Freelance Web Development

Visually based on the “Pretty Simple” Message Style by Piotrek Marciniak, I’ve created a new breed of Adium Message Style – which boasts a completely custom scrollbar.

This message style is a working proof of concept. It is a prototype for the talented folks that create  wonderful message styles. I’m a developer, not an artist. I hope that others will use it as a spring board for rapid development of a whole new breed of message styles with custom scrollbars.

Since Adium Message Styles are really web pages, it only seemed right to mash up Prototype JS, LivePipe UI and Scriptaculous!

Features

• Fade-in of messages
• Auto smooth scrolling when new message is received
• Custom styled scrollbar
• Dynamic height scrollbar handle
• Header and Footer objects of scrollbar handle
• Auto-hiding and fading scrollbar (mouse in/out of window)
• Mouse wheel support

( View full size 800×600 MP4 3.7MB )

Go and get it!

• Adium Xtras
• Github Repo (with source + media)

Adium, JavaScript, Mac OS X, Scriptaculous livepipe ui, prototype js, scrollbar, scroller

I had a long time gripe about the DigitalColor Meter that ships with Mac OS X. It would be nice to use it for web development when you want to copy a color from an image to make text of the same color with CSS. But the way this utility works drove me nuts…

Setting the pulldown to “RGB as Hex Value, 8-bit” sounds right. Then put the aperture over the color you want, hit command+shift+c and you have the hex rgb in your clipboard. Nice! So go paste that into your css editor and you get:

Note the quotes

So now I have to go in and remove the quotes manually each time. But then, it still does not work when you view the web page. Turning on hidden characters reveals…

What a mess

“… just… like… WHY, Steve?” An otherwise nice utility is a real pain to do anything useful with.

Well, tonight I found a good workaround for this. In the preferences, turn on “Drag in swatch drags out the color”:
Then, Instead of command+shift+c, do a command+shift+h. That holds the color instead of copying it:

Then drag that chip in the middle to where you want to copy the hex…

And there you have it:

Now… as to why it is holding F39200 but dragged F88D00? I have no idea! Comments, suggestions, etc are welcome.

Mac OS X CSS, DigitalColor Meter, Mac OS X

I’ve been a Mac user since 1990. I do all of my work on a Mac. And I know them in and out. And having to use all OSes in my field of work, I can make an educated decision that Apple products, to quote Steve, are “really great”.

So when it came time to get my wife a new laptop to replace the Titanium PowerBook 677Mhz, of course I was thinking of another Mac. The primary use is transcribing audio tapes (Word), then blogging, photos and other family stuff. Laptops can handle that pretty well. And we also use it on family trips so I can remote pilot back at home, etc. No heavy lifting.

Competition

I was going to buy another Mac. Really, I was. It was almost going to be the $1300 Aluminum 13 inch MacBook. Then I saw a Dell at Best Buy. More ram than the MacBook, same storage and processor. Much less dough. For $550 I picked up the Dell Inspirion T3200. My wife had been a PC user her whole life so switching back for her would be no problem.

Apple folk will swear up and down that Apple hardware is no more expensive than a closely configured PC. So lets do some comparative shopping right now.

Apple Aluminum 13 inch MacBook

• Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2GHz
• 2GB DDR3 Memory
• 160GB hard drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
• 13″, 1280×800
• Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard, iLife 08

Dell Inspirion T3200

• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core @ 2GHz
• 3GB DDR2 Memory
• 160GB hard drive
• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• 15″, 1280×800
• Windows Vista Home Premium, MS Works 9

That’s without nit-picking the details (dell has more ports and larger screen, but shared video ram and Vista, etc). If you want to split hairs, feel free to use the links above. It looks like the Apple is better. I don’t think $750 better, but better nonetheless. Wow, I just realized it’s over 2x the cost! $100 per inch.

Software

It took about three days to find adequate software to mimic the previous setup. Like so:

• Usage: Mac / PC
• Web Browsing: Firefox / Firefox
• Photo Management: iPhoto / Picasa
• Instant Messaging: Adium / Trillian
• Email: Mail / Thunderbird
• Blogging: iPhoto+Mail+blogger.com / Picasa
• Remote Pilot: VNC / ??

Finding and testing programs is one thing. What about moving over all your stuff? Photos, passwords, mail, etc etc. This is how I pulled it off. It went quite well.

