IOS tip: I wanted a reminder every workday at a certain time. You can't set these up in Reminder. Nor in Calendar. Only under Clock > Alarms. And these alarms you cannot swipe to dismiss, you have to swipe to unlock the phone then lock it again. Or snooze the alarm from the lock screen. Not nice when driving.
Fork webpages
I'm looking for something a bit unusual. Say you are following the instructions for installing a software package (rl example: http://
How do you keep your notes/additional instructions together with the original? Now you have two problems, your instructions and the original can be updated independently. What happens when the original is updated, or a new version of the software is released?
Wouldn't it be great if you could fork the webpage and update it (or even submit a pull request to the maintainer)?
Is there any practical way of working this way - or will I be stuck with a notetaker / blog / bunch of outdated textfiles?
A lot of questions - maybe one of you has the answer.
Link: Stop paying your jQuery tax
Speed up your jQuery powered site by moving scripts to the footer.
Turns out that pushing jQuery to the footer is quite easy for the common case. If all we want is a nice
$.readyfunction that we have accessible everywhere we can explicitly define it without jQuery. Then we can pass the functions we capture to jQuery later on after it loads.The big lesson learned is that we could avoided this whole problem if we started off with my proposed helper.
What Happens When You Swear At Your Users
A valuable lesson for anyone running a website:
After working out a few technical kinks and several botched emails, thanks to missing line breaks, we sent out a final test email to ourselves. Unfortunately, it went out to every user
fetchworthy notes • What Happens When You Swear At Your Users.
Hide elements that will be shown by jQuery later
I stumbled upon this gem by Jerph on Stackoverflow:
Right after the body tag, put a script tag with this javascript:
jQuery('body').addClass('js');This gives you a style hook for any elements that will look different in some way when Javascript enabled, and it happens immediately.
via css - Hide jQuery Accordion while loading - Stack Overflow.
Preprocessing CCK field output
So I spent a totally unproductive morning figuring out how to override a single field's output in Drupal without rewriting my complete template code for the content type - I want to keep using the $content variable. After many a fruitless attempt luckily Grag Harvey has the answer:
Actually, control over CCK fields can be gained using CCK's own templates.
Consider the situation where your field is called field_test.
Copy content-field.tpl.php to your theme directory and copy it again for the field whose mark-up you wish to alter, naming it content-field-field_test.tpl.php in this case.
Then change the mark-up in the file and it will alter the output of that specific CCK field.
No need to touch node.tpl.php!
Adapted via greg.harvey's answer at node.tpl.php | Drupal API.
Project Cars
Sign up to WMD, the somewhat unfortunate acronym chosen for Slightly Mad's World of Mass Development platform, and you're granted access to regularly released builds of the game, which you're then free to pick apart in the official forums. That feedback then gets absorbed by Slightly Mad Studios, a simple loop that means that, when the game is eventually released, it'll be as much a product of the community as it is of the studio.
via Project Cars Preview • Eurogamer.net.
Looks like an interesting development strategy, made famous by Minecraft.
Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces
Discovered this javascript MVC framework SpineJS. The ToDo app is extremely impressive. Try and manipulate items as quickly as possible. Tthen close and reopen the browser. Nice.
via Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces.
The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX for the iPad
The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX for the iPad - Valletta Ventures.
The first step in compiling WEB code is to run TANGLE to produce unhelpful Pascal source files. Thoughtfully the TeX build system includes a translator to produce compilable C files. Although WEB was hugely influential as the progenitor of modern source code documentation it is now obsolete, and modern extensions to TeX have been written in C. This is compiled alongside the translated WEB code. It is not hard to imagine the effect this has on the readability of the codebase.
Why programming is not yet as advanced as nature in evolution.
Combining multiple Subversion repositories
This post describes a step by step guide on how to combine multiple Subversion repositories whilst keeping individual history (and commit messages).
Dumping
Exporting from pagefeedbacktool repository the /trunk/public folder and integrating that into the services repository under /trunk/public/pagefeedback:
Dump the repository including only /trunk/public as follows:
E:\\Repositories\\pagefeedbacktool>svnadmin dump .| svndumpfilter include --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs trunk/public > ..\\services\\filtered.dump
Loading
However as pathnames are stored as part of the dump (and replacing the path with a texteditor corrupts the dump), we have to include the full path under a different parent directory:
In VisualSVN create a /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public folder structure (try without the final public if import fails) then load the dump as follows:
E:\\Repositories\\services>svnadmin load . --parent-dir "trunk/public/pagefeedback" < filtered.dump
The dump is successful but at the wrong path:
currently: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public
should be: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/
Post-correction
Open two Windows Explorer windows with both paths side by side, select all the files that should be moved, then RIGHT click drag them to the destination folder and choose SVN Move versioned files here...
