McDermott Solutions

SXSW Vids & Notes

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:29:02 +0000

Bummed I’m not out at SXSW Interactive, so I’ve been digging up all the notes & videos I can find of 2012 SXSW Interactive talks. Here’s what I’ve found so far. I imagine much more will surface in the next few days and weeks.

3/13 update: I’ve found a butt-load of SXSWi 2012 media tonight and updated this post accordingly.

Long Vids of Talks

Short Vids of Talks

Full Audio

Notes

Interviews

2011 Stuff

While searching around, I found this cool intro to typography talk from SXSWi 2011

Cure For The Common Font

Flash z-index & wmode transparency bug on Android

admin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:07:21 +0000

Do you use flash banners or youtube flash embed code and sometimes use wmode transparent and z-index positioning to jazz things up and overlap HTML elements on top of your flash content? Then you’d better make sure you double check how your sites look on Android phones.

Z-index positioning using wmode transparent is currently broken on Android. A coworker found this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418115/android-flash-content-breaks-webview-boundings-and-overlaps-native-layout-eleme. On Android, your flash will be on top of your HTML content no matter what you do. I imagine Adobe or mobile browser developers will fix this soon, but right now there’s no z-index solution.

Arrg Me Penguin!

admin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 01:07:20 +0000

penguin & skull elements from eiko via iheartvector.com

Dorky Fun With Facebook

admin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:42:42 +0000

Alternate working title: How to lose friends and alienate people.

Bored and was googling how to use javascript in the address bar tonight. Found this life changing gem, http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/05/hacking-facebook/, which at the bottom mentions some cute emoticons you can use in facebook chat like (^^^) and <(") which render a little shark and penguin, respectively. I know, right!?

Now that your mind is well blown, for my grand finale I will demonstrate how to put smiley faces in the background of your facebook page. I know, just what your life was missing. When you're on facebook, copy and paste this entire line into your address bar and hit enter:

javascript:void(document.getElementById('contentCol').style.background='url("http://mcdermottsolutions.com/smiley.jpg")');

You're welcome.

Pretty harmless stuff. It's visible only to you and will disappear when you refresh the page or anything like that. Tested in firefox, ie8 & ie7.

Make Vim Less Ugly

admin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:55:31 +0000

Want to make the Vim GUI prettier? After switching back to Notepad++ for a bit for work, I started to miss the Vim style typing where your fingers don’t have to leave the home row keys. Configuring Vim again made me realize I would have wanted to know how to make Vim look like a respectable text editor a year ago when I started messing with it. It really is debilitatingly ugly compared to any modern text editor. At least in Windows it is. I know in linux it often looks a bit nicer. Below is how I configure Vim for Windows. Feel free to adapt and tweak these however you like and make Vim more beautiful:

Download the developer colorscheme (a screenshot can be seen at google vim colorschemes under “developer”). I like coding on light colorschemes. They’re easier on the eyes, I find, when switching back and forth from the web where many pages are bright white. The text colors in the developer colorscheme aren’t beautiful, but functionally they are my favorite syntax highlighting for html. Copy the developer.vim file into Vimvimfilescolors.

Download new bitmap Vim toolbar icons. Unzip the file after you download it. And place the whole bitmaps folder which actually contains the icons right in Vimvimfiles.

Here are some basic rules I add to the bottom of my _vimrc file (it’s right in the main Vim folder):

colorscheme developer
set guifont=lucida_console:h14
set nobackup

The first line will turn on the developer colorscheme. The second line sets the default font to lucida console (which is a decent coding font, I think) to a nice geriatric size so you can sit back and relax as you code. The third line turns off Vim’s automatic file backups, which are nice but will drive any non-Vimmers you work with crazy when they see a bunch of weird backup files everywhere with weird tildas in the filenames.

Make sure you restart vim and then you should be good to go.

How To Fix jEdit Character Encoding Problems

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:04:45 +0000

jEdit is a great text editor for web coding, but its default character encoding can be problematic for saving certain types of files. If you try to save any files with strange characters (like maybe you pasted some text straight from Word and it has the curly apostrophes ’ instead of the straight apostrophe '), you will get a character encoding error. This bugged me for a long time before I figured it out. I would sometimes have to switch to Dreamweaver or Vim to save and work with certain files.

But the fix is actually simple. For us web coders, we want to set jEdit to a character encoding more friendly to web characters, like UTF-8. Go to Utilities -> Buffer Options -> Character Encoding and select UTF-8 from the drop down menu. Happy jEditing!