Web Browser

This wasn’t too hard because we’re used to (and prefer) Firefox. Installing Firefox was easy of course. Then to not skip a heartbeat, I installed Foxmarks plugin on the old Mac. Foxmarks is a free add-on for Firefox that syncs and backs up your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers. Then chose the option to copy over passwords. Then I installed it on the PC’s Firefox and synced down. Perfect! All bookmarks and logins are remembered. WHEW.

Photo Manager

Weeks ago I was so happy because I bought a nice Canon camera that captured video as MP4 (h.264) .MOVs. Sweet! Now they import into iPhoto without fuss and are smaller than AVI.
And here I am, now with a PC. Murphy. Luck. Whatever. Moving on…

Sadly, there is no free equivalent of iPhoto for the PC. And in some ways thats a good thing. Picasa is probably the closest. And after trying a dozen, it’s the one I settled on.

iPhoto keeps it’s own secret storage facility masked by the OS as a sinlge file in your User’s directory. Picasa keeps an eye on a directory in your computer. This is both good and bad.
It’s easy to replace files with picasa, such as re-encoding a video. Doing that manually in iPhoto is a nightmare. Video files don’t store meta info such as the date taken.

In iPhoto, I filtered all photos by month. Then created that month’s folder on the PC. Over the LAN, I drag and dropped from iPhoto to the mounted drive (and the month’s folder). This took many night because the TiPB is so dang slow.

After importing the existing photos from the old mac, Picasa made quick work of it. Very very fast! Afterwards, I used QTAmateur on my iMac to batch convert all the old huge AVIs into smaller but visually identical MP4s. Again, directly over the LAN with a mounted share. Launch Picasa, and it updates automatically, re-reading the dir contents.

But wait… Picasa does not import video from the camera! DOH. So I use MS’s built in function to grab the photos and place them automatically into a folder. Launch Picasa, and it updates automatically – again.

Instant Messaging

On the Mac we were using the multi protocol, and awesome, Adium. They do not make Adium for other platforms. But Trillian filled the hole quite well. Since both AOL and Yahoo! store the buddy list contacts on their end, there was no export/import work to do. Just log in and chat. Nice!

Email

I really liked Mail.app on the Mac. But no equal for the PC. I installed Thunderbird. Since all of our accounts are IMAP, moving over was a breeze. I just had to set up the accounts and wait a few minutes. Done!

Blogging

My wife uses blogger.com. I think their RTE majorly sucks really really bad. Google programmers should be ashamed. (Ask me how I really feel). But the nice thing is that posting articles to blogger can be done right inside of Picasa with images. How cool! But only 4 images… don’t get me started. WT…. why only ffoouurr?? It’s just crazy.

Mac OS X Windows

I haven't come across any ColdFusion file manager that is good, free, and can be used with TinyMCE. Even the commercial products don't impress me. And  don't like relying on PHP in my CF applications. So I'm writing my own File Manager, WVFM. Sounds like an oldies station I plan on releasing it as open source for free.

The following are my main goals for WVFM:

• Speed
• Aethetics
• Easy to install
• Easy to use

I plan to accomplish those goals with:

• Optimized code (CFML and HTML/CSS)
• FamFamFam Silk Icons, and a designer willing to help for free
• AJAX w/ Scriptaculous web2.0 javascript library
• Mimics Mac OSX Finder's column view navigation
• Extra information for webmasters and content editors

Right now it's pretty much a drag and drop CFC. It runs immediately by navigating to its loader (index.cfm) with good default settings.

It figures out the root dir of the website, and if you're navigating within it, allows you to click on files to view/listen/download.

Every attribute of a file/dir is sortable. Sorting is prioritzed automatically as you sort by attribute. That sorting is saved as a cookie for when you return.

You can specify which attributes of the objects you need to see. The code is optimized to not bother asking the file system for those attributes. Good optimization for a large number of objects in a directory.

More to come! Next is making navigation like Finder's column view.

ColdFusion, JavaScript, Mac OS X, Scriptaculous, TinyMCE, WV File Manager, Web Coding Front End Development

The problem

As you use your virtual machine, it will continue to grow in size. I have my virtual XP machine to maximum of 10GB. All I really need it for is testing sites in IE6 (ick) and connecting to a SQL Server (ew). After installing a few things, running all Windows Updates… my vanilla XP is using 8GB. Wha? All I have installed is WinAmp, Cisco VNC Client, and SQL Manager. Whats going on?

