the JSON data set that the Open Flash Chart swf reads.

Here are links to the docs and resources that I have found:

• JSON data structure/fields in Open Office
• Open Flash Chart docs pages (which seem mostly incomplete at this time)
• Open Flash Chart forum