Musings of a busy mind
Technically interesting
‘God mode’ on Windows Vista and Windows 7
Apr 1st
Windows "God" mode is an interesting way of pulling together most of the useful Windows tools that you might need into one place. All of these functions are available to you in various panels and menus, but it is nice to have a consolidated array of them.
To enable this, you simply:- Create a new folder somewhere on your desktop or hard drive
- Rename this new folder as "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"
- Open the newly renamed folder by double-clicking on it.
Note you do not have to name it “GodMode” as any name you enter will work as long as it ends with the {} suffix. Alternatively, you can just use the registry entries in the attached zip file which I provide here but credit and thank the folks at http://www.askvg.com for.
TEAM session report: HTML 5 and CSS 3
Apr 1st
Yesterday, I presented a self-authored session on HTML 5 and CSS 3. This presentation consisted of:
- A brief history and overview of HTML
- Specifying semantic meaning with HTML
- A brief history of CSS
- CSS 3 feature overview
- HTML 5 feature overview
The last two topics took the form of a high-level summary of some of the more interesting additions and changes these two specifications bring to the table.
Throughout this presentation, I thought it was important to remind attendees of what I consider to be HTML's primary function: To provide semantic and relational structure and context to the data and other content we provide on websites or in web applications. As engineers, we are always under pressure to deliver high-quality products in ever-shrinking time frames. This often leads us to ignore miss the opportunity to specify the semantic meaning of content and, instead, resort to using DIVs and SPANs for formatting and placement alone, not even taking care to give semantically meaningful names to CSS classes or element IDs. In my opinion, HTML 5 and CSS 3 work together to give developers and designers more options, flexibility and power to impose higher quality and more coherent semantic context to the HTML content we produce. I hope that this reminder will serve to encourage developers and designers to invest the extra effort to, where possible, choose more meaningful HTML tags than just DIVs and SPANs and to consider using more explicit and meaningful names for CSS classes and element IDs. In short, I strongly believe that, as the Semantic Web evolves and more applications are developed which can harvest and use any semantic clues provided by properly structured and annotated HTML-based content, your investment will be paid back many times over. I am gratified that this presentation was very well attended and was pleased that the feedback I received from attendees was very positive. I hope to author and present a follow-on session in the near future which will focus on the semantic web, microformats and other related topics.Technology Education and Mentoring (TEAM) sessions at work
Mar 31st
TEAM stands for “Technology Education and Mentoring” and is a program which I conceived of and implemented at my workplace. This program consists of a series of presentations, delivered during the lunch hour, covering a wide variety of technical topics of general interest to software engineers, architects, QA, interaction designers and even product owners. The purpose of these sessions is to assist my co-workers in keeping their knowledge and skills current relative to the ever-changing world of software architecture and implementation. A secondary benefit of these sessions is that it provides a forum in which one can improve as an author and presenter. These sessions have been incredibly well-received and my co-workers are very excited about this program. When I attend or present a particularly interesting session, or have tips or lessons learned advice on facilitating/organizing/running these sessions, I'll be sure to post again on this topic.
Site5 Rails upgrade breaks specific RJS file
May 1st
This was a strange one. After Site5 upgraded Rails to version 2.3.2, I began seeing the following error when executing a previously working RJS file:
ActionView::TemplateError (undefined method `[]‘ for #<Enumerable::Enumerator:0xb75bd33c>) on line #2 of app/views/store/pp_checkout.rjs:
1: page['pp_invoice'].value = @result
2: page['pp_checkout_form'].submit
3: page.replace_html “breadcrumb_trail”, “Please wait … transmitting data to PayPal for final checkout.”
4: page.replace_html “work_area”, :partial => ‘shared/paypal_processing’
Luckily, I found this post >>>http://wiki.github.com/radiant/radiant/undefined-method-for-enumerable<<< which explained that a change to a method in the String class introduced in the rails 2.0.2 resulted in a missing method error being thrown by some previously working code. This error seems to be triggered by using the page['someElement'] or page[:someSymbol] syntax in RJS files.
Following the advice in the github WIKI post and then restarting the server immediately fixed this issue.
IEs4Linux – A cool tool
Jul 17th
I just installed IEs4Linux on my Ubuntu 8.04 development VM. This was as painless an install as I’ve ever had. I started with the step-by-step document available here:
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Installation:Ubuntu
For your convenience, here are the instructions provided there:
1) Open a terminal
2) Open /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list3) Uncomment (or add) following lines:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy universe4) Add this line:
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main5) Close gedit. Update and install wine and cabextract:
wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wine cabextract6) Download IEs 4 Linux and install
wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz cd ies4linux-* ./ies4linux
The only thing I changed was that I simply typed in the following instead of doing all of wget installs of those two packages:
sudo apt-get install wine cabextract
That worked nicely for me. I then followed the rest of the instructions and everything went swimmingly. Now I can test my web artistry on Firefox and IE while in Linux. NICE !!!
Update: If you do as I suggest above, everything seems to work fine. However, when you start up the IEs4Linux install script it complains about an “old” version of wine. I dismissed the warning and everything went swimmingly. However, the warning did say that there might be some issues since the latest version of IEs4Linux expects the latest version of wine to be installed.
I plan to re-do the install following the “wget” route for wine (as specified on the wine site) and see if the results were any different. This site says to do the following to install the latest version of wine:
First, open a terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). On Debian, you will need to open a root terminal. Then add the repository’s key to your system’s list of trusted APT keys by copy and pasting the following:
wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
Next, add the repository to your system’s list of APT sources:
For Ubuntu Hardy (8.04):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.listFor Debian Etch (4.0):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/etch.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.listThen update APT’s package information by running ‘sudo apt-get update‘.
If you are using Ubuntu, you can now install Wine by clicking this link. Alternatively, you can install by going to Applications->Add/Remove and searching for Wine.
The nice thing about the way I did it is that you can actually script this install as part of your standard machine prep script since there is no specific reference to the version of ubuntu that you are running (i.e. hardy heron as is found in the instructions on the wine site).