“Well, when Windows deletes a file, it doesn’t actually
delete the data in the disk; it just deletes the references/pointers in
the file allocation table. So when ESX is exporting a VMDK and is
looking at the raw disk, it’s seeing values that aren’t empty
(non-zero), and exports them as such. The result is more disk space is
used and takes longer to export the disk.”
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=40

The solution

What we want to do is remove all unneccesary files. Caches, installer temps, restore points, and useless software. Then use VMware’s Shrink utility to reclaim the disk space. Other virtualization vendors will have similar solutions which may
vary. But the build up to the final ’shrink’ is the same. All steps are
carried out in the guest Windows XP virtual machine.

Results and Benefits

• Smaller guest OS footprint (mine went from 8GB to 3GB)
• Smaller virtual disk on the host
• When zipped, the virtual disc is smaller again (mine is 1.4GB) – making it much more portable
• With a cleaner guest OS, it runs much faster
• Suspend/Resume is close to instant

Turn Off Unnecessary Windows XP Services

First I turned off all Windows XP Services I did not need. You’ll have to deceide what you do and don’t want. You can do so from Services in Administrative Tools. Double click services you don’t want needlessly eating resources, Stop the service, then set the Startup Type to ‘Manual’ or ‘Disable’. Apply. OK. Do that to all services you don’t want running, then reboot the machine. Not sure what to disable? Jason A. Nunnelley has a good writeup: Turn Off Unnecessary Windows XP Services.

Uninstall Unused Windows Components

Next I deleted all Windows Components I’d not need. You’ll have to deceide what you do and don’t want. You can do so from Add/Remove Windows Components button of the Add/Remove Programs control panel. Double click each item, continuosly, to turn off anything you don’t want. Like extra Mouse Pointers, or Paint.exe. If using the typical Microsoft 85 pixel high scrolling window isn’t your thing, try using XPLite instead. It’s a nice GUI with even more options.

Turn off system restore

• Right click My Computer; select properties
• Click the System Restore tab
• Click the “Turn off System Restore” checkbox

Set Visual Effects to minimum

• Right click My Computer; select Properties
• Click the Advanced tab
• Click the Performance Settings button
• Click the “Adjust for best performance” checkbox

Clean the XP Drive

This will get all your bits in order. Run a defragmentation on your XP drive. This usility is located in: Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Cleanup
You can decide what to clean and keep. I deleted everything. This takes a little while.

Defragment the XP Drive

This will get all your bits in order. Run a defragmentation on your XP drive. This usility is located in: Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter
It may take a while. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

Finally… the magic

Here is where the instructions branch, depending on whether you use Paralles, VPC, or VMWare. I have VMware, so these are the instructions for it…
Double click the VMware Tools icon in the Sytem Tray.
Click the Shrink tab. Tick the checkbox for your drive. Then click ‘Prepare to Shrink’. This will take a long time, longer if you cleaned a lot of space above.
Eventually it will ask you is you want to shrink your disk(s) now. Ya think? Click Yes. This will also take a long time.

Conclusion

And that’s all folks. You should now have a very slim XP virtual machine. I noticed mine running much faster. And with zip compression, it is now much more portable, at only 1.3 GB.

Resources

Of course, I did not figure this out all by myself.

• Creating Smaller Virtual Machines
• XPLite
• XP Defrag
• Offline VMware disk shrink?

Mac OS X Virtualization, VMware Fusion, windows XP

While working, I use iTunes. But I find that the controller gets
obscured by other windows. Or it just plain clutters my desktop. So I wanted to get  rid of the controller but still use iTunes.

There are many utilities that will control iTunes. But I didn’t want to load another program on my development machine. However I do run DragThing on my system. I consider it as part of the OS.

If you have an iTunes icon in a dock, you can right click to show the menu and control iTunes right from there. But I didn’t like the extra step. So I came up with another solution.

Using three AppleScripts, I made it so you can controll iTunes from within a dock without any menus. All you have to do is expand the draw and click play (or next/previous). Check out the movie:

I left the iTunes conteler up to demonstrate the functions of the buttons in DragThing. Being that everything works, you can close the iTunes controller – which does not quit iTunes or interrupt the music in any way. You’re left with a clean desktop, and quick access to iTunes from a DragThing dock. Sweet.

Mac OS X, Web Coding AppleScript