Commit from the repository root.
It is now safe to remove the trunk/public folders under /trunk/public/pagefeedback/
Commit again.
Useful Coding Tools and JavaScript Libraries For Web Developers
Here are some of the most useful coding and workflow tools released recently.
via Useful Coding Tools and JavaScript Libraries For Web Developers
Modified Files - Windows 7 Productivity Tip
To quickly access the files you've been working on today, create a new Favorites item for these files.
To do this, open Windows Explorer and select your Libraries link on the left. Then in the search box, enter modified:today and click the Save Search toolbar button.
Enter a name, such as Libraries Today, and press enter. You will now see the new item appear in your Favorites menu.
You can select this item whenever you need to access recently worked on files.
How to tell a site is reputable or not?
I get asked every now and then if a new online shopping site is reputable or not. As there is no magic way to determine this I have written up these pointers to help you do the same. Now please I am not responsible for any mistakes in ordering from a site that seems legit and then turns out to be fraudulent!
I'm trying to look at the following things:
- Do a google search for the domain name together with one of the following words added: reliable, reputable, fraud, scam etc. This might bring up a few experiences, check some links to determine that these experiences are genuine (not written by a competitor for example).
- Search for the domain name on the Web Of Trust and TrustPilot. Don't just look at the figures, look at the comments, so these seem genuine (have they been written with due care and attention and proper punctuation etc)?
- View the incoming links for the domain, using Alexa. Are these from genuine sites or things like link directories where people can add their sites just to get higher in the search results.
- All reputable shops will use social networking for marketing purposes. Check their Twitter replies and Facebook wall comments for happy / unhappy customers.
- If you know of a community that discusses the subject matter, search there too. They will probably have determined whether or not the site can be trusted.
- If you are still unsure, attempt a trial checkout and see if the website supports reputable external payment options. If your payment details are not stored with the website then they are safe in the event of a hack / security breach.
From the resources above you will get a general gist of any major issues. Feel free to get in touch with any of your tips.
HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack
Unicode can be an issue that's hard to resolve, so it's guide to use the guidance in this document and ALWAYS use unicode where possible.
PuTTY updated after four years
When you press Win + left/right it will now correctly occupy half the screen, which was annoying me for a while. Essential app.
2011-07-12 PuTTY 0.61 is released
PuTTY 0.61 is out, after over four years (sorry!), with new features, bug fixes, and compatibility updates for Windows 7 and various SSH server software.
On Free to Play games
Many gamers now look at the listing of a game in the store, and if there is an inapp purchases link and they see 100 of x, 200 of x, 300 of x where x is energy, credits, bux, dollars, street cred, or whatever just skip the game - even though it might have interesting mechanics. Just be brave and proud and ask for a subscription instead of hoovering money out of my pockets. It's a black mark on the state of gaming in my opinion.
It's a clear indication that the game is not made to have the most fun with, but to make the most money out of you by artifical limiting the experience. Where a subscription allows the same steady income without affecting the game experience. Just say no.
The fact that f2p iap titles sell well just proves my argument that "the game is not made to have the most fun with, but to make the most money out of you by artifical limiting the experience". I didn't say these games are not financially successful, because they are.
If the free2play games are so much fun to play, you'd expect to see a lot of sequels in the charts to build on previous success. In the top grossing list (which favour inapp free2play titles) there are no f2p sequels as opposed to 2-4 paid sequels.
So it seems the only way to get people to play your f2p iap title is to make it appear like a new experience by reframing the theme, from restaurant to club to bakery - or from vampire to gangster to army.
Is this because people get jaded from the f2p model?
WordPress Coding Standards
If you are looking for guidance on how how to format your code, you could do worse than to base it this coding standards styleguide.
Firefox fixes the version number problem
This is great for the following reason:
It will help supporting Firefox because there will just be two versions that matter: the up to date version, and the old version (which is any older version).
This simplifies any solution and troubleshooting, it either works in the current version, or Firefox will update - if it's connected to the internet. Which means eventually, Firefox is always up to date and there will no old versions and therefore no issues.
Slicehost Articles: Checking Linux file permissions with ls
Once you understand Linux file permissions, the next step on the road to enlightenment is learning how to check the permissions for a file or directory.
via http://
Slicehost Articles: Linux file permission concepts
Linux file permissions are strange and wondrous things. Start down the path of understanding by looking at the core concepts behind them before moving on to practical